The Serial Killer Files (37 page)

He was also a vampire. The abrasions on young Johanna Motta’s thighs were from his teeth. After strangling her, he had sucked her blood in a frenzy of “lustful pleasure.” He had then torn out a piece of her calf, intending to roast it at home, though he had abandoned this plan, fearing that his mother would be suspicious if she saw him cooking a strange piece of meat.

The texture and odor of his victims’ intestines were another source of pleasure. After disemboweling the women, he carried pieces of their entrails away with him, so he could smell and touch them. He possessed no normal sexual interest of any kind; it had never occurred to him to touch or even look at his victims’ genitals. “To this very day, I am ignorant of how a woman is formed,” he declared. He never felt the slightest pang of guilt or remorse for his crimes.

Verzeni advised the authorities that “it would be a good thing if he were kept in prison, because with freedom he could not resist his impulses.” The judges agreed, and he spent the remainder of his life behind bars.

Wilhelm Stekel

Next to Krafft-Ebing, the psychiatrist who made the most detailed study of sadistic behavior was one of Freud’s former colleagues, Dr. Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel’s two-volume, 1929 work, Sadism and Masochism, contains dozens of extraordinary case histories: men and women in thrall to the most extreme, and often appalling, sexual aberrations.

I should like most of all to kiss her breasts … and then tear them or bite them off … and then eat them.

I would tear out the vagina, the uterus … and the rectum. I would eat all of them and with them the inner portions of the thigh which border on the sexual parts. I would then tear her open and fondle the viscera—take them out and put them back. I should like to feel their warmth. Finally, I should want to suck the blood from the side of her neck.

—One of Wilhelm Stekel’s patients, describing a favorite fantasy Some of the individuals described by Stekel might well have become serial killers if they hadn’t found ways to sublimate their violence—to vent their violent impulses on substitute objects. There was, for example, a man Stekel identifies only as “Mr. K. H.,” who “always has a fowl with him when he goes to a brothel. This fowl he has to strangle before the eyes of the prostitute; then he throws himself upon her and performs coitus with a great orgasm. Without the bird, he is completely impotent. In this case, the fowl plays the role of the prostitute. He must strangle a living being, wring its neck.”

Another patient examined by Stekel was “a fifty-three-year-old very elegant man known as the ‘sofa-stabber.’ He goes only to those prostitutes who know his mania and are not afraid of him. He undresses himself, murmurs all sorts of wild but completely unintelligible words, throws himself upon the sofa, and stabs it through ever so many times with a knife. Then brief coitus, after which he lies for some time as if unconscious.”

However bizarre, these activities—which allowed these two men to act out their murderous impulses without actually killing a woman—seem relatively benign. Other sadists mentioned by Stekel were genuine monsters, including the notorious Fritz Haarmann—one of the most ghastly of all twentieth-century serial killers.

Fritz Haarmann, the Vampire of Hanover

Born in 1879, Haarmann was a mama’s boy who liked to play with dolls and dress in girl’s clothes—activities that didn’t sit well with his surly, alcoholic father. Like many incipient serial killers, he began displaying bizarre behavior at an early age. One of his favorite pastimes was trussing up his sisters and terrorizing them by banging at their window and pretending to be a demon.

As he grew into adolescence he became a habitual child molester. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, he was sent to an asylum after being diagnosed as “mentally deficient.” Six months later, he managed to escape and, after a stint in Switzerland, made his way back home. In what his biographers generally refer to as the only sexually “normal” period of his life, he seduced and impregnated a young woman and even got engaged. Before long, however, he deserted her and their unborn child and joined the military.

For a while, he did well as a soldier but eventually suffered a mental collapse and was discharged as unfit.

Back in Hanover, he launched a life of petty crimes that ran the gamut from small-time swindling to house burglary to grave-robbing. Throughout his twenties, he was in and out of jail for various offenses.

He spent World War I behind bars.

Released in 1918, he returned to his native city and joined a postwar smuggling ring that trafficked, among other things, in old clothes and black-market beef. He also served as a police stool pigeon—a sideline that afforded him protection for his illicit activities. In 1919, however, after being caught in bed with a young boy, he was shipped back to prison.

It was after his release nine months later that Haarmann embarked on his career of unparalleled depravity. Living in Hanover’s seedy Old Quarter with a young lover named Hans Grans, he set about preying on the young male refugees pouring into the city. Picking up one of these penniless boys at the railway station, he would invite him back home, feed him a meal, then demand sexual favors in return.

As Haarmann approached his climax, he would suddenly clamp his teeth around the boy’s throat and tear at the flesh, reaching his orgasm as he chewed through the Adam’s apple. He would later describe his method of disposal to the police:

I’d make two cuts in the abdomen and put the intestines in a bucket, then soak up the blood and crush the bones until the shoulders broke. Now I could get the heart, lungs, and kidneys and chop them up and put them in my bucket. I’d take the flesh off the bones and put it in my waxcloth bag. It would take me five or six trips to take everything and throw it down the toilet or into the river.

When human remains began washing up on the riverbank in the spring of 1924, it became clear that a monster was on the loose in the city. Haarmann, like every other known sex offender, fell under suspicion. He was arrested when the mother of one missing boy noticed another young man wearing her son’s jacket. The young man turned out to be the son of Haarmann’s landlady. He had been given the garment by Haarmann.

Haarmann was charged with twenty-seven counts of murder, though he intimated that the total was closer to forty. Hans Grans—whose role in the atrocities is still a matter of dispute—was charged with

“instigating” two murders. After a two-week trial in December 1924, Haarmann was found guilty of twenty-four murders and sentenced to death. When the verdict was announced, he proclaimed: “I want to be executed in the marketplace. On the tombstone must be put this inscription: ‘Here Lies Mass-Murderer Haarmann.’ ”

While awaiting execution, he produced a written confession in which he described, with undisguised relish, the sensual pleasure he had derived from his atrocities. His request for a public execution was ignored. He was decapitated behind the walls of the Hanover Prison in April 1925, at the age of forty-six.

de River and Reinhardt

Two psychiatrists with close ties to law enforcement published important studies of sadistic crime in the post–World War II era. In 1949, Dr. J. Paul de River, head of the Sex Offense Bureau for the LAPD, came out with the first edition of his book, The Sexual Criminal (a work recommended only for those with a high tolerance for stomach-churning gore, since de River chose to illustrate it with photographs of hideously mangled victims). And in 1957, James Melvin Reinhardt, a criminology professor at the University of Nebraska, published Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes, which contained an important chapter on lust-murder—or, as Reinhardt called it, “mutilation madness.”

Among the cases cited by Reinhardt was that of a seventeen-year-old boy who, in 1947, lured an eight-year-old boy into a barn, then “seized the boy around the throat from behind, dragged him across the barn floor, took a beer can opener from his coat pocket, stripped off the unconscious child’s pants, threw the shirt over the child’s face, and with the beer can opener tore open the rectum and slashed the testicles of the victim. He then sat down beside this small mutilated body and engaged in an act of onanism.”

I likes to see blood. Then I feel great—I feel like I could tear up anything. I once was in a place where there was a shooting and there was blood all over the place. I wanted to go and wet my shoes and walk in the blood. I likes blood.

—Sadistic lust-murderer quoted by Dr. J. Paul de River

One sobering lesson taught by these works is that—though a relative rarity in regard to other kinds of crime—sadistic lust-murder is more common than most people suppose. Fortunately, the vast majority of deviants who commit such outrages are caught after their first murder and so never have a chance to turn into serial killers.

Those who do manage to get away with their crime are almost certain to repeat it, since the very essence of this perversion is—as Reinhardt puts it—“uncontrollable lust urges to mutilate and kill.”

Disciples of De Sade

Some notorious serial killers are known to have been fans of the Marquis de Sade. Ian Brady, for example—the male half of the infamous British couple known as the “Moors Murderers”—praised de Sade as a “good writer” and endorsed the Sadean belief that murder is “necessary, never criminal.”

Ted Bundy was also familiar with de Sade’s fiction. During a jailhouse interview conducted shortly before his execution, Bundy—speaking of himself in the third person—referred to de Sade when describing his own malevolent desire to dominate and possess his victims:

“Uh, with respect to the idea of possession. I think that with this kind of person, control and mastery is what we see here… . In other words, I think we could read about the Marquis de Sade and other people who take their victims in one form or another out of a desire to possess and would torture, humiliate, and terrorize them elaborately—something that would give them a more powerful impression that they were in control.”

Of course, to say that people like Brady and Bundy enjoyed de Sade’s writings does not mean that they were directly inspired by him, or that they wouldn’t have committed their atrocities if they hadn’t read him. It is probably more accurate to say that, in the case of these particular psychopaths, de Sade provided them with a philosophical justification for their crimes. Serial killers, after all, don’t need books to give them hideous ideas. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, is said to have perpetrated an atrocity very much like the one described in the above quotation from 120 Days of Sodom. Turned on by the sight of human viscera, Dahmer reportedly slit open the bellies of his victims and—there’s no other way to put this—fucked the entrails. And there’s no indication that Dahmer ever read de Sade. He dreamed it up all by himself.

Robert Berdella, Torture-Slayer

His business card alone should have been a giveaway. Underneath the name of his shop—“Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar”—was a quotation that could only make sense to a madman:

“I rise from death. I kill death, and death kills me—although I carry poison in my head. The antidote can be found in my tail, which I bite with rage.”

Still—in a way that so often seems true with serial killers—none of his neighbors or acquaintances in Kansas City, Missouri, thought there was anything particularly wrong with Robert Berdella. He seemed friendly enough, a quiet man who belonged to the neighborhood “Crime Watch” and had turned his modest home—so he claimed—into a kind of halfway house for troubled young men.

His store, located in the section of town known as “Olde Westport,” was one of those supposedly hip

“head shops” that—along with pot paraphernalia like bongs and roach clips—specialize in macabre curios beloved by adolescent “Goths”: plaster-of-Paris skulls, statuettes of capering skeletons, and the like.

These pseudo-Satanic gewgaws paled beside the actual horrors in Berdella’s home. But until the spring of 1988, only a few people had discovered that terrifying fact. And they didn’t live to reveal it.

The beginning of the end for Berdella occurred on the morning of Saturday, April 2, 1988, when one of his neighbors heard a frantic pounding on the front door. Opening it, he was startled to discover a terrified young man, naked except for a dog collar around his neck. There was something wrong with his eyes. The young man, whose name was Chris Bryson, explained that he had just escaped from the house next door, where he’d been held captive for several days.

The neighbor summoned the police. Bryson told them that he’d been picked up a few days earlier by Berdella, who took him home, led him upstairs, then knocked him unconscious with a blow to the back of the head. When Bryson awoke, he was naked and tied spread-eagle to a bed.

Over the next four days, he was subjected to a horrendous range of torture—sodomized with various objects, beaten with an iron club, shocked with electrodes attached to his testicles. His throat had been injected with animal tranquilizer, his eyes jabbed with chemical-soaked Q-Tips. Eventually, he had managed to escape when Berdella went off on an errand. Getting hold of a matchbook left on a bed table, he had burned the rope binding one wrist, freed himself from his other restraints, and jumped from the second-floor window.

Berdella was immediately arrested on charges of forced sodomy, felonious restraint, and first-degree assault. A search warrant was obtained. Amid the squalid clutter of his house, investigators turned up a weird assortment of artifacts: skulls, devil masks, a hooded red robe. There were also books on voodoo and novels by the Marquis de Sade. However disturbing, none of these items proved anything more than Berdella’s interest in the bizarre and occult.

The photographs were a different story.

Police found them in a box: about two hundred Polaroids of naked young men being raped and tortured.

There was also a diary, written in crude shorthand, meticulously detailing the type of abuse each victim had been subjected to.

The police still hadn’t found any hard evidence of murder, however. There were two human skulls in Berdella’s bedroom, but it wasn’t immediately clear if they were the real thing or the kind of replicas Berdella sold in his store. In fairly short order, however, a forensic anthropologist determined that one of the skulls was authentic. It belonged to a young man who had evidently died sometime within the previous two years. Another skull—this one with hair and some tissue still intact—was unearthed in Berdella’s backyard. Through dental charts, both skulls were eventually identified. Berdella was charged with first-degree murder.