Serial Killer Investigations (8 page)

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 realised 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 his mother’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 for 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 central chapters of the book is entitled ‘Fantasy Finds a Victim,’ and deals with various cases in which fantasy played a central part.

One of the oddest of these cases concerns the shooting of Eddie Waitkus, first baseman of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, by an admiring fan. On 15 June 1949, 19-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 as 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 a young couple in conversation at a gas station, 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 23.

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 20 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.’

It was obviously a possibility, and although Ressler did his best to appear calm, his pulse began to race. He tried bluffing, saying he was armed; Kemper was clearly unconvinced. Ressler was deeply relieved when the guard finally showed up.

It is a curious story, because the reader has come to feel that, no matter how much of a threat he might be to women, Kemper would certainly not represent a danger to a federal agent who had been interviewing him. The anecdote suddenly makes us aware that this is not correct; locked in with this massive psychopath, Ressler could easily have found himself in trouble. From then on, he made sure he had a partner during the interviews.

We also note that Kemper talked about screwing off Ressler’s head. He clearly had a fetish about heads, which meant he experienced sexual excitement at the thought of removing them. When he arrived home with the bodies of Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu in the trunk, and found his mother already home, he went and severed the heads in the car because he could not wait. But how does one develop sexual excitement at the thought of beheading somebody? A psychiatrist consulted before his trial suggested that he associated it with symbolic removal of his penis (which was undersized), but that sounds far-fetched. Another psychiatrist, Dr Vanasek, suggested at Kemper’s trial that he might not be a sociopath but a classic sadist, and that must surely be closer to the truth. Certain types of sadism may be inborn, possibly some kind of undesirable genetic inheritance—that is, an inherent tendency to associate cruelty with sex. And he seems to have been only about four when he cut off the heads of his sister Allyn’s dolls. The reason may have been the noisy quarrels between his father and mother, both over six feet tall, both with loud voices. He also fantasised about killing his other sister, Susan, six years his senior, and his mother.

Ressler uncovered another interesting clue to the behaviour of serial killers. Kemper admitted that his first murder—otherwise unrecorded—occurred after a quarrel with his mother, in the spring of 1972, when he left the house in a fury and swore he would kill the first attractive young woman he saw. It was a case of rage and frustration overcoming normal inhibitions (since Kemper was basically a mild person), like an angry person driving too fast.

In an interview in Margaret Cheney’s book on Kemper,
The Co-ed Killer,
Kemper explains: ‘It’s kind of hard to go around killing somebody just for the hell of it. It’s not a kicks thing, or I would have ceased doing it a long time ago. It was an urge, I wouldn’t say it was on the full moon or anything, but I noticed that no matter how horrendous the crime had been or how vicious the treatment of the bodies after death, still at that point in my crimes the urge to do it again coming as often as a week or two weeks afterwards—a strong urge, and the longer I let it go the stronger it got, to where I was taking risks to go out and kill people—risks that normally, according to my little rules of operation, I wouldn’t take because they could lead to arrest.’

As with so many serial killers, it became an addiction, a strange compulsion, not unlike demonic possession.

Ressler’s interviews with Ed Kemper occurred in 1978. During the same period, Ressler went to interview Charles Manson.

Manson had always maintained that he was not guilty of any crimes. He had not been present at any of the murders, and he had not ordered his followers to commit them. Strictly speaking, this was true—although Manson had tied up the LaBiancas before he sent Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel in to kill them.

Manson was a little man who looked harmless. But the staring, hypnotic eyes betrayed a man of high dominance.

When Charles Manson arrived in San Francisco in 1967, he was 32 years old, and had spent most of his adolescent and adult life in reform school or prison. His mother, Kathleen Maddox, was 15 when she became pregnant with him; a few years later she was in jail for armed robbery. Manson was placed in a children’s home when he was 12, and began his career of burglary soon after. By the time he emerged from a ten-year jail sentence in 1967—for car theft, cheque fraud, and pimping—he had been institutionalised for more than half of his life and would have preferred to stay in prison.

Yet, San Francisco in the age of the flower children proved to be a revelation to him. Suddenly he was no longer an ex-jailbird but a member of the ‘counterculture’. He was well qualified, having learned to play the guitar from Alvin ‘Creepy’ Karpis, a former Public Enemy Number One and last surviving member of the infamous Ma Barker gang. Busking outside the university in Berkeley, he met a librarian named Mary Brunner, and soon moved in with her. He acquired a second girl—Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme—when he found her crying on the pavement after a quarrel with her family. Manson told her, ‘I am the god of fuck.’ After years in prison he was as sexually active as a rabbit.

He attracted young women because he had a striking personality, yet seemed unthreatening—almost a father figure. He told a friend: ‘I’m a very positive force... I collect negatives.’ A prison report on him had stated: ‘Charles Manson has a tremendous drive to call attention to himself.’ But now he no longer had to call attention to himself; teenaged girls stuck to him as if they were fragments of coloured paper and he possessed some kind of static electricity.

Another young woman he picked up was 19-year-old Susan Atkins, who had left home at 16 and served some time for associating with criminals. She invited him back to her apartment, and as they lay naked, he told her to imagine that it was her father who was making love to her. She claimed that it was the greatest orgasm of her life. Later she was to say of him: ‘He is the king and I am his queen. And the queen does what the king says.’

The drugs undoubtedly helped. Manson and his ‘Family’ never used heroin; they preferred pot and psychedelics. It was on an LSD trip that Manson saw himself as Christ, and went through the experience of being crucified. It made a deep impression. His followers later said that he had ‘Christlike vibes’. He liked to point out that his surname meant ‘Son of Man’.

He somehow acquired a battered Volkswagen bus, and with his ‘Family’ of young women, now grown to half a dozen or so, he shuttled around between California, Oregon, and Washington, gradually acquiring more followers. They exchanged the Volkswagen for a yellow school bus, and removed most of the seats so that they could sleep in it.