The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (8 page)

In the context of serial murder, the triad of youthful behaviour most frequently seen as indicative of violence ahead is:
enuresis
(bed wetting) beyond the age of twelve (although analysts also recognise that there may be several different reasons for this).
Next is
arson
– sometimes committed by children as young as five or six.
Its long-term significance lies in the type of arson offence.
A ‘disorganised’ young arsonist is likely to cause smaller fires and least monetary damage.
In contrast the ‘organised’ arsonist – the one who thinks things through – usually starts his fires from the outset in occupied buildings.
His intention is to hurt people, as well as to inflict maximum monetary damage.

The ultimate state of the behavioural triad is
cruelty
, to animals and other people.
‘We’re not talking here about kicking the dog,’ said one analyst.
‘We’re talking about throwing puppies on to bonfires or tying firecrackers to the cat, that kind of behaviour.
One serial killer talks about “Tying a cherry-bomb to the cat’s leg, lighting it – and blowing the cat’s leg off.
Made a lot of one-legged cats.”’ This trait can be seen in children on both sides of the Atlantic who grew up to be serial killers.
Moors murderer Ian Brady won a childhood reputation as an embryo psychopath who threw cats from tenement windows in the Glasgow Gorbals.
When Ed Kemper, the Californian serial killer, was thirteen he cut the family cat into pieces with his Scout’s knife.

‘The next step is aggression against people.
He chooses animals first because animals can scream, they show fear, they bleed, they do all those things we do – but they’re not
people
.
This time, it’s projection.
Now he’s getting even with society.’ Hostility to society is one of the hallmarks of the adult serial killer.
Some express it in the murders they commit, others express it in words.
We know that the man calling himself Jack the Ripper wrote ‘I am down on whores and shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled’.
When actress Sharon Tate begged the Manson ‘Family’ gang to spare her for the sake of her unborn child, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel responded by stabbing her sixteen times, inflicting several wounds after her death.
Finally Atkins dipped a towel in the actress’s blood and wrote ‘Pig’ on her living-room door.
Dennis Nilsen – a heavy drinker – clearly felt this need to ‘get even’ with society in each murder he committed – including those he could barely remember next morning.
While awaiting trial, he wrote from jail to the police who had questioned him: ‘God only knows what thoughts go through my mind when it is captive within a destructive binge.
Maybe the cunning, stalking killer instinct is the only single concentration released from a mind which in that state knows no morality . . .
There is no disputing the fact that I am a violent killer under certain circumstances.
It amazes me that I have no tears for these victims.
I have no tears for myself or those bereaved by my actions.
Am I a wicked person, constantly under pressure, who just cannot cope with it, who escapes to reap revenge against society through a haze of a bottle of spirits?’

The same detailed behavioural research which first indentified the importance of fantasy in the evolution of the serial killer also examined the part played by pornography.
Between 1979 and 1983 agents from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit conducted an in-depth psychological study of thirty-six convicted, incarcerated sex murderers held in United States prisons nationwide.
Of those thirty-six murderers, twenty-five were serial killers: the other eleven were either ‘spree’ killers (a detailed classification of murderers appears in the next chapter), or single or double sex murderers.
Nearly half of those who co-operated with the FBI analysts (43%) were found to have been sexually abused in childhood, one third (32%) during adolescence, and a slightly larger percentage (37%) over the age of eighteen.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most admitted to ‘sexual problems’ as adults.
More importantly in the context of pornography, nearly seventy per cent said they felt ‘sexually incompetent’ (as adults), and relied heavily on visual stimuli
– with a large majority rating pornography as the most effective stimulus.

Pornography is seen by analysts of the Behavioural Science Unit as a factor which fuels the serial killer’s violent fantasy, rather than as a cause of the murders he commits.
In particular they condemn the ‘bondage’ type pornography – so frequently portrayed on the cover of American detective magazines – as the sex stimulus most likely to fuel, say, the Bundy-type murderer’s fantasies.

‘That is what appeals most to the sexual sadist.
To see a woman who is bound, or restrained in some way with a gag round her mouth, looking terrified as someone threatens her with a knife or a gun.
That
is
their fantasy: to dominate and control, to inflict pain and suffering on the victim.
To see this portrayed on the cover of the magazine may fuel that fantasy – but it’s not the
cause
of the murder (he commits).
Such killers have these desires, they have this violent tendency within them, and that’s why they’re attracted to this type of pornography.
We find the sexual sadist and the really violent offender more drawn to this type of pornography than what one might call “classical” pornography, with its explicit sexual content.
What the sexual sadist looks for is dominance, control over the victim, and that’s what he sees in this kind of magazine cover.
Bundy may have blamed pornography for his “sick obsessions” but that kind of statement is typical of the serial killer.
He
always
blames someone – or something – else for what he’s done; he is not to blame, it’s never his fault.’

Although the original survey of the thirty-six murderers was completed in 1983, the practice of interviewing convicted offenders by FBI analysts is a valued, ongoing process.
No inducement of any kind is offered to the prisoners concerned – some of whom may be on Death Row, awaiting the outcome of their appeals – in return for their co-operation.
Furthermore, no visitor may carry weapons inside prison for obvious security reasons, with the result that the lone FBI agents who carried out those pioneer interviews ran considerably personal risk in questioning convicted, violent murderers who literally had nothing to lose, no matter how they reacted.
That practice ceased after one agent – who conducted a solitary interview with a serial killer weighing close on three hundred pounds (more than twenty-one stone) and standing six feet nine inches tall – rang three times in fifteen minutes without response when attempting to alert the prison staff that the interview was over.
The serial killer (FBI agents do not identify violent offenders who co-operate in Behaviour Research Interviews) whose crimes included the decapitation of most of his victims, was fully aware of the interviewer’s dilemma.
‘I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard,’ he said.
The agent bluffed his way through until the warder arrived, and was not harmed; but today all FBI agents work in pairs when interviewing violent offenders in jail.

Such interviews may last from four to seven hours.
One agent talks with the prisoner, while his colleague monitors the conversation.
Even so the authorities recognise that there must always be some element of risk involved.
Some penal institutions require signed waivers ruling out negotiation in the event of hostage-taking, and/or to release the state from responsibility should death or injury result from the interview.
While neither analyst nor offender may claim to enjoy the experience, it can prove beneficial to both parties – if for vastly different reasons.
Some murderers who have admitted their crimes find relief in talking freely about them.
Others feel flattered to be included in a work of reference.
Not a few try to impress the interviewer with their innocence.
For the analyst it is a unique opportunity to meet face to face with an offender whose violent, sometimes bizarre crimes are a matter of record: a rare chance to probe the psyche of the
kind
of serial murderer he may encounter time and again in the investigative years ahead.

With most serial killers except ‘medical serial killers’ (
see here
), their individual libido is mirrored in the kind of victim they mark down for murder.
The heterosexual targets females, homosexuals prey on fellow ‘gays’ and the bisexual serial killer makes no distinction between male and female victims.
Ted Bundy, a heterosexual and former law student at the University of Washington in Seattle, was a handsome and intelligent undergraduate who enjoyed normal sexual relationships with a number of female students before he turned Peeping Tom and, ultimately, one of the worst serial killers in United States criminal history.

At first, whenever opportunity occurred during the four years in which he was an active serial killer (he spent half the time in custody, but twice escaped), Bundy scoured university campuses, student rooming houses and youth hostels searching for ‘look-alike’, attractive female victims.
His
modus operandi
was to use guile, plus his undoubted surface charm, to lure them to a waiting car.
The car was almost always stolen; in a sudden Jekyll-and-Hyde switch of character he would club them over the head, abduct and drive them to some lonely spot, then rape and sexually abuse his victims before strangling them and dumping their bodies like so much refuse.
‘Throwaways’, he called them contemptuously.

After his second escape from custody in 1977, Bundy deteriorated into a drunken, disorganised ‘blitz’ type of serial killer.
While he continued to target female students, he now attacked them in a wild ‘overkill’ fashion after breaking in to their quarters.
On the night of his penultimate attack in January 1978, he broke into a student rooming house in Tallahassee, Florida, and battered four girls unconscious.
One he raped and strangled.
He sexually abused another, who died on her way to hospital.
A third girl suffered a fractured skull, and the fourth a broken jaw.
Bundy fled.
Three weeks later he murdered again, and for the last time.
His victim was a twelve-year-old schoolgirl whom he abducted, strangled and sexually violated.
He was arrested shortly afterwards – not for her murder (the child’s body was not found for a month) – but for firing on a traffic policeman who gave chase while Bundy was driving a stolen car.
Bundy, who was using an assumed name, was identified in custody (the FBI had profiled him) and later charged with the three Florida murders only.
He was tried and found guilty, and – after a decade of highly-publicised and largely self-conducted appeals – Ted Bundy was executed in 1989.

Negro drug pusher, burglar, rapist and heterosexual serial killer Carlton Gary, alias ‘The Stocking Strangler’ of Columbus, Georgia, assaulted, raped and strangled five elderly white women in Columbus in the late 1970s.
His victims were all complete strangers who lived alone, and whose homes Gary broke into in the exclusively white Wynnton district of the city.
A sixth white woman of seventy-eight, whom Gary raped when he broke into her Wynnton home immediately preceding the fifth murder, escaped death only because she fought him off long enough to sound a burglar alarm and summon the police.
Gary escaped, and the murders ceased abruptly in February 1978.
Although a native of Columbus, Gary had moved east in the mid-1970s.
After escaping from a New York state prison in 1977, he returned to Columbus and committed the Wynnton murders.
At that time he was not a suspect; then in 1979 – a year after the Wynnton murders had ceased – he was arrested elsewhere in Georgia on unrelated charges.
After interrogation he was charged with three of the Wynnton stranglings, together with associated counts of rape and burglary.
In 1986 he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair.
Gary, now thirty-seven, is on Death Row awaiting the outcome of appeals which may not be decided until the early 1990s.

One
racial
criminal behaviour characteristic links the Carlton Gary homicides in Columbus, Georgia, with nine serial murders committed in New York City in 1974 by Calvin Jackson – another heterosexual negro ex-convict – and a series of at least seven murders, committed a decade later and more than four thousand miles away in Stockwell, South London, by the bisexual British serial killer Kenneth Erskine.

By early summer in New York in 1974, five women – mostly elderly – had been found dead in their rooms over a period of two years in the run-down Park Plaza Hotel at 50 West 77th Street.
Foul play was not suspected.
All were thought to have died either from acute alcoholism or (in one case) asphyxia, that might have been self-induced.
Then Yetta Vishnefsky, who was seventy-nine, was found dead in Room 605.
This time no pathologist was needed to establish the cause of death.
She had been bound with her own stockings, and knifed in the back: the post-mortem examination revealed that she had been raped.
Shortly afterwards Kate Lewinsohn, who was sixty-five, was found dead in Room 221 with a fractured skull.
She, too, had been raped.
And on 8 June Winifred Miller was found burned to death in her bed in Room 406.

While the police investigation into those three murders was continuing, a ninth victim – sixty-nine-year-old Mrs Pauline Spanierman – was found by a maid, battered to death in her room in the adjacent twelve-storey apartment house at 40 West 77th Street.
On this occasion there was a suspect; a black man, weighing about one hundred and forty pounds (ten stone) and five feet seven inches tall, who had been seen making his way down the fire escape at the Park Plaza at half-past three that morning, approximately the time that Mrs Spanierman was murdered.
The precise description led the police to Calvin Jackson, an ex-convict and former drug addict, who worked at the Park Plaza as a porter – and shared a room there with a woman named Bernice Myers.

Jackson (who, it transpired, was also wanted for questioning in connection with a series of murders in Buffalo, New York State) confessed to the nine Park Plaza killings and stood trial in 1976.
Psychiatrist Dr Emilia Salanga, one of a group of mental specialists who considered Jackson to be unfit to plead, told the court ‘[Jackson] told me he enjoys killing.
He said it was like sex, and that he had sex with his victims sometimes before and sometimes after he killed them.
He believes that his body and mind were being controlled, and he told me he had thought of seeking out a priest.
He thought he was the Devil, and he wanted himself exorcised.’