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by Gary C. King
The phenomenon of serial murder has existed among humankind throughout history, though the documentation of this type of killing has not been substantial prior to this century. Despite the long history of serial murder, however, it should be noted that the number of incidents or commissions of such murders has never been as great as they are today. According to Serial Murder: A New Phenomenon of Homicide, a now somewhat dated, but still very useful, 1984 study of serial murder by Robert Ressler, of the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, and his colleagues, Ann Burgess, Ralph D’Agostino, and John Douglas, serial murder has climbed to "an almost epidemic proportion." Ten years later these "motiveless" crimes have come even closer to reaching epidemic proportions. The result: higher percentages of stranger-to- stranger murders than most sociologists, psychologists, and law enforcement professionals would have ever thought possible when they first began compiling statistics many years ago.
Despite the fact that some crime authors, including at least one best-selling writer that this author can think of, estimate the numbers to be in the hundreds, in reality there are only some 35 to 50 serial killers are operating at any one time in the U.S. according to the best law enforcement estimates available. But those in law enforcement expect the numbers to continue upward on the graphs despite the advent of modern technology and better communication abilities and practices between law enforcement agencies in different jurisdictions, though not at the rapid rate that some authors would have you believe.
Despite the enormity of the subject matter and the limited space for this piece, an attempt will be made to provide an ever so brief overview.
According to Ressler et al., "serial homicide involves the murder of separate victims with time breaks between victims, as minimal as two days to weeks or months. These time breaks are referred to as a cooling off period." Because homicides involving multiple victims is gradually becoming more commonplace, and to facilitate an understanding of the aforementioned definition, it is helpful to differentiate serial murder from other types of murder, such as mass murder, which involves "four or more victims killed within a short time span," and spree killings, which Ressler et al. defines as "a series of sequential homicides connected to one event committed over a time period of hours to days and without a cooling off period."
Utilizing these definitions, it can easily be seen that murderers such as Richard Speck, who on July 14, 1966, broke into a quiet Chicago town house and killed eight student nurses in a bloody sexual frenzy after binding them one by one (see "The Crime of the Century," by Dennis L. Breo and William J. Martin, Bantam Books), would fall into the classification of a spree killer. The murders that Speck committed were "connected to one event" and were "committed over a time period of hours...without a cooling off period." Charles Whiteman, on the other hand, would be considered a mass murderer because he killed his victims "within a short time span" while sitting atop a Texas clock tower. Examples of true serial killers can be found in John Wayne Gacy, who claimed 33 victims, all male, in Illinois (for more information about Gacy see Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer, by Tim Cahill, Bantam Books [some 35 pages of this book are devoted to Gacy’s own words, in which he chillingly describes his crimes]; and Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders, by Terry Sullivan with Peter T. Maiken, Pinnacle Books). Gacy became an expert in manipulating the system, and despite his statements to the contrary, Gacy denied any involvement in the killings and maintained his innocence right up to his execution.
Yet another example of a prolific serial killer who has managed to manipulate the system is that of Henry Lee Lucas (see Henry Lee Lucas: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Notorious Serial Killer, by Dr. Joel Norris, Zebra Books), who has claimed to have killed at least 157 people (many of those killings, according to Lucas, occurred with the aid of his "partner," Ottis Toole). Lucas led investigators from around the country on wild goose chases only to recant most of his confessions after gaining favors for his disclosures.
It is important to emphasize that most serial murders are classified as sex-related. Many of a serial killer’s victims are nude when discovered, and evidence in many cases show that the murders were committed during the killer’s episodes of sadistic fantasy. Cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, the so-called "Hillside Stranglers," are prime examples of serial killers addicted to sexually sadistic fantasy (see Two Of A Kind: The Hillside Stranglers, by Darcy O’Brien, Signet). Theodore Bundy is another good example of a sexually motivated serial killer (The Only Living Witness, by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, Linden Press, is in this writer’s opinion the best, most intelligently and objectively written, not to mention informative, of all the books that have been written about Bundy, and there are several).
Another excellent study of a serial murderer is The Misbegotten Son, by Jack Olsen, in which Olsen intricately explores the case of Arthur Shawcross, also known as "The Genesee River Killer."
In one of my own books, Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer, NAL/Onyx, which is a study and portrayal of Dayton Leroy Rogers, Oregon’s worst serial killer to date, I stressed that the evidence in most serial murder cases show that the crimes are sexual in nature and are driven by fantasy. This is in agreement with Ressler et al., who contend that serial murders are carried out within "the context of power, sexuality, and brutality." In the Rogers case, I emphasized that the "bloodlust is an aberration unique to the human animal, that when it occurs, it does so without purpose and has no reverence for the normal needs intrinsic to humankind survival (serial killers rarely show any remorse). The aberration—for that is what it really is—is clearly sexual and all evil" and occurs when the killer "fails to achieve sexual gratification in any other way." Such is also true in the case of serial child killer Westley Allan Dodd, the subject of another of my books, Driven To Kill, Pinnacle Books.
Most serial killers’ behavior is also ritualistic in nature, as Dr. Joel Norris’s book, Serial Killers, Anchor Books, so aptly points out. Most so-called "experts," if there are any such experts, will agree with Norris’s assessment that a serial killer’s crimes are repeated within a framework of definite observable patterns, which thus forms the ritual. In most cases these patterns rarely digress from crime to crime, although it has been shown that some killers make meager attempts to alter, veil, or otherwise disguise their modus operandi.
Most serial killers choose easy victims of opportunity, such as prostitutes, as they troll city streets looking for prey. Sometimes the victims even initiate contact with the killer, as in the case of John Wayne Gacy when boys and young men sought out employment with Gacy’s construction business. But despite the attempts to disguise their modus operandi, the ritual is crystal clear in most cases and often includes bondage, torture, sexual deviancy, mutilation, and murder. Simply put, the ritualistic behavior provides the framework in which the killer can carry out his, or in rare cases, her, darkest fantasies.
In studying the backgrounds of serial killers, it becomes clear that most, if not all, manifest what are now considered classic behavior patterns, symptoms, if you will, of what has come to be known in law enforcement and psychology circles as "episodic aggressive behavior," again citing Norris from his book, Serial Killers, in which he has identified a number of behavior patterns exhibited by serial killers that include ritualistic behavior; wearing a mask of sanity; compulsive behavior; chronic inability to be truthful; history of serious assault; deviate sexual behavior and hypersexuality; victim of abuse as a child; a history of drug/alcohol abuse; and extreme cruelty to animals (see Jeffrey Dahmer, also by Dr. Joel Norris, Pinnacle Books, for a look at such cruelty); to name but a few examples. Norris also identifies other patterns, including "seven key phases" that a serial killer goes through during the ritual of serial murder: the aura or fantasy phase; the trolling phase, in which he is searching for his victim; wooing the victim; capturing the victim, carrying out the murder; totemic phase, in which the killer tries "to preserve the intensity of the murder, to prolong the feeling of power and triumph over their pasts, by attempting to preserve the body through a ritualistic dismemberment of the dead victim. Either the victim’s genitals are cut off and carried away, or the limbs are severed, or the head is removed"; and the depression phase, after which the cycle starts all over again.
To provide an example of the aforementioned, I’ll again cite from my own book, Blood Lust, about serial killer Dayton Leroy Rogers, so that it can easily be seen how these so-called patterns fit into the various phases of the ritual of serial murder that such killers go through. Rogers always started out in a fantasy state that involved bondage, in which he imagined the tremendous power he could possess over women, all prostitutes, who had been incapacitated by him. Then he would begin trolling the high vice areas and wooing his potential victims with the promise of money. Once he had his victim baited and inside his truck, he would demonstrate his power over her, which essentially comprised the capturing phase of the ritual. The victims were nearly always bound, sometimes willingly, unaware that they would be seriously harmed during the game that they were playing with a sadistic psychopath. Fantasizing about the bondage and power turned him on, elevated his mood, and became the springboard that hurled him into further, more destructive action. When he reached the apex of his sexual frenzy hours later, after seemingly endless hours of torture that entailed cutting and biting his victim’s feet, breasts, and buttocks, he would murder her in the most horrifying ways imaginable. Using a hacksaw, he sawed off the feet at the ankles of several of his victims while, the police believe, the victims were still alive and conscious until shock took over. He inserted what is believed to be a machete into the vagina of another victim, and ripped her up the middle from her vagina to her sternum, also, police believe, while she was alive and conscious. Afterward he would take souvenirs of his kills, things like clothing and jewelry (some serial killers take body parts), to aid him in reliving the episode again and again within the confines of his tormented mind. But eventually, after growing tired of reliving what had already occurred and his bloodlust no longer satisfied, Rogers’ desire for a new victim and fresh blood became uncontrollable and he would become depressed. It was always within days or sometimes merely hours before Rogers entered the depression phase, during which the vicious phase would begin all over again.
Like Rogers, David Berkowitz, the notorious "Son of Sam" serial killer who terrorized New York in the mid-seventies, exhibited many of the foregoing behavior patterns. Also like Rogers and most other serial killers, Berkowitz lives in denial of his crimes, at least partly so. Despite his guilty plea in 1977, Berkowitz recently said during an appearance on Inside Edition that he did not act alone in the shootings that killed six people, a statement that clearly conflicts with the evidence. "I did not pull the trigger at every single (murder)," Berkowitz said. Instead, he contends, he was part of an organized satanic cult, a theory which was examined in The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry, Bantam Books.
Another serial killer who lives in denial of his deeds is William Heirens. Heirens was convicted of murdering three women (Josephine Ross, Francis Brown, and Suzanne Degnan) between June 1945 and January 1946. In the article, "Serial Murder and Sexual Repression," by David Heilbroner, Playboy Magazine, Heirens is said to have attacked Josephine Ross in her bedroom. When she was awakened by his intrusion, Heirens cut her throat and stabbed her mercilessly about her body. He then purportedly masturbated a number of times while still in Ross’s apartment. Following the murder of his next victim, Heirens wrote on the bathroom mirror with his victim’s lipstick: "For Heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself." Before his arrest in 1946, Heirens murdered and dismembered a six-year-old girl. Heirens responded to Heilbroner’s article in a letter to the editor at Playboy, in which he denied murdering any of his victims: "I did not murder Josephine Ross, Francis Brown or Suzanne Degnan, and what led to my conviction for these crimes is well covered in William Heirens: His Day In Court, by Delores Kennedy." Heirens went on to chastise Heilbroner’s claims and said, "I never masturbated before I was sent to prison."
Although I make no secret of the fact that I don’t particularly subscribe to the many ideas that serial killers can be identified by traits alone and question much of the so-called accepted research that has and is being done in this area, I included many others’ ideas here because they are considered significant by some in contemporary research of the subject. I’m sure there is a certain amount of validity to much of the research, but I think it’s important to call into question those who say that "this makes a serial killer" or "that makes a serial killer." The truth is no one, not even the best-selling authors who sometimes lecture at the FBI Academy at Quantico and claim to be experts, really know for certain what makes a person become a serial killer. Such charlatans who make such claims do so for their own self-serving needs, and they should be recognized for perpetrating such deceptions. It is hoped that the foregoing has provided an ever-so-brief overview of the subject matter, and has whet the reader’s appetite, so-to-speak, for more information. The information I’ve provided herein is by no means to be considered comprehensive. I’m not an expert, and I shy away from people who try to place such a label on me. To learn more about the macabre phenomenon of serial murder, read the books in this article as well as the supplement that follows.
Gary C. King Email—garyking@accessnv.com Web—http://coyote.accessnv.com/garyking
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