The Serial Killer Files (57 page)

Though serial murder is at least as old as the human species, psychos who get a kick out of playing such games did not appear until the nineteenth century. There is a good reason for this. Before there could be criminals who enjoyed jeering at the police and generating frenzied news coverage, two things were required: police departments and a popular press. These institutions didn’t come into being until the Victorian era. The modern London police force was not established until 1839, and sensationalistic tabloids didn’t appear until the late 1800s. So it’s not surprising that the first serial killer who fits this pattern was Jack the Ripper.

Ironically, the most famous of the written taunts received by the police during the height of the Whitechapel horrors—indeed the one that gave this shadowy madman his legendary pseudonym—was probably not written by the killer at all. Inscribed in red ink, it read: 25 Sept: 1888

Dear Boss

I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again.

You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to go to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper

In the view of most students of the case—Ripperologists, as they call themselves—this message was most likely a hoax. A few weeks later, however, a letter was received that is generally regarded as the only authentic communication sent by the Whitechapel monster. On October 16, 1888—two weeks after the Ripper savaged a streetwalker named Catherine Eddowes and removed her left kidney—a parcel arrived at the home of George Lusk, head of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, a group of local tradesman who had organized to assist in the hunt for the killer. Inside the package was a rotting chunk of human kidney, accompanied by a jeering letter addressed to Lusk. Printed on the upper left-hand corner of the letter was the sender’s return address (which, a century later, would supply the title for an acclaimed graphic novel and movie on the Ripper case): “From hell.”

The letter itself read as follows:

Sor

I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer signed

Catch me when

you can

Mishter Lusk

The practice of mailing taunting letters to their pursuers, first established by the monster of Whitechapel, has been carried on by other serial killers, whose infamy partly derives from the correspondence they have entered into with authorities and/or members of the press. In April 1977, for example, police investigating the latest double murder committed by the phantom shooter who had begun terrorizing New York City the previous summer found a letter that—like the first message from the self-styled

“Jack the Ripper”—would provide this notorious figure with his homicidal nickname. The letter was addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli, a key member of the police task force that had been established to track down the shadowy gunman known, until then, as the “.44-Caliber Killer”: Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli,

I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the “Son of Sam.” I am a little brat.

When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood.

“Go out and kill,” commands father Sam.

Behind our house some rest. Mostly young—raped and slaughtered—their blood drained—just bones now.

Papa Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can’t get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by.

I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength then everybody else—programmed to kill.

However, to stop me you must kill me. Attention all police: Shoot me first—shoot to kill or else keep out of my way or you will die!

Papa Sam is old now. He needs some blood to preserve his youth. He has had too many heart attacks.

“Ugh, me hoot, it hurts, sonny boy.”

I miss my pretty princess most of all. She’s resting in our ladies house. But I’ll see her soon.

I am the “Monster”—“Beelzebub”—the chubby behemouth.

I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are prettyist of all. It must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt—my life. Blood for papa.

Mr. Borrelli, sir, I don’t want to kill anymore. No sur, no more but I must, “honour thy father.”

I want to make love to the world. I love people. I don’t belong on earth. Return me to yahoos.

To the people of Queens, I love you. And I want to wish all of you a happy Easter. May God bless you in this life and in the next. And for now I say goodbye and goodnight.

POLICE: Let me haunt you with these words:

I’ll be back! I’ll be back!

To be interrpreted as—bang, bang, bang, bang—ugh!!

Yours in murder

Mr. Monster

Son of Sam’s West Coast counterpart, the elusive psycho-killer known as Zodiac, was an even more

inveterate writer of sadistically gloating letters. Typical of his epistolary style, which combined sneering references to police incompetence with promises of future atrocities, was a letter he mailed to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in October 1969, shortly after he shot San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine to death. Enclosed with the letter was a bloody swatch of fabric he had removed from the victim’s shirt:

Zodiac letter

(Courtesy of Tom Voight)

This is the Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington St + Maple St last night, to prove this here is a blood stained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the north bay area. The S.F. Police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motorcicles seeing who could make the most noise. The car drivers should have just parked their cars and sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover.

School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the frunt tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.

Heriberto “Eddie” Seda—the New York City Zodiac copycat who shot four people in 1990—also sent several written taunts to local papers, vowing to kill one person born under each of the twelve astrological signs.

If the Jack the Ripper case represented the first time that a psycho-killer played mind games with his pursuers by mailing them taunting letters, it also established another pattern that would be repeated in future instances of serial murder: the tendency of some sick individuals to get in on the fun by sending hoax messages to the police. A century after the Whitechapel horrors, for example, Great Britain was shocked by the murder spree of another savage harlot-killer dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper.” During the manhunt for this vicious psycho (who would ultimately turn out to be a seemingly stable and contentedly married truck driver named Peter Sutcliffe), George Oldfield, the chief investigator, received a taunting tape-recorded message, presumably from the killer, outlining his plans to slay another victim and challenging the authorities to find him:

“I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. Can’t be much good, can you? I’m not sure when I will strike again, but it will definitely be sometime this year, maybe September or October—even sooner if I get the chance.”

As it turned out, this and other communications from the same source were not from the actual perpetrator but were rather the twisted handiwork of a hoaxer—a “criminal joke,” in the words of writer Jane Caputi, “that disastrously diverted the police from the track of the actual killer as they assiduously searched for someone who matched the voice and accent of the wrong man.”

The arrogance that underlies the act of sending taunting messages—the killer’s deluded belief that his superior intellect and cunning make him invincible—can sometimes lead to his undoing. Theodore Kaczynski, for example—the so-called Unabomber whose mad crusade against modern technology left three people dead and twenty-nine injured—was finally captured after the New York Times agreed to publish his thirty-five-thousand-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Fate.” Recognizing its writing style—to say nothing of its fanatical views—Kaczynski’s brother notified authorities, and the Unabomber was soon in custody.

Overweening arrogance also led to the arrest of the men believed to be the Beltway Snipers in the fall of 2002. In mid-October, an anonymous caller contacted a police hotline, claiming to be the sniper and bragging about a murder-robbery he had committed in Montgomery, Alabama. Pursuing the lead, investigators ran a fingerprint found at the Alabama crime scene through the FBI database and found a match with the prints of seventeen-year-old Jamaican-born John Lee Malvo which were on file with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Before long, both Malvo and his sociopathic mentor, John Allen Muhammad—who allegedly had placed the boastful call—were under arrest, bringing to an end one of the most sensational and highly publicized homicide cases of recent times.

A Maniac’s Twisted Taunt

Undoubtedly, the most viciously taunting letter ever written by a serial killer was not sent to the police (though it quickly found its way into their hands). It was mailed to the mother of one of the killer’s young victims. In 1934, six years after committing one of the most heinous acts in the history of American crime—the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization of twelve-year-old Grace Budd—the insanely perverted Albert Fish, who had gotten away scot-free with the atrocity, felt impelled to compose a letter to little Grace’s mother, detailing the outrages he had perpetrated on the child.

Fortunately, Fish’s sadistic intention in composing this message—i.e., to rub the poor woman’s nose in the horror—was thwarted by the fact that she was functionally illiterate. When her adult son read the letter, he immediately passed it along to the lead detective on the case, who used it (or more precisely, the envelope it came in) to track down the monster.

Here is the content of this appalling communication:

My dear Mrs. Budd,

In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1–3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go to any shop and ask for steak—chops—or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or a girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid [sic] there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them—tortured them—to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 yr old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was Cooked and eaten except head—bones and guts.

He was Roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried, stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E. 100 St. near—right side. He told me so often how good Human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3—1928 I called on you at 406 W. 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me.

I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and Called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run downstairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9

days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could have had I wished. She died a virgin.

Nine years elapsed between Jeffrey Dahmer’s first and second murders. In June 1978, while his parents were away on vacation, the eighteen-year-old Dahmer picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks and brought him home for beers. A few hours later, when the handsome young man got ready to leave, Dahmer smashed his skull with a barbell, choked him to death, dismembered the body, and buried it in the backyard. He did not kill again until September 1987, when he met twenty-eight-year-old Steven Tuomi at a gay bar in Milwaukee, took him to a nearby hotel, and murdered him during the night.

By contrast, in the two months between May 24 and July 22, 1991, when he was finally arrested, Dahmer committed no less than six homicides, killing at the approximate rate of one young man per week. Not only had the pace of his murders accelerated dramatically; the horrors he perpetrated on his victims had also grown increasingly grotesque. By the end, he was having anal sex with the corpses, saving the heads, torsos, and genitalia in his refrigerator, and cutting out the hearts for consumption.