The Serial Killers Read online

  The police had no leads. But nine months later, a tip to look in a certain library book revealed a letter from the killer, promising more murders. He declared ‘I find it hard to control myself’, and admitted that he felt he was possessed by a monster. Naturally the press pounced on such a lurid story and soon the murderer had a media nickname: ‘the BTK Strangler’ (short for Bind Torture Kill) often shortened to just ‘BTK’.

  Three months after the Otera murders, 20-year-old Kathryn Bright and her 19-year-old brother Kevin came home soon after midday to find an intruder with a gun, who told them he needed money to escape from the police. He tied Kathryn, then took Kevin into the bedroom and tried to strangle him. When Kevin resisted he was shot in the head. Then he heard sounds of distress from his sister, and dragged himself into the next room, only to be shot again; in spite of this he succeeded in escaping and getting help. But it was too late: Kathryn had been stabbed three times in the stomach and later died in hospital. The killer had also tried to strangle her.

  The murders ceased for three years. The next victim was 26-year-old mother of three Shirley Vian, found strangled on 17 March 1977, on her bed; her three children, locked in the bathroom, had escaped through a tiny window; the killer later admitting he had intended to kill them too.

  Nine months later, on 8 December 1977, it was the murderer himself who rang the police and told them that a girl named Nancy Fox had been killed. The call was quickly traced, but police found only a dangling public phone. 25-year-old secretary Nancy Fox had been strangled in the night, and semen indicated that the killer had masturbated over her.

  Then came an eight-year gap, and the next victim, 53-year-old widow Marine Hedge, was strangled in her home on 27 April 1985. The killer then took her in the boot of her car to a nearby Lutheran church and took photographs of the body in various types of bondage, then drove her to a ditch, where he covered her over. Her disappearance was not attributed to BTK.

  The strangler would later reveal that women like Marine Hedge were his ‘projects’, observed and stalked for days or weeks before he struck.

  This was also true of his next victim, a 28-year-old married woman named Vicki Wegerle, to whose house he gained entry on 16 September 1986, by claiming to be a telephone repairman; he strangled her after holding her at gunpoint, then took photos of her. Although he thought she was dead when he left her, she actually lived for a short time. Her husband found her dying on his return from work.

  The killer gained entry to the house of the eleventh and final victim, 62-year-old Delores Davis, on 19 January 1991 by hurling a concrete block through her window, then telling her he was on the run and needed food and money. He handcuffed her, pretended he was leaving, then went back and strangled her. Then he took her body in the boot of her own car and dumped it under a bridge.

  For thirteen years nothing further was heard from BTK. But on 19 March 2004, the newsroom of the Wichita Eagle received a letter from him acknowledging responsibility for the death of Vicki Wegerle – whose husband had been chief suspect since 1986 – enclosed with a photograph of her driver’s license and photographs of her body.

  Immediately, the fear was back again. But it proved unnecessary. BTK was about to make the mistake he had been so careful to avoid for thirty years, and it came about because of his craving to play games with the police.

  There were no less than eleven communications between March 2004 and February 2005, including a letter describing the Otero murders, cards with images of bondage of children on them, and even a misleading ‘autobiography’, giving false details of his life, which led to a public appeal to anyone who might recognise the writer. There was also a cereal box containing a bound doll with a plastic bag over its head, and another containing a bound doll symbolising Josephine Otero.

  Then BTK made his mistake; he asked the police if he could send a message on a floppy disk, and on being assured (via a newspaper advertisement) that it would be acceptable, he sent one to a television station. But electronic traces on the disk indicated it had been formerly used by the Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita by someone called ‘Dennis’.

  A man named Dennis Rader, aged 60, president of the church council, was kept under observation, and his daughter was approached by the police for a blood sample. The DNA proved to be the same as that in the semen left at crime scenes and, on 25 February 2005, Rader was arrested and charged. He seemed almost relieved, and quickly confessed.

  The trial, from 27 June to 19 August 2005, ended with the expected guilty verdict, and Rader received ten life sentences which would last 175 years. He is presently serving them at the El Dorado Correctional Facilty, Kansas.

  The Unabomber

  What is now called ‘eco-terrorism’ – that is, illegal militant action taken against people or organisations that are believed to be damaging the environment – has been taking place since the 1960s. Most such actions are, fortunately, relatively harmless – animal rights activists set laboratory test animals free, demonstrators trespass into restricted areas to make protests and anti-globalisation riots occasionally wreck multinational-owned burger outlets. But such ‘eco-terrorists’ generally revere human life as much as they do all life on the planet, so rarely try to actually harm other people. One exception, however, stands-out . . .

  On 25 May 1978, a small parcel bomb wounded a security guard at Illinois’ Northwestern University. This was the first amateurish attack made by the serial killer who later became known as ‘the Unabomber’. Over the next eighteen years, the Unabomber sent homemade, but increasingly sophisticated, parcel bombs to educational establishments, technology companies and corporate businesses.

  Police were doubly flummoxed by this method of attack: not only was the killer murdering strangers – the first and greatest problem in serial crime investigation – but he or she was also striking from a distance, using the unwitting US Postal Service as an accomplice. There were no personal links to lead from the victims to the killer and no possibility of chance eyewitnesses identifying the murderer.

  Between May 1978 and December 1985, the Unabomber is known to have sent out nine, fortunately non-fatal, parcel bombs. Two were intercepted and defused, but the others injured eighteen people, some seriously. One of these bombs – that wounded United Airlines president, Percy A. Wood – earned the bomb maker the media nickname ‘the Un. A. bomber,’ later simplified to ‘the Unabomber.’

  December 1985, in Sacramento California, saw the first fatal Unabomber attack. Hugh C. Scrutton tried to remove a package left lying in the car park behind his computer rental shop. It exploded, killing him. This bomb had not been delivered by the Postal Service; it had simply been left in the parking lot. It seemed likely, therefore, that the killer had put it there in order to watch, from a distance, the result of his handiwork. Unfortunately, nobody had seen the booby trap bomb being planted.

  The next bombing followed the same pattern. On 20 February 1987, a bomb was left in the parking lot outside a computer firm in Salt Lake City. This time, however, a secretary in the firm spotted the bomber placing the booby trap. She thought it odd that the tall man in the hooded sweatshirt and aviator dark glasses should leave a lump of wood with nails sticking out of it right where in might damage somebody’s tyres but, unfortunately, before she could alert anyone her boss, Gary Wright, drove into the lot, got out of his car and kicked the lump of wood out of the path of his tyres. The resulting explosion took off his leg, but did not kill him.

  Police were delighted to have a description of the Unabomber – albeit a slightly sketchy one – and plastered the artist’s reconstruction all over the national media. Any doubt that the Unabomber meant his bombs to kill had been removed by the last two attacks: both bombs had been packed with metal fragments, designed to shred their victims with flying shrapnel. But at least he seemed to have given up killing from a distance – the temptation to see the results of his murders obviously had been too great.

  Unfortunately, the publication of the witne
ss description inadvertently removed this advantage. The Unabomber stopped sending bombs for six years – presumably frightened that the police might identify him – and when he struck again he did so using his older, and for him safer, method of delivery: the US Mail.

  On 22 June 1993, a parcel bomb badly injured Dr Charles Epstein, a leading geneticist at the University of California, partly destroying his hand and sending shrapnel through his chest and across his face. Only swift medical aid saved his life.

  The next day a similar parcel bomb badly hurt computer scientist Dr David Gelernter of Yale University. He lost most of his right hand, and the sight and hearing on his right side. He too survived, but only with extensive medical treatment.

  On 10 December 1994, a parcel bomb killed New York advertising executive Thomas Mosser. Some doubted that this was a genuine Unabomber attack until it was pointed out that one of Mosser’s corporate clients was the Exxon oil company – responsible, in many people’s eyes, for recklessly polluting the environment. Less than five months later, on 24 April, timber industry lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray picked up a parcel, supposedly sent by a firm called ‘Closet Dimensions’. As Murray picked up the package, one of his staff members joked: ‘It’s heavy. Must be a bomb.’ The blast was particularly powerful, destroying Murray’s head and upper body, but not killing anyone else. Fortunately, he was to be the Unabomber’s last victim.

  In 1995, in the wake of the Oklahoma bombing, the Unabomber sent a ‘manifesto’ to the Washington Post and the New York Times – threatening to blow up a passenger jet if it were not promptly published. It proved to be a rambling screed that attacked big business, environmentally damaging government policies, scientific research and progress in general. The opening paragraph read:

  The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in ‘advanced’ countries.

  It was plain that the Unabomber believed that all development since the Industrial Revolution was dangerous and damnable. He was evidently a well-educated, well-read man, and many of the things he stated were simply extreme extensions of mainstream environmentalism. But he was also delusional and self-justifying; insisting that his bombing campaign had been the only way to make the media pay attention to his message. It may have been true that there were few avenues to attack modern technology through the conventional, pro-technology US media, but killing to get people’s attention completely undermined the credibility of his manifesto.

  And the fact that he had almost certainly watched the explosions that killed Hugh C. Scrutton and crippled Gary Wright placed the Unabomber firmly in the serial killer category. Whatever environmental and political self-justification he offered, he was not an ecological activist: he was a homicidal sadist.

  Fortunately, the manifesto was the last terror package the Unabomber was ever to send. David Kaczynski, in Montana, read the Unabomber’s manifesto and realised with horror that it sounded just like the rantings of his hermit-like older brother Theodore. Most telling was the reversal of the old homily: ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it.’ The Unabomber, insisting that the positive uses of technology were not worth the negative side effects, wrote: ‘you can’t eat your cake and have it.’ This was a family habit, picked up from their mother, and its inclusion convinced David that Theodore was the Unabomber.

  With natural misgivings, David Kaczynski informed the FBI, who raided Theodore’s isolated Montana cabin and found plenty of proof that he was indeed the Unabomber.

  Theodore J. Kaczynski had been a brilliant academic – in 1967, at just 25, he had been appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Berkley University, California – but, in 1969, Kaczynski suffered a total emotional breakdown and had subsequently become a recluse in Montana. Living in an isolated log cabin, Kaczynski believed he followed a life that was in tune with nature – making bombs with some parts carefully hand-carved from wood and roiling in hatred for the modern world.

  In 1996, Ted Kaczynski was sentenced to four life sentences, with parole permanently denied.

  The Green River Killer

  For over two decades the mystery of the Green River serial killer hung over the American north-west. And not just police investigators were shamed by their lack of success in apprehending the killer; so were local media organisations – one of which publicly revealed the existence of a police trap set for the murderer in the early days of the hunt. Moreover, Washington State, seen by many as an idyllic, rural state, was revealed to have a darker underbelly: just like New York or Los Angeles, it was a place where many teenage girls ended up as prostitutes . . . and where the killer of such girls could escape justice for decades.

  On 12 August 1982, a slaughterman discovered a bloated corpse floating in the slow-flowing Green River, near Seattle, in Washington State. The police pathologist succeeded in lifting an excellent set of prints from the swollen flesh, which enabled the criminal identification department to name the victim as 23-year-old Debra Lynn Bonner, known as ‘Dub’; she was a stripper with a list of convictions as a prostitute. She was the second of literally dozens of women who would be found during the next three years.

  The first had been found a month earlier, half a mile downstream, strangled with her own slacks, and had been identified as 16-year-old Wendy Coffield. In spite of her age, she had a record as a prostitute – indeed, as a ‘trick roll’: someone who sets up her clients (‘Johns’) for robbery.

  Within three days of the finding of Debra Bonner, Dave Reichert, the detective in charge of the case, heard that two more bodies had been found in the Green River. Both women were black, both were naked, and they had been weighted down to the river bottom with large rocks. They were only a few hundred yards upstream from the spot where Dub Bonner had been found, and had almost certainly been there at the time.

  As Reichert walked along the bank towards the place where Dub had been found, he discovered another body. Like the other two, she was black, and was later identified as 16-year-old Opal Mills. The fact that rigor mortis had not yet disappeared meant that she had been left there in the past two days. Which in turn meant that if the police had kept watch on the river after the first bodies were found, the killer would have almost certainly been caught.

  It was the first of a series of mischances that would make this one of the most frustrating criminal cases in Seattle’s history.

  The next – and perhaps the worst – occurred two days later, when a local TV station fatuously announced that the riverbank was now under round-the-clock surveillance, thus destroying all chance of catching the killer on a return visit.

  The medical evidence on the other two women, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, confirmed that the Green River Killer was a ‘sick trick’; both women had pointed rocks jammed into their vaginas. Like the others, they were prostitutes working the Strip – the main road – leading to Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport.

  On Saturday 28 August 1982, Kase Lee left her pimp’s apartment to ‘turn a trick’, and vanished. The next day Terri Milligan took an hour off from soliciting to go for a meal; apparently a car pulled up for her as she walked to the fast-food joint, and, unwilling to reject business, she climbed in.

  The following day, 15-year-old Debra Estes – known to the police as Betty Jones – was picked up by a blue and white pickup truck; the man drove her to remote woodland, made her undress at gun point, then ordered her to gi
ve him a ‘blow job’. After that he robbed her of $75 and left her with her hands tied. This man was pulled in by police who recognised the description of his pickup truck, and identified as the attacker. But a lie-detector test established his innocence of the Green River murders. And while he was still in custody, 18-year-old Mary Meehan, who was eight months pregnant, disappeared, and became victim number nine.

  Within three weeks of her rape, Debra Estes would become the tenth victim of the Green River Killer. Six more victims in August, October, November and December would bring his total up to at least sixteen – the largest annual total for any American serial killer up to that time.

  Yet it would be exceeded in the following year, 1983, when twenty-six women vanished, and the remains of eight of them were found near Sea-Tac Airport or close by. In March, special investigator Bob Keppel, known for his brilliant work on the Ted Bundy case, was asked to write a report on the investigation. It was devastating, with hundreds of examples of incompetence and failure to follow up on leads. For example, when the driving license of victim Marie Malvar was found at the airport, and the police notified, they did not even bother to collect it – although it might well have contained the killer’s fingerprint.

  In 1984, four victims were found together on Auburn West Hill, six more in wooded areas along State Route 410, and two near Tigard, Oregon, the latter giving rise to the speculation that the killer had moved to live in a new location. In January a Green River Task Force of 36 investigators was formed, with a then staggering $2 million budget. By 1988 the cost of the investigation was to reach over $13 million.