SERIAL KILLERS AND MASS MURDERERS

Cultural Obsession and Reality

While serial killers and mass murderers have existed at all times in human history, the reporting of their crimes seemed to have reached an all-time high during the 1980s. A series of incidents that came to light during this decade as well as increasing success by the FBI in predicting the behavior of serial killers led to a greater public awareness of their existence. The decade also saw some horrible incidents of mass murder, explained in some cases as retribution by fired or harassed employees. In other cases motives were unavailable.

Ted Bundy

While many serial killers are less-educated drifters who may in some instances travel across wide areas killing their victims, in some cases the serial killer is a highly intelligent, seemingly socially respectable person. Ted Bundy was of this type. As one noted expert on serial killers, Robert Keppel, states, "He taught us that a serial killer can appear to be absolutely normal, the guy next door." Bundy had been a law student at one time and had appeared to be a pillar of the community as well. He had even been the assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission. Bundy was born on 24 November 1946 and never knew the identity of his biological father. By the time he finished high school, he knew that he was somehow different. He looked upon others as objects, not people to be loved or hated, just objects. What he did not know was that this is the hall-mark of the psychopathic personality. By 1974 Ted Bundy began to murder. He began abducting, raping, and torturing college students in Oregon and Washington. By August of that year, police knew of at least twelve killings presumably committed by a mysterious man known only as "Ted," the name he gave to one intended victim who chose not to accompany him. In September 1974 Bundy moved to Utah. A month after his arrival, he began killing again. He killed at least eleven women in Utah and Colorado. As often happens in law enforcement, a chance encounter with a police officer who pulled him over marked the beginning of the end for Bundy. The officer noticed a crowbar, a ski mask, handcuffs, and rope in Bundy's vehicle and arrested Bundy for possession of burglary tools. In describing Bundy to other officers, a homicide detective noted the similarity to a man who had kidnapped a woman a year earlier. When checks of his credit card receipts placed Bundy near the scene of several murders in Colorado, the circumstantial evidence grew. At a police lineup the kidnap victim and two other witnesses picked Bundy out, and he was charged and later found guilty of aggravated kidnapping and sent to Utah State Prison on a one-to-fifteen-year sentence. In the meantime police continued investigating him and linked him to three murder victims in Colorado. In 1977, while awaiting trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell, he escaped by jumping from the second floor of the Pitkin County courthouse library. He was captured in a stolen vehicle several days later. In December 1977 he escaped once again from his prison cell through a small trapdoor he had cut in the ceiling and headed for Florida. Only a week after arriving in Florida, on the night of 14 January 1978, he attacked several coeds at the Chi Omega sorority on the campus of Florida State University, killing two and viciously wounding two others. On 12 February 1978 he was once again pulled over, by a suspicious police officer who saw Bundy's car leave an alleyway late at night. Bundy fought the officer but was finally subdued and arrested. He refused to identify himself. Several days later, a fingerprint check with the FBI, who had just placed him on their Most Wanted list, established his identity. On 23 July 1979 he was convicted of killing the two students at FSU. One of the key pieces of evidence used against him were dental impressions made of his teeth, which perfectly matched several bite marks found on the body of one of the young women. He was sentenced to death by electrocution. For nearly the next decade he tried every method of appeal he could to escape the executioner. He even started listing where additional bodies of victims could be found as a bargaining chip to stay alive a little longer. But he ran out of appeals and schemes to remain alive. On 24 January 1989 Ted Bundy, admitted killer of at least thirty women (and perhaps, investigators believe, more than one hundred) was electrocuted by a female executioner.

The Hillside Strangler

The Hillside Strangler actually turned out to be two men, cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi. As many serial killers often do, they copied the technique of another well-known criminal (Caryl Chessman, a kidnapper and rapist, executed in 1960) by impersonating undercover police officers to ensnare women into entering a "police car." Their killing spree began in 1977, and during the next several years they killed at least ten women. The fact that there were two killers working together held the police off for awhile as this was a somewhat unusual method for serial killers to use. Buono also took precautions to minimize the ability of the authorities to identify the killers by washing the bodies of the victims before disposing of them so that clues such as hairs or semen would be washed away. One early intended victim who later testified at the Buono trial got lucky because of a photograph she carried in her wallet. Catherine Lorre was stopped by the two men, and upon handing over her license, Bianchi noticed that she had a picture of herself as a girl sitting on the lap of her father, the actor Peter Lorre. The duo's fear of the publicity that would surround her death is all that kept her from becoming a victim. After several murders in California, Bianchi moved to Washington State, where he was eventually connected to two murders and was linked as a possible suspect to the Hillside Strangler killings in California. Bianchi offered Washington authorities a deal to escape the death penalty in that state by identifying the "real" strangler. As a result, Buono was convicted of nine murders in 1983. Buono received nine life sentences without the possibility of parole, and Bianchi received a life sentence in Washington. Bianchi will be eligible for parole in 2005.

John Wayne Gacy, Bisexual Serial Killer

Gacy was born on 17 March 1942, the second child of Marion and John Gacy's three children. Over the years the young boy suffered under the stern discipline and verbal abuse of an authoritarian father. As he entered his teens, Gacy was caught on more than one occasion wearing women's underwear, and he feared that his father thought him less of a man as a result. No matter what Gacy did in an effort to impress his hardworking father, it didn't seem to be enough. He abruptly left home at age nineteen after another disagreement with his father and went to work in a mortuary. He left that job after his supervisor began finding bodies undressed for no reason. In 1964, at age twenty-two, Gacy had his first homosexual encounter with an acquaintance who managed to take advantage of Gacy after getting him intoxicated. During the 1960s Gacy enjoyed increasing business success, but during a run for president of the Jaycees in Waterloo, Iowa, he was charged with assaulting a fifteen-year-old son of another Jaycee. He bowed out of the race and eventually pleaded guilty to sodomy in the hope that he would get probation. To his surprise, Judge Peter Van Metre sentenced him to ten years at the Iowa State Reformatory. His wife, Marilyn, filed for divorce and later remarried.

Murder Spree

When Gacy left prison, he moved to Chicago to live with his mother, his father having died. Gacy married for a second time in 1972, despite having admitted to his prospective wife that he was bisexual. What he hadn't told his new wife was that he had started killing young men earlier that year and burying them in the crawl space of his house. By 1975 it became apparent to both Gacy and his wife that their marriage was essentially over. He and his wife were divorced amicably in 1976. During 1975 and 1976 John Gacy, or, as he would later put it, his "alter ego, bad Jack," began a killing spree. In 1977 he tortured, raped, and killed nine young men and buried them under his house. Unfortunately, the authorities did not believe several potential victims who were able to escape from Gacy during this period. The killings continued until 11 December 1978. Police arrested him on unrelated marijuana charges on 21 December and obtained a warrant to search his house as a result. They eventually dug up twenty-nine bodies on the property. Gacy's trial began 6 February 1980 and lasted nearly six weeks. On 12 March 1980, after deliberating for only one hour and fifty minutes, the jury found him guilty of thirty-three counts of murder. The next day the same jury took two hours to decide that he deserved the death penalty. For the next fourteen years he successfully fought off the executioner through appeals of his sentence. In June 1994 John Wayne Gacy was executed in the Illinois gas chamber.

James Huberty, Mass Murderer

While history has no shortage of criminals who kill for no apparent reason, James Huberty ranks right at the top for sheer viciousness. Huberty was born on 11 October 1942 in Canton, Ohio. When he was three he contracted polio and had to wear braces on his legs for several years. During that time other children made fun of the way he walked. When he was seven, his mother abandoned the family to become a Pentecostal missionary to Indian reservations, leaving her son devastated. An introvert, his one passion was guns, and he became very good with them. He became a welder and prospered for several years with his wife, Etna, and his two daughters. Coworkers, friends, and even the pastor who performed the marriage of Huberty and Etna noticed that he was a man who clearly suffered from inner demons and pent-up hostility. The beginning of the end started in late 1982, when Huberty was laid off from his position because of the economic recession. He became increasingly paranoid and blamed his misfortune on a massive conspiracy involving government figures, the Trilateral Commission, and practically anyone else he could think of. He began to hear voices that urged him toward suicide. After a short attempt to live in Mexico, he moved to San Ysidro, California, into an apartment complex where his family were the only Anglo-Americans in a largely Hispanic facility. Things began to look more promising when he successfully completed a security-guard training course and obtained a part-time job. However, the voices got worse and worse. He became delusional and in one instance approached a police car, claiming to be a war criminal. After checking with the FBI, who found no record of him, police sent him home. On 10 July 1984 he was fired from his job as a security guard because his superiors were worried about his nervousness and mental state for the job. On 17 July his wife was able to convince him to contact a mental health clinic, but the clinic did not get back to him right away. On 18 July, when he had not heard from the clinic, he apparently reached a decision to end it all. On that afternoon he told his wife that he wanted to kiss her good-bye. As to the mental health clinic's failure to return his call he stated, "Well, society had their chance." Shortly before 4 P.M., Huberty walked into a McDonald's restaurant and opened fire with a shotgun, a 9-mm pistol, and an Uzi submachine gun. He indiscriminately shot men, women, children, and even infants. As police arrived, Huberty walked around inside the restaurant shooting the wounded to death. Because of the broken glass from the shotgun pellets, the police had trouble seeing inside the restaurant to get a clear shot at the gunman. Meanwhile, Huberty's wife had heard of the shooting on the television, and her daughter had reported that her father's car was at the McDonald's. Etna contacted police and gave them as much information as possible to assist them, pointing out that her husband owned armor-piercing ammunition and was an excellent shot with either hand. At 5:17 P.M. SWAT sniper officer Charles Foster obtained a clear view of Huberty from the neck down and killed him. The final toll from what was at that time America's worst mass murder: twenty-one dead and nineteen wounded. This grim record stood until 16 October 1991, when a man named George Hennard killed twenty-two and wounded twenty-three at Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas.

Source:

Joel Norris, Serial Killers: The Growing Menace (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1988).

Serial Killers

Serial killers, those who kill more than once, pose a special problem for crime investigators because the their motives are often far less obvious than those of the person who commits a single homicide. Investigators describe three types of killer who commit multiple murders. The mass murderer kills several people at one time. Often these killers turn out to be disgruntled employees who show up at their places of work with shotgun in hand, bent on revenge. Spree killers often go on rampages with knives or guns, killing one person after another. Such people often have serious mental health problems. The serial killer, however, dispatches one victim at a time, with a time interval that may be as long as several years between each murder .

The "Washington Sniper" (aka, "Beltway Sniper" or "D.C. Sniper") killed ten people within a three-week period in the Washington, D.C., area in 2002. Originally thought to be a lone gunman, the killers turned out to be Gulf War veteran John Allen Muhammad and 18-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo, who were both convicted of capital murder. The media quickly labeled them "spree killers." Forensically speaking, however, they are probably more accurately described as a serial killers.

The serial killer tends to prey upon people at random. Usually, the attacker does not know the victims personally. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI ) Behavioral Science Unit developed the concept of psychological profiling in the 1960s to aid in the pursuit of serial killers and to let police know what kind of man (serial killers are nearly always men) is instigating the crimes.

Despite attempts by authorities to profile and find serial killers, some killers can continue killing and elude authorities for years. The so-called Green River Killer murdered at least 48 victims over a span of 16 years, from 1982 to 1998. The confessed murderer, Gary Leon Ridgway (now serving a life sentence), claimed that strangling young women was his "career."

Despite all the work that has been done on the psychology of the serial killer, forensic psychologists and psychiatrists are still far from understanding such people. Although it may be easier to comprehend someone who kills out of greed or revenge, the work of a serial killer is so far removed from normal behavior that most people have little understanding of his motives.

Many serial killers are psychopaths. Psychopathy, or anti-social personality disorder, is not considered completely curable. There is even debate by some scientists as to whether it is a mental illness at all. The hallmark of the psychopath is an extreme lack of guilt or empathy for others, which means the serial killer can carry out terrible crimes without emotional distress. Studies of serial killers in prison and evidence gathered from those who know them suggest that many of these murderers were the targets of physical, psychological, or sexual abuse in early childhood. This may lead them to build a world based on fantasy as a protective measure. These fantasies are then acted out in the course of a violent crime, often with a sexual context. The killer feels satisfied after the crime and then relaxes for a while. However, it is only a matter of time before the fantasies push them toward the next killing.

As the homicides mount, it becomes increasingly urgent for police to track down the killer. Also, as the killings mount, so too does the evidence, no matter how clever the killer may consider himself to be. As he continues, he may become careless or complacent, and the chances of his capture increase.

The forensic psychiatrist uses evidence from the crime scene to build a psychological profile of the serial killer. One categorization that has been found useful is to decide whether the investigators are dealing with an organized or a disorganized killer. If the crime scene suggests the murder was carefully planned and executed, then the killer may be a man of average to high intelligence who has a stable social network. He may be married with a family. He may also be employed. Living a "normal" life on the surface requires a degree of self-control, which manifests itself in the way the crime is carried out. Sometimes, though, the organized offender does lose control in the actual attack when the fantasy motivation takes over. In such cases, a violent or frenzied attack may occur, yet there may also be careful attempts to conceal or destroy evidence.

The disorganized offender leaves a mess at the crime scene. He may use any weapon that is available to strike out and makes little effort to cover his tracks. This lack of planning and control often suggests low intelligence. He is likely to be unemployed and may be a bit of a loner with few friends. The attack may be marked by excessive violence and could also include sexual contact with the victim after death. The disorganized serial killer often turns out to have a history of mental illness.

A number of other factors can be added to the profile. Many serial killers are young adults in their twenties or thirties. They tend not to cross racial lines. White killers tend to kill white victims; black killers tend to kill blacks. Many kill close to home the first few times, but then start to move farther away. Serial killers are eventually often highly mobile, which can make the logistics of catching them difficult.

Of particular interest to those investigating serial killers is what is taken from the scene or from the victim. In most crimes, the perpetrator will take items of monetary value, like cash or jewelry. They may also take evidence, such as a weapon. The serial killer often takes something known as a trophy or souvenir, of no obvious value except to him in his fantasy world. The item is known as a trophy if it is seen as a symbol of achievement and a souvenir if it is to remind the killer of the crime.

Trophies and souvenirs are an important part of the killer's modus operandi ("method of operation," or M.O.), the name given to the particular tools and strategies that distinguish the killer's work. The M.O. includes factors such as the location of the crimes, the tools used, the time of day, the alibi, and any accomplices involved. The M.O. may, of course, evolve over time as the killer becomes more experienced. The investigators will be particularly interested in any details that are unique to that killer, such as leaving a note behind. They will also look for the signature of the crime. Trophies and souvenirs can be part of the signature, as can mutilating or having sex with the corpse, or placing the body in a certain position.

Victimology, the study of the victim, can be crucial in tracking down a serial killer. The investigators need to know what it was about that particular person that attracted the killer. Was the victim truly chosen at random or had the person been stalked previously? The killer may have been searching for the one person who fit his fantasy and, if a common link can be found between the victims, this may be very revealing. For instance, nearly all of the victims of serial killer Ted Bundy had dark hair parted in the center.

The location of the serial killer's crimes is also of significance. Geographical profiling is based on the premise that the killer will operate in a zone where he feels comfortable. This may be near home or, alternatively, far away from it, depending on his psychological make-up. Location is not just where the crime was committed, but is also where the victim was abducted and where the body was taken and left after the crime. Establishing a geographical profile can be challenging if the victim was a prostitute, for instance, or someone who might not be missed by relatives or co-workers for a while. The Yorkshire Ripper killed several prostitutes in the United Kingdom from 1977 to 1981, and the difficulty of tracking the victims' movements sometimes hindered the investigation. Sometimes bodies are dumped in remote places and may not be found for some time. In such cases, a forensic anthropologist may be called in to judge the times of death so the order in which victims were killed can be determined.

The world's most prolific serial killer was Dr. Harold Shipman, a British physician who took his own life in prison in 2004. He may have been responsible for up to 300 deaths, but the true figure will never be known as he always denied the killings. Prior to this, the so-called "Monster of the Andes," Pedro Lopez, held this dubious distinction, having been convicted of 57 murders in 1980. He may have killed many more; his victims were young girls in Colombia.

Despite his notoriety, Shipman was, in many ways, an unusual type of serial killer. His victims, many of whom were elderly women, met their end through morphine injections, one of the main methods of assisted suicide, which some believe to be a compassionate act. He was well known and liked in his community, and there was no obvious motive for the crimes. Some psychiatrists have suggested Shipman disliked older women, or that he was trying to re-enact the death of his mother. Others believed he gained pleasure from the power of life and death that he could exercise as a doctor. Shipman may have begun to kill patients very early on in his medical career, before he had even finished training to be a doctor. Initially, it was thought he began his career as a serial killer in 1974 when he first became a family doctor. This would put the number of deaths between 216 and 260. If, however, he began to kill almost as soon as he had the opportunity, then at least 24 more deaths, and maybe more, could have been at the hands of Shipman.

see also Bundy (serial murderer) case; Psychological profile; Psychopathic personality.