The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases (12 page)

He was incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Crest Hill, Illinois. Though he preferred solitary pastimes, such as stamp collecting, Speck was anything but a model prisoner. Most of his infractions involved drugs and bootleg alcohol. He sought and was denied parole on six different applications, the last being in 1990.

Speck died of a heart attack on 5 December 1991, the day before what would have been his 50th birthday. An autopsy performed on his brain revealed gross abnormalities. However, further examination and study was curtailed after samples disappeared.

Speck’s unclaimed body was eventually cremated. A service was held, attended only by the county coroner, a deputy, a newspaper columnist and a pastoral worker. His ashes were spread in an undisclosed location.

The death of Richard Speck was a news story for a day or two; some media outlets provided summaries of his awful crimes. Then, just as Speck slowly began to fade from modern memory, in May 1996 a videotape surfaced. Believed to have been shot two years before his death, it features a bizarre-looking Speck with pendulous breasts, wearing blue silk panties. He is shown taking drugs and having sex. But more shocking than the visual images are Speck’s words, answers to questions posed by another inmate. He describes the process and strength required in strangling someone to death. When asked about the deaths of the eight nurses, he responds, ‘It just wasn’t their night.’

Controversy followed. Some advocates of the death penalty used the tapes to support their cause. Others stated that it was obvious Speck was being forced by other inmates into the acts, and argued for penal reform.

EDMUND KEMPER

It is sometimes claimed that serial killers want to be caught. Increasing sloppiness, risk-taking and taunting yet revealing letters sent to the authorities are often cited as proof. Ultimately, this is nothing more than speculation; we cannot really know. However, it can be said with certainty that Edmund Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer, wanted to be caught, and that’s down to the simple fact that he actually turned himself in.

Edmund Emil Kemper III was born on 18 December 1948 in Burbank, California, the home of the Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers. An only son, he had one older and one younger sister. Kemper was named after his father, with whom he was extremely close. In 1957, his parents divorced, and his mother moved with the children to Helena, Montana. There, nearly 2,000 kilometres away from his father, Kemper suffered his mother’s emotional abuse. She would often lock him in the basement, thinking that he would molest his sisters. While still a child he began to torture and kill animals, and used his sisters’ dolls in acting out aberrant sexual fantasies and situations. On more than one occasion, his younger sister found that her dolls had been decapitated. In a favourite childhood game Kemper would dream of his own execution, enlisting one of his sisters to lead him to a pretend electric chair.

At the age of 13 he ran away from home and made his way back to California. His father, who had remarried, was somewhat less than pleased to see him. It was during the trip that Kemper learned he had a stepbrother – a boy who had replaced him in his father’s affections. He was sent back to Montana, where he was equally unwelcome.

As a 14-year-old, he was sent to live with his paternal grandparents, Maude and Edmund Kemper, on their 17-acre ranch in North Fork, California. Already considerably more than six feet tall, he was an awkward boy, both physically and socially. Despite his height, he was easily bullied. According to Kemper, his grandmother was another in a list of tormentors.

On the afternoon of 27 August 1964, the two argued and, taking the rifle given to him by his grandfather the previous Christmas, Kemper shot his grandmother once in the head and twice in the back. It was an impulsive act. His grandfather arrived home and was shot as he got out of his car. Kemper would later say that he killed his grandfather to spare the old man the discovery of his dead wife, killed by his grandson.

After phoning his mother to tell her what he had done, Kemper called the local police and waited on the porch for their arrival. In custody he was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia and sent to the Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

On his 21st birthday, 18 December 1969, against the wishes of several psychologists, he was released into his mother’s care. She had moved back to California during her son’s incarceration, and was now living in Santa Cruz, a rapidly growing beach town to the south of San Francisco. Kemper attended community college and received high marks. He became friendly with various members of the Santa Cruz Police Department. For a time he planned on becoming an officer, a dream that ended when he learned he was too tall. Now standing 6 feet, 9 inches, and weighing nearly 300 pounds (over 20 stone), Kemper was an imposing figure.

He worked at a number of jobs before settling into a position as a labourer with the California Division of Highways, an occupation that had some relationship to his subsequent crimes. Kemper wasn’t good with money, but he managed to save enough to move out of his mother’s home and share an apartment with a roommate. He also purchased a motorcycle, which played a part in two separate accidents. As a result of one of these, Kemper received a settlement of $15,000. He used this money to buy a yellow Ford Galaxie, and began to cruise the area along the Pacific coast in search of female hitch-hikers. By his own estimation, he generously provided rides to approximately 150 young women and girls, all the while slowly and deliberately gathering items of sinister purpose in his trunk: knives, handcuffs, a blanket and plastic bags.

On 7 May 1972, he picked up his first victims, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, who were hitch-hiking 270 kilometres from Fresno to Stanford University. At first the girls felt themselves lucky, as Kemper told them he would drive all the way to Stanford. However, he soon drove off the highway and on to a deserted dirt road. There he stopped, killed both girls, and drove back to the highway with their bodies in his car boot. In a scene reminiscent of a movie cliché, Kemper was almost caught when, as he drove back to his apartment, the police pulled him over and issued a warning for a broken tail light.

Kemper arrived at his apartment to find that his roommate was out. He carried in both bodies, laid them on the floor of his bedroom and began to dissect them, taking photographs to mark his progress. He later admitted that he’d had sex with various severed parts. He disposed of the girls’ bodies in the mountains, burying that of Pesce in a shallow grave which he marked in order to find it on future visits.

During the next four months he continued to give lifts to women, often engaging in conversations about an unknown man who was murdering female hitch-hikers.

On 14 September, he raped and killed Aiko Koo, a 15-year-old girl who had decided to hitch-hike after becoming tired of waiting for a bus. She, too, was taken to the apartment and dissected. The next day Kemper went before two psychiatrists, a requirement of his parole. As a result of the interview, it was concluded that he was no longer a danger. Later, he disposed of Koo’s body parts outside Boulder Creek.

The following January and February, Kemper killed three more women, two of whom he picked up at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus, where his mother was employed. These same two women he dismembered and beheaded in his mother’s home.

On 21 April 1973, Good Friday, Kemper killed his mother with a pick hammer as she slept. After decapitating her, he sexually assaulted the corpse. The head he placed on the mantelpiece, where he used it as a dart board. He then invited over one of his mother’s female friends, Sally Hallett, whom he strangled and beheaded.

On Easter Sunday, he drove off eastward in Hallett’s car, listening for news reports of the murders he had committed on the radio. After driving 2,400 kilometres without hearing a word on his crimes, Kemper pulled off the road. From a phone booth in Pueblo, Colorado, he phoned his old friends at the Santa Cruz Police Department and confessed to the murder of his mother, her friend and the six female hitch-hikers. However, the officer who took the call, knowing Kemper, did not think him at all capable of the crimes, and considered the call a practical joke made in poor taste. It took several further phone calls to convince the Santa Cruz police that a visit to Mrs Kemper’s house might be warranted.

On 7 May 1973, Kemper was charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. While awaiting trial, he twice attempted suicide. The trial began on 23 October and lasted less than three weeks. Kemper’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity was countered by three prosecution psychiatrists who declared him to be sane. In the end, he was found guilty on all eight counts.

He asked to be sentenced to death, but his childhood fantasy was denied. Kemper is currently serving a sentence of life imprisonment in the California State Medical Corrections Facility.

JERRY BRUDOS

The mind of the serial killer seems such a mystery; explanations of their crimes are beyond the realm of the easy answer. Incredibly, some observers have blamed the troubled life and horrific crimes of Jerry Brudos, Oregon’s worst serial killer, on the void created by the absence of a mother’s love.

Jerome Henry Brudos was born on 31 January 1939 in South Dakota, the third child in a family that already included two boys. He would later say that his mother had so hoped for a daughter that the birth of yet another son was a great disappointment. Raised by a mother who viewed him with scorn, Brudos grew up with the knowledge that at least one of his parents thought he had been born the wrong sex. He sought approval and friendship from other females, but often found himself ignored and very much alone. As he matured, so too did his attraction to women’s shoes and lingerie. The roots of Brudos’ fetishes are quite deep and, unnervingly, can be traced back to a very early age. As a 5-year-old, he uncovered a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes at a local dump, and later was caught wearing them by his mother. Her strong and violent reaction, which included the destruction of his treasure, may very well have served to fuel Brudos’ interest in women’s footwear as something forbidden. At the same age, he was caught stealing the shoes of his kindergarten teacher.

By the age of 17, Brudos’ desire for the feminine had taken a more serious turn. He abducted a 17-year-old girl at knifepoint, and led her to a local hillside in which he had excavated a large hole. Once there, Brudos beat the girl and forced her to remove her clothing. The assault was interrupted by an elderly couple out for a stroll and he was arrested.

As a result, Brudos spent nine months in the psychiatric ward at the Oregon State Hospital, where he openly discussed his fantasies with the attending doctors. He explained that the hillside dugout had been intended as a place to keep girls he wanted to use as sex slaves. One of his more disturbing fantasies concerned dumping women into freezers so that he might later use their stiff bodies in creating sexually explicit poses and scenes. Amazingly, as Brudos provided doctors with details of his various dreams and desires, he was permitted to attend his high school classes. Ultimately, these same mental health practitioners determined that their teenaged patient was suffering from nothing more than a difficulty in adjusting to adolescence. Despite the abduction, the beating and the hole he’d created for sex slaves, the future serial killer was considered a person not prone to violence.

After high school, Brudos enlisted in the military, but was soon discharged as an undesirable recruit. He became an electronics technician and, in 1961, married a shy 17-year-old, five years his junior. At the beginning of their marriage, Brudos insisted that his bride remain naked when at home. Exactly how long this rule remained in place is unknown – it may have lasted until the birth of his children, or perhaps the arrival of his mother. Whatever the answer, there was another rule that remained in place. All were forbidden to enter certain areas of the house – rooms in which Brudos indulged his sexual fantasies. And yet, as the years passed, Brudos’ wife caught glimpses of his secret life: a paperweight in the shape of a breast, photographs of nude women. On one occasion he appeared before her in women’s underwear, garments probably obtained by breaking into other people’s houses. During at least one of these break-ins, Brudos encountered a woman and raped her.

On 26 January 1968, he committed what is thought to have been his first murder. The victim was Linda Slawson, a 19-year-old who was trying to raise money for university by selling encyclopaedias door to door. Brudos lured the young woman into his workshop, where she was clubbed on the head, then strangled. All this took place while, at Brudos’ encouragement, the rest of the family sat eating at a local fast food restaurant. Over the next few days, he dressed, photographed and sexually violated the corpse. Eventually, he disposed of Slawson’s body by throwing it off a bridge into the Willamette River – but not before amputating one of her feet, which he kept and used to model his collection of women’s shoes. When the severed foot had deteriorated to a point at which Brudos no longer found it to be of use, it too was thrown in the river.

Eleven months later to the day, he murdered again. The second victim was Jan Whitney, whom he encountered on a roadside after her car had broken down. Brudos took her to his house, saying that she would be able to wait with his wife, while he returned to repair the car. Instead, he strangled Whitney, sexually violating the corpse before carrying it to his workshop. Again, he took photographs and dressed the corpse in his collection of women’s clothing. For several days he left the body hanging from the ceiling.

Despite his actions, and the fact that his crimes were taking place in a house shared with his wife, his children and, of course, his mother, Brudos seemed to think there was no way he would be caught. It was then that a bizarre accident took place. A car struck his house, damaging the structure to such an extent that passers-by could easily view the inside. Before the police could investigate the interior of the house, Brudos took down Whitney’s body and hid it in a small structure on his property.