Manhunters Read online

  Ressler describes how, at the end of the interview, Sirhan stood by the door, pulling in his stomach and flexing his muscles, which he had kept in trim with weight lifting, and as he left asked: “Well, Mr. Resssler, what do you think of Sirhan now?” It was clear that he believed he had made a strong impression. “Obviously,” said Ressler, “he felt that to know Sirhan was to love him.”

  The next three interviews—with Juan Corona, Herb Mullin, and John Linley Frazier—were unrewarding, offering no real insights. Corona, a Mexican labor contractor who had killed and then buried twenty-five tramps and migrant workers in 1971, was originally believed to have killed them to avoid paying their wages. But the fact that many of the men—mostly alcoholics—had their trousers around their ankles suggested a sexual motive. Corona, argued his defense, was a “hopeless heterosexual” who was married with children, and was therefore unlikely to be guilty. But he had formerly been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the violence of some of the murders certainly hinted at a disturbed personality. Unfortunately, since Corona was “entirely uncommunicative,” Ressler was unable to form any assessment.

  The Frazier case had caused some panic at the time, since the Manson murders were fresh in everyone’s minds. After shooting Victor Ohta, his wife and two children, and his secretary, Frazier had dumped them in the swimming pool, and then set the house on fire. Under the windshield wiper of Ohta’s Rolls Royce was a grandiloquent note signed with the four suits of the tarot pack, suggesting some kind of occult group, or perhaps another Zodiac. The doctor’s station wagon had been left in a railway tunnel in the obvious hope of causing a serious accident, but the goods train that struck it was traveling so slowly that it only pushed it out of the tunnel.

  Questioning a group of hippies in the nearby woods pointed the investigation in the direction of a twenty-four-year-old car mechanic who had left his wife to live with hippies, and fingerprints on the door of the Rolls Royce confirmed this. John Linley Frazier had been studying the tarot and books on ecology, and concluded that American society lacked spirituality. He had burgled the Ohtas’ expensive home before the crime, and subsequently told someone that the Ohta family was too materialistic and should be killed. (In fact, Dr. Ohta had founded a hospital in Santa Cruz to which he gave financial support, and gave free treatment to patients who could not afford his fees.) After his arrest, Frazier had remained silent throughout his trial but had nonetheless been sentenced to death because his guilt was established beyond reasonable doubt. Like Sirhan, he had been saved by the abolition of the death penalty in 1971.

  Ressler also found this interview disappointing, commenting only that John Linley Frazier was “the prisoner of his delusions.”

  Herb Mullin had first shown symptoms of schizophrenia after the death of his closest friend in a car accident, and by the time he was twenty-one (in 1969) was hearing voices that told him to shave his head and burn his penis with a lighted cigarette. In 1972, driving along a highway in the mountains he saw an old tramp; he asked him to take a look at his engine, and then, as the man leaned over the car, killed him with a baseball bat. Ten days later, as he was giving a lift to a college student, he stabbed her in the heart, and then disemboweled her. A month later he killed a friend and his wife, and then a woman and her sleeping children. In a Santa Cruz state park he shot to death four teenagers who were camping, and finally, at random, an old man in his front garden. A neighbor who witnessed the shooting called the police and Mullins was arrested.

  These murders, he explained at his trial, had saved thousands of lives by averting natural disasters such as earthquakes. Oddly enough, he was deemed to be sane and sentenced to life. One psychiatrist blamed his murder spree on Governor Ronald Reagan’s closing of mental hospitals in California to save money.

  Ressler found Mullin docile and polite, but with nothing to say.

  Ressler’s conclusions about his interviewees so far was that, apart from Sirhan they belonged to a category his fellow profiler Roy Hazelwood called “disorganized” killers; these are fundamentally weak personalities whose crimes tend to be spontaneous and are poorly and inadequately planned. He writes: “The disorganized offender’s actions are usually devoid of normal logic; until he is caught and tells us his version of the crimes, chances are that no one can follow the twisted reasoning he uses to pick his victims.”

  Organized killers such as Ed Kemper and Charles Manson proved to be a more complex proposition.

  “I’m sorry to sound so cold about this,” Kemper explained to Ressler, “but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I wanted to, I had to evict them from their human bodies.”

  Edmund Emil Kemper III, born on December 18, 1948, had started to show signs of severe psychological disturbance as a child. His mother and father separated when he was seven; he was one of those children who badly needed a man to admire and imitate, and became an ardent fan of John Wayne. He had been a boy scout and was taught to shoot and handle a knife at summer camp. He claimed that his mother, Clarnell, ridiculed him, and he grew up with a highly ambivalent attitude towards her. As a child, he played games with his sister in which she led him to die in the gas chamber, and he once cut the hands and feet off her doll.

  At thirteen he cut the family cat into pieces. He had sadistic fantasies which included killing his mother, and often went into her bedroom at night with a gun, toying with the idea. He grew up to be six feet nine inches tall and weighing 280 pounds. He also had fantasies of sexual relation with corpses. In spite of his powerful sexual interest in women from an early age, he was pathologically shy; when his sister once joked with him about wanting to kiss his teacher he replied, “If I kissed her I’d have to kill her first.” Which is precisely what he did to his victims in manhood. Like English sex murderer John Christie, he seems to have killed women because he would have been impotent with a living woman.

  At thirteen Ed ran away to his father. But his sullen demeanor and his sheer size made his stepmother nervous, and she prevailed on her husband to return him to his mother. He was then sent to live with his father’s parents on a ranch in California. His mother rang her ex-husband to warn him that he was taking a risk in sending Ed to live with them; she said, “You might wake up one day and find they’ve been killed.” Which is exactly what happened. When he lost his temper with his domineering grandmother one day in August 1963, he pointed a rifle at the back of her head and shot her. He then stabbed her repeatedly. When his grandfather came home, he shot him before he could enter the house. He then telephoned his mother and waited for the police to arrive. Donald Lunde, a psychiatrist who examined him later, remarked: “In his way, he had avenged the rejection of both his mother and father.”

  After five years in mental hospitals, he was sent back to his mother. She moved to Santa Cruz, where she became an administrative assistant in a college of the University of California. She and Ed had violent, screaming quarrels, usually about trivial subjects. Kemper loathed her. He bought a motorcycle and wrecked it, suing the motorist involved, and then did the same with a second motorcycle. Using the insurance money he bought himself a car, and began driving around, picking up hitchhikers, preferably female. And on May 7, 1972, he committed his first sex murder, picking up Anita Luchessa and Mary Anne Pesce, both students at Fresno State College, in Berkeley. He produced his gun, drove to a quiet spot, and made Anita climb into the trunk while he handcuffed Mary Ann and put a plastic bag over her head. She seemed unafraid of him, and tried to talk to him reasonably. He stabbed her several times in the back, then in the abdomen; finally he cut her throat. After this he went to the trunk, and stabbed the other young woman repeatedly. He then drove home—his mother was out—carried the bodies up to his apartment, and decapitated and dissected them. Later, he buried the pieces in the mountains.

  On September 14, 1972, he picked up fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo hitchhiking to a dance class in San Francisco. He produced his gun, drove her to the mountains
, and then taped her mouth. He suffocated her by placing his fingers up her nostrils; she fought fiercely but vainly. When she was dead, he laid her on the ground and raped her, achieving orgasm within seconds. He took her body back to his apartment, cut off the head, becoming sexually excited as he did so, then her hands, and dissected the body. He took the remains out to the mountains above Boulder Creek and buried them. By then, newspapers were reporting that the “Chopper” or the “Coed Butcher” was preying on young women.

  On January 8, 1973, he picked up Cynthia Schall, who usually hitched a lift to Cabrillo College. He produced the gun, drove her to the little town of Freedom, and stopped on a quiet road. For a while he played a game of cat and mouse with her, assuring her that he had no intention of harming her, enjoying the sensation of power. Then he shot her, dumped the body in the trunk, and drove home. She was a heavy girl, and he staggered with her into his bedroom and stuffed her into his closet. His mother came home, and Kemper talked to her and behaved normally.

  As soon as she was gone the next morning, he took out the body and engaged in various sex acts. He then dissected it with an axe in the shower, and drove out to Carmel, with the pieces in plastic sacks, and threw them off cliffs. This time, parts of the body were discovered only a day later, and identified as Cynthia Schall.

  After another violent quarrel with his mother on February 5, 1973, he drove to the local campus, and picked up Rosalind Thorpe, who was just coming out of a lecture. Shortly after, he picked up twenty-one-year-old Alice Liu. As they drove along in the dark, he shot Rosalind in the head. Alice covered her face with her hands, and he shot her several times in the head.

  He then put both bodies in the trunk, and drove home. His mother was at home, so he couldn’t carry them in. Unable to wait, he took his big hunting knife (which he called “the General”) and hacked off their heads in the trunk. The next morning, after his mother left for work, he carried Alice into the bathroom, cleaned off the blood, and had sexual intercourse with the headless corpse. He also cleaned up Rosalind, although it is not clear whether he again performed necrophiliac sex. He placed both bodies back in the trunk, cut off Alice’s hands, then drove to the coast highway south of Pacifica and disposed of the heads; the bodies were dumped in Eden Canyon, Alameda. They were found nine days later.

  Meanwhile, media coverage in the Santa Cruz area heightened the atmosphere of terror. Shortly after the discovery of Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu, a policeman checking through gun licenses realized that Ed Kemper had a criminal record, and had not declared this. He drove to Kemper’s house, and found him in his car with a young blonde woman. Kemper handed over the gun, and the policeman drove off. The visit probably saved the life of the blonde hitchhiker.

  Kemper felt that he was going to “blow up” soon, commit a crime so obvious that he was going to be caught. He decided to kill his mother first. On the morning of Easter Sunday 1973 Kemper walked into Clarnell’s bedroom and hit her on the head with a hammer. He then cut off her head with the General, “humiliated” her body in some unspecified way, and then dumped it in a closet wrapped in a blanket.

  He felt sick and went out for a drive. On the way he saw an acquaintance who owed him $10 and they went for a drive in his friend’s car: his friend offered him the $10, which, said Kemper later, “saved his life.” But he felt the craving to kill again, so he rang a friend of his mother’s, Sara Hallett, and invited her to dinner with him and his mother. When she arrived, she was breathless, and said, “Let’s sit down. I’m dead.” Kemper took this as a cue, hit her, and then strangled her, crooking his arm round her neck from behind and squeezing as he raised her from the floor. Later, in removing her head, he discovered that he had broken her neck.

  That night he slept in his mother’s bed. The next day he drove west in Mrs. Hallett’s car. Then, using money he had taken from the dead woman, he rented a Hertz car. At one point he was stopped by a policeman for speeding, and fined $25 on the spot. The policeman did not notice the gun on the back seat.

  Kemper had been expecting a manhunt, but when, after three days, there was still no news on the radio of the discovery of the bodies, he stopped in Pueblo, Colorado, and telephoned the Santa Cruz police to confess to being the “co-ed killer.” They asked him to call back later. He did, several times, before he finally convinced them that he was serious. They sent a local policeman to arrest him. In custody in Pueblo, he showed himself eager to talk loquaciously about the killings, describing them all in detail—even how he had buried the head of one victim in the garden, facing towards the house, so that he could imagine her looking at him, and how he had cut out his mother’s larynx and dropped it in the trashcan “because it seemed appropriate after she had bitched me so much.” He explained that he had driven to Pueblo before turning himself in because he was afraid that if he went straight to the local police they might shoot first and ask questions later, and he was “terrified of violence.”

  Kemper was adjudged legally sane, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Ressler obviously felt that Kemper, unlike Frazier, Mullin, and Corona, was well worth the trip to Vacaville Prison—in fact, he visited there three times. Kemper told him how, at the age of ten, he had returned home one day to find that all his belongings had been moved to the windowless basement, his mother explaining that his size made his sisters feel uncomfortable (they were in their teens). She also spent much of her time belittling him—another unpleasant characteristic of many parents of serial killers. So Kemper was virtually condemned to fantasy.

  The importance of the role of fantasy in the early lives of serial killers could hardly be exaggerated. Kemper admitted that he had killed thousands of women in fantasy before he did it in reality. In his classic Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes (1957), James Melvin Reinhardt, professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, starts by underlining the central role played by fantasy in sexual aberration, and adds: “These tend to generate their own psychic energies”—that is to say, the fantasy takes over. The result, says Reinhardt, “is that they can bring about a “deterioration that leads to criminality, alcoholism and other modes of escape.”

  One of the oddest of the cases in which fantasy played a central part concerns the shooting of Eddie Waitkus, first baseman of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, by an admiring fan. On June 15, 1949, nineteen-year-old Ruth Anne Steinhagen, an attractive six-foot brunette, left a note for Waitkus in the Edgewater Hotel in Chicago saying that she had to see him urgently. When he came to her room, she let him in, and then shot him with a rifle she had bought in a pawnshop. It collapsed his right lung, but struck no vital organs.

  She explained in a letter to her court-appointed psychiatrist: “As time went on I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy. I knew I would never get to know him in a normal way, so I kept thinking I will never get him, and if I can’t have him nobody else can. Then I decided I would kill him.”

  With other fans she would wait for hours outside the baseball park to see him leave. Yet when he finally emerged, she always hid. Her fantasy had built up so much psychic energy that it was unable to endure the least contact with reality.

  What strikes us odd is that her adoration was transformed—not into hatred, but into a kind of sadism. The thought of killing her hero convulsed some strange sexual nerve. We can see the parallel with Harvey Glatman, snatching girl’s purses in the playground and then flinging them back at them. It is as if both he and she are saying: “If you won’t take an interest in me, then you’ll pay for it.” And in Glatman’s case, women did literally pay for it with their lives.

  Here we are coming close to the basic motivation of the serial killer, and how desire can be transformed into violence.

  Another case cited by Reinhardt involved a huge white-haired rapist named Carl J. Folk, a carnival owner who had been released from a mental hospital after tying a girl to a tree and raping and beating her.

  In December 1953, Folk engaged in conversation at a gas
station a young couple, Raymond and Betty Allen, who were towing a trailer en route to their new home in California. Folk followed them all day, and that night entered their trailer, knocked Allen unconscious, and then spent the night raping and torturing his wife, while Allen, tied hand and foot, was forced to listen to her screams. Finally Allen succeeded in freeing his legs and escaping from the trailer; a passing motorist untied his hands, and Allen went and got his revolver from his car. As Folk poured gasoline over Betty and her baby, with the intention of burning the trailer, Allen shot him in the stomach, disabling but not killing him. His wife proved to be dead—Folk had strangled her after burning her with matches and cigarettes and biting her all over.

  Folk was executed in the gas chamber in March 1955. In view of the fact that he was middle-aged, it seems likely that Betty Allen was not his first murder victim. Folk had obviously spent a lifetime engaged in sadistic fantasies. What seems surprising about Kemper is that he had reached the same stage by the age of twenty-three.

  That Ressler was aware of Kemper’s continued potential for violence is illustrated by an amusing story he tells of their third interview. On this occasion he had been alone with Kemper, and at the end of a four-hour session that included detailed discussion of appalling depravities, Ressler pushed the buzzer to summon the guard to come and let him out. When no one came, he simply carried on the conversation. But there was not much more to say. Ressler buzzed again. Then again.

  He says: “A look of apprehension must have come over my face, despite my attempts to keep calm and cool, and Kemper, keenly sensitive to other people’s psyches (as most killers are) picked up on this.” He told Ressler to relax; the guards were serving meals and might take twenty minutes. He stood up, emphasizing his huge bulk. Then, sensing Ressler’s rising tension, he said: “If I went apeshit in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you? I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”