The Serial Killer Files

Origin of the Term

Definitions

Categories of Carnage: Serial/Mass/Spree

Psychopath vs. Psychotic

Psychopaths: The Mask of Sanity

“Moral Insanity”

Psychotics: The Living Nightmare

Beyond Madness

TWO: WHO THEY ARE

Ten Traits of Serial Killers

Warning Signs

How Smart Are Serial Killers?

Male and Female

Angels of Death

Black Widows

Deadlier Than the Male

Black and White

Young and Old

Straight and Gay

Bloodthirsty “Bi”s

Partners in Crimes

Folie à Deux

Killer Couples

The Family That Slays Together

Married with Children

Bluebeards

Work and Play

Uncivil Servants

Killer Cops

Medical Monsters

Nicknames

Serial Killers International

THREE: A HISTORY OF SERIAL MURDER

Serial Murder: Old as Sin

Grim Fairy Tales

Serial Slaughter Through the Ages

FOUR: GALLERY OF EVIL—TEN AMERICAN MONSTERS

Lydia Sherman

Belle Gunness

H. H. Holmes

Albert Fish

Earle Leonard Nelson

Edward Gein

Harvey Murray Glatman

John Wayne Gacy

Gary Heidnik

Jeffrey Dahmer

FIVE: SEX AND THE SERIAL KILLER

Perversions

Sadism

The Man Who Invented Sadism

Science Looks at Sadism

Wilhelm Stekel

de River and Reinhardt

Disciples of De Sade

Dominance

Fetishism

Transvestism

Vampirism

Cannibalism

Necrophilia

Pedophilia

Gerontophilia

The World’s Worst Pervert

SIX: WHY THEY KILL

Atavism

Brain Damage

Child Abuse

Mother Hate

Bad Seed

Mean Genes

Adoption

Fantasy

Bad Books, Malignant Movies, Vile Videos

Pornography

Profit

Celebrity

Copycats

The Devil Made Me Do It

SEVEN: EVIL IN ACTION

Triggers

Hunting Grounds

Prey

Targets of Opportunity

Snares

“Wanted: Well-Built Man for Slaughter”

Signature, Ritual, MO

Methods

Rippers

Stranglers

Ax Murderers

Poisoners

Shooters

Taunts

Escalation

Torture

Trophies

Disposal

EIGHT: HOW IT ENDS

Profiling

Origins

The Mind Hunters

How It Works

Capture

Psychics

Suicide

Punishment

NGRI (Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity)

Unsolved

NINE: SERIAL KILLER CULTURE

Fun with Serial Killers

Art

Music

Film

Literature

Humor

Murderbilia

Tourist Spots

Groupies

Internet Resources

Lethal Lives: A True-Crime Bibliography

About the Author

Also by Harold Schechter

Copyright

The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World’s Most Terrifying Murderers Harold Schechter

for

Joe and Whitney

There are people who genuinely believe that serial killers are a strictly contemporary phenomenon, a symptom of something horribly amiss in the moral fabric of modern American society. The public’s intense fascination with sensational crime (demonstrated so dramatically in the fall of 2002, when the airwaves were filled with twenty-four/seven coverage of the so-called Beltway Sniper rampage in the Washington, DC area) has likewise been viewed as depressing proof of our supposed cultural decline.

Since the purpose of this book is to provide the most accurate information about the subject of serial killers, let’s begin by considering a pair of images that should help correct these common misconceptions.

The first, at the top of the following page, shows a child-snatcher who has just decapitated a little victim after assaulting her in the woods. The picture comes from a nineteenth-century publication called the Illustrated Police News of London. Like today’s supermarket tabloids, this weekly periodical ran stories about all sorts of bizarre phenomena, from ghostly visitations to encounters with sea serpents. Its real speciality, however, was grisly true crime—real-life accounts of atrocious murders, accompanied by graphic illustrations. Largely because of its emphasis on gore, the Illustrated Police News had the highest circulation of any publication in Victorian England.

The second image, below, is by the famous Mexican artist, José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913). It

shows a homicidal maniac named Francisco Guerrero, the “slitter of women’s throats,” committing an atrocity upon an unnamed victim in 1887. This illustration was one of thousands Posada produced for mass reproduction in the form of “broadsides”—one-page accounts of sensational news events, the vast bulk of which dealt with shockingly violent crimes.

Though Posada has long been recognized as a significant artist, neither his illustration nor the anonymous one from the Illustrated Police News was meant to be great art. They were created strictly for commercial purposes: to sell papers by appealing to the public’s taste for gruesome horror. Certainly, they weren’t supposed to be educational in any way. Nevertheless, there are several lessons we can draw from them:

Serial killers have always existed. They just weren’t called serial killers in the old days. Back when these two pictures were first published, for example, newspapers often described such criminals in supernatural terms: “murder fiends” or “bloodthirsty monsters” or “devils in human shape.”

In addition to the legendary ones that everyone has heard about, like Jack the Ripper (an exact contemporary of the two long-forgotten murderers in these illustrations), there are many serial killers who, for whatever reason, never achieve lasting notoriety. Lots of them, however, commit crimes every bit as hideous as those perpetrated by more infamous killers.

Serial murderers aren’t limited to the United States. They can be found in England, in Mexico—in fact, all around the world.

There’s nothing new about the interest in serial murder. People have always been fascinated by it. They want every last grisly detail, preferably with accompanying pictures. Nowadays we have twenty-four-hour news channels to satisfy that need. A hundred years ago, when cheap, mass-produced printing was state-of-the-art, there were illustrated tabloids. Only the technology has changed. The public’s appetite for sensational true-crime stories has remained exactly the same.

This final point offers further food for thought. Given how deeply unsettling the subject of serial murder is, it’s legitimate to wonder why it has always possessed such popular appeal. Why do so many people want to see pictures, hear stories, and read books (like this one) about such morbid matters?

One clue to this mystery is suggested by the great nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson.

Though the popular image of the “Belle of Amherst” is of a prim Victorian spinster, Dickinson was, in fact, a tough-minded person with a taste for newspaper sensationalism (in one of her letters, she confesses her fondness for stories about fatal train wrecks and factory accidents where “gentlemen get their heads cut off quite informally”). One of Dickinson’s most memorable poems, “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted,” deals with the fact that everyone, even the most law-abiding person, possesses a hidden side that is fascinated with the forbidden. One stanza from the poem goes: Ourself behind ourself concealed—

Should startle most—

Assassin hid in our Apartment

Be Horror’s least.

Dickinson is referring to the part of the human personality that psychologists call “the shadow”: the brutish Mr. Hyde that lurks beneath the proper veneer of our civilized selves and that loves to dream about all kinds of taboo experiences.

Of course, to say that all of us have a shadow side that revels in lawless fantasies does not mean that everyone is a potential serial killer. There is a world of difference between thought and action, between dreaming and doing. Indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of serial killers is precisely their willingness to step over that line and turn their twisted fantasies into nightmarish reality. Plato made this point several thousand years ago when he wrote: “The virtuous man is content to dream what the wicked man really does.”

The doings of those supremely wicked people we call serial killers—and the dark dreams they inspire in the rest of us—are the subject of this book.

One reason people tend to think that serial murder is a frighteningly new phenomenon is that, until about twenty years ago, no one ever heard of such a thing. For most of the twentieth century, the news media never referred to serial killers. But that isn’t because homicidal psychos didn’t exist in the past.

Indeed, one of the most infamous American serial killers of all time, Albert Fish, committed his atrocities around the time of the Great Depression. After his arrest, his unspeakable crimes were covered extensively by the newspapers. Nowhere, however, is Fish described as a serial killer. The reason is simple. The phrase hadn’t been invented yet. Back then, the type of crime we now define as serial murder was simply lumped together under the general rubric of “mass murder.”

Credit for coining the phrase “serial killer” is commonly given to former FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler, one of the founding members of the Bureau’s elite Behavioral Science Unit (aka the “Mind Hunters” or the “Psyche Squad”). Along with his colleague John Douglas, Ressler served as a model for the character Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter trilogy.

In his 1992 memoir, Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler writes that, in the early 1970s, while attending a weeklong conference at the British police academy, he heard a fellow participant refer to “crimes in series,” meaning “a series of rapes, burglaries, arsons, or murders.” Ressler was so impressed by the phrase that, upon returning to Quantico, he began to use the term “serial killer” in his own lectures to describe “the killing of those who do one murder, then another and another in a fairly repetitive way.”

In thinking up the term, Ressler also says he had in mind the movie-matinee adventure serials of his boyhood: Spy Smasher, Flash Gordon, The Masked Marvel,
etc.
Like a child looking forward to the latest installment of his favorite cliffhanger, the serial killer can’t wait to commit his next atrocity.

That is Ressler’s version of how he came to invent the phrase that has now become such a vital part of our language. There is just one problem with the story. There is documented proof that the expression

“serial murderer” existed at least a dozen years before Ressler supposedly invented it.

According to Jesse Sheidlower, editor of the major new revision of the Oxford English Dictionary, the term can be traced as far back as 1961, where it appears in a citation from Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. The quote, which is attributed to the German critic Siegfried Kracauer, is:

[He] denies that he is the pursued serial murderer.

—first documented use of the term “serial murderer,” as it appears in Merriam-Webster’s 1961 Third New International Dictionary

By the mid-1960s, the term “serial murderer” had become common enough, at least overseas, that it was used repeatedly in the 1966 book The Meaning of Murder by the British writer John Brophy.

Jack the Ripper, still unidentified and still the most famous of all serial murderers, was not altogether true to type. The typical serial murderer kills once too often and gets caught.

—from The Meaning of Murder (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), p. 189

It’s possible that, during his visit to England (where Brophy’s book was originally published), Ressler picked up the term, perhaps subliminally. To give credit where it is due, it was evidently Ressler who altered the phrase from “serial murderer ” to the slightly more punchy “serial killer. ”

In any event, if he can’t really be credited with coining the expression, Ressler certainly helped introduce it into American culture. Surprisingly, it did not enter into common usage until quite recently.

The earliest published example of the phrase “serial killer” that the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have been able to come up with is only twenty years old. It comes from the article “Leading the Hunt in Atlanta’s Murders” by M. A. Farber, published in the May 3, 1981, issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Here, reprinted for the first time, is the passage containing the first known published use of the term