The Serial Killer Files (47 page)

from Outer Space; and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. As one criminologist wisely advised, “I would caution against looking at this list as any indicator of violent tendencies.”

Indeed, anyone inclined to blame psychopathic violence on a killer’s favorite books or movies must deal with the discomfiting fact that a significant number of serial murderers have been devoted students of the Bible, capable of committing the most horrendous crimes even while reciting Scripture.

Several years before metamorphosing into the crazed, woman-hating gunman known as “Son of Sam,”

David Berkowitz underwent a religious awakening, becoming a convert to evangelical Christianity during an army stint in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Embracing his new faith with a near-obsessive zeal, he became a fixture at the Beth Haven Church, listening raptly to the hellfire sermons, undergoing the ritual of full-immersion baptism, and taking to the sidewalks to preach about sin and salvation. Even in his ardent religiosity, however, Berkowitz’s pathology shone through. The only souls he was interested in saving were those of men. As he later explained to a prison psychiatrist, “I just wanted to see the men get into heaven. Who the hell needed those sluts, those go-go dancers? Too many women in heaven would spoil it.”

John George Haigh was raised in a hyperreligious household, his parents being devout members of a puritanic sect, the Plymouth Brethren. Throughout his life—even during the years when he was busily dispatching victims and dissolving their bodies in drums of hydrochloric acid—he loved to take part in theological discussions, impressing his listeners with his intimate knowledge of the Bible.

Earle Leonard Nelson, too, was highly conversant with Scripture, having been brought up by a fanatically religious grandmother. Obsessed with the Book of Revelation, he could quote his favorite passage by heart:

So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a gold cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF

THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.

Nelson used his religious training to win the confidence of his potential victims, who never suspected—until it was too late—that the well-spoken, seemingly devout young man was really the notorious

“Gorilla Murderer” wanted from coast to coast for the savage slaying of nearly two dozen women.

Another Scripture-spouting serial strangler was the still-anonymous psychopath known only as “Bible John,” who murdered three women in Glasgow, Scotland, in the late 1960s. The killer’s nickname derived from his habit of reciting scraps of the Old Testament, particularly bits relating to Moses. The identity of the Bible-quoting psycho-killer remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in the annals of Scottish crime.

Of all Bible-crazed serial killers, however, the most terrifying was undoubtedly Albert Fish, whose obsession with the story of Abraham and Isaac drove him to act out hideous sacrificial rituals on a string of child victims. The cannibalistic Fish—who described the eating of one twelve-year-old girl as an act of “Holy Communion”—spent years poring over Scripture, searching for the most disturbing passages, which he would then commit to memory. His favorite was Jeremiah 19:9: “And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.”

Recommended Reading

Jib Fowles, The Case For Television Violence (1999)

Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence (2002)

It’s a common occurrence. A serial killer is captured, and the police—while searching his living quarters

—turn up a stash of violent sadomasochistic porn. Immediately, the proponents of censorship trumpet this discovery as proof of the evils of pornography in general, its insidious power to corrupt morality and inspire crimes against women.

Clearly, there are problems with this argument. For one thing, the vast majority of porn consumers are law-abiding citizens who use XXX-rated material to excite their libidos, not their aggressions. There’s no solid evidence that pornography has anything other than an aphrodisiacal effect on such viewers.

For another thing, it makes perfect sense that serial killers seek out sadomasochistic porn. Criminal psychopaths, after all, are predisposed to violent fantasy. It would be far more surprising if the cops broke into the home of a sadistic lust-killer and discovered that his entire video library consisted of the collected episodes of SpongeBob Squarepants.

Still, the arguments of the antipornography crusaders received a powerful boost from a source who certainly seemed to know as much about the subject as any man alive (however temporarily). On the night of January 23, 1989, just hours before his execution, Ted Bundy gave an interview to Christian psychologist Dr. James Dobson, an antiporn crusader and former member of President Reagan’s Commission on Pornography.

Hailed by some as compelling testimony of the dangers of pornography—and dismissed by others as the self-serving rationalizations of a pathological liar—Bundy’s responses are fairly thoughtful, if not consistent or especially convincing. At one point he states that his atrocities cannot be blamed on pornography; at another, he describes himself as someone who was perfectly normal until he fell under the evil sway of dirty magazines. He denies that he is trying to evade responsibility for his behavior, even while insisting that he would never have committed his outrages if it hadn’t been for his exposure to images of “sexualized violence.”

In the end, it is hard to know what to make of the interview. Was Bundy—a quintessential psychopath who had gone through life masquerading as normal—simply playing one final role, that of the repentant sinner? Or was he really struggling to comprehend his own evil nature and grasping at an easy explanation for that ultimately unknowable mystery?

Here are the relevant parts of the interview:

Bundy: As a young boy of twelve or thirteen, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, soft-core pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature—more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography—and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience—is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces

—as I know only too well—brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.

Dobson: Walk me through that. What was going on in your mind at that time?

Bundy: Before we go any further, it is important to me that people believe what I’m saying. I’m not blaming pornography. I’m not saying it caused me to go out and do certain things. I take full responsibility for all the things that I’ve done. That’s not the question here. The issue is how this kind of literature contributed and helped mold and shape the kinds of violent behavior.

Dobson: It fueled your fantasies.

Bundy: In the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. Then, at a certain time, it is instrumental in crystallizing it, making it into something that is almost a separate entity inside.

Dobson: You had gone about as far as you could go in your own fantasy life, with printed material, photos, videos, etc., and then there was the urge to take that step over to a physical event.

Bundy: Once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction, you look for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far—that jumping-off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it will give you that which is just beyond reading about it and looking at it.

Dobson: How long did you stay at that point before you actually assaulted someone?

Bundy: A couple of years. I was dealing with very strong inhibitions against criminal and violent behavior. That had been conditioned and bred into me from my neighborhood, environment, church, and schools. I knew it was wrong to think about it, and certainly, to do it was wrong. I was on the edge, and the last vestiges of restraint were being tested constantly, and assailed through the kind of fantasy life that was fueled, largely, by pornography.

Dobson: Do you remember what pushed you over that edge? Do you remember the decision to “go for it”? Do you remember where you decided to throw caution to the wind?

Bundy: It’s a very difficult thing to describe—the sensation of reaching that point where I knew I couldn’t control it anymore. The barriers I had learned as a child were not enough to hold me back from seeking out and harming somebody.

Dobson: You hadn’t known you were capable of that before?

Bundy: There is no way to describe the brutal urge to do that, and once it has been satisfied, or spent, and that energy level recedes, I became myself again. Basically, I was a normal person. I wasn’t some guy hanging out in bars, or a bum. I wasn’t a pervert in the sense that people look at somebody and say, “I know there’s something wrong with him.” I was a normal person. I had good friends. I led a normal life, except for this one, small but very potent and destructive segment that I kept very secret and close to myself. Those of us who have been so influenced by violence in the media, particularly pornographic violence, are not some kind of inherent monsters. We are your sons and husbands. We grew up in regular families. Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home twenty or thirty years ago. As diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children, and as good a Christian home as we had, there is no protection against the kinds of influences that are loose in a society that tolerates.

When the term “serial killer” exploded into public consciousness in the early 1980s, it was applied to madmen like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez
et al.
These were classic sexual predators

—lust-killers, as they used to be called—who could only get aroused and reach climax when they were perpetrating unspeakable acts on the bodies of helpless victims.

Though most serial killers fall into this category, not all of them are motivated primarily by sexual sadism. Some commit their crimes not only for pleasure but also for monetary gain.

Such profit-driven killers are no less psychopathic than their sexually perverted brethren. In conceiving and carrying out their atrocities, they proceed in a rational, cunning, often highly intelligent manner.

They are also utterly without conscience, remorse, or the capacity to empathize. To them, other human beings are simply objects to be manipulated, destroyed, and disposed of for their own narcissistic ends.

A classic example of this breed is Dr. H. H. Holmes, the notorious nineteenth-century “Torture Doctor”

who killed an indeterminate number of victims around the time of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Though this suave lady killer and bigamist was certainly interested in sex, his crimes were fueled largely by an insatiable greed, characteristic of the money-crazed ethos of the post–Civil War “Gilded Age.”

One of Holmes’s many scams required the use of dead bodies to defraud insurance companies. In his published autobiography, he repeatedly refers to these corpses as “material”—a term that says a great deal about his psychopathic personality. To Holmes, the decomposing remains of a fellow human being meant nothing more than a piece of lumber does to a carpenter—and if no dead bodies were available when required, he was only too happy to create his own.

The same was true of the entrepreneurial eighteenth-century ghouls, Burke and Hare, who began by supplying dead bodies to British anatomists desperate for human specimens and quickly progressed to serial murder as a way of maintaining their inventory.

In our own century, another medical monster, Dr. Marcel Petiot, disposed of dozens of trusting victims—desperate Jews hoping to flee Nazi-occupied France who were killed, incinerated, and relieved of their earthly possessions by the homicidal physician.

The kinds of serial killers known as Bluebeards and Black Widows—respectively, male and female psychopaths who murder a succession of spouses—also fall into this motivational category, since greed, as much as the gratification of malevolent impulses, underlies their crimes.

There is a tendency to see mercenary serial killers as less horrific than lust-murderers. And it is true that, as a general rule, such psychopaths tend not to indulge in the most appalling atrocities: torture, dismemberment, evisceration, cannibalism,
etc.
Even so, murder isn’t just a matter of business to them.

It’s a distinct and very twisted pleasure.

Holmes, for example, may have killed his victims primarily for money, but he also liked to see them suffer, reportedly outfitting some of the rooms in his “Murder Castle” with peepholes that permitted him to watch the death agonies of his victims. Marcel Petiot also had a peephole installed in the door of his basement death chamber for similarly sadistic reasons. The nineteenth-century “Angel of Death,” Jane Toppan stole sizable sums from her victims. But she also derived exquisite pleasure from climbing into bed with them during their dying moments and holding them tight as they suffered their final convulsions. And greed alone can’t account for the actions of John George Haigh, who supported himself for years by murdering some of his closest acquaintances, then dissolving their bodies in metal drums filled with acid and pouring the resulting unspeakable muck into the sewers. As Haigh himself put it, “There are easier ways of making money.”