The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (56 page)

Other cases, however, continue to pose enduring—and tantalizing—puzzles. Another Ohio maniac—the “Cleveland Torso Killer” (aka the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”)—is a case in point. During a four-year span in the 1930s, this bloodthirsty maniac chopped up a dozen people, leaving body parts strewn around the city. Nevertheless, in spite of an all-out effort by law officials, led by no less an eminence than Eliot Ness, the former Untouchable who was serving as Cleveland’s director of public safety), the “Mad Butcher” eluded arrest. In the spring of 1938, his atrocities came to a sudden, mysterious halt. To this day no one knows who he was. Suspects range from a mentally unbalanced premed student to a Bohemian immigrant to a psychopathic hobo. Perhaps the most unsettling theory of all was put forth by a Cleveland detective who believed that the torso slayings stopped because the culprit pulled up stakes and headed west to California—where he committed the infamous “Black Dahlia” homicide.

Cracking a legendary unsolved murder case is a challenge that some crime enthusiasts find impossible to resist. Every publishing season seems to bring another book, claiming to be the ultimate solution to one of these real-life whodunits. In the past few years alone, the American public has been treated to a former Los Angeles police officer fingering his own father as the “Black Dahlia” killer (Steve Hodel’s
Black Dahlia Avenger
); a veteran true-crime writer naming the original “
Zodiac
” (Robert Graysmith’s
Zodiac Unmasked);
and a bestselling mystery author announcing, with great fanfare, that she had finally figured out who Jack the Ripper was (Patricia Cornwell’s
Portrait of a Killer
). Whether these books will truly prove to be the last word on their respective subjects only time will tell, though there is reason to believe that these cases (especially Saucy Jack’s) will continue to generate new “ultimate solutions” far into the future.

Occasionally, of course, a long-unsolved serial-murder case really will come to a sudden, unexpected resolution—not, however, as the result of the ingenious theorizings of a bestselling writer but through the apprehension of the perpetrator after years of persistent police investigation. In December 2001, for example—twenty years after he committed his first atrocity—the infamous “Green River Killer” was finally brought to justice. A few years later, another notorious case that had frustrated investigators for decades—the “
BTK
” killings in Wichita, Kansas, came to a gratifying conclusion with the arrest of a suspect, Dennis Rader.

Unsolved No More

Time is not, as a rule, on the side of homicide investigators. With every passing year, the trail gets colder and the chances of finding the killer diminish. When whole decades go by, those chances fade to just about zero.

In at least one case, however, the reverse turned out to be true. The passage of time—and, more specifically, the technology that developed during that period—made it possible to identify one of the most notorious and elusive serial sex slayers in modern American history.

In the early 1980s, a mysterious psychokiller murdered dozens of young women, mostly prostitutes and runaways, dumping many of them along the Green River of Kings County, Washington—a signature pattern that earned
him his homicidal nickname, the “Green River Killer.” Most of his victims were strangled. In some cases, they had been raped after death.

Not only were the local police unable to identify the culprit, they had a hard time keeping track of how many people he killed, largely because he was so adept at squirreling the bodies away in the Kings County countryside. By 1984, when the murders seemed to stop, the authorities put the number of victims at twenty-four. Five years later, after finding more decaying remains, their best bet was forty-nine.

The police might not have had many conclusive leads, but there was one thing they didn’t lack: possible suspects. Altogether, they compiled a list of some 1,300 names. One of them was a truck painter, Gary Ridgeway, who had been seen with a few of the victims. He also had a problem keeping his hands off women’s throats. He had once tried to throttle a prostitute and another time tried the same with his wife. The police suspected him enough to request that he take a lie detector test. Ridgeway agreed and passed the test not once but twice. He was off the hook, at least for the next fifteen years or so.

From some of the corpses, investigators were able to collect semen samples, but they were minuscule—too small for 1980s forensic science to produce any useful results. By 2001, however, the situation had changed. Enhanced technology now made it possible to analyze such small samples, and the semen found on three of the victims matched the DNA in the saliva taken from Ridgeway.

In November 2001, police arrested the fifty-two-year-old painter, nearly twenty years after the last known victim had been murdered. In order to escape the death penalty, he agreed to cooperate, supplying the police with information about other murders that they were not aware of, one of them committed as late as 1996. At his trial, he confessed to forty-eight killings, but there might have been more—perhaps as many as sixty. The problem was, after so many years, Ridgeway had trouble remembering.

As he told investigators, “I killed so many women, I have a hard time keeping them straight.”

U
PBRINGING

It is common to describe an especially harsh, deprived childhood as “Dickensian”—but in the case of serial killers, that adjective is wildly inadequate.
Compared to the boyhoods of most serial killers, Oliver Twist’s early years in a Victorian poorhouse seem like an extended vacation at Disneyland.

Albert “Boston Strangler”
DeSalvo
was raised by a monstrous father who liked to bring whores home with him, screw them in front of the kids, then beat his wife savagely when she complained. One of DeSalvo’s most vivid childhood memories was of watching his father knock out all of his mother’s teeth, then break her fingers one by one as she lay sprawled beneath the kitchen sink. DeSalvo himself not only received regular, vicious thrashings with a lead pipe but, along with his two sisters, was sold into slavery. An acquaintance of the senior DeSalvo paid nine dollars for the three children, who were shipped off to Maine and forced to work as farm laborers.

Henry Lee
Lucas
was raised in unimaginable squalor by a brutal, alcoholic prostitute who compelled her paraplegic husband to watch her have sex with her tricks. Henry was forced to watch, too—generally while dressed up in the little girl’s clothing his mother made him wear. She also beat him mercilessly with objects ranging from broomsticks to two-by-fours and took pleasure in killing his pets.

Little Charlie
Manson’s
mother was a bisexual alcoholic prostitute, who reportedly once traded her son for a pitcher of beer. After she was thrown into prison for armed robbery, Manson was taken in by a brutal uncle, who derided him as a sissy and sent him to school in a dress. In later years, he was placed in an institution where he was routinely beaten with a wooden paddle for bed-wetting.

Raised in a gothically grim orphanage, Albert
Fish
was schooled in sadism by a female teacher who disciplined disobedient boys and girls by stripping them naked and beating them in front of the other children. Sex murderer Joseph Kallinger—whose victims included his own son—was raised by adoptive parents who kept him in line with a hammer, a cat-o’-nine-tails, and constant threats of castration. Serial killer Hugh Morse was brought up by an insanely tyrannical grandmother, who once punished him for sneaking out to the movies by butchering his pet mice.

According to
FBI
findings, 42 percent of serial killers have suffered severe physical abuse as children, 43 percent were sexually molested, and a full 74 percent were subjected to ongoing psychological torture.

Of course, there are those who sneer at the notion that an unhappy childhood is the main cause of serial killing, pointing out that countless people
who grow up in seriously dysfunctional households do not turn out to be homicidal maniacs. These critics also refer to monsters like Jeffrey
Dahmer
and Ted
Bundy
, who appear to have come from more or less normal, middle-class backgrounds. And indeed, childhood snapshots of little Ted, dressed up in a cowboy suit or posing beside a snowman, would not look out of place in Ozzie and Harriet’s family album.

It’s undoubtedly true that other factors are involved in the making of serial killers (see
Causes
). Still, “negative parenting” (as the sociologists quaintly call it) is invariably present in their backgrounds. (There are indications that Dahmer and Bundy were both victims of sexual abuse by relatives.) Brutalized in childhood, the serial killer grows up full of a murderous rage that is turned against all of humanity. He can know pleasure only by administering pain. He can feel alive only when he is inflicting death.

“I hated all my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that I was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten. I was made to do things that no human bein’ would want to do.”

H
ENRY
L
EE
L
UCAS