The Serial Killer Files (39 page)

And then there was Hadden.

Derided by his father as a “retard” and treated as a female plaything by his mother—who liked to put him in girl’s clothing and address him as “Kristen”—Hadden, perhaps unsurprisingly, grew up to be a severely disturbed youth. He enjoyed running down other children with his bike and leaving the decapitated heads of house pets on the doorsteps of schoolmates who annoyed him.

Unable to succeed academically, he eventually decided to become a chef. Despite his malicious temperament (he retaliated for real or imagined slights, for example, by pissing into the mashed potatoes of people he disliked), he managed to graduate from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. With degree in hand, he landed a job in the tony Cape Cod town of Provincetown—a community with a high tolerance for alternative lifestyles. Even there, however, Clark’s behavior—guzzling beef’s blood in the kitchen, for example—was regarded as extreme. He was constantly moving from job to job.

In the meantime—so he claimed—he was using the cutlery skills he had acquired as a chef for far more sinister purposes than cooking. According to his later admissions, he murdered a number of victims while residing on Cape Cod, burying one naked woman in the sand dunes of Wellfleet after cutting off her hands.

Having worn out his welcome among the restaurateurs of Cape Cod, Clark drifted from job to job during the next few years, working in the kitchen of a cruise ship, at banquet halls on Long Island, and in Lake Placid, New York, at the 1980 Olympics. He enlisted as a cook in the navy. His shipmates, however, did not take well either to his increasingly erratic behavior or his fondness for frilly panties, and Clark was subjected to frequent savage beatings at their hands.

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and given a medical discharge, Clark went to live with his older brother, Geoffrey, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Less than a year later, he committed his first confirmed atrocity. It happened on the sweltering afternoon of May 31, 1986. Clark—who had been kicked out of the house after masturbating in front of his young niece, Eliza—was packing up his belongings when six-year-old Michelle Dorr, dressed in a pink, ruffled swimsuit, drifted over from her backyard wading pool, looking for Eliza. Luring her into the house, Clark butchered the girl with one of his chef’s knives, made an abortive attempt to have sex with her corpse, then stuffed the body into a duffel bag, drove it to a nearby park, and buried it in a shallow grave after devouring some of her flesh.

While police focused their attention on the wrong suspect—Michelle’s distraught father—Clark embarked on a rootless existence, living in his pickup truck and working at odd jobs. His mental condition continued to deteriorate at an alarming pace. By 1989, he had been arrested on various charges: assaulting his mother, shoplifting women’s apparel, destroying a rented home with black dye, rotting fish heads, and dead cats. He had also begun conversing with squirrels and birds.

In 1992, while working as a gardener in Bethesda, Maryland, for a woman named Penny Houghteling, he committed his final atrocity. Around midnight on October 17, he sneaked into the bedroom of Mrs.

Houghteling’s daughter, Laura, a recent college graduate. He was got up in full female regalia—wig, purse, blouse, and slacks—and carried a .22-caliber rifle. Nudging the girl from her sleep, he demanded to know what she was doing in his bed. He then forced the terrified young woman to admit that he was Laura.

It was a scene straight out of a horror movie: a beautiful young woman being awakened by a deranged transvestite who claims her identity and accuses her of being an impostor.

After forcing her at gunpoint to undress and bathe, Clark asphyxiated her by covering her face with duct tape. He then removed her earlobes with a scissor, smuggled her body, along with the bloody bed linens, into his pickup, drove her to a deserted spot, and buried her in a shallow grave.

Quickly identified as a suspect, Clark was arrested when his fingerprint was found on one of the bloody pillowcases he had saved as a souvenir. In 1993, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was given a thirty-year sentence. While in prison, he began bragging about the Michelle Dorr murder and eventually led police to her remains. Tried again, he received another thirty years.

The world hadn’t heard the last of Clark. Following his second conviction, he became convinced that a long-haired fellow inmate was actually Jesus Christ and confessed to this supposed Messiah that he had killed as many as a dozen women throughout the Northeast during the 1970s and 1980s. In early 2000, Clark agreed to show investigators the murder sites on the condition that they purchase a female wardrobe for him at Kmart. Decked out in his new wig, panties, bra, and skirt, he then led detectives to various spots in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. On a piece of Cape Cod property that had once belonged to Clark’s grandfather, police dug up a bucket containing two hundred pieces of jewelry, including items belonging to Laura Houghteling. Clark claimed that these were articles he had taken as trophies from his many victims. Beyond the remains of the Houghteling girl and little Michelle Dorr, no additional bodies have been found to date.

In folklore, myth, and Gothic literature, the word “vampire” conjures up images of the evil “undead”—supernatural, seductively creepy beings who spend their days snoozing in coffins, emerge after dark to batten on the blood of the living, and are highly susceptible to garlic, crucifixes, and sharp wooden stakes. Happily, such creatures do not exist outside of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the novels of Anne Rice, and about a zillion grade-Z horror movies, many of them starring Christopher Lee.

In the realm of abnormal psychology, however, “vampirism” refers to a different and all-too-real phenomenon: a perversion (or paraphilia) in which people derive intense sexual pleasure from the drinking of human blood. It should be stressed that—as repellent as such a practice might seem to most people—not all, or even most, real-life “vampires” are criminal psychopaths. Indeed, nowadays—when even the most outré sexual activities have their advocates—there are socially responsible Web sites like Sanguinarius.org which advise vampirically inclined individuals on medical precautions (“Make sure your victims get blood tests done!”), legal matters (“Have them sign some form of consent!”), and etiquette (“When feeding, it is impolite to lap blood like an animal!”).

Needless to say, serial killers with a yen for drinking blood do not observe such niceties. They are not politically correct paraphiliacs who ask permission from their victims and take care not to slurp while they feed. Rather, they are blood-crazed maniacs who resort to the most hideous acts to satisfy their monstrous cravings.

A classic example of a vampiric lust-killer is Vincenz Verzeni, one of the many cases included in Krafft-Ebing’s classic study of extreme aberration, Psychopathia Sexualis. In 1871, in a frenzy of blood mania, this Italian madman savaged two young women, ripping open their bodies, chewing on their flesh, and gorging on their blood.

Verzeni wasn’t the only vampiric lust-killer at large in late-nineteenth-century Europe. His countryman, Eusebius Pieydagnelle, got so turned on whenever he passed a butcher’s shop and caught a whiff of fresh blood that he was impelled to go out and commit some butchery of his own, slaughtering six women in 1878. Nineteen years later, the “French Ripper,” Joseph Vacher, admitted that blood-drinking was one of the many atrocities he committed on the bodies of nearly a dozen male and female victims.

Some of the most notorious serial killers of the twentieth century engaged in vampirism, along with other abominations. During his uniquely depraved childhood, for example, Peter Kürten managed to perform several deviant acts at once—sadism, vampirism, bestiality, and necrophilia—by cutting off the heads of swans and drinking their spurting blood while sexually violating their dying bodies. In adulthood, the so-called “Monster of Düsseldorf” gratified his unspeakable lusts on human victims, mutilating—and often drinking the blood of—more than two dozen men, women, and children. Equally horrific was Kürten’s Weimar-era contemporary, Fritz Haarmann, known as the “Vampire of Hanover”

for his habit of of chewing through the throats of his young male victims.

The extravagantly perverted Albert Fish—a big fan of Haarmann’s, who saved newspaper stories about the German lust-killer the way teenage girls collect clippings of their favorite pop stars—sampled the blood of at least one of his juvenile victims. Fish, however, did not find the reeking fluid especially palatable. The same was true of another all-American cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, who told FBI profiler Robert Ressler that he had drunk some human blood out of “curiosity” but “hadn’t liked the experience nor found it stimulating.”

By contrast, the Russian “Mad Beast,” Andrei Chikatilo—a twentieth-century monster every bit as appalling as Kürten or Fish or Dahmer—eagerly consumed the blood of his many victims, along with other parts of their anatomy, including their genitals.

A recent case of alleged vampiric serial murder involved a young African-American named Marc Sappington. Raised in a slum district of Kansas City, Kansas, by a hardworking, churchgoing mother, Sappington was, by all accounts, a model child: bright, fun-loving, and well behaved. During his adolescence, however, his personality underwent a radical change when, succumbing to the temptations of the streets, he got hooked on angel dust and “danks”—cigarettes soaked in embalming fluid. In March 2001, the onetime choirboy gunned down a young man during a robbery for no other reason than sheer malice.

His vampiric spree began a month later. By then—possibly because of the effects of the drugs—he had begun hearing voices commanding him to taste human flesh and blood. On April 7, he lured a longtime friend, twenty-five-year-old Terry Green, into the basement of his home, savaged Green with a hunting knife, then knelt by the mangled carcass and lapped up some blood from the cement floor.

Just three days later, he committed a nearly identical atrocity, luring another old friend—twenty-two-year-old Michael Weaver—into an alley, stabbing him to death, then drinking his blood. The sound of approaching footsteps, however, caused Sappington to cut short his vampiric feast and flee.

On his way home from the murder, Sappington—his bloodlust unsated—spotted a neighborhood teenager named Alton “Freddie” Brown. Inviting the boy into his basement, Sappington quickly dispatched him with a shotgun, then leisurely drank some blood and cannibalized the body. He then stuffed the remains in a trash bag and went out for a postprandial stroll.

When his mother returned a few hours later, she quickly discovered the scene of carnage in her basement and notified the police. Sappington was arrested a short time later. In custody, he maintained a stubborn silence before spilling out his grisly tale—a confession that earned him his media nickname, the “Kansas City Vampire.”

Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento

Dr. John Seward runs an “immense lunatic asylum” in Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic masterpiece Dracula.

Under his care is a patient named Renfield who has caught Seward’s attention as a new kind of lunatic: My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoophagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. He gave many flies to one spider and many spiders to one bird, and then wanted a cat to eat the many birds. What would have been his later steps?

Bloodlust powers Renfield’s madness—a bloodlust spawned and controlled by his Transylvanian master, Count Dracula. It is a famous fiction. It is the novel that gave us the most popular image of the vampire.

In late-twentieth-century America that fiction turned into nightmarish fact.

His name was Richard Chase. Early in his life, he tortured and killed small animals—birds, rabbits, cats, dogs—and drank their blood. He also gorged upon the intestines of his animal victims. He believed their blood would prevent his own from turning to dust. Sometimes, he injected the blood of rabbits into his veins. At other times, he used kitchen blenders to mix together the blood and entrails of animals for hideous gore shakes.

He spent two prolonged stays in mental institutions, where he puzzled fellow patients and health-care professionals with his obsession with blood. They called him “Dracula” but thought he was as harmless as Renfield, that his obsession was limited to animal blood.

They were horribly wrong.

By 1977, he progressed from rabbits to larger mammals. That year, police spotted him stumbling naked across the Nevada desert covered in blood. In his car, they found a bucket of coagulated blood and two rifles that had been used to stir the horrid concoction. Tests revealed the blood to be that of cows, and Chase was released. But this blood collecting soon turned even more monstrous.

Chase’s first human victim was a middle-aged man whom he shot dead on the street for no apparent reason. Then he began breaking into houses. In late January 1978, he barged into a Sacramento home and shot a twenty-two-year-old woman to death. He disemboweled her body and covered himself in her blood. He used an empty yogurt cup to collect and drink her blood. His victim had been three months pregnant.

Four days later, he broke into the home of thirty-eight-year-old Evelyn Miroth and shot her to death along with her six-year-old son and a visiting male friend. He eviscerated Miroth, mutilated her face, and sodomized her. He also collected her blood and drank it. Chase committed a final outrage upon the dead woman by stuffing her mouth with animal feces. But the worst atrocity was still to come.

Miroth had been babysitting her twenty-two-month-old nephew. When the crime scene was discovered the baby was missing. The vampire had taken the little boy back to his lair. The decapitated child was eventually found in a box dumped in a vacant lot.

A classic “disorganized killer,” Chase had left footprints and fingerprints all over the crime scenes and had used a car of one of the victims. He was soon apprehended. Inside his apartment, police discovered a vampire’s inner sanctum. Blood covered everything, including the blenders Chase used to mix his horrid zoophagous shakes.