Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (42 page)

Serial sexual killers torture their victims for one reason only: to obtain a maximal orgasm that they are unable to achieve in any other way. That is to say, they capture, torture, and kill for recreational purposes. Killing is usually an integral part of the sexual turn-on. Sometimes, however, the killing is done to obtain a body for necrophilic purposes. At other times, the victim succumbs to the torture or the victim is killed to eliminate a witness.

It is difficult to understand serial killers because their acts seem to have nothing to do with the usual human motives that impel most ordinary crimes. They even have very little to do with the motives of most murders, which tend to be done out of passion, jealousy, and revenge, or to obtain money or power. This understanding of the killers’ motivation is supported by the fact that the serial sexual killers’ victims are usually unknown to them. The victims are or become mere objects or props on which the killers play out their lethal sexually sadistic and, frequently, necrophilic fantasies. Serial sexual killers do not want a partner; they crave a victim. The ultimate sexual gratification is the total domination and humiliation of helpless prey.

Serial sexual killers prey on the weak, the vulnerable, the confused, and the naïve. Their victims are people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Often, there is very little resemblance among the victims of one serial sexual killer—although Ted Bundy did frequently choose young women who parted their long, dark hair down the middle of their heads.
Serial sexual killers are usually identified—when they are identified at all—because in the acting out of their fantasies, they leave their characteristic signatures on the bodies of their victims and on the other elements of the crime scene. It is these clues that have led the FB I’s Behavioral Science Unit to success in deducing the general identity of serial sexual killers, as well as in arresting some killers.

Serial sexual killers have been studied psychologically. They usually hit their peak of killings in their late 20s, with a range in age from the early 20s to the mid-30s. Their fantasies, however, begin 10 or 15 years before the first killing, usually in their early to mid-adolescence. Serial sexual killers do not suddenly become psychotic and start killing. In fact, very few are out of touch with reality. As a group, they show certain striking characteristics. Serial sexual murderers become loners at an early age and show a marked preference for fantasy over reality. Their fantasies usually fuse violence and cruelty with sexuality. Many, though not all, were severely physically and sexually abused as children. A number of them, including Bundy and Berkowitz, were illegitimate or adopted; several were sons of prostitutes. Although they are deeply angry and full of malignant hatred, there is no evidence that a particular childhood trauma is being endlessly repeated in their crimes. Some serial sexual killers had intensely ambivalent, smothering relationships with their mothers that were fueled by both maternal abuse and sexual attraction to the mother.

The play of children who become serial sexual killers is joyless and shows repetitive and aggressively hostile patterns. They display a disregard for other children. They set fires, lie, steal, destroy property, and are cruel to animals as well as to other children. David Berkowitz set thousands of fires. They are rebellious and difficult to control. As adults, when they begin their criminal careers, they may start with assaultive behavior and escalate to burglary, arson, abduction, rape, and nonsexual murder. They finally reach the absolute depths with sadistic and necrophilic sexual murder. Some serial sexual killers like to impersonate police officers, are attracted to police work, and sometimes even insert themselves into the investigations of crimes they have committed. John Gacy, Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianchi, David Berkowitz, and Wayne B. Williams (who was convicted of murdering at least 28 known victims in Atlanta) were police buffs or impersonated police. Dennis Nilsen, who killed for company out of loneliness, actually served a year in the London police force.

Police work holds a certain fascination for many people, particularly because it exposes the titillating darker side of life. But serial sexual killers have their own unique set of motivations. Impersonating a police officer gains the serial sexual killers easy access to their victims by momentarily lowering the victims’ guard. Police work lends itself to the killers’ fantasies of power, domination, and submission. Some killers view their relationship with the police as a chess match, taking great pleasure at beating them at their own game. For others, the fear of being apprehended is an aphrodisiac, leading some serial killers to court police attention. Others still may want to have an inside track on the progress of police investigations into the murders. The line between police work and criminal behavior sometimes can be a very fine one.

Dennis L. Rader, the BTK murderer (“Bind them, Torture them, Kill them”) started killing in 1974 and stopped in 1991. He killed at least 10 victims, men, women and children ranging in age from a woman in her 60s to a child of less than 10. Rader is the perfect example of a serial killer hiding in plain view. He was employed as a code enforcement officer, having a badge and carrying a gun, which gave him the power to control others. For 34 years Rader and his wife attended church. He became a member of his church’s governing council, volunteered in his son’s Boy Scout troop, and earned a college degree in criminal justice. When his wife told Rader she was afraid of the BTK killer, he told her to lock the doors and not to worry.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—Hiding in Plain View

As with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the famous fictional depiction of the two alternate sides of a single personality, most serial sexual killers can appear quite ordinary and indistinguishable from the rest of humanity. Parallel with their monstrous, murderous side, they also lead reasonably normal lives, at least in outward appearance. Serial sexual murderers share the same human condition with everyone else. They have to fill their cars with gas, pay their bills, make a living, and pay their taxes. So they take on the protective coloration of the guy next door— a coloration that makes it even more difficult to detect and apprehend them.

Like politics, most serial killers are local. A notable exception is Ted Bundy, who traveled through a number of states during his killing spree. Serial killers generally prowl within a specific area. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, collected his prey from the red light districts of Seattle and Takoma and along Pacific Highway South.

It is much easier to live in a community and hide in plain view than to be a newcomer who attracts attention and thereby risks detection. Changing locations also requires adjustments to the killer’s tried and true methods of stalking victims, thus increasing the likelihood of apprehension.

The most seemingly normal and prosperous of outward lives was that composed by John Wayne Gacy. As a serial sexual killer, he raped, sodomized, tortured, and strangled to death 33 young men. He did this while running a prosperous construction business, marrying twice, and becoming a public benefactor. The acute phase of his killings began about 7 months before his second marriage and continued through that marriage and afterwards. The gregarious Gacy buried most of his victims in the basement of the home where he lived with his wife and entertained their friends. These burials, with Gacy’s use of the house as a cover for horrible activities, were a perfect metaphor of his dual life.

Gacy was active in community projects and belonged to several civic organizations. He was voted the local Jaycees’ outstanding member for 1967. As a member of the Jolly Jokers Club, Gacy created the character of Pogo the Clown, and as Pogo he traveled to hospitals to bring cheer to sick children. As director of the Polish Constitution Day Parade in 1978, he was photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter. In referring to his antics as a clown—and perhaps to more of his other activities—he once said, “A clown can get away with murder.”

When Gacy had victims alone in his home, he would ply them with alcohol and drugs and show them heterosexual and then homosexual porn films. He would immobilize them by tricking them into participating in handcuff and rope tricks. He would then strangle them to death, but slowly, tightening and loosening the ligatures many times in order to prolong the victim’s agony and his own sexual pleasure.

In the movie about Gacy,
To Catch a Killer
, Gacy was played by actor Brian Dennehy. In a television interview about the role, Dennehy candidly admitted, “I learned about a part of myself.”

Theodore Robert “Ted” Bundy, who killed 35 women, and possibly more, had an almost perfect cover. His mother considered him to be an ideal son. His political friends considered him to be on the fast track in the legal profession, heading toward being a future governor or senator. His girlfriends found him to be a woman’s romantic dream come true, an attentive, tender lover who sent flowers and wrote love poems. He was engaged to marry at one point. At another time, he was dating one woman and killed 24 others, all of them strangers to him. His girlfriends did not satisfy his intense, predatory impulses. Most of them were unaware of those impulses, although at least one of them became aware of some of his desires for deviant sexual practices.

Bundy and Gacy used their covers to lure victims. Gacy attracted some young men with promises of jobs in his construction business, whereas Bundy lured women by smooth talking, and also by feigning an injury. With his arm in a cast, he would get them into his car, or to some isolated spot, and then bludgeon them with a short crowbar concealed in the removable arm cast. While the women were unconscious or semiconscious, he would then commit gross sexual acts, including anal assault. Bundy bit various body parts, sometimes biting off a victim’s nipple or leaving bite marks on her buttocks. He killed the victims by strangulation. Bundy mutilated and decapitated their bodies and severed their hands with a hacksaw. He would leave the bodies in secluded spots and return to them after several days to commit necrophilic acts such as ejaculating into the mouth of a disembodied head.

More Bad Than Mad?

Serial sexual killers are sadistic sexual psychopaths. They are males, mostly white males, and of at least average intelligence. Some have demonstrated superior intelligence.

Sadistic
.
Sexual
.
Psychopaths
. Each of these descriptive terms is important. Psychopaths have deviant personality and character flaws. They are detached from others. Their relationships with people have importance to themselves only insofar as these relationships provide them with pleasure; otherwise, they discard people like trash. Psychopaths’ consciences are deformed or essentially absent—they are unwilling to restrain their antisocial aggressive and sexual impulses.

In serial sexual killers, the sexual and aggressive drives are fused together at an early age. Among sexual murderers, sadists are those who derive intense sexual pleasure from inflicting suffering upon a live victim. Some of these killers record the terrified screams of the tortured victims and play them back later for renewed pleasure. Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, known together as the Hillside Strangler, would strangle women while having sex, bringing them back to life over and over again to heighten their own orgiastic ecstasy. Once the women had been strangled to death, they were no longer of interest to the cousins, who dumped them unceremoniously along hillsides in the Los Angeles area. Because both men also carried on plentiful sex lives during the period that they were committing their murders, it is clear that sex alone was not the motive for the murders. Sadism played a large part in it.

As with some other serial killers, Bianchi was fascinated by police work and wanted to join the Los Angeles police force. He even inserted himself into the Hillside Strangler investigation, asking the police to show him some of the sites where the women had been found. It is actions like these that permit us to understand that, unlike some psychotic killers, serial sexual murderers do know right from wrong. The perception that their sexually aggressive impulses are irresistible is an incomplete explanation of their behavior; instead, serial killers choose not to resist these impulses in their continuing quest for thrilling orgiastic pleasure. Even those serial sexual killers who claim to be compelled to kill by the sheer force of their deviant drives know what they are doing and that what they are doing is wrong. But they choose to do it anyway for the sexual gratification. Among human beings, knowing what is right does not necessarily lead to doing the right thing. It is necessary to
want
to do the right thing. Often we do not want something because it is good. It is good because we want it.

Serial sexual killers are always sadistic, sometimes necrophilic, often both. They all obtain sexual thrills from the hurt and terror they produce in their victims and from the total power they wield over their victims, alive or dead. In psychiatric terms, these killers are psychopaths who have a
paraphilia
. Paraphilias are characterized by acting out, or being distressed by, recurrent intense sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies that involve either nonhuman objects or the suffering and humiliation of oneself or of children or other nonconsenting persons. A psychopath who does not also have a sadistic paraphilia might not kill; he or she could be satisfied with perpetrating various scams. And the sadist who is not a psychopath might confine his or her sexual desires to fantasy or to acting out the sadistic impulses with the aid of a consenting masochistic partner. So, too, the necrophile who is not a psychopath might be content to have sex with dead bodies that he digs out of a graveyard or with bodies that he works with in a mortuary. The disordered core of the serial sexual murderer requires that he have a lethal combination of psychopathy and sadism or necrophilia.

Edmund Emil Kemper II I was a necrophilic killer. Such killers usually murder their victims quickly to obtain the object of their desire. The victim may be spared a slow, agonizing death. The necrophilic killer’s sexual desires begin with the victim’s death and are kindled by the dead body. Kemper wished to procure a dead body for his purposes, and later, after being imprisoned, he was quite clear about his intentions. “I’m sorry to sound so cold about this, but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I had to, I had to evict them from their bodies.” It was as though he was a landlord, getting rid of an unwanted tenant. Kemper also said,