Serial Killers

May 7, 2012

Dennis Lynn Rader, "The BTK Killer"

Over the years, thanks to movies like The Silence of the Lambs, public perception about serial killers has become more mythical than factual.  In reality, there is no real profile for this rare breed of killer.

by Erin Geyer

Charles Manson once said “Look down at me and you see a fool; look up at me and you see a God; look straight at me and you see yourself.” These words give us a glimpse into the psyche of a killer. It is hard to say why certain serial killers develop such a tremendous public interest and following in the media. Public perceptions about serial homicide have become more mythical than fact. I will examine the common misconceptions about serial killers, and how the media affects the public’s opinion on this issue. I have always been interested in criminal law, and movies based on murder, mystery, and suspense. Serial killers both disgust and captivate me. Though I could never fathom committing such heinous crimes, I am intrigued by those who do.

Forget Hannibal Lecter. The movie portrayal of serial killers as deranged loners with unusually high IQs is dangerously wrong and can hinder investigations. According to the FBI, serial killers are much different in real life. For years, law enforcement investigators, academics, mental health experts, and the media have studied serial murder, from Jack the Ripper in the late 1800s to the sniper killings in 2002, and from the “Zodiac Killer” in California to the “BTK Killer” in Kansas. These diverse groups have long attempted to understand the complex issues related to serial killers. In 2005, the FBI hosted a symposium in San Antonio, Texas. This report contains the collective insights of a team of experts on serial murder. The symposium’s focus was actually two-fold: to bridge the gap between fact and fiction and to build up our body of knowledge to generate a more effective investigative response.

Much of the general public’s knowledge concerning serial murder is a product of Hollywood productions. Story lines are created to heighten the interest of audiences, rather than to accurately portray the criminal. Law enforcement professionals are subject to the same misinformation from a different source: the use of circumstantial information. Professionals, such as investigators, prosecutors, and pathologists may have limited exposure to serial murder. Their experience may be based upon a single murder series, and the factors in that case are generalized to other serial killers. As a result, stereotypes take root in the police community regarding the nature and characteristics of serial murders.

A growing trend that compounds the fallacies surrounding serial murder is the talking heads phenomenon. A talking head is a person who claims to have an expertise in serial murder. They appear frequently on television and in the print media and speculate on the characteristics of the killer, without being privy to the facts of the investigation. Unfortunately, inappropriate comments may spread misperceptions concerning serial killers and impair law enforcement’s investigative efforts. The rarity of serial murder combined with inaccurate information and fictional portrayals of serial killers have created seven main serial killer myths. I discussed these myths in a survey given to students in a rural college community.

May 7, 2012

Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker

Repeated psychiatric evaluations conducted by various prison doctors showed that Lawrence Bittaker was a psychopath who should not be paroled. Yet he was paroled time and time again before being convicted of brutally raping, torturing and murdering five teenage girls over a four-month period in 1979. 

by Mark Pulham

The San Fernando Valley is a familiar sight for moviegoers. The Valley is the home to Universal Studios, and is filled with beautiful homes, and is a destination point for visitors from all over the world. It’s the setting for such films as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the Back To The Future series. Less wholesome is the fact that it’s also the porn center for the United States, with 90 percent of legally distributed porn films that are made in the U.S. being made by companies based in the Valley.

Despite the less than respectable industry that is based there, the Valley is a great place to live.

But at the end of 1979, the Valley got an unwelcome shock.

For the previous couple of years, Los Angeles had been terrorized by a series of murders committed by the Hillside Strangler, a singular name given to two killers, cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, with some of the victims connected to the Valley.

There was relief when Angelo Buono was arrested on October 22, to join his cousin in custody, maybe the city could relax.

But the relief was short lived.

It was Halloween night in the San Fernando Valley, and a young girl was hitchhiking in the Sunland-Tujunga residential district. It was late, and when the GMC van drew alongside her, she was grateful for the ride. But, appropriately for Halloween, her night turned into one of terror.

For the residents of one house in Hermosa Beach, the fictional horrors of the night before turned into a real one the next morning. Displayed on their lawn, like a discarded Halloween prop, was the naked and tortured body of the young girl.

The police and the community were stunned by the discovery. Ten days had passed since the arrest of the second Hillside Strangler, could there have been a third that no one knew about? But it was plainly obvious that this was not a strangler victim, this was something much worse. The community was horrified, they had just ended one serial killer spree, and now they were facing another.

But this young girl was not the first victim, she was the last, and unknown to the residents of the city, this was a team that had been working for months.

May 7, 2012

Fritz Harrmann

Over a six-year period, Fritz Haarmann sodomized and murdered up to 50 young men and boys in Hanover, German, by clamping his teeth on their throats and biting through their windpipes.  He then drank their blood. 

by Mark Pulham

The Great War was over. After more than four years of hostilities, Germany had been defeated, and there was a hefty price to pay. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, ordered that Germany, which was forced to take the entire blame for the war, would also have to repay the entire costs of the war. The total amount was a staggering 132 billion marks, the equivalent today of $442 billion. It was an amount that Germany would not finish paying until 2010.

The result for the people of Germany was disastrous. Money became worthless, and by the 1920’s inflation had gone through the roof. In 1923, hyperinflation caused the price of a loaf of bread to skyrocket from 250 marks in January to 1,500,000 marks in September.

The wealthy suddenly found that their fortunes had vanished almost overnight. People couldn’t provide for their families, and food shortages became normal. Life for the people of Germany had become an enormous struggle, and the black marketers saw an opportunity to profit from the misery.

With the horrors of war still fresh in the minds of the population, could there be anything that made life any worse?

For the people of Hannover, the answer came in 1924.

Feb. 20, 2012

John Reginald Halliday Christie

Serial Killer Reg Christie pinned one of his eight murders on the witless Timothy Evans before he was discovered to be the “Monster of 10 Rillington Place.”  Evans’s execution by hanging – and his posthumous pardon – helped lead to the abolishment of the death penalty in Great Britain. 

by Mark Pulham

When most people think of Notting Hill, there are a few things that first come to mind. One could be the Notting Hill carnival, a colorful event held every year by the West Indian community and, after Rio, the second largest street carnival in the world. Or it may be Portobello Road, home to the worlds largest Antiques Market, held every Saturday, and also the home to the Portobello Film Festival, where over 700 films have had their premiers.

It could be that the first thought is of the 1999 Julia Roberts film, “Notting Hill.”

But for some, those with longer, darker memories, the thought may be of 10 Rillington Place.

What took place in this house, and the subsequent events, make up a tale of tragedy, horror, and disgust.

Once an area known for pig farms and pottery works, Notting Hill, in the northern part of Kensington, began to be developed in the early to mid 1800’s, and became a fashionable area with its own artistic community. Large houses were built in the hope that they would entice the wealthy from Belgravia and Mayfair, but the plan didn’t work, and instead, it drew the upper middle classes, who liked the idea of Belgravia style houses at the lower Notting Hill prices.

In the late 1980’s, redevelopment of the area brought back its affluence and it is now one of London’s most desirable areas to live, and one of the most expensive.

But sandwiched between these two periods of wealth and prosperity, were decades of neglect and decay. At the beginning of the 20^th century, the middle classes stopped having servants and the large houses were sold off to property developers who split the houses into multiple dwellings, with each floor making up a separate flat, and each flat rented out as cheap lodgings.

Rapidly, the area went downhill and became, as one put it, “a massive slum, full of multi-occupied houses, crawling with rats and rubbish.”

Rillington Place was a typical street in the area. Number 10 was a narrow, dreary, and depressing house at the end of a narrow, dreary, and depressing cul-de-sac. Built probably around 1869, it was a grimy and cramped house that had been, like many others, split into three flats, one on each floor.

At the beginning of 1948, only two of the flats were occupied. In the ground floor flat lived the Christies, Reg and Ethel. Their flat consisted of a front living room, a back bedroom, and a kitchen, which included a pantry or cupboard. A passageway led from the front door of the house through to the back door, splitting the Christie’s kitchen from their other rooms.

On the next floor was the home of Charles Kitchener, a man in his 60s who was suffering from failing eyesight. His flat was almost identical to the one below, but without the passageway.

The top floor flat was smaller than the others, having only a kitchen and a bedsitting room.

Outside, there was a small wash-house with a sink and a boiler, where the occupants could do small amounts of laundry. Also outside was the only lavatory, which everyone had to use. Access to both of these was through the passageway that separated the Christie’s kitchen from the rest of their flat.

Beyond the wash-house and lavatory, behind a fence, was what only the delusional would call a garden. It was a dirt wasteland less than 20 feet square that only the hardiest of plant life could survive.

Nov. 21, 2011

Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman

During the last quarter of the Twentieth century, Dr. Harold Shipman killed his patients and got away with it.  In the process, he became the most prolific serial killer not just in Great Britain but in the Western World.  It eventually became known that he had murdered 215 patients and that he was probably responsible for killing another 69, bringing his ghastly total to 284 victims.  He may have actually murdered many more. 

by Mark Pulham

It could have been a scene from a horror movie. Men were standing in the shadows, gathered around an open grave as a heavy rain lashed down. Some light showed what they were doing. Night staff at a local nursing home watched as a coffin was raised from the black hole in the ground and taken away.

The exhumation was the first ever carried out by Greater Manchester Police, though it would not be the last.

Kathleen Grundy was 81-years-old when she had died five weeks earlier, on June 24, 1998. Though in general a woman of that age suddenly dying would not be considered unusual, for the people of Hyde it was quite a shock.

Kathleen was a fit and active woman who worked two and a half days a week at an Age Concern shop, handling their banking, and on three days of the week, she volunteered at Werneth House, a social center for pensioners, where she helped with the lunches.

For this former Lady Mayor of Hyde to have suddenly died was unthinkable.

Oct. 31, 2011 

Special to Crime Magazine:  An excerpt from David A. Gibb’s book, Camouflaged Killer: The Shocking Double Life of Canadian Air Force Colonel Russell Williams.  By day Williams commanded the largest military base in Canada; by night he stalked single women in their bedrooms.  What began as a fetish to steal women’s undergarments grew into a compulsion to rape and murder. 

Chapter Ten

Enemy under Fire

With true military precision, Colonel Russell Williams arrived at the Ottawa police headquarters at 3 p.m. and reported for his scheduled interview.

He was introduced to Detective-Sergeant Jim Smyth, a forty-something, slightly bookish, unassuming officer in a dark suit and tie. Mild-mannered in his approach and soft-spoken by nature, Smyth was not the type of fellow one would suspect of being a police officer. In fact, much like TV’s Columbo, he probably owed much of his success to people’s innate tendencies to underestimate his talents and resolve. At six feet two, Williams’s tall and lean build dominated the smaller-framed officer.

Smyth, who had started his policing career in 1988, was one of only a half-dozen certified criminal profilers in Canada. His success as a profiler and polygraph operator for the OPP’s Behavioral Sciences and Analysis Services unit had been well documented.[1] As far as cops went, he seemed to have the proverbial Midas touch, the kind of cop most case investigators would want holding their ladder.

Sept. 27, 2011

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

Myra Hindley was, for the British public, evil personified, and was the most hated woman in Britain from the time of her arrest in 1965 until the day she died in 2002 for murdering children with her boyfriend and burying them on the Moors.

by Mark Pulham

At around 8:40 on the morning of Thursday, October 7, 1965, Bob Talbot knocked on the back door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. He wore a long white coat and carried a basket of bread under his arm. A woman opened the door and looked at him. He wasn’t the usual bread delivery man, and she told him he’d got the wrong house. The woman was tall and square-jawed, with honey-platinum hair and thick black eyebrows. Talbot would have put her age as around 35-years-old, but he would have been wrong, she had only turned 23 a few months before.

Talbot dropped the pretence. “I’m a police officer.” he said, as he stepped through the door, “Is the man of the house in?”  The newly promoted Superintendent Bob Talbot followed the woman through the kitchen and into the living room, as behind him, his Detective Sergeant Jock Carr slipped into the kitchen through the back door.

In the living room was a bed, and a man was lying on it, writing a letter. He looked up as they entered. It was a neat and tidy room, with a couple of dogs and a budgie. It was not the superintendent’s idea of what a crime scene looked like. He looked at the man and said that he believed that a murder had been committed there.

It had started less than three hours before, when a frantic call had come into Hyde Police Station. It was just after 6 a.m. when the young police constable picked up the telephone and heard the called say, “Is this Hyde Police Station?” The caller was stammering with nervousness, but told the constable his name was David Smith. He said he was speaking from Hattersley, his broad Manchester accent causing him to drop the ‘H’. There’s been a murder, Smith told him, and that he was phoning from the call box on Hattersley Road West.