The Serial Killers Read online

  In April 1980, the man who had become known as ‘the Monster of the Andes’ used his usual technique to lure away the eleven-year-old daughter of Carlina Ramon Poveda; but the frantic mother caught up with her daughter, walking hand in hand with her abductor. She denounced him shrilly, and when he called her a dirty Indian, summoned some Indian men to come and help her; they held Lopez down until the police arrived.

  In the murders of the three men who raped him, we see the typical response of a Right Man to humiliation. When Lopez was making his complaints to journalist Ron Laytner, he declared: ‘I cannot see the sky. This is wrong, for I am the Man of the Century. I will be famous in history.’ Like Knowles, he felt he had finally achieved ‘success’. Asked to explain how he justified his murders, he told Laytner: ‘The arrival of life is divine. It comes through the act of sex. And so if an innocent person dies in the act of sex, it is also divine. That person will find heaven without suffering in this world.’ It sounded curiously like Panzram’s explanation that he was ‘doing people good’ by murdering them, since life was so vile that to kill someone was to do him a favour . . . The Right Man lives in a strange universe of fantasy and self-justification, and the serial killer ‘punishes’ society through murder.

  By one of those grisly coincidences that are so frequent in the world of murder, a second ‘Monster of the Andes’ was operating in Ecuador within five years of the arrest of Lopez. He was Daniel Camargo Barbosa and, like Lopez, he came from Colombia. In 1985 he was serving a life sentence in Colombia for rape and murder, but succeeded in escaping into Ecuador. During 1986, he raped and murdered seventy-two women and girls in the area of the port of Guayaquil. He was arrested in Quito when a policeman noticed bloodstains on his clothing. A slightly built man of fifty-seven, with a great deal of natural charm, he seemed an unlikely mass murderer. Like so many serial killers, he was avid for ‘recognition’; he began to boast about his murders, and willingly led detectives to the sites of fifty bodies. He even appeared on television, and when asked whether he had accomplices, replied proudly: ‘No, I did it all myself.’ Asked why he had committed his crimes, he explained: ‘When one has been the victim of traumatic experiences in childhood, one grows up with the mental conditions for committing these acts’, a reply that indicates that, like so many serial killers, he possessed a relatively high I.Q. Like Lopez, he was sentenced to sixteen years in prison, the maximum possible under Ecuadorian law.

  Henry Lee Lucas might be regarded as the American equivalent of Pedro Alonzo Lopez, at least as far as the number of his victims is concerned: he has confessed to three hundred and sixty murders. A rather mild-looking character, who has become deeply religious since he was sentenced to death, he seems at first an altogether less obvious example of a Violent Man; but, as the evidence makes plain, appearances can be deceptive.

  Born in 1937 in Blacksburg, Virginia, Lucas was the son of a prostitute and a railway worker who had lost both legs in an accident. His mother seems to have detested the child and treated him with sadistic cruelty, once causing brain damage when she struck him on the head with a piece of wood. His teacher, who often gave him hot meals, described him as one of the most impoverished and desperate hill children she had ever met. An accident led to the loss of one eye, so that he had to have it replaced with a glass one. By the age of fifteen he had become a juvenile delinquent, and was sent to a reformatory for breaking and entering. ‘I started stealing as soon as I could run fast.’ He had also by this time committed his first murder, attempting to rape a seventeen-year-old girl at a bus stop and strangling her when she resisted. In January 1960, he murdered his mother during the course of a quarrel, slashing at her with a knife. (He claims that he had no idea that she was dead, and that her death was due to a heart attack.) He was sentenced to forty years in prison, where he made several suicide attempts. He was recommended for parole after ten years. In fact, he seems to have felt secure in prison and wanted to stay there; when paroled, he told the board that he would kill again. On the day he left prison, he kept his word, raping and killing a woman in Jackson. The murder remained unsolved until he eventually confessed to it.

  There followed an unsuccessful marriage, which lasted only a short time. In Carbondale, Pennsylvania, he met another drifter, Ottis Toole, a homosexual with a penchant for cannibalism. The two teamed up and, according to Lucas’s biographer Max Call, ‘left a bloody trail through Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin’. Call claims that they kept the head of one murder victim in the trunk of the car for two days. ‘I was bitter at the world,’ Lucas claimed. ‘I hated everything.’ ‘Killing someone is just like walking outdoors. If I wanted a victim I’d just go to get one.’

  Ottis Toole’s parents liked Lucas enough to appoint him the guardian of their two youngest children, Becky Powell, nine, and her younger brother Frank. A year or two later, she left her Florida home with Lucas and her brother Ottis, and became Lucas’s mistress. She was present during a number of his killings, and even helped to bury the bodies. (Lucas claimed that it was his care in disposing of the bodies that prevented the law from catching up with him for so long.) When Becky was thirteen she was caught and sent to a juvenile detention centre in Florida; with the help of Lucas and her brother she escaped, and the three of them went on another killing spree. Lucas claims that he was also a contract killer for an organisation called ‘Hand of Death’, but this part of his story is, to say the least, unverified. What is certain is that in 1982 he was paid to look after an eighty-eight-year-old woman named Kate – ‘Granny’ – Rich, and that he was to murder her later. Before then, he and Becky had become members of a fundamentalist sect called House of Prayer in Stoneberg, Texas, and lived and worked there for several weeks. Under the influence of the religious teaching, Becky decided she wanted to go back to Florida and finish her sentence in the reformatory. Lucas wanted her to stay, but finally agreed. On the way to Florida they quarrelled, and when Becky suddenly slapped his face, he stabbed her to death. He dismembered the body and buried it. As far as Lucas was concerned, the murder of Becky was the beginning of the end.

  Back in Texas at the House of Prayer, he took Kate Rich for a long drive and both drank cans of beer. A quarrel developed, or Lucas became angry at her questions about Becky; he stabbed her to death, raped the body, and hid it in a culvert.

  Lucas was the chief suspect in Granny Rich’s disappearance, but there was no evidence against him. In June 1983 his friend Reuben Moore, head of the House of Prayer, reported to the police that Lucas owned a gun, a felony for an ex-convict. He was arrested and in prison underwent a religious conversion that led him to confess to murdering Becky and Kate Rich. He also confessed to a total of three hundred and sixty murders.

  In fact, many of these admissions proved to be false, but several were verified by the investigators: a recent figure is 199 murders in twenty-seven states – including the rape and murder of the woman in Jackson, of a West Virginia police officer, and of an unknown female hitchhiker known simply as ‘orange socks’. Lucas was eventually sentenced to death for eleven murders; his accomplice Ottis Toole also received a death sentence.

  Sheriff Jim Boutwell of Williamson County, Texas, who came to know Lucas well in prison, noted in 1985: ‘Henry Lee Lucas is helping write a new chapter in the history of law enforcement . . . Henry’s confessions, and the subsequent investigations, have exposed the mobility of crime in the United States.’ In fact, it was the Lucas case more than any other that made America aware of the existence of the mobile serial killer.

  Since Lucas was a masochist, a man who apparently enjoyed being dominated by women, it may seem doubtful that he should be classified as a ‘Right Man’, but many points in his confession confirm it. From the murder, at the age of fifteen, Lucas killed those who resisted him. Lucas was a high-dominance, highly sexed male, with an extremely low bursting-point. ‘Sex is one of my downfalls. I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do. If I don’t, I don’t
. I rape them; I’ve done that. I’ve killed animals to have sex with them . . .’ He also admitted that he had skinned animals alive during his teens.

  Asked about the problems of interrogating Lucas, Sheriff Boutwell replied: ‘You don’t interrogate him . . . You talk with him just as a conversation. The good/bad guy role that officers traditionally use with suspects wouldn’t work with him . . . If at any time you indicate you disbelieve him . . . you’ll ruin your credibility with him.’ Boutwell describes a case in which a police officer had driven three thousand miles to interview Lucas and, even though he had been warned against it, called Lucas a liar within the first two minutes. His journey was wasted; Lucas immediately refused to hold any further conversation. This is, of course, the behaviour of a Right Man, a man who refuses, in any circumstances, to admit that he could be wrong or a liar. Boutwell also commented on Lucas’s high I.Q. and remarked that successfully interrogating him depended upon an appeal to his ego. Lucas was allowed all kinds of privileges – as much coffee as he liked (he was a coffee addict) and endless cigarettes. Asked by the interviewer whether this was not ‘babying’ him, Boutwell again emphasised that this was the only way to get Lucas to co-operate – to take care that he felt he was not just an ordinary prisoner.

  The murder of Becky Powell seems to have been a watershed for Lucas. It is obvious – from his confession – that he loved her in a way he had never loved anyone; she was at once his wife, mistress and daughter, the only person who had ever accepted him without criticism, who regarded him as a kind of god – the kind of ego-balm that the Right Man craves above all else. Yet, because of that fatal tendency to explode under pressure, he killed her. Now he was not only on his own, but deprived of his one reason for living. The murder of Granny Rich – one of the few people who had treated him with kindness – may have been a masochistic gesture of defiance and despair, like shaking his fist at the sky.

  One thing becomes very clear from the study of serial killers: that defiance and despair are part of the syndrome. The psychologist Joel Norris, the author of Serial Killers: The Growing Menace, writes of a killer who had ‘reached the final stage of the serial murderer syndrome: he realised that he had come to a dead end with nothing but his own misery to show for it’.

  Norris is writing about Leonard Lake, perhaps the most horrific serial killer of the 1980s. He earns this gruesome distinction by a kind of ruthlessness and sadism that seem to belong in the pages of a horror comic.

  The murders – of at least twenty-five people – came to light in the summer of 1985. On the afternoon of Sunday 2 June an assistant at a hardware store, South City Lumber, in San Francisco, observed a slight, bespectacled youth walking out of the store with a $75 vice for which he had not paid, and called a policeman. The man – who was obviously Asiatic – was putting the vice in the boot of a car, and when the policeman approached he immediately ran away. An older, bearded man, explained that his companion thought he had already paid for it. The policeman pointed at a hold-all in the car boot. ‘What’s in there?’ ‘I don’t know. It belongs to him . . .’ The bearded man opened the hold-all, and revealed a 22 automatic pistol with a silencer. Since this was against the law in California, the policeman told the man that he would have to accompany him to headquarters.

  There the man offered his driving licence for identification; it was in the name of Robin Scott Stapley. The policeman said he would have to do a computer check, and that the suspect would then have to post bond before he could be released. The man asked if he could have a glass of water, and when one was provided put a plastic capsule into his mouth, swallowed and drank it down; seconds later, he slumped forward. His interrogators at first assumed he had suffered a heart attack; but in hospital it was discovered that he had taken a cyanide capsule. Four days later, he died.

  Meanwhile, the computer check had revealed that he was not Robin Stapley; the latter was a twenty-six-year-old who had been missing for months. A further check revealed that, soon after Stapley had been reported missing, his pick-up truck and trailer had been in a minor accident in San Francisco. The slight, Chinese youth who had been driving said he took full responsibility for the accident, and that there was no need to report it, but the driver whose goods vehicle had been grazed had to report it under his company’s rules. The pick-up truck then proved to belong to the missing Robin Stapley. By this time, the Chinese youth and the truck had vanished.

  The car the two men had been driving proved to be registered in the name of Paul Cosner. Cosner had also been reported missing. He had told his girlfriend that he had sold the car to a ‘weird-looking man’ who would pay cash, and had driven off to deliver it; no-one had seen him since. When forensic experts examined the car, they discovered two bullet holes, two spent bullets, and some bloodstains.

  In the pockets of the man who had died from cyanide poisoning police found bills made out to ‘Charles Gunnar’, with an address near Wisleyville, in Calaveras County, 150 miles north-east of San Francisco. The sheriff there, Claude Ballard, was able to tell the investigators that Gunnar owned a small ranch, and that he lived with a young Chinese named Charles Ng (pronounced Ing). In fact, Ballard had already been checking on the two men. They had been advertising various things for sale, such as television sets, videos and articles of furniture, and Ballard had suspected they might be stolen. However, checks on serial numbers had come to nothing. What was more ominous was that Gunnar had offered for sale furniture belonging to a young couple, Lonnie Bond and Brenda O’Connor, explaining that they had moved to Los Angeles and had given him the furniture to pay a debt. No-one had heard from them since. At a nearby camp site, another couple had simply vanished, leaving behind their tent and a coffee pot boiling on the stove.

  By now, a check on the dead man’s fingerprints had revealed that he had a criminal record – for burglary and grand larceny in Mendocino County – and had jumped bail there. His real name was Leonard Lake.

  The ranch house, in Blue Mountain Road, proved to be a two-bedroom bungalow set in three acres of land. The sight of the master bedroom increased the forebodings of the detectives; hooks in the ceiling and walls, and chains and shackles found in a box, suggested that it might be some kind of torture chamber. A wardrobe proved to contain many women’s undergarments and some filmy nightgowns. On the hillside at the back of the house there were burnt bones that looked ominously human. In a cinderblock bunker cut into the hillside they discovered more hooks and chains, and walls covered with pictures of girls posing in their lingerie. What was disturbing about this was that the backdrop of many of these showed a forest scene mural that covered one of the walls; they had obviously been taken in the same room. The expression on some of the faces suggested that the girls were not enjoying it.

  The grimmest piece of evidence was a filing cabinet full of videotapes. The police slipped one of these – labelled ‘M Ladies, Kathy/Brenda’ – into the recorder, and found themselves looking at a frightened girl handcuffed to a chair, with a young Chinese – Charles Ng – holding a knife beside her. Then a large, balding man with a beard enters the frame, takes off the handcuffs, shackles her ankles, and orders her to undress. She does so reluctantly, hesitating before removing her knickers. The bearded man tells her: ‘You’ll wash for us, clean for us, fuck for us.’ After this, she is made to go into the shower with the Chinese. A later scene showed her strapped naked to a bed, while the bearded man tells her that her boyfriend Mike is dead.

  Two five-hundred-page journals – in Lake’s handwriting – left no doubt what had been happening. His fantasy was to have women as sex slaves, but he was willing to go a great deal further than Cameron Hooker or Gary Heidnik. One couple – Brenda O’Connor, her boyfriend Lonnie Bond, and their two-year-old baby – had been invited to the house for dinner; the man and baby had been killed, and Brenda O’Connor had been handcuffed in the chair, while Ng cut off her clothes. On the video she asks: ‘Why do you guys do this?’, and he tells her: ‘We don’t like you. Do you wan
t me to put it in writing?’ ‘Don’t cut my bra off.’ ‘Nothing is yours now.’ ‘Give my baby back to me. I’ll do anything you want.’ ‘You’re going to do anything we want anyway.’ Lake’s journal commented: ‘The perfect woman is totally controlled. A woman who does exactly what she is told to do and nothing else. There is no sexual problem with a submissive woman. There are no frustrations – only pleasure and contentment.’

  Other videos showed the girls being raped and murdered; there were also snapshots of dead bodies, and bags of human bones that seemed to have been boiled.

  By now police had dug up four bodies from a trench at the back of the house, two of them blacks. Ng had been seen driving to the ranch with two black men, yet was known to hate blacks and Hispanics. He had also taken various transients to work at the ‘ranch’; now it began to look as if some of them may never have left. Another person who had disappeared was Lake’s younger brother Donald, who had failed to return after a visit to his brother in an earlier ‘survivalist compound’ in Humboldt County. Two months before Lake’s arrest, a San Francisco couple, Harvey and Deborah Dubs, together with their sixteen-month-old son, had vanished from their San Francisco apartment, and the detective who had looked into their disappearance had been told that a young Chinese-looking man had been seen moving out their furniture; by coincidence, the same officer was now working on the Lake case . . .

  Ng was now one of the most wanted men in America, but had not been seen since his disappearance. A few days later, a San Francisco gun dealer who had been repairing an automatic pistol belonging to Ng notified the police that Ng had telephoned him from Chicago asking if he could send him the gun by post. When the gun dealer had explained that it would be illegal to send handguns across state lines, Ng had cursed him and hung up.