The Serial Killer Files (14 page)

They brought another victim home for sexual abuse and murder just five days later. Catherine—unnerved by the sheer horror of the previous incident—left the sixteen-year-old girl unbound and alone in the bedroom while Birnie was away at work. The captive managed to escape and gave the police complete details about the identity of her tormentors.

Under arrest, Birnie and his common-law wife soon confessed to all four torture-killings and led police to the buried remains. At their 1987 trial, they each pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and were given the maximum sentence of life in prison.

Some team killers are connected, not just by a sick psychological bond—a shared, mutually inciting interest in torture and murder—but by actual ties of kinship. The Hillside Stranglers, for example, were cousins. So, too, were a pair of bloodthirsty psychopaths who terrorized the American frontier more than two centuries ago.

The Harps

Their names were William and Joshua Harpe. Though often referred to as siblings, they were actually first cousins—the children of two Scottish brothers who emigrated from their homeland to North Carolina sometime around 1760.

As young men during the Revolutionary War, the younger Harpes picked the wrong side, fighting alongside the British. Their motives had less to do with politics than with the opportunities for rape, pillage, and murder that the conflict afforded them. After taking part in a losing battle in South Carolina, the brutish pair deserted the Redcoats and fled to the wilderness. Before long, they had abducted a couple of women and carried them off to Tennessee, settling down around Chattanooga. Over the next few years, they raided farms and robbed unwary travelers. They are also reputed to have killed at least four of their own offspring: unwanted babies born to their captive women.

Sometime around 1794, the two killer cousins dropped the final “e” from their family name and changed their Christian names to Micajah and Wiley. Along the frontier, however, they would come to be known simply as Big Harp and Little Harp—names that would strike fear into the backwoods residents. In 1798, the Harps embarked on what many criminal historians regard as the first serial murder spree in American history. Over a nine-month period, they roamed from Tennessee to Virginia to Kentucky to Illinois, slaughtering an estimated forty victims at a time when the entire population of the country was less than six million.

Some of their murders were especially atrocious. On one occasion, they stripped a man naked, tied him to a horse, then blindfolded the animal and ran it off a cliff. On another, Big Harp picked up his own four-month-old daughter by the ankle and bashed her brains out against a tree because he was worried that the crying infant might alert a posse to his whereabouts. The Harps were also fond of slitting open their victims and filling their bellies with stones before sinking the corpses in a river.

Eventually, Big Harp was shot and seriously wounded by a pursuing posse near present-day Dixon, Kentucky. One of the posse members, Moses Stegall—whose wife and child had been murdered by the Harps—decapitated the still-living outlaw with a hunting knife, impaled the head on a tree, and left it there to rot. To this day, the spot is known as Harp’s Head.

Little Harp escaped, changed his name to Sutton, and took up with a band of Mississippi river pirates. In 1804, however, after being recognized in Greenville, Mississippi, he was arrested, convicted, and hanged. As with his brother, his head was cut off and displayed on a stake as a warning to other outlaws.

The Kallingers

Other team killers have been even more closely related to each other than the Harp cousins. In the early 1970s, for example, a Philadelphia shoemaker named Joseph Kallinger enlisted his own son as an accomplice in a series of horrendous crimes.

Born in 1936, Kallinger was abandoned in his infancy and adopted at eighteen months by a sadistic Austrian couple who subjected him to savage floggings, beat him with a hammer, and convinced him that his penis had been permanently stunted by a hernia operation he was forced to undergo at age six.

Two years later, he was gang-raped at knifepoint by a bunch of older boys.

Unsurprisingly, he grew up violently disturbed. As an adolescent, he liked to masturbate while clutching a knife and stabbing at pornographic pictures. He was a lifelong pyromaniac who set fires for both pleasure and profit, torching homes for insurance money as well as for the ecstatic sense of power derived from seeing buildings go up in flames.

Briefly committed on two occasions to mental hospitals, he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic sadist with intense hostility toward women. For the most part, however, he managed to pass himself off as normal.

Marrying twice, fathering seven children, he opened a shoe repair shop in the Kensington district of Philadelphia. To the outside world, he appeared to be a respectable, self-employed member of the community.

At home, his sadistic violence was never far below the surface. His children were its primary targets. In early 1972, three of them filed abuse charges against him, including his thirteen-year-old daughter, Mary Jo—who claimed that, as punishment for some minor infraction, her father had once branded her thigh with the blade of a red-hot spatula. Kallinger was convicted, but released on probation after just a few months behind bars.

By 1974, his psychosis was in full bloom. Among other symptoms, he began to hear voices—issued by an invisible floating head named “Charlie”—commanding him to murder and castrate young boys.

When he asked his thirteen-year-old son Michael for help in this deranged mission, the boy readily agreed. On July 7, 1974, they lured a young Puerto Rican boy into an abandoned factory, stripped him, gagged him with his socks, and sliced off his penis.

The next victim was Kallinger’s twelve-year-old son, Joey. Kallinger drowned him in a stagnant pool in the cellar of an abandoned rug factory while Michael watched.

Beginning in November 1974, Kallinger and his son went on a wide-ranging rape and robbery spree, invading homes in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, assaulting the female residents and making off with money and jewelry. Their nine-month crime wave culminated in a horrific episode, when—after gaining entrance to a house in Leonia, New Jersey, and trussing up eight people at gunpoint—Kallinger slit the throat of a twenty-one-year-old woman when she refused to bite off the penis of a male victim.

Two weeks later, he and his son were arrested.

Michael—deemed by the courts to have been under his father’s nefarious influence—was released into foster care after a stint in reform school. Kallinger was sentenced to life. In prison, he underwent a progressive mental breakdown, proclaiming himself God, declaring his desire to slaughter every person on earth. He also developed an obsessive fascination with his own feces, which he liked to eat from the toilet, smear on his skin, and mail to pen pals. He died of a seizure on March 26, 1996, at the age of fifty-nine.

The Pandys

Another serial sex-killer who enlisted his own child—in this case his daughter—to participate in his atrocities was Belgian pastor Andras Pandy. A stout, bespectacled man with a perpetual half smile and a goofy Prince Valiant hairdo, the middle-aged clergyman looked like the last person on earth capable of homicidal depravity. Underneath his innocuous facade, he was a psychopath of monstrous proportions.

A refugee from Hungary, Pandy settled in Brussels in 1956 and became a respected pastor and founder of a humanitarian organization, presumably set up to provide foster care for children orphaned during the Romanian revolution that toppled the Ceaucescu dictatorship. At home, however, he was a vicious sexual predator. He began raping his daughter Agnes when she was thirteen. Psychologically enslaved to her degenerate dad, Agnes was forced to assist him in a series of horrendous crimes. Between 1986 and 1992, they murdered an indeterminate number of victims, bludgeoning some with a sledgehammer, shooting others, then hacking up the bodies and dissolving the dismembered pieces in a vat of Cleanest—a store-bought drain opener with a high acid content. Six of the victims were Pandy’s own family members—his first and second wives, several children and stepchildren. Others were apparently orphans recruited through his “charitable” organization, along with women he lured into his clutches through

“lonely hearts” ads in a Hungarian newspaper.

In 1997, Agnes—by then pushing forty—confessed to police. Searching Pandy’s home, investigators turned up ghastly evidence of his atrocities—human bones and teeth in the basement, chunks of human flesh in his freezer. Arrested in 1997, the “Pastor Diabolique”—as he was dubbed by the local press—finally went on trial in February 2002, and received a life sentence for six counts of murder. For assisting her monstrous father, Agnes was given a sentence of twenty-one years.

It was my task to take out the organs while Pandy was cutting up the remains. I just used a kitchen knife.

You have to exercise strength. It’s not that easy.

—Agnes Pandy, explaining how she had eviscerated one of her own stepsisters The Beanes

Among the more sensational crimes of the blood-soaked 1960s were the appalling murders perpetrated by the so-called Manson family. Of course, the wild-eyed bunch who carried out this slaughter weren’t really relatives; just a band of psychopathic pseudohippies under the sway of their deranged messiah.

But there have been a few cases in which entire families have collaborated in serial murder.

One legendary killer clan was the barbarous tribe headed by a fifteenth-century outlaw, Sawney Beane.

Born during the reign of James IV of Scotland, the bloodthirsty Beane and his common-law wife fled from civilized society and found refuge in a cave on the Galloway coast, where they proceeded to spawn a family that—through years of incestuous breeding—eventually grew to four dozen members. The main component of their diet was human flesh. Preying on unwary travelers, the feral clan not only robbed but cannibalized their victims, “butchering them in their den, then salting and pickling the meat for future consumption,” as historian Michael Anglo writes.

According to legend, hundreds of people ended up as provender for the man-eating Beanes. Their hideout was finally discovered when some travelers spotted several members of the monstrous family feasting on the flesh of a freshly killed husband and wife who had been ambushed on the way home from a fair. Led by the Scots king himself, a small army rounded up the entire clan, who were condemned to a punishment commensurate with their crimes.

“The sex organs of the men were cut off and cast into a fire, and their hands and legs severed from their bodies,” historian Anglo explains. “They were left to bleed to death while the females were forced to watch. Finally, cursing and swearing, the women were thrown into fires and slowly burned to death.”

Though female psychos like Karla Homolka, Charlene Gallego, and Rosemary West were active accomplices in their husbands’ depravities, not every woman married to a sadistic sex-murderer participates in his atrocities. Indeed some of these wives aren’t even aware that their mates are serial killers.

Undoubtedly a certain amount of denial is at work in such cases. When Herb Baumeister’s wife, Julie, asked him about the half-buried human skeleton that their son had stumbled across in their wooded backyard, Herb hastily explained that it was just an old, discarded lab specimen inherited from his physician father. Unlikely as this story was, Julie chose to believe it. Mostly, however, the fact that certain serial killers are able to fool their own families is testimony to one of the most chilling traits of these psychopaths: their ability to pass themselves off as normal, to conceal their monstrous secret identities from the rest of the world, even from those who share their homes.

Peter Kürten, for example, was married to a perfectly respectable woman who never had an inkling that her spouse was the infamous “Monster of Düsseldorf,” responsible for butchering twenty-nine victims in 1929. Nor did the wife of the Russian maniac Andrei Chikatilo ever guess that she was wed to a creature who not only slaughtered more than fifty victims but perpetrated unspeakable acts of torture, mutilation, and cannibalism on their bodies. Peter Sutcliffe—aka the “Yorkshire Ripper”—maintained his facade as a happily married family man while conducting a savage five-year murder spree that claimed the lives of thirteen women.

To be sure, some wives of serial killers come to realize that their husbands are seriously disturbed. John Wayne Gacy’s first wife, for example, divorced him after it became clear that he was an inveterate molester of boys. His second marriage ended for similar reasons. And in 1944, the wife of serial prostitute killer Steve Wilson left her husband because of his penchant for sneaking up on her while she was naked and and slicing her buttocks with a razor blade—his idea of an affectionate gesture.

Even in such cases, however, the women never guess the full scope of their husbands’ depravity. Of course, the crimes committed by a creature like Gacy are so inconceivable that it’s easy to see why his wife wouldn’t suspect. After all, it’s one thing to leave your husband because he prefers to have sex with teenage boys. The thought that he might also be torturing them to death before stashing their corpses in the crawl space would simply not occur to most people.

Some women married to serial killers do eventually discover what kind of monsters they’re living with.

Unfortunately for most, this realization comes too late. Like the wife of British sex-slayer John Reginald Christie—who ended up buried beneath the floorboards of her own dining room—these poor women are doomed to learn the dreadful truth the hard way.

Herb Baumeister, Family Man

Situated twenty miles from the state capital, Westfield, Indiana, is an exclusive bedroom community of million-dollar estates, so safe and sheltered that locals refer to it as “the golden ghetto.” But in the summer of 1996, residents of that exclusive enclave were stunned to discover that a monster had been living in their midst.