Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (15 page)

By the twentieth century, serial murder in the United States was catching up with European patterns. Earle Leonard Nelson raped and murdered twenty-seven landladies between February 1926 and June 1927. Nelson was a migratory serial killer, leaving multiple victims in San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Barbara, Oakland, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, and finally Winnipeg, Canada, where he was apprehended, tried, and hanged. Nelson was twenty-nine when he began killing, but he had a criminal record going back to age twenty-one, when he was arrested for attempted rape. We will see that Nelson also fit a certain characteristic that many serial killers have—a history of head injury. When Nelson was ten, he was dragged under a streetcar, resulting in severe head trauma.

In New York City in 1928, the grandfatherly Albert Fish, fifty-eight years old at the time and the father of six children, befriended the Budd family. He originally had come in response to a newspaper advertisement placed by one of the Budd sons seeking work. Using a false name, Fish visited the family several times and finally offered the son work at his fictional Long Island farm, no doubt intending to kill him. But at the last minute, the Budds’ twelve-year-old girl, Grace, enchanted Fish. He told the trusting parents that his sister was having a children’s birthday party and offered to take Grace to the party while the son was packing his suitcase to leave for the supposed farm. The last the Budds saw of their daughter Grace was her walking off toward the subway holding the kindly old man’s hand. A massive police investigation turned up no clues.

Six years later, the girl’s mother received a letter from Fish revealing what happened to her daughter. Fish wrote [with original spelling and punctuation]:

My Dear Mrs. Budd,

In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1–3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and used for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak-chops-or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or a girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N. Y. he stole two boys one 7 one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them-tortured them to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 yr old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was Cooked and eaten except head-bones and guts. He was Roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried, stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 st., near-right side. He told me so often how good Human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3-1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese-strawberries.

We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and Called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run downstairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick-bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

The police managed to trace the letter back to Fish by its particular stationery and arrested him. He confessed to molesting more than four hundred children over twenty-years, and is believed to have murdered somewhere between six and fifteen children. Fish was executed in January 1936.

Minnesota-born Carl Panzram was thirty-nine when he was executed after killing twenty-one people. Panzram was a personality of almost mythical proportions—he committed his first burglary at age eleven and remained a professional criminal the rest of his life. In 1920, he brazenly burglarized forty thousand dollars’ worth of property from former U.S. president William Howard Taft’s house. In jail, he terrorized the guards and administration by inciting riots and burning down the kitchen and factory in one of the jails. At one point, he broke out of jail, stole a yacht, and sailed it to Africa and Europe. He lured sailors on board his vessel, then sodomized them, killed them, and threw their bodies into the water. In prison, Panzram wrote a book openly describing his sex crimes, confessing to some one thousand homosexual rapes. Panzram stated, “My motto is: Rob them all, rape them all, and kill them all.”

In 1929, Panzram was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for burglary and threatened in the courtroom to “kill the first person who bothers me.” Ten months later, he beat in the head of a fellow prisoner with an iron bar. For this crime he received the death sentence. When an anti–capital punishment group attempted to have Panzram’s sentence commuted, he raged: “The only thanks you or your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it . . . I believe the only way to reform people is to kill them.”

On September 11, 1930, Panzram was led out to the gallows and there asked if he had any last words. He replied, “Yes, hurry it up, you hoosier bastard. I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.”

Many cases of serial murder were never solved and remain on the record as fragmentary reports. Moreover, as some of these murders occurred exclusively in black communities, the press often ignored them unless the victims were light-skinned blacks. In Atlanta, for example, between May 1911 and May 1912, an unknown killer stalked light-skinned black women on the street. He cut the throats of and mutilated twenty victims before he inexplicably ceased killing. Meanwhile, in Louisiana and Texas, between January 1911 and April 1912, somebody axe-murdered forty-nine victims. Again, nobody was convicted of the crime.

In Cleveland, Ohio, between 1935 and 1938, somebody killed and mutilated prostitutes and derelicts of both sexes. A total of twelve bodies were found before the murders mysteriously ceased. In Alaska, between 1930 and 1931, somebody tracked fishermen and hunters to remote locations and then killed them there. The murders were never solved.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the phenomenon of serial killings seemed to decline in frequency and intensity, but the nature of the crimes became more bizarre. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Charles Floyd stalked and killed seven women between 1942 and 1948 because they had red hair. Jarvis Roosevelt Catoe, an African-American taxi driver, confessed in 1941 to strangling nine women in New York and Washington. In 1946 in Chicago, William Heirens killed two women and an eleven-year-old girl. On a wall in the apartment of one of the victims, he wrote in lipstick, “For Heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.” In Los Angeles, Harvey Glatman in 1957–1958 hired models to pose for him and murdered them after taking their picture—he killed three women. In 1957 in rural Wisconsin, Ed Gein was arrested for killing two local women and cannibalizing their corpses. In Virginia and Maryland in 1959, Melvin Rees flashed his headlights at night to pull over motorists. He killed the men and raped the women. He killed a total of nine victims, an all-time high for any identified serial killer in the United States during the two decades between 1940 and 1960.

It would be Albert DeSalvo—the Boston Strangler—who bridged for us old-world-era serial homicide with the post-JFK epoch.

 Albert DeSalvo—“The Boston Strangler”

There has recently been some serious controversy as to whether Albert DeSalvo really was the Boston Strangler. In 2000, the families of DeSalvo and of Mary Sullivan, his purported last victim, jointly exhumed her body and conducted DNA tests on trace material recovered from her corpse. The material, appearing to be traces of seminal fluid buried with the body for forty years, did not match the DNA pattern taken from DeSalvo’s surviving brother. But the testing was privately done and has not so far changed the state position that DeSalvo is indeed the confessed Boston Strangler. There are some conflicting reports as to whether DeSalvo’s brother is willing to cooperate with authorities in a state-sponsored DNA test.

If not the deeds, than at least the canonical story of Albert DeSalvo, who allegedly murdered thirteen women between 1962 and 1964, capped the industrial age of serial murder and ushered us forward into the new Ted Bundy epoch. Despite numerous cases of serial killings around the world since 1888, Jack the Ripper held his place as the worst in popular memory until the early 1960s. But in 1962 his primacy was shaken by the Boston Strangler, at least in the United States.

Like Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler focused on a very small “killing ground.” He killed in so-called lace curtain neighborhoods of Boston’s lower-middle-class districts. His victims lived among the dense rows of inexpensive low-rise apartment buildings. This type of focused killing had the effect of terrorizing the city, and as the press announced each new victim of the Boston Strangler, his reputation became legendary. After his confession, in the days before made-for-TV movies, Hollywood chose him as a subject worthy of a film. Twentieth Century Fox’s
The Boston Strangler
starred Tony Curtis as the killer and Henry Fonda as the detective who pursued him. While many know the moniker “Boston Strangler,” few remember the name of the man behind it: Albert DeSalvo.

Albert Henry DeSalvo was born on September 3, 1931 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. His mother, Charlotte, came from an old respectable “Yankee” family; her father was an officer in the Boston Fire Department. Charlotte was fifteen when she married Albert’s father, Frank DeSalvo, a brutal alcoholic delinquent (69 percent of sexual killers in a FBI study report a history of alcohol abuse in the family). The father was arrested eighteen times (50 percent of sexual killers had a parent with a criminal record). DeSalvo’s description of his childhood is horrendous. His earliest childhood memories are of his father beating his mother. He witnessed him once knocking out her tooth and breaking her finger. DeSalvo said that he himself was beaten severely by his father and once sold to a farmer in Maine along with his two sisters for nine dollars (42 percent of sexual murderers report physical abuse in childhood). After six months his mother found them. When Albert was twelve years old his father was jailed, and afterward his mother divorced him. (47 percent of serial killers report their father leaving before age twelve.)

The historiography of serial murder is inconsistent. Often descriptions of cases are written quickly and focus on the more lurid aspects of events. Attention to detail, authenticity, and fact is minimal and definitive case information is often locked up in inaccessible police archives. Such is the case for the question of Albert’s relationship with his mother. Dr. James A. Brussel, a renowned criminal psychiatrist who interviewed DeSalvo, wrote in 1968, “The mother, Albert said, was not the warm and loving woman who might have made his life tolerable. She was, at best, indifferent to the boy. She was out of the house most nights. ‘There was no home life. She didn’t stop the nightly beatings.’ ”
⁷⁴
On the other hand, DeSalvo’s biographer, Frank Gerold, wrote that Albert was his mother’s favorite (he had two brothers and three sisters) and that as an adult, he would visit his mother as often as possible.

Like 71 percent of the serial killers in the FBI study, Albert felt isolated in childhood: “I never allowed myself to get close to anyone . . . Maybe I wasn’t able . . . I recall, I used to run away as a kid. I hid out in a junk yard. There was a dog there: Queenie . . . tough . . . bit everyone. Maybe I was looking for affection, but I slept with that dog night after night, and it never bit me.”

According to Dr. Brussel, Albert’s father used to bring prostitutes home, and the children witnessed him having sex with them. (Thirty-five percent of serial sex killers report witnessing disturbing parental sex acts.) When Albert was five or six, he and his brothers and sisters began attempting sex acts. The circumstances of Albert and his sisters being sold to a farmer by their father are unclear, and Albert never talked about what happened during the six months they were there.