Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (3 page)

By the time the trial began, Chikatilo’s head was shaved and he appeared quite mad, howling at the courtroom spectators from within a specially built cage. But even seeing the earlier photographs of him in the press, I never recognized him from that day I met him in the Moscow tent city. I still occasionally told my Richard Cottingham story, never realizing what punch-line lurked beyond it. It was only years later that I came across a transcript of Chikatilo’s police interrogation in which he complained about the conspiratorial attempt to build a garage and toilet behind his son’s apartment and his intention to meet with Gorbachev in Moscow. I was transfixed in horror—could it possibly be the same guy? It
had to be
—the story was just too eccentric, and even the Russian investigator remarked on Chikatilo’s emotional peaks when he began to speak of the garage. Indeed, after some further research I uncovered an account of Chikatilo’s visit to Moscow in October 1990 just before he committed his last three murders.
²

I came to realize that in my life I had met not one, but
two
serial killers—unidentified and out there killing—and for the longest time I had not even known it. How many more could there be? And where the hell were they coming from?

I was puzzled by the conventional backgrounds of these two killers—both gainfully employed family men: Cottingham, a New York City computer operator with a house and three kids in the suburbs; and Chikatilo, a university-educated schoolteacher, father of two children, writer of political essays for Soviet publications, and, later, factory materials purchaser. These two were not grizzled glassy-eyed drifters or twitchy recluses—types we frequently associate with serial killers. They were ordinary.

Most of all, I was fascinated with their invisibility—their forgettability. Apparently they stalked and killed like evil transparent ghosts. Even when I had run into Cottingham, presumably carrying two severed heads and having just set fire to a hotel I was checking into, I would forget him within seconds of the encounter. Cottingham was so forgettable that after leaving behind a mutilated corpse under a motel bed, he checked back into the very
same
motel a mere eighteen days later, and nobody recognized him.

Of Chikatilo himself, I still have no memory—just that of his ridiculous story and fragmentary glimpses of the monster: glasses, the knot of his tie, a clean-shaven cheek, a briefcase lying in the grass by his feet—but of
him
 . . . nothing. This invisibility let him kill fifty-three people and almost walk away untouched, with blood on his face, from a police officer looking for him. What manner of ghoulish monsters were these?

All of this led me to contemplate how Cottingham and Chikatilo came to exist—where had they sprung from and by what means and paths did they move about for me to so randomly stumble across these
two
homicidal monsters, roaming free in the wild among us?

In my attempt to map the primordial substance from which they rose, I came to write this book, and in a way, map my own substance as well. Was there something about me that led me to cross their paths? I learned that many victims of serial killers “facilitate” their own deaths by their choice of lifestyle or behavior—hitchhikers, runaways, street hookers. While not a victim, I perhaps facilitated my meeting with Cottingham by my choice of hotels near a hookers’ stroll. I strayed into a serial killer’s hunting grounds as a trespasser and got a bump from a monster.

While my Cottingham encounter in New York was one of those experiences that one can easily write off as coincidence, my second encounter with a serial killer made me wonder. I questioned the mathematical odds of running into
two
killers in that manner. One killer I could easily understand, but
two
made me ask,
how many more
might there be out there that I did not know about? I wondered what the odds were of walking by a serial killer without ever finding out about it—on the street, waiting in line for burger, browsing for books in a true-crime section, or sitting next to one on a train or bus? I shuddered when I heard somebody explain that serial killers might be strangers—but only to you. They become very familiar with you if they pick you as their target—you are no stranger to them.

It seemed to me that millions of people move about their daily lives without meeting a serial killer—or at least, without
finding out
they had met one. Perhaps
that
is precisely what makes me different from you—that I have uncovered the transparent monsters who had tramped across my path—
my
serial killers—while you perhaps have not uncovered
yours.
I pray you never will.

PART ONE
A HISTORY OF MONSTERS

ONE
THE POSTMODERN AGE OF SERIAL HOMICIDE, 1970–2000:
The Silence of the “Less-Dead”

All creatures kill—there seems to be no exception. But of the whole list man is the only one that kills for fun . . .
—
MARK TWAIN
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.
—
ROBERT F. KENNEDY
³

The Postmodern Serial Killer

He was a handsome, athletic, well-spoken young man. He was unfailingly polite and popular, and appeared caring and concerned to those in his proximity. He was educated, sophisticated, and well mannered, a graduate with a university degree in psychology. He had plenty of friends of different ages and romantic relationships with women. Many other women considered him their trusted friend and confidant. An elderly woman he befriended described him as a “lovable rascal.” Another woman, a former police officer who would become America’s leading true-crime writer and who coincidentally knew him, described him as having “old-world gallantry.” He had worked as a suicide counselor at a phone-in crisis clinic and had been recently admitted into law school in Seattle. The state government hired him as a crime-control consultant and he even wrote a rape-prevention handbook for women. He was a hardworking volunteer for the Republican Party, an often-invited dinner guest, and a popular date, and was considered by his elders as somebody worth grooming for a possible future as state governor, perhaps even president. He was a necrophiliac who kidnapped, murdered, raped, and mutilated, in that order, twenty college-age women over a period of sixteen months. At one point he kept four of their heads in his apartment. He burned the head of another in his girlfriend’s fireplace.
⁴
His name was Theodore “Ted” Bundy.

It is bitterly said that Bundy is our first “postmodern” serial killer. He came at the right time to be that—we would have first heard of him at the end of the 1970s. Back then, we the public did not use the term
serial killer,
nor had we such a concept in mind despite the fact that such a thing was on the increase and was being puzzled over by experts and police.

Yes, we knew that more people were being murdered. We had
felt
it since that Friday afternoon in November 1963 when JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Those of us who were children then remember how all the cartoon TV shows were preempted that afternoon and remained off the air until the next week. The only thing to see on the tube for the first three days were lots of shaken and frightened people. On the third day they put somebody on live TV and showed
him
being shot dead. Then they broadcast it over and over in replay. If Bert the Turtle warning us kids to “duck and cover” when the bomb fell hadn’t gotten to us before, then after the Kennedy assassination the world definitely became spooky forever. The death of JFK defined for us the halfway point between Pearl Harbor and 9/11—when bad things stopped happening “over there” and began to occur “over here.”

The statistics may prove something else, but that is when it really started to
feel
bad: in November 1963. It was precisely around that time, on the second day after the assassination, that the Boston Strangler was ushering in the new times by raping and killing his twelfth victim, a twenty-three-year-old Sunday school teacher. Twelve is a lot even by today’s standards—academics studying serial homicide describe it as an “extreme” case: more than eight. (How did they come up with that number—why not seven or nine?)

Things would get worse quickly. The times that followed were hyper-violent. People were being killed everywhere: in their homes, in church, at work, in the streets, overseas at war, in rice paddies, on college campuses, in cotton-belt bayous, in shopping centers, in riots. It was confusing. It was coming to and from all over, and out of it would spring forth occasional monstrous episodes: In 1966 we heard that in Chicago some alcoholic drifter killed eight student nurses in one hot amphetamine-frenzied night of binding, strangling, and stabbing. Three weeks later a crazed college boy in Texas climbed a clock tower with a high-powered rifle and gunned down forty-five people, killing sixteen. Then Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were shot months apart, with more street riots in between. And when our boys came home from My Lai as baby killers and Sharon Tate was hacked to death by crazed hippies, we could not imagine it getting any worse. But then the 1970s had not crawled in on us yet.

The first big case of that decade to reach public notice occurred in May 1971. Again, even by today’s standards, the number was huge; police dug up twenty-six bodies of transient agricultural workers in a California peach orchard. Juan Corona, a labor contractor and a father of four children, was charged with the murders. We did not get it: How can someone kill that many people and nobody noticed it? That they were killed over a prolonged period of time just did not compute. Nor was there much follow-up in the press—it looked like Corona was simply insane, and to boot, according to the press, some kind of closet-homosexual aberrant, while the victims were all transient agricultural workers and Mexicans hardly worth mourning over.

Likewise two years later, reports of Dean Corll’s murder of twenty-seven transient male youths in Houston also quickly faded, for he was a “white-trash homo,” and he was dead, as were his delinquent runaway victims—no trial, no story, nobody cared. The big wave was yet to come. A recent study of serial homicides in the United States between 1800 and 1995 discovered that 45 percent of known serial homicides would occur in the recent twenty-year period between 1975 and 1995.
⁵

In 1976–1977, David Berkowitz was systematically shooting women in Queens, New York, and sending taunting letters à la Jack the Ripper, signed “Son of Sam,” to the police and press. This time everybody noticed when college girls on the way home from school or on dates were being slaughtered. New York City was in a panic. When Berkowitz was captured we were surprised by how mild-mannered, soft, and pudgy the killer looked. Again, he seemed totally insane, claiming to receive orders from a black dog, and that was sufficient explanation for us.

The whole serial-sequential aspect of these murders somehow slipped by us. These crimes were perceived as inexplicable, sudden explosive acts of deranged monsters, a perception that was still rooted in the 1880s with our experiences of Jack the Ripper. From Jack the Ripper to the Boston Strangler, there were many cases in between, but rarely any attempts to grasp exactly what was going on. These homicides were perceived as isolated acts of animalistic depravity, sometimes called “lust murders,” a symptom of the modern industrialized world, we thought.

It would be Ted Bundy who would define for us the new postmodern serial killer role model. His story first slowly trickled out in Colorado in 1977, when he was linked to seventeen homicides of young women, and then grew into a torrent everywhere after his two escapes and three subsequent murders in Florida. Many of his victims were “respectable” college students, and so was he. As Bundy’s trial in Florida was televised live and the scope of his secret life began to be understood, the concept of a particular type of multiple murderer who kills serially began to take form in popular lore. Ann Rule’s classic account of Bundy,
The Stranger Beside Me,
pioneered a whole new resurgence of true-crime literature. It introduced the general public to the concept of serial murder, even though the term never appeared in the text of her 1980 book.

Jack the Ripper was always imagined as an aristocrat with a top hat—the best of our society gone worst. The serial killers who followed were portrayed as depraved monsters—freaks of nature—outcasts and drifters whose demented criminal features should have given them away. But not Bundy—he was like so many of us: an attractive college student with typical ambitions who drove a cute Volkswagen bug. He was an updated and egalitarianized version of Jack the Ripper—a killer of superior social qualities attributed to all the young middle-class upwardly mobile professionals taking over America. In other words, unlike serial killers of the past, he was not one of “them” but one of “us.”