The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (97 page)

new murder indictment in March 2004. The victim in Psychiatrists declared Watts sane but noted his that case, 36-year-old Helen Dutcher, was slain in the pathological hatred of women, whom he regarded as Detroit suburb of Ferndale on December 1, 1979.

evil incarnate. The feelings dated back to childhood, Police initially lacked evidence to charge Watts with the Watts said, when a favorite uncle was allegedly killed crime, so Dutcher’s murder was excluded from the list by female relatives. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizo-of homicides for which Watts had immunity. Extradited phrenic, Watts was said to view the world around him to Michigan in April 2004, Watts filed a not guilty plea
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WEAPONS Preferred by Serial Killers

at his arraignment on June 17. Michigan jurors convicted Watts of first-degree murder on November 17, 2004, in the December 1979 slaying of Helen Fuchter.

He received a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

WEAPONS Preferred by Serial Killers

When it comes to choice of weapons, American serial killers defy all national norms. In 1996, according to the FBI’s
Uniform Crime Report,
68 percent of American murders were committed with firearms, 26 percent were the result of hands-on violence—stabbing, beating, strangulation—and another 6 percent were committed by other means, including ARSON, BOMBS and poison. Serial slayers, by contrast, prefer the personal Murder tools of Britain’s “Yorkshire Ripper” (Author’s touch: 51 percent kill manually, versus 22 percent who collection)

rely exclusively on guns and 10 percent who utilized

“other” means; another 14 percent alternate between shooting and manual attacks, and 3 percent—including sex with more than 100 prostitutes after learning that killers like HENRY LUCAS and OTTIS TOOLE—use any-he was HIV positive. Italian police published photos thing and everything available as homicidal tools.

of prostitute Giuseppina Barbieri in February 1998, (Lucas once bragged that he had murdered using declaring that the HIV positive woman had engaged in

“everything but poison,” including victims who were unsafe sex with a staggering 5,000 clients. The same crucified, run down with cars, and burned alive.) month brought announcements that Darnell McGee, a In classifying sexually motivated killers as “ORGA-Missouri AIDS carrier murdered in January 1997, had NIZED” and “DISORGANIZED,” FBI analysts determined infected at least 18 of his 100-plus sex partners since that the first group normally planned their crimes in his illness was diagnosed in 1992. The first U.S. crimi-detail, procuring any necessary weapons well ahead of nal charges on record were filed against Nushawn time, and the latter type more often killed on impulse, Williams, jailed on a New York drug charge in Sep-thus arriving unprepared, and found their weapons tember 1997, who later admitted seducing girls with waiting for them at the murder scene. “Disorganized”

crack cocaine and having unprotected sex with his offenders also have a tendency to leave their tools sedated victims. At least a dozen teenage girls were behind, often with useful fingerprints, while their thus infected, resulting in a February 1999 guilty plea

“organized” competitors keep (or dispose of) their on charges of reckless endangerment and statutory weapons in an effort to avoid detection.

rape. (He received a sentence of four to 12 years in A significant break from the serial-killing “norm” is prison.) Tennessee divorcée Pamela Wiser cited seen when drugs and poisons are employed. Aside from revenge as a motive for exposing 50 men to her dis-MEDICAL MURDERS wherein both male and female

ease. In December 1998 she pled guilty on 22 counts killers display a fondness for lethal injections, the great of criminal exposure and received a 26-year prison majority of poisoners are women, typically “BLACK

term.

WIDOWS” who spice their home cooking with unortho-The first case of an HIV-positive defendant charged dox ingredients ranging from arsenic to antifreeze. This with deliberate murder was reported from Hamilton, tendency of female slayers to avoid the use of shotguns, Ontario, in February 2005. Johnson Aziga, 48 years axes, and piano wire has prompted some authors to old, was initially indicted in 2004 for endangering the dub them “gentle” killers, but that designation fails to lives of 13 women, with whom he had unprotected sex recognize the suffering endured by many victims of suc-despite his knowledge that he carried AIDS. Seven of cessive deadly doses that result in blindness, seizures, Aziga’s unknowing partners later tested positive for hemorrhages, and a protracted, agonizing death.

HIV, and two died from AIDS-related illnesses, in By the later 1990s, human bodily fluids themselves December 2003 and May 2004. Nine months after the were sometimes considered weapons of multiple mur-second death, Canadian prosecutors charged Aziga der, as authorities worldwide pursued individuals with two counts of first-degree murder. No trial date accused of deliberately infecting multiple sex partners had been scheduled for Aziga’s case at press time for with HIV (the incurable virus that causes AIDS). In this volume.

Finland, Stephen Thomas reportedly had unprotected
See also
MODUS OPERANDI; MOTIVES

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WEST, Frederick and Rosemary

WEST, Frederick and Rosemary

school, Fred also displayed a perverse sexual interest in In August 1992, police in Gloucester, England, his younger sisters. One later claimed to have carried launched an investigation of child-abuse charges filed his child, though Fred blamed the pregnancy on his against local contractor Frederick West and his wife father. At age 17, a motorcycle crash left Fred comatose Rosemary. Both suspects were arrested on August 6, for a week. He woke to find a thick metal plate in his Fred charged with rape and sodomy of a minor, his wife skull and one leg permanently shorter than the other.

held as an accomplice to the crime. Large quantities of Disfigurement did not prevent him from romancing 16-pornography were seized from the family home at 25

year-old prostitute Catherine “Rena” Costello, but she Cromwell Street, but the case collapsed when two soon moved to Scotland, leaving Fred to play the field.

young witnesses refused to testify. Still, detectives and One target pushed him from a fire escape after Fred social workers continued their investigation of the thrust a hand up her skirt, resulting in another head strange family, and that persistence revealed a festering wound.

nightmare.

In 1961, Fred and a friend were fined for shoplifting.

The abortive case against Fred and Rosemary West Later that year, he was accused of impregnating a 13-was not their first brush with the law. Twenty years ear-year-old neighbor. At his trial for statutory rape, a lier, they had been charged with assaulting another physician testified that West suffered from epileptic young victim, 16-year-old Caroline Raine. Raine was seizures. The news saved him from jail, but not from pregnant when the Wests picked her up in September conviction. The jury’s vote left West a convicted child 1972, hitchhiking from Tewksbury to Cinderford in molester at age 20. Rena Costello returned to pick up search of work. They hired Raine on the spot, to serve their relationship in summer 1962, bringing word that as nanny for their children, but she soon grew nervous she was pregnant by an Asian bus driver. Fred told his in their company. Fred West incessantly discussed her parents that the child was his and married Rena in pregnancy, offering an amateur abortion if Raine November 1962, embarking on a life in Scotland. When changed her mind about keeping the child. She soon left daughter Charmaine was born in March 1963, Fred their home, but met the Wests again in December, once wrote his mother that the child had been stillborn, again while thumbing rides. Raine was barely in the car prompting him to adopt a mixed-race replacement.

before Fred beat her unconscious, bound her, and drove Despite her background as a streetwalker, Rena soon her home for a sadistic “genital examination” that balked at Fred’s nonstop demands for sex, including included flogging Raine’s vagina with a belt. They sodomy and bondage. Dissatisfied, Fred sated his threatened to kill Raine and bury her “under the paving desires with young girls he met on his job as driver of stones of Gloucester,” but she screamed for help when a an ice cream truck. Rena bore a second daughter, Anne-visitor came to the door, landing the Wests in jail. Rape Marie, in 1964, around the same time that Fred struck charges were dismissed, but the Wests pled guilty to and killed a young boy with his truck. Fearing that he indecent assault with bodily harm, paying a £100 fine.

would lose his job, he moved the family to Gloucester The new investigation cost Fred and Rosemary the and found work in a slaughterhouse, where he devel-custody of their six youngest children, as new details of oped (in the words of British author Colin Wilson) “a kinky sex and violence emerged from 25 Cromwell morbid obsession with corpses and blood and dismem-Street. Worse yet, the children sent to foster care voiced berment.” Rena went back to Scotland in 1965, leaving fears of being planted “under the patio like Heather” if both children with Fred, and in her absence Gloucester they spoke against their parents. Sixteen-year-old recorded eight rapes by a man matching West’s descrip-Heather West had dropped from sight in June 1987, tion. When Rena returned in July 1966, she found Fred without benefit of a missing-person report from her living with another woman, Anna McFall. That sight parents. When questioned, Fred and Rosemary insisted prompted a visit to police, where Rena denounced Fred that Heather had left school and home for a job at a as a pervert unfit to raise children.

holiday camp in Devon. Searchers arrived to dig up the Anna announced her own pregnancy in early 1967, Wests’ garden on February 24, 1994. The search was but Fred took the news badly. He killed Anna that July still in progress on February 25, when Fred confessed to and dismembered her body, retaining her fingers and killing Heather and burying her in the garden. By then, toes as grim TROPHIES of the act when he buried her police had found sufficient evidence to know that she (and her unborn child) in a field near Much Marcle.

was not alone.

Rena soon rejoined the dysfunctional family, turning Fred West was born in 1941, the first of seven chil-tricks in her free time while Fred openly fondled daugh-dren born within a decade to Walter and Daisy West at ter Charmaine. Some investigators now believe he mur-Much Marcle, 120 miles west of London. A poor stu-dered 15-year-old Mary Bastholm in January 1968, after dent who was frequently punished for misbehavior at snatching her from a Gloucester bus stop. As evidence,
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WEST, Frederick and Rosemary

investigators note that West patronized a market where kinky sex life. They put ads in swingers’ newspapers Bastholm worked, and that one witness claims to have and hired babysitters to watch their children while they seen the girl in his car. West later admitted grabbing scoured Gloucester for “young virgins.” At least one of other victims from bus stops, but he was never charged those babysitters was also drugged and raped.

with Bastholm’s murder. Daisy West died in February In June 1972, Rosemary bore another daughter,

1968, and Fred soon embarked on a series of workplace named Mae. That arrival prompted a move to larger petty thefts that cost him one job after another. Novem-quarters, at 25 Cromwell Street, boasting a garage and ber 1968 found him driving a bakery truck, when he large basement. The Wests took in boarders to cover met teenage prostitute Rosemary Letts.

their bills, while Fred converted the cellar into a private Rosemary was born in November 1953, the daughter torture chamber. Daughter Anne-Marie was its first vic-of a violent schizophrenic father and a clinically tim, raped repeatedly by Fred with the advice that he depressed mother who endured sessions of electroshock was preparing her for marriage. As with Rosemary, Fred therapy while pregnant with her daughter. Household also invited strange men to molest his daughter. (Fred punishments included frequent beatings, marathon gar-impregnated his daughter once, then procured an abor-dening sessions, and dousings with buckets of cold water tion when the fetus developed in her fallopian tube.) The when the children overslept. Slow-witted and afflicted assault on Caroline Raine followed in December 1972, with nervous tics, Rosemary was nicknamed “Dozy while Rosemary was pregnant once again, and the Wests Rosie” for her habit of lapsing into semiconscious dream escaped with a small fine in January 1973 after persuad-states. Obesity made matters worse, subjecting her to ing the court that Raine had consented to rough sex.

constant ridicule from peers. Forbidden to date by her Lynda Gough, a 21-year-old seamstress, joined the father, she fondled her brother and teased older men on Wests as a live-in nanny in 1973, but the relationship the sly, at least one of whom raped her. Soon Rosemary soon soured. Fred murdered and dismembered her, began selling sex on the streets. Her parents separated in removing Gough’s fingers, toes, and kneecaps before he early 1969, and Rosemary startled neighbors by moving buried her remains in the basement. Son Stephen was in with her father. Their odd relationship fueled rumors born in August, but his arrival failed to halt the of incest that remain unsubstantiated.