The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (9 page)

His confession, which was tape-recorded, appeared to tell a different story: of a man determined to kill a certain type of woman, with rape a secondary motive.
‘When I came in the room, she was scared and offered me some sex.
I guess that was in hopes I might leave, that I’d be satisfied just to have sex with her.’ And with another victim: ‘I lied to her.
I told her I was not going to kill her.
Then I strangled her with my hands.
I made sure she was dead by forcing her face down into a pillow . . .
I think one sock might have been burned off when I started the fire in the bed.’ After first returning to the courtroom for a ruling on the definition of ‘intentional murder’, the jury returned a verdict of guilty; and on 6 July 1976 Jackson was sent down for four terms of life imprisonment.

Kenneth Erskine, who was born of mixed West Indian and Scottish parentage, was dubbed ‘The Stockwell Strangler’ by the British press after he terrorised the South London district of that name for four months in 1986.
Between early April and late July that year he strangled at least seven old-age pensioners – four men and three women, aged from sixty-
seven to ninety-four – and sodomised five of them in the process.
Erskine, who was described by counsel as ‘a killer who enjoyed killing’, was believed by police to have murdered two other elderly victims during the same period, but no charges were preferred through lack of evidence.

Erskine, a slim coffee-coloured man of twenty-four (but said to have a mental age of only eleven), targeted old folk exclusively.
His
modus operandi
was to break in to their flats with great stealth – in one case he squeezed in through the cat-flap – and surprise his victims in their sleep.
He would then clamp one hand over their mouths and strangle them slowly with the other, by alternately increasing and lessening the pressure on their throats.
By offering (and promptly denying) his old, terrified victims the long-drawn-out hope of life, Erskine heightened the erotic pleasure he derived from the act of murder.
He invariably tidied up the room afterwards, tucking his naked victims neatly into bed with the sheets drawn up to their chins.
Because of their age and inability to resist strongly, the bruising on their throats was usually too slight to be obvious to the naked eye.
Hence, his first victim – whose body was examined both by a doctor and a policeman – was wrongly thought to have died in her sleep and was shortly to be cremated when a relative noticed that the television set was missing.
(As with the Carlton Gary murders in Columbus, Georgia, and the Calvin Jackson homicides in New York City, robbery was Erskine’s secondary motive.)

The identifiable racial behaviour link that stamped his crimes – like those of Gary and Jackson – as the work of a coloured man was his sexual assault of the elderly; it is the only sex crime that blacks commit more often than whites.
No-one knows why – it is a statistic established by years of patient criminal behaviour research.
Interestingly, the same behavioural research shows that most serial killers are young, male, and white – again there seems no logical reason why – and most serial killers, regardless of colour, commit their first murder between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.

One of the earliest known bisexual serial killers was Joseph Vacher, an ex-army corporal sometimes referred to as ‘The French Ripper’ and a near contemporary.
Vacher murdered eleven people in the countryside around Belley, in south-east France (some forty miles from Lyons), between 1894 and 1897, when he was arrested and later guillotined.
His victims were mostly farm workers.
Seven were females, whose ages ranged from sixteen to fifty-eight; the four males were all youths of fourteen to sixteen.
The murders ceased for a period of six months in 1896 when Vacher served a brief prison sentence (for vagrancy), and resumed almost immediately on his release.

Vacher carried a set of knives with him as well as a cudgel, which bore the legend ‘
Mary of Lourdes: who does good, finds good
’.
He stabbed, raped and disembowelled the females, and sodomised and castrated each of the youths.
Several of the bodies bore the imprints of his teeth.
He was caught when he attacked a powerfully-built peasant woman, who fought him off until her family came to the rescue.
Vacher, who was then aged twenty-eight, was a former mental patient who had recently been discharged as ‘cured’.
At his trial he claimed that his ‘madness’ dated back to a bite from a rabid dog years earlier.
However, he was found guilty of the murder of a shepherd boy (his final victim) and executed on New Year’s Eve, 1897.

Although serial killers are mostly male, women serial killers have always been with us.
Two of the earliest-known pre-date Jack the Ripper.
Bavarian solicitor’s widow Anna Zwanziger was sentenced to death in 1809 for the murder of two women and a child.
Sentence was carried out two years later.
Hélène Jegard, a Breton peasant, was executed in 1852 for the murder of twenty-three people, including her sister.
Both killers were arsenic poisoners.
As if the need to kill was an addiction, Zwanziger told the judge it would have been impossible for her to cease poisoning others and described the virulent poison as her ‘truest friend’.

In the 1960s a number of young female serial killers were found guilty of multiple murder.
In Britain in 1966 Myra Hindley and her lover, Ian Brady – the so-called ‘Moors Murderers’ – were jointly charged with three murders, two of them of children aged ten and twelve respectively.
Brady, a self-confessed disciple of de Sade, was found guilty of all three murders: Hindley guilty of two, and of being an accessory to the third.
Such was the sense of public outrage it was known as ‘the trial of the century’.
The trial judge described the pair of them as ‘sadistic killers of the utmost depravity’.

In August 1969, four young American women serial killers – Susan Atkins, Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie van Houten, all members of the notorious Manson ‘Family’ gang – took an active part in two apparently ‘motiveless’ murders which stunned Los Angeles.
In the first, film star Sharon Tate (then eight months pregnant), three of her friends and a delivery boy were either knifed repeatedly or shot dead.
Two days later, husband and wife Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were first tortured and then stabbed to death.
Rosemary LaBianca suffered forty-one knife wounds, her husband twelve – plus fourteen ‘puncture’ wounds from a large, double-pronged meat fork.
The victims in both sets of murders were complete strangers to the Manson gang.
All four women ‘Family’ members were sentenced to death – sentences which were commuted to life imprisonment in 1972, after the California Supreme Court voted to abolish the death penalty for murder.

A newly-identified sub-species of serial murderer has emerged with increasing frequency in today’s welfare-oriented society, often in institutions caring for the elderly and infirm – the
medical
serial killer.
This type of multiple murderer may be male or female, and although clearly less violent than, say, the Manson ‘Family’ women or the male, Ripper-style ritual murderers, these self-styled ‘mercy killers’ consistently claim large numbers of victims before they are apprehended.

In November 1981, a heavily-moustachioed Los Angeles male night nurse named Robert Diaz – then aged forty-two, a man who had always wanted to be a doctor but felt he was too old for medical school – was arrested and charged with the murder of twelve patients by injecting them with massive doses of Lidocaine, a powerful heart drug.
It was a case which aroused nationwide concern in the United States.
In April of that year, a deputy coroner in San Bernadino County, Los Angeles, received an anonymous telephone call from a woman who said nineteen mystery deaths had occurred in two weeks at the Community Hospital of the Valleys, near Perris.
Police enquiries showed there had been eleven deaths at Perris, and one other at nearby Banning Hospital between 29 March and 25 April 1981.
The twelve were all hospital patients, aged between fifty-two and ninety-five; and all had died suddenly after complaining of dizzy spells or seizures, and were found to have high blood acidity and an unusual blueish tinge to their skin from the waist up.

The first break in the investigation came after a doctor at the Perris hospital reported the disappearance of confidential papers relating to patients in the intensive care unit.
Suspicion fell on Diaz; a warrant was obtained, and although the search of his home failed to reveal any papers, police found two vials of Lidocaine, a syringe and some morphine.
Diaz’s explantion was that nursing staff often pocketed part-used vials of medicine and later found they had taken them home in error.

Subsequent enquiries showed that supplies of Lidocaine, stored at Perris and re-submitted to the Chicago manufacturers for tests, in some cases contained an unusually low drug content; while in at least one other instance a vial was found to have a far higher Lidocaine content than that stipulated on the label.
On 23 November 1981 Diaz was arrested and charged with the twelve murders.
District Attorney Thomas Hollenhurst said the charges followed a number of exhumations, and a study of hospital records, which showed a ‘common plan and design’ in the twelve deaths.
All had occurred at hospitals where Diaz was working at the time.
The victims died either during the shift he worked on (usually between lam and 4am) or shortly before 7am, when he went off duty: ‘There almost appeared to be a time for dying.’ He also said Diaz had been on duty on ten of the shifts in which patients had died over a twelve-day period.

Diaz responded by filing a multimillion dollar suit against the Riverside County authorities, in which he alleged defamation of character and violation of civil rights.
His trial for murder, however, went ahead in March 1984.
Some witnesses testified that Diaz – who liked to ‘play doctor’ – sometimes predicted the death of patients whose condition appeared stable; and die they did.
Other nurses said they had seen him flitting from room to room ‘like a butterfly’ late at night, administering injections which had not been prescribed by a doctor.
Diaz himself denied injecting any patient with a fatal overdose of Lidocaine, although he admitted he sometimes took on the role of doctor in emergencies ‘because the doctors on duty did absolutely nothing’.

Robert Diaz was born in Gary, Indiana, one of a family of thirteen children.
He joined the United States Marines when he was eighteen, but deserted and was subsequently discharged as unsuitable.
He lived in a fantasy world and liked to be called ‘Dr Diaz’ when only a nursing student.
He told some of his fellow students he had lived an earlier life, in the body of an ancient Egyptian king; with others he purported to be a descendant of ‘El Cid’ – real name Rodrigo Diaz, the Spanish knight and folk-hero who defeated the Moors in the eleventh century.
His motive for murdering the twelve patients seemed obscure, although prosecutor Patrick Magers said Diaz committed the crimes ‘for his own amusement and entertainment’ while playing doctor.
On 30 March 1984 he was found guilty of all twelve murders, and sentenced to die in the gas chamber.

In March 1983 Dr Arnfinn Nesset was found guilty of murdering twenty-two elderly patients under his care at the Orkdal Valley nursing home in central Norway.
The doctor – a mild-looking, bespectacled man of forty-six – killed them all in three years by injecting curacit into their veins.
Curacit is a derivative of curare, the vegetable poison which South American Indian tribes paint on the tips of their arrows to kill animals and enemies.
(It paralyses the motor nerves, including those in the respiratory system, to cause swift but agonising death.)

How many unsuspecting elderly patients Dr Nesset murdered in this way is uncertain.
He himself told police during the preliminary investigation ‘I’ve killed so many I’m unable to remember them all’.
At one stage it was thought possible he might have been responsible for as many as sixty-two suspicious patient deaths, dating back to 1962 and the first of three such institutions where he had worked.
In the event, no post-mortem examinations were made because of the difficulty in tracing curacit in the human body with the passage of time; so, once Dr Nesset retracted his alleged confession and the trial began, he was charged only with the twenty-five murders the prosecution felt it could prove.

The patients involved – fourteen women, eleven men – were aged between sixty-seven and ninety-four.
It took the clerk of the court a quarter of an hour to read the lengthy indictment.
No fewer than 150 witnesses were called, yet a curious feature of the prosecution case was that none had actually
seen
Nesset administer a lethal injection.
(A number had seen him alone with patients shortly before they died, and evidence of injection by hypodermic syringe was found on their arms.) The murder enquiry was started when a woman reporter on a local newspaper became suspicious about the deaths at Orkdal Valley nursing home, after receiving a tip-off that Dr Nesset had ordered large amounts of curacit.
Nesset, who pleaded not guilty to all charges, was found guilty of twenty-two murders and one attempted murder; it took the jury three days to arrive at its multiple verdict.
He was also found guilty of five charges of forgery and embezzlement (worth altogether about £1200 sterling, or 2000 US dollars), although this was not suggested as a motive for the killings.

No clear motive was established, despite a lengthy police investigation.
The prosecution claimed that under early interrogation, Nesset had suggested a variety of motives – mercy killing, pleasure, ‘schizophrenia coupled with self-assertion’, and a morbid need to kill.
Four psychiatrists who examined the doctor found him sane and accountable for his actions when administering the poison, but said his emotional development had been ‘disturbed’.
They considered that Nesset, who was an illegitimate child, felt unwanted and isolated in the tightly-knit rural community on Norway’s west coast where he grew up.
They said this left him with a marked inferiority complex, and aggressive tendencies which were liable to ‘erupt’ in certain circumstances.
However, the three judges who heard the case sentenced Nesset to twenty-one years’ imprisonment – the maximum for murder under Norwegian law – and up to ten years’ preventive detention.
The twenty-two murders of which he was found guilty were sufficient to make the doctor the record mass killer in Scandinavian crime history.