Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (27 page)

FOUR
THE EVOLUTION OF MONSTROSITY:
Visionary Missionary Hedonist Power-Assertive Anger-Retaliatory Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy Serial Spree Killers and Other Emerging Categories

It only took them a month to get me to kill.
—
HERBERT MULLIN
I had to evict them from their human bodies.
—
EDMUND KEMPER

Evolving Categories

The FBI model classifying offenders as
disorganized, organized,
or
mixed
was only the beginning of an effort to classify serial killers. While the FBI categories are used for investigative purposes, there are many other ways of classifying serial killers for psychological or criminological study. These categories are often more valid and accurate in their definition, because they are based on already identified serial killers about whom much is known—unlike the FBI system, which is focused on unknown killers for investigative goals. The most prevalent typologies in current use for studying offenders are those defined by criminologists Ronald Holmes, Stephan Holmes, and James De Burger, who based their classification system on motive, as opposed to the FBI’s basis in method. Holmes, Holmes, and De Burger grouped serial killers into four distinct types with several subgroups, based on the motive or type of gratification the serial killer derived from his crime:

1. Visionary:
   These serial killers kill at the command of hallucinated external or internal voices or visions that they experience. Such individuals are almost always suffering from psychoses or other mental illness.
   
2. Mission-oriented:
   Some serial killers come to believe that it is their mission to rid the community of certain types of people: children, prostitutes, old people, or members of a specific race.
   
3. Hedonistic:
   These include killers who murder for financial gain (
   comfort killers
   ), those who gain pleasure from mutilating or having sex with corpses, drinking their blood, or cannibalizing them (
   lust killers
   ), and those who enjoy the actual act of killing (
   thrill killers
   ). For the first two subtypes, the comfort and lust killers, murder is only a means to an end and in itself is less important than the acts accompanying or following the killing; for the third subtype, the thrill killer, the desire to kill is central to the motive.
   
4. Power/control-oriented:
   These are perhaps the most common of all serial killers, for whom the fundamental pleasure of their crime lies in the power and control they exert over their victims. They enjoy torturing their prey and find it sexually arousing, and murder is often the most satisfying and final expression of their power and control over their victim.
   ⁹⁸
   

We are going to look at these categories here in greater detail and see how they are manifested in actual cases.

VISIONARIES

These types of serial killers commit incomprehensible murders, leaving behind chaotic crime scenes. They often leave behind an abundance of physical evidence, but their victims frequently seem to fit no comprehensible pattern. That is because the killer’s mind is completely disconnected from reality: Voices and visions drive the offender to kill for reasons secreted in the recesses of his madness. Sometimes these types of offenders are completely nonfunctional in society—living alone and having no contact with other people. In other cases, the offenders have episodic breaks with reality during which they kill but otherwise appear harmless or at worst, eccentric, to those around them. Most visionary serial killers genuinely suffer from mental illness and some are schizophrenic or psychotic (as opposed to
psychopathic,
which is a behavioral disorder, see Chapter 5). While almost all serial killers have a disturbed or difficult childhood to some degree, visionary killers might grow up in completely normal, supportive family settings. Because mental illness such as schizophrenia often first manifests itself in late adolescence or early adulthood, visionary killers are often young. While visionary killers do little to disguise their identity and leave behind evidence, they are difficult to apprehend because there is no clear method or motive to their crimes. They operate on an agenda entirely synched to the incomprehensible madness within them.

While most serial killers have an ideal victim in mind and kill for sexual purposes, the visionary killer selects his victims at random in a logic often indiscernible to an investigator. Visionary killers often kill close to home; because of their disturbed state of mind, they are unlikely to venture very far. Visionary killers almost exclusively fall into the FBI disorganized category because of the mental disorder driving their offenses.

Some serial killers have been known to pose as visionary killers, claiming to hear voices or have multiple personalities, in an attempt to secure a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.

 Herbert William Mullin—“The Die Song”

Herbert Mullin was born in 1949 in Santa Cruz, California, and by most accounts grew up in a stable and nurturing, but perhaps too strict, Roman Catholic household. In high school he was smallish—five foot seven, weighing in at 120 pounds, but he was popular with both boys and girls. He played offensive guard on the school football team, was unfailingly polite and well mannered, got excellent grades, and was voted “most likely to succeed” by fellow students. The first indication of some kind of instability in Mullin cropped up at age sixteen, when a friend of his was killed in a road accident. Mullin set up a shrine for him in his bedroom and began to obsess that he might be a homosexual. When he turned seventeen Mullin began to hear distant voices—a classic symptom of paranoid schizophrenia, a disease that often begins to make its first appearance at this age.

Between ages eighteen and twenty-four, Mullin’s life was punctuated by a series of hospitalizations in psychiatric facilities, relieved by periods of normalcy. He enrolled in Cabrillo College and earned an associate degree in arts, got an award in mechanical drawing, and designed the Santa Cruz tourist information booth, which stood in front of the Holiday Inn.

In 1968 he enrolled in San Jose State University, but his mental health began to decline rapidly. He was picked up several times by the sheriff’s department, babbling to himself and wandering aimlessly. Making matters worse, Mullin became a user of marijuana and LSD, a potent hallucinogenic drug that mimics the symptoms of schizophrenia in healthy subjects. One can only imagine what it does in a user who already has schizophrenia—and no, it does not mimic sanity.

In 1969 on a visit to his sister, he began to mimic everything her husband did, and at other times he sat motionless, staring at them, refusing to say anything. The next morning his sister drove him to a mental health hospital and he checked himself in voluntarily. But as Mullin did not display any inclination to hurt himself or others, he was released in a week. To his credit, Mullin also ceased to consume drugs as his condition worsened.

He experimented with the hippie lifestyle for a period, adopting Eastern religions, growing his hair long, and wearing beads. Then he cut his hair short and put on a suit and tie. He approached strange women on the street, proposing marriage. Rejected, he traveled to San Francisco’s gay neighborhood and propositioned men. He traveled to Hawaii and ended up in a mental hospital there. Back in California he was hospitalized several more times. He stood up in a Catholic church during a service and shouted out that it was not really Christian, but then shortly afterward he enrolled in studies for the Catholic priesthood.

He appeared at a boxing gym in San Francisco wearing a sombrero and carrying a Bible and proved himself to be a ferocious boxer. He was even considered to be a potential lightweight professional contender but suddenly dropped out. In Santa Cruz Mullin developed a crush on a local deputy sheriff and kept turning up at his office calling him “sweetheart.” He continued doing this long after he had begun his series of murders.

A year after he had registered as a conscientious objector, Mullin joined the Marines with the help of his father, a former Marine colonel. He successfully completed basic training, but his mental condition made itself visible in the end, and he was quickly discharged. Who knows what the effect of Marine Corps combat drills had on the young schizophrenic, but he came to believe that American lives being sacrificed in the Vietnam War were saving California from the predicted great earthquake.
*

In hindsight one must appreciate both the freewheeling and apocalyptic times that Mullin was living through in the late 1960s and early 1970s—and the role California played at their epicenter. With his bizarre behavior, Mullin must have been invisible in the do-your-own-thing rainbow of the Haight-Ashbury hippie culture that swept out of California and engulfed not only the nation but the rest of the Western world. But by the early 1970s it turned bad. Charlie Manson had long before abandoned Haight-Ashbury as a trip gone bad and unleashed his followers to commit a series of horrific murders in Los Angeles before retreating to the remote Death Valley desert. What was celebrated in the green fields of Woodstock was put to death on the black asphalt of Altamont, where during a Rolling Stones performance of “Sympathy for the Devil,” Hell’s Angels bikers beat a spectator to death in front of center stage.

In the late summer of 1972 as America stood by to reelect Richard Nixon, Mullin journeyed one more time to San Francisco and attempted to join a hippie art collective on Geary Street. He was just too bizarre for them and was sent packing by management. Michael Roberts, one of the artist residents there who had protested Mullin’s expulsion, recalled, “He left the human race that day. It was the final rejection.”

In September 1972, Mullin returned to his parents’ home in Santa Cruz. He spent that month, according to witnesses, deeply contemplating the Bible. Mullin later stated that he discovered that killing was a biblical tradition, and that his father, the ex-Marine, had reinforced that in him. According to Mullin, his father used to urge, almost force him to go deer hunting to develop his masculinity. Mullin began to hear the disembodied voices of his parents ordering him to sacrifice lives to stave off the natural disaster threatening California’s coast. Mullin stated, “It only took them a month to get me to kill.”

On October 13, 1972, Mullin was driving down a highway when he noticed Lawrence White, a fifty-five-year-old vagrant, walking along the roadside. Mullin stopped his vehicle ahead of him, and when White approached him, Mullin killed him with blows to the head with a baseball bat. He then dragged White’s body into the bush and left it there.

Soon Mullin began to hear his father’s voice explaining that pollution was coming from inside people’s bodies. He had just been reading accounts of Michaelangelo’s dissections in Irving Stone’s
The Agony and the Ecstasy
when on October 24 he picked up college student Mary Guilfoyle, who was hitchhiking. When she climbed into his vehicle, he plunged a knife into her chest, killing her. He then dragged her body out into the woods and cut open her abdomen, taking out her organs and inspecting them for traces of pollution. So he could better inspect the intestines, he strung them across the branches of a tree. Her body would not be found for months.

Even today, with all the advances in profiling, it is hard to imagine investigators linking these two seemingly different crimes to the same perpetrator or understanding the motives behind the mutilation of Mary Guilfoyle. Most likely they were attributed to Jack-the-Ripper-type sexual lust, but in fact, these were not sexual fantasies driving Mullin—they were not really even fantasies, but hallucinations.

Still deeply linked to his Catholic faith, Mullin went in the afternoon of November 2 to St. Mary’s Church in Los Gatos, a suburb of Santa Cruz, to seek help from a priest. Father Henri Tomie at random entered the confessional booth to listen to Mullin. Mullin began to hallucinate that Father Tomie was asking Mullin to kill him. Mullin recalls that he told the priest that his father had been telepathically ordering him to sacrifice people.

In Mullin’s recollection of the conversation, the priest asked him, “Herbert, do you read the Bible?”

“Yes.”

“The commandments, where it says to honor thy father and mother?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know how important it is to do as your father says.”

“Yes.”

“I think it is so important that I want to volunteer to be your next sacrifice,” the priest said, according to Mullin.
⁹⁹

Mullin beat the priest, kicked him, and stabbed him six times in the chest and back, leaving him to die in the confessional booth.