The Serial Killers Read online

  Beginning in February 1985, middle-aged prostitutes in the Turin area were abducted and tortured, then murdered; the bodies were dumped in ditches. The killers cut off fingers and toes and made numerous cuts and burns all over the victin’s body. The third and fourth victims – who vanished from a village festival – had been suspended by the wrists and whipped to death. The fifth victim had been tortured for two days before her death. The sixth and seventh were mutilated in a manner reminiscent of Jack the Ripper. On 28 June 1957 a handsome young man in a sports car picked up a thirty-six-year-old prostitute on the highway from Turin to Piacenza. She was considerably younger than most of the victims (whose ages had ranged from mid-forties to mid-sixties), and it may have been this realisation that made the driver decide to dispose of her without further ado; he stopped the car and shot her through the head, then dumped the body in a cemetery. A few miles further on he was halted by police making a routine check on cars, and their suspicious were aroused by his nervousness; then one of them noticed blood on the passenger seat and a gun sticking out of a bag on the back seat. Giancarlo Guidice, a thirty-four-year-old lorry-driver from Turin, immediately confessed to the murder of Maria Rosa, and led the police back to her body. A search of his apartment revealed an elaborate torture kit of handcuffs, knives, scissors and other instruments. Fingerprints of three of the murdered women were also found in his apartment. Psychiatrists concluded that Guidice was driven by an overwhelming rage against older women – a rage that almost certainly had its origin in his relationship with his mother. Psychiatric examination also revealed that he was incurably insane, and in March 1989 he was confined in an institution for criminal psychotics. Police and forensic scientists who had studied the corpses had already concluded that they were dealing with a madman.

  Even clinical insanity is not the ultimate stratagem of the unconscious mind when faced with intolerable conflict. There is a still more bizarre extreme known as multiple personality, in which Robert Louis Stevenson’s division into Jekyll and Hyde becomes a psychological reality. One of the most bizarre cases of this type on record is that of the rapist Billy Milligan.

  During a three-week period in October 1977, three girls were kidnapped from the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus, driven out to remote spots in the countryside, then raped. Each was also made to cash cheques and hand over the money. The victims went through mugshots at police headquarters, and quickly identified their assailant as a twenty-two-year-old ex-convict named William Stanley Milligan; but even as the police were on their way to arrest him, Milligan was telephoning his local police station to give himself up. When arrested, he stared in front of him in a strange, trancelike manner, and appeared to grasp very little of what was happening; the police, understandably, thought he was merely being unco-operative.

  In prison, Milligan attempted suicide by banging his head against a wall. By now it was obvious that he was not malingering, and a doctor diagnosed acute schizophrenia. When a psychiatrist went to see him in his cell, he denied that he was Billy, and explained that his name was David. Asked where Billy was, he pointed to his chest and said: ‘He’s sleeping. In here.’ David stated that he was eight years old. The following day, Billy identified himself in a cockney accent as Christopher, aged 13. He mentioned that he had a three-year-old sister named Christine, also British. The next day it was sixteen-year-old Tommy, a painter and electronics expert. Then came Danny, a fourteen-year-old boy who had once been buried alive. After this it was Arthur, a cool, controlled twenty-two-year-old Englishman who spoke fluent Arabic, and who seemed to be a kind of ringmaster of this circus of personalities. He told the psychologist that the robberies had been committed by a Serbo-Croat personality called Ragen, but added that Ragen had not committed the rapes. A psychiatrist who went to the prison convinced that he was about to confront a faker left several hours later shaken and totally convinced that he was dealing with a genuine case of ‘MPD’ – multiple personality disorder.

  Multiple personalities have been known to doctors since the early nineteenth century. One of the first, Mary Renolds of Pennsylvania, woke up one morning in 1811 with a totally blank memory: she had to be taught everything, like a baby. Five weeks later, the original Mary came back. For the next decade or so, the two Marys shuttled in and out of the body until, in middle life, they eventually fused together. There have been many famous cases since then – two of the most recent being those of Christine Sizemore, documented in the book The Three Faces of Eve, and ‘Sybil’, a girl with fourteen personalities, described in the book Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber. Most ‘multiples’ have had highly traumatic childhood experiences, and it is now widely believed that the most important common factor is sexual assault by an adult – often a parent – in childhood.

  This, according to Billy Milligan, explained how he had originally began to split into sub-personalities: at the age of eight, he had been frequently sodomised and beaten by his stepfather, Chalmer Milligan, who also used to beat Billy’s mother. In order not to hear his mother’s screams, Billy closed his eyes and became a deaf child called Shawn. Soon several other personalities – including the physically powerful Ragen – were also sharing the body. When he attempted suicide – by throwing himself off the school roof at the age of fourteen – the ‘others’ took over, and put Billy to sleep. He remained asleep until his arrest eight years later.

  Unfortunately, some of the twenty-two personalities who were sharing the body were criminals; one of them, Kevin, committed a robbery that landed ‘Billy’ in jail. It was also Kevin, in association with a nineteen-year-old lesbian called Adalana – yet another of the Milligan menagerie – who abducted the girls. Adalana raped them, and Ragen robbed them. When Danny woke up in the body and realised that something terrible had happened, it was he who rang the police to give ‘himself’ up. In fact, the police had by then identified the rapist, and were already on their way to arrest him. After psychiatrists had diagnosed Billy Milligan as a multiple personality, he was sentenced to detention in a mental hospital, and the psychiatric treatment to fuse his multiple personalities ended.

  Many mysteries remain. If the various personalities of Billy Milligan were all fragments created by his unconscious mind, how is it that one of them could speak fluent Arabic and another Serbo-Croat? Whatever the solution, it seems clear that Billy Milligan displayed a far more severe form of the self-division than can be seen in so many psychotic killers, from Albert Fish to Gary Heidnik.

  The sadist is a retarded personality, trapped at an infantile stage of development by a tendency to live in a world of fantasy; his sense of reality is as weak as that of a child, and this is why he is capable of treating other human beings as if they were mere objects. We can see, for example, that the realisation of Cameron Hooker’s daydream of possessing a ‘sex slave’ had the effect of transforming him into something more like a socially normal human being. The sadistic murder represents a muddled quest for fulfilment: sexual fulfilment and fulfilment of the urge to self-esteem. In a few rare cases, such as that of Hooker, it actually achieves its object. The most striking of these occurred in Boston in the 1960s.

  Between June 1962 and January 1964 the city of Boston, Massachusetts was terrorised by a series of murders that achieved worldwide publicity. The unknown killer, who strangled and sexually abused his victims, became known as the Boston Strangler. The first six victims were elderly women, whose ages ranged from fifty-five to eighty-five.

  On 4 June 1962 fifty-five-year-old Anna Slesers was found in her apartment in the Back Bay area of Boston. She had been knocked unconscious with a blunt instrument – later determined to be a lead weight – and then strangled. The body, clad only in an open housecoat, was lying on its back with the legs apart. No semen was found in the vagina, but she had evidently been sexually assaulted with some hard object such as a soda bottle. The apartment had been ransacked.

  Two weeks later, on 30 June, sixty-eight-year-old Nina Nichols failed to call back a friend aft
er a telephone conversation had been interrupted by a ring at the doorbell. The friend asked the janitor to check her apartment. Nina Nichols was lying on the bedroom floor, strangled with a stocking, her legs open in a rape position. Her killer had also bitten her. Medical examination revealed that she had been sexually assaulted with a wine bottle after death. There was semen on her thighs, but not in the vagina.

  Two days later, on Monday 2 July, neighbours of a sixty-five-year-old retired nurse named Helen Blake, who lived in Lynn, north of Boston, became anxious at not having seen her for two days, and sent for the police. Helen Blake was lying face downwards on her bed, a stocking knotted around her throat. Again, there was dried semen on her thighs but not in the vagina. Mrs Blake had apparently been killed on the previous Saturday, the same day as Nina Nichols.

  On 21 August Mrs Ida Irga, seventy-five, was found dead in her apartment. Death was due to manual strangulation, after which a pillow case had been tied round her neck. She had been sexually assaulted with some hard object, and bitten. It was estimated that she had been dead for two days.

  The last of the elderly victims was sixty-seven-year-old Jane Sullivan, another nurse. She was found in a kneeling position in the bathtub, her face in six inches of water. She was a powerful Irishwoman, and had evidently put up a tremendous fight – her assailant must have been very strong to overpower her. Two stockings were knotted around her neck. She had been killed on the day after Ida Irga, but the body was not found for more than a week; consequently it was impossible to determine whether she had been raped, but she had been sexually assaulted with a broom handle.

  Boston was in a state of hysteria, but as weeks went by without further stranglings, it slowly subsided. A hot summer was succeeded by a very cold winter. In the early evening of 5 December 1962 two girls rang the doorbell of the apartment they shared with a twenty-year-old black girl, Sophie Clark, and were surprised when she failed to answer. They let themselves in, and found Sophie lying on the floor; she was naked and in the rape position. She had been strangled with nylon stockings knotted round her neck. Medical examination established that she had been raped, and a semen stain on the carpet beside the body indicated that her killer had later masturbated over her. This was the first case in which rape was unquestionably established, and it led to the speculation that her killer was a second Boston Strangler, one who preferred young girls.

  Three weeks later, on the last day of 1962, a businessman stopped his car outside the apartment of his secretary at 515 Park Drive and blew his horn. When she failed to come down, he assumed that she had already left, but when he found that she was not at the office, he rang the superintendant of her apartment building to ask him to check on her apartment. Patricia Bissette, twenty-three, was lying in bed, covered with the bedclothes. She had been strangled with stockings, and medical examination established that she had been raped.

  On 18 February 1963 a German girl named Gertrude Gruen survived an attack by the Strangler. A powerfully built man with a beaky nose, about five feet eight inches tall, knocked on her door and told her he had been sent to do work in her apartment. She was suffering from a virus, and only allowed him in after some argument. The man removed his coat and told her that she was pretty enough to be a model. Then he told her she had dust on the back of her dressing gown; she turned, and he hooked a powerful arm round her neck. She fought frantically, and sank her teeth into his hand until they bit to the bone. The man pushed her away, and as she began to scream, he ran out of the apartment.

  The police were excited when the girl reported the attack – and then frustrated when they discovered that the shock had wiped all traces of the Strangler’s face from her memory.

  A month later, on 9 March 1963, the Strangler killed another elderly victim. Sixty-nine-year-old Mrs Mary Brown lived in Lawrence, an industrial town twenty-five miles from Boston. The fact that her breasts had been exposed and a fork stuck in one of them should have suggested that she had been murdered by the ‘Phantom’ (as the press had now labelled the killei). However, because her skull had been beaten to a pulp with a piece of brass piping, she was not recognised as a Strangler victim – it was assumed that she had disturbed a burglar. In fact, she had been manually throttled.

  The next victim was also nontypical. On 9 May 1963 a friend of twenty-three-year-old graduate student Beverly Sams was puzzled when she failed to answer the telephone, and borrowed a key from the building supervisor. Beverly had been stabbed in the throat, and a stocking knotted around her neck. She was naked, and her legs spreadeagled and tied to the bed supports. Medical examination revealed that she had been raped.

  Four months later, on 8, September friends of a fifty-eight-year-old divorcee, Evelyn Corbin, wondered why she failed to keep a lunch appointment and let themselves into her flat. Evelyn Corbin was lying almost naked on the bed, nylon stockings knotted around her throat and her panties rammed into her mouth. There was semen in her vagina and in her mouth.

  On 23 November 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated, the Strangler killed his next victim in Lawrence. She was Joanne Graff, a Sunday-school teacher. She had been strangled with stockings and raped.

  The final victim was strangled on 4 January 1964. She was nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan, who was found by room-mates when they came back from work. She was sitting on the bed, her buttocks on the pillow, her back against the headboard. Her knees had been parted, and a broom handle inserted into her vagina. Semen was running from the corner of her mouth. A card saying ‘Happy New Year’ had been propped against her foot. The killer had placed her body in a position where it would be seen as soon as anyone opened the door.

  The murders ceased; but a rapist who became known as The Green Man – because he wore green clothes – began operating over a wide area that included Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. On one occasion he raped four women in a single day. He gained entrance to the apartment – sometimes forcing the lock with a strip of plastic – and often threatened the victim with a knife. When she was stripped, he would caress her with his hands and mouth; then, if he judged she wanted him to, he ‘raped’ her. (He was later to insist that the ‘Green Man’ had never raped an unwilling woman.) He was never physically violent, and had even been known to apologise before he left.

  On the morning of 27 October 1964 a young married woman was dozing in bed after her husband had gone to work when a man entered the bedroom. He was dressed in green trousers, a green shirt, and wore green sunglasses, and he insisted that he was a detective. After seizing her by the throat he threatened her with a knife. He tore off her nightclothes, stuffed a pair of panties into her mouth, and tied her wrists and ankles to the bedposts. Then he kissed and bit her from head to foot, finally ejaculating on her stomach. His sexual appetite was obviously enormous; he continued to abuse her sexually for a great deal longer before he seemed satisfied. Then, after apologising, he left. The girl called the police immediately, and went on to descrbe her assailant in such detail that a police artist was able to make a sketch of his face. As one of the detectives was studying it, he commented: ‘This looks like the Measuring Man.’ The ‘Measuring Man’ had been a harmless crank named Albert DeSalvo, who had been arrested in 1960 for talking his way into girls’ apartments claiming to represent a modelling agency. If the girl indicated that she might be interested in modelling, he would take her measurements with a tape measure. After that he would thank her politely and leave. The aspiring model would never hear from him again, and it was this that made some of them so indignant that they reported him. The police were baffled, since there seemed to be no obvious motive – although some girls admitted that they had allowed him to raise their skirts to measure from the hip to the knee. On a few occasions, he had allowed himself an intimate caress; but if the girl protested, he immediately apologised. One girl, as he crouched with his hand on her panties, had said: ‘I’d better get these clothes off or you won’t get the right measurements’, and stripped. On t
his occasion, as on a number of others, the ‘Measuring Man’ had ended up in bed with the girl.

  On 17 March 1960 a police patrol that had been set up to trap the ‘Measuring Man’ saw a man acting suspiciously in a backyard in Cambridge, Mass., and arrested him. Girls identified him as the ‘Measuring Man’, and he finally admitted it – claiming that he did it as a kind of lark, in order to make himself feel superior to college-educated girls. In May 1961 DeSalvo was sentenced to serve two years in the Middlesex County House of Correction. He served eleven months before being released. He had told a probation officer that he thought there was something wrong with him – that he seemed to be wildly oversexed, so that he needed intercourse six or more times a day. No-one suggested that he needed to see a psychiatrist.

  Albert DeSalvo had clearly graduated from caressing girls as he measured them to rape. He was arrested on 5 November 1964 and identified by some of his victims. On 4 February 1965 he was committed to the Bridgewater State Hospital, a mental institution in Massachusetts.

  Bridgewater had – and still has – many sexual psychopaths in residence, and many spoke freely about their exploits, particularly in the group therapy sessions. Albert DeSalvo was not reticent about his own sexual prowess, which was apparently considerable. He described how, in the summer of 1948, when he was seventeen, he had worked as a dishwasher in a Cape Cod motel, and spent much time swimming and sunbathing on the beach. There were many college girls there, and they found the powerfully-built youth attractive. Word of DeSalvo’s amazing sexual prowess soon spread. ‘They would even come up to the motel sometimes looking for me and some nights we would spend the whole night doing it down on the beach, stopping for a while, then doing it again . . .’