The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (57 page)

With natural misgivings, David Kaczynski informed the FBI, who raided Theodore’s isolated Montana cabin and found plenty of proof that he was indeed the Unabomber.

Theodore J.
Kaczynski had been a brilliant academic – in 1967, at just 25, he had been appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Berkley University, California – but, in 1969, Kaczynski suffered a total emotional breakdown and had subsequently become a recluse in Montana.
Living in an isolated log cabin, Kaczynski believed he followed a life that was in tune with nature – making bombs with some parts carefully hand-carved from wood and roiling in hatred for the modern world.

In 1996, Ted Kaczynski was sentenced to four life sentences, with parole permanently denied.

The Green River Killer

For over two decades the mystery of the Green River serial killer hung over the American north-west.
And not just police investigators were shamed by their lack of success in apprehending the killer; so were local media organisations – one of which publicly revealed the existence of a police trap set for the murderer in the early days of the hunt.
Moreover, Washington State, seen by many as an idyllic, rural state, was revealed to have a darker underbelly: just like New York or Los Angeles, it was a place where many teenage girls ended up as prostitutes . . .
and where the killer of such girls could escape justice for decades.

On 12 August 1982, a slaughterman discovered a bloated corpse floating in the slow-flowing Green River, near Seattle, in Washington State.
The police pathologist succeeded in lifting an excellent set of prints from the swollen flesh, which enabled the criminal identification department to name the victim as 23-year-old Debra Lynn Bonner, known as ‘Dub’; she was a stripper with a list of convictions as a prostitute.
She was the second of literally dozens of women who would be found during the next three years.

The first had been found a month earlier, half a mile downstream, strangled with her own slacks, and had been identified as 16-year-old Wendy Coffield.
In spite of her age, she had a record as a prostitute – indeed, as a ‘trick roll’: someone who sets up her clients (‘Johns’) for robbery.

Within three days of the finding of Debra Bonner, Dave Reichert, the detective in charge of the case, heard that two more bodies had been found in the Green River.
Both women were black, both were naked, and they had been weighted down to the river bottom with large rocks.
They were only a few hundred yards upstream from the spot where Dub Bonner had been found, and had almost certainly been there at the time.

As Reichert walked along the bank towards the place where Dub had been found, he discovered another body.
Like the other two, she was black, and was later identified as 16-year-old Opal Mills.
The fact that rigor mortis had not yet disappeared meant that she had been left there in the past two days.
Which in turn meant that if the police had kept watch on the river after the first bodies were found, the killer would have almost certainly been caught.

It was the first of a series of mischances that would make this one of the most frustrating criminal cases in Seattle’s history.

The next – and perhaps the worst – occurred two days later, when a local TV station fatuously announced that the riverbank was now under round-the-clock surveillance, thus destroying all chance of catching the killer on a return visit.

The medical evidence on the other two women, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, confirmed that the Green River Killer was a ‘sick trick’; both women had pointed rocks jammed into their vaginas.
Like the others, they were prostitutes working the Strip – the main road – leading to Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport.

On Saturday 28 August 1982, Kase Lee left her pimp’s apartment to ‘turn a trick’, and vanished.
The next day Terri Milligan took an hour off from soliciting to go for a meal; apparently a car pulled up for her as she walked to the fast-food joint, and, unwilling to reject business, she climbed in.

The following day, 15-year-old Debra Estes – known to the police as Betty Jones – was picked up by a blue and white pickup truck; the man drove her to remote woodland, made her undress at gun point, then ordered her to give him a ‘blow job’.
After that he robbed her of $75 and left her with her hands tied.
This man was pulled in by police who recognised the description of his pickup truck, and identified as the attacker.
But a lie-detector test established his innocence of the Green River murders.
And while he was still in custody, 18-year-old Mary Meehan, who was eight months pregnant, disappeared, and became victim number nine.

Within three weeks of her rape, Debra Estes would become the tenth victim of the Green River Killer.
Six more victims in August, October, November and December would bring his total up to at least sixteen – the largest annual total for any American serial killer up to that time.

Yet it would be exceeded in the following year, 1983, when twenty-six women vanished, and the remains of eight of them were found near Sea-Tac Airport or close by.
In March, special investigator Bob Keppel, known for his brilliant work on the Ted Bundy case, was asked to write a report on the investigation.
It was devastating, with hundreds of examples of incompetence and failure to follow up on leads.
For example, when the driving license of victim Marie Malvar was found at the airport, and the police notified, they did not even bother to collect it – although it might well have contained the killer’s fingerprint.

In 1984, four victims were found together on Auburn West Hill, six more in wooded areas along State Route 410, and two near Tigard, Oregon, the latter giving rise to the speculation that the killer had moved to live in a new location.
In January a Green River Task Force of 36 investigators was formed, with a then staggering $2 million budget.
By 1988 the cost of the investigation was to reach over $13 million.

Among the hundreds of suspects interviewed by the police was Gary Leon Ridgway, 35, a mild-looking man with fishlike lips, who worked for the Kenworth Truck Plant and was known to pick up prostitutes – he even admitted being obsessed by them.
He also confessed to choking a prostitute in 1982, but claimed this was because she bit him.

By 1986, with the investigation stalled, Ridgway’s file was re-opened, and his ex-wife interviewed about his preference for sex in the open, often near the Green River.
Ridgway was placed under surveillance.
And still women disappeared – although no longer with quite the same frequency.

In December 1988, a television special on the case, ‘Manhunt Live’, led to 4,000 tips from the public, and to the arrest of 38-year-old William J.
Stevens, who had a criminal record.
But although both police and media believed the Green River Killer had been arrested, credit card receipts proved Stevens had been elsewhere at the time of some of the murders, and he was released.

And so throughout the 1990s, the case marked time, while Reichert, the chief investigator, admitted that his obsession with the killer had caused serious problems in his marriage.

Genetic fingerprinting had first been used in 1986, and had led to the solution of many murders.
The main problem was likely to occur if there was not enough DNA material for testing, or if it was old.
In 2001, a major breakthrough came when the Washington State crime lab acquired the equipment to extract usable DNA from old samples and multiply the quantity by the method known as STR, or short tandem repeats.
(This is also known as the PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, which amplifies genetic samples by ‘unzipping’ the double-stranded DNA molecule, and making two exact copies.)

Now a major review of samples of semen evidence began.
And by September 2001, it had paid off.
Semen samples, taken from Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Carol Christensen, three of the earliest victims, proved to be from Gary Ridgway.
Paint fragments and fibre evidence taken from the grave of Debra Estes in 1988 were also linked to Ridgway.
So when Ridgway was finally arrested on 30 November 2001, he was charged with four counts of murder.

At first pleading innocent, he later agreed to change his plea to guilty to avoid the death penalty.

Ridgway’s account of how he became a serial killer occupies the most fascinating chapter of Reichert’s book:
Chasing the Devil.
As with many killers, the problems seem to have started with his upbringing.
He was a chronic bed-wetter, and his mother would drag him out of bed and parade him in front of his brothers, then make him stand naked in a tub of cold water.
His father seems to have been a timid nonentity.
But as an employee of a mortuary he strongly influenced his son’s fantasies by describing at length interrupting someone having sex with a corpse.
Ridgway began to fantasise about this.
When he saw his mother sunbathing he had imagined having sex with her, but now he dreamed of killing her and violating the body.

Like so many serial killers he was sadistic to animals, and once killed a cat by locking it in a refrigerator.
He also claimed that, as a teenager, he once drowned a little boy by wrapping his legs around him and pulling him under the water.
And later he would stab and injure another small boy, although he was never caught.

Joining the US Navy, Ridgway was sent to the Philippines, and there began to use prostitutes regularly.
They quickly became his lifelong obsession.

He had discovered he enjoyed choking people during a quarrel with his second wife, Marcia, when, on an angry impulse, he wrapped his arm round her neck from behind (a method also used by the Boston Strangler).
In addition he enjoyed tying her up for sex.
In 1975 they had a son, Matthew, whom he adored.
A religious phase lasted until 1980, when they divorced.
Yet, during their marriage, he constantly used prostitutes.

He embarked on killing after his divorce.
Because he seemed a feeble-looking ‘milquetoast’ his victims felt no alarm about him, and allowed him to get behind them.
He often took them back to his house, had sex, and then killed them.
Later, he found he preferred to kill them first and have sex with the bodies.
He also confessed to revisiting bodies several times for more sex.

He even admitted to a fantasy – never carried out – to overpower a prostitute then impale her with an upright pole inserted into her vagina; a favourite practice of the original Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler.

This apparently innocuous little man was able to carry on killing for many years – partly because he looked so harmless, partly through luck and largely through the general incompetence shown by investigators and the media at the start of the investigation.
Reichert emphasises that Ridgway was full of self-pity, regarding himself as the main helpless victim of his sinister urges.

On 5 November 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to 48 murders, and received 48 life sentences.

Jack Unterweger

Jack Unterweger, poet, dramatist and serial killer, qualifies as one of the strangest criminals of the twentieth century.

From the point of view of law enforcement, his case began on 14 September 1990, when the naked body of a shop assistant, Blanka Bockova, was found on the banks of the Vltava River, near Prague.
She had been beaten and strangled with stockings.
Although lying on her back with legs apart, atampon was still in place, and there were no traces of semen.
She had been out drinking with friends in Wenceslas Square the previous evening, but had decided not to leave with them at 11.45.
The police were baffled; there were simply no leads.

On New Year’s Eve 1991, in a forest near Graz, Austria, nearly 300 miles south of Prague, another woman was found strangled with her pantyhose.
She was Heidemarie Hammerer, a prostitute who had vanished from Graz on 26 October 1990.
Although fully clothed, there were signs that she had been undressed and then re-dressed after she was dead.
Bruises on her wrist suggested rope or handcuffs.
Again, no semen was present.
Some red fibres found on her clothes were preserved as forensic evidence, as were minute particles of leather, probably from a jacket.

Five days later, a badly decomposed woman was found in a forest north of Graz.
She had been stabbed and strangled – again, probably with her pantyhose.
She was identified as Brunhilde Masser, another prostitute.

There was another disappearance from Graz on 7 March 1991, a prostitute named Elfriende Schrempf.
Her decomposed body was found eight months later, on 5 October, in a forest near Graz.
And still the police had no clue to this multiple killer of prostitutes.

When four more prostitutes, Silvia Zagler, Sabine Moitzi, Regina Prem and Karin Eroglu, disappeared in Vienna during the next month, it looked as if the killer had changed his location.
Although the police claimed there was no established connection between the crimes, the press began to speak of a serial killer.
They called him ‘the Vienna Courier’.

And at this point, investigators found a vital lead.
Ex-policeman August Schenner, retired for five years from the Vienna force, was reminded of the MO of a murderer he had met seventeen years earlier, in 1974.
His name was Jack Unterweger, and he was now a famous writer and media personality.

The case dated back to the time when Unterweger was 23.
Two women had been strangled.
The first, Margaret Schaefer, 18, was a friend of Barbara Scholz, a prostitute, who had turned him in.
Scholz told how they had robbed Schaefer’s house, then taken her to the woods, where Unterweger had strangled her with her bra after she refused oral sex.
He had left her naked and covered with leaves – just as in most of the more recent killings.

The second 1970s victim, a prostitute named Marcia Horveth, had been strangled with her stockings and dumped in a lake.
Unterweger was not charged with this murder, because he had already confessed to the first and had been sentenced to life.
Nevertheless he had pleaded guilty to the murder of Horveth, claiming that as he was making love to her, he had seen the face of his mother before him.
This, apparently, was his reason to kill her.
A psychologist diagnosed him a sexually sadistic psychopath with narcissistic tendencies.