Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (30 page)

Victims are frequently known to the killer. The killer is the victim’s husband or wife, business partner, friend, or employer-employee or is in some kind of professional relationship with the victim. Victims are very carefully chosen for the profit their death will yield, and their murders are planned and their bodies carefully disposed of. The types of killers are divided between geocentric killers who lure victims to their place of residence or business and nomadic killers who seek out the victim. Victims are often killed quickly, and any mutilation of the corpse has to do with disposal as opposed to psychopathology. Female serial killers are frequently this type of killer. In some cases, complete strangers who randomly enter the offender’s “kill zone” become victims.

 Dr. Marcel Petiot

Hauntingly similar to the late-nineteenth-century profit-motivated murders by Herman Mudgett in Chicago, who killed victims in his custom-designed “murder hotel” during the World’s Fair, were the crimes in 1941–1944 of Dr. Marcel Petiot in Paris. Petiot preyed on refugees, often Jews attempting to flee France during the war, claiming that for a price he could assist them in escaping German-occupied France. They came to his home, in which Petiot had built a soundproof room with a peephole. Petiot “inoculated” his victims with poison and then guided them to the soundproof room. He watched them die through the peephole, and afterward he buried their bodies in the basement or burned them in a furnace. The money the victims paid Petiot for his “help” was supplemented by their belongings, which he stole after their deaths. After his arrest he was found with 1,500 articles of clothing and forty-seven suitcases belonging to some of his victims. Nobody noticed the people disappearing, as it was thought that they had either escaped Paris or had been arrested and deported by the Germans.

In March 1944, when neighbors complained of rank black smoke emerging from Petiot’s chimney, the fire department checked Petiot’s apartment and stumbled upon the remains of forty-seven bodies in his house. Petiot cleverly evaded arrest by claiming that the bodies were German soldiers or collaborators whom he was disposing of at the orders of the Resistance. In the wartime confusion Petiot was allowed to go free, but subsequent investigations pieced together the identities of the victims, and in November 1944 he was arrested. He was convicted of twenty-seven homicides committed between 1941 and 1944, but was believed to have committed a total of sixty-three. He was guillotined on May 26, 1946.

HEDONIST LUST KILLERS

Hedonist lust killers are probably the scariest and most monstrous of all types of serial killers. Not all of them want to necessarily hurt or kill you—they simply want to wear your skin or eat your liver or have sex with your severed head. It’s just that your life gets in the way. . . . Edmund Kemper, who murdered ten victims and had sex with their corpses and various mutilated body parts, explained that the actual killing of his victims had little to do with his fantasies. “I’m sorry to sound so cold about this,” he said, “but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I wanted to: I had to evict them from their human bodies.” (See Chapter 5 for a case study of Kemper’s offenses.)

Lust killers often have an ideal victim type in mind with fetishistic elements—type of footwear or clothing worn, color or style of hair, body shape, a “cheerleader type” or a “slutty type,” and so on.

Lust killers often need intimate skin-to-skin contact in their killing, and use a knife or strangulation to murder. Necrophilia is a very frequent aspect of lust killer homicides. They are mostly highly organized, having gone through years of the process of transforming and rehearsing their often bizarre fantasies into reality. Lust killers are often aware that their victim choice is visible to police and may choose to travel to various jurisdictions in both their hunt for and disposal of victims. Because sometimes these killers consume certain body parts or focus on them, dismembered victims might be spread over different locations. The lust killer usually chooses different dumping grounds for each victim (unlike the power/control killer, who might like to keep his victims’ corpses together at a choice location).

 Jerry Brudos—The Fatal Shoe Fetishist

Brudos is a minor serial killer whose story, nonetheless, demonstrates the evolution of a hedonistic sexual serial killer and is worth summarizing in some detail here.
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In 1969, young women were vanishing in Oregon and police were very concerned. On March 27, nineteen-year-old Karen Sprinker went missing in Salem. She was home visiting from college and was to meet her mother for lunch at a downtown shopping center. Her mother waited for an hour, but Karen never arrived. Police found her car parked in the indoor garage of the department store where her mother was waiting. There were no signs of any violence at the vehicle.

The police surmised that Sprinker was kidnapped in broad daylight as she was walking from her car to the store downstairs to meet her mother. When the police subsequently surveyed shoppers in the center who might have been there when Sprinker went missing, they were told of a huge strange woman lurking around the garage—except that the woman, witnesses thought, was really a man dressed in female attire.

Next, twenty-two-year-old Linda Salee, a secretary at a moving company, went missing in Portland. She had been last seen at a shopping mall purchasing a birthday present for her boyfriend after work. But she never showed up to meet him later that evening.

When Salee failed to appear at work the next day and was reported missing, the police took the report very seriously and a search was made. Her car was found parked and locked at the mall with no signs of violence. Salee was not the first girl to disappear under similar circumstances. In the previous months, two other women had vanished.

Linda Salee was found three weeks later in a river about fifteen miles south of Corvallis, Oregon. A fisherman discovered her body bobbing in the river, firmly wedged against the current. The police had a difficult time extracting her corpse from the river because it was weighed down with a heavy automobile transmission box. Her body had been attached to the transmission with nylon cord and copper wire. The cord was tied off with a distinctive knot, while the copper wire was twisted in a manner in which electricians trim electrical lines. Cause of death was determined to be strangulation with a cord. One thing puzzled the medical examiner: There were two strange needle marks, one on each side of Salee’s rib cage. The punctures were circled by small burns, which evidently had occurred after death.

Several days later, about twenty yards from where Linda Salee’s body was found, police divers located the body of Karen Sprinker. Her body was lashed to a six-cylinder engine head, with the same type of cord and copper wire, knotted in the same electrician’s manner. Her autopsy revealed that she too had been strangled with some kind of strap. She was clothed in the green skirt and sweater that her mother had reported her wearing the day she disappeared. She was also wearing the same cotton panties, but was clad in a bustier-type waist-long black bra many sizes too big for her. When the medical examiner removed the bra he discovered that it was stuffed with brown paper toweling. Karen Sprinker’s breasts had been cut off and the toweling inserted to create the illusion of a big bosom. Clearly the two bodies were the work of the same killer.

Although the river yielded no further bodies, police in Oregon had on their hands two other cases of mysterious disappearances of young women. On January 26, 1968, in Portland, nineteen-year-old Linda Slawson went missing. She was selling encyclopedias door-to-door but when she did not show up at the sales office the next few days, nobody paid much attention. Encyclopedia sales were a very difficult and discouraging line of work—salespeople came and went all the time. Her family lived in Minnesota, so it took some time before she was reported missing. When the police checked with the encyclopedia company where she was making sales calls, the best they could do was give the police a neighborhood in Portland, but no specific addresses. Slawson had simply vanished, nobody sure exactly where and when.

Then on November 26, 1968, twenty-three-year-old Jan Whitney went missing while driving home for the Thanksgiving holidays from her college. Her car was found just outside Albany, Oregon, locked and parked at a highway rest area. There was a minor mechanical breakdown in the engine that would have prevented the car from being driven. Somebody had obviously offered Jan Whitney a ride.

With the recovery of two victims, both obviously murdered by the same killer, the police now began in earnest to search for a suspect. They knew he was probably a strong large male because he was able to carry bodies weighed down by engine parts. By the way he trimmed the wire binding the victims, police guessed that he might be an electrician. They had only one very tenuous lead. On April 22, in Salem, a day before Linda Salee disappeared while shopping for her boyfriend’s gift, a fifteen-year-old girl reported that a huge man with sandy hair and freckles had attempted to force her into his vehicle—a small sports car. Other than that, the police had no further clues.

Police decided to work their way back to Karen Sprinker’s college residence in Corvallis—perhaps her killer knew her from there. Investigators began a massive interview of all of Sprinker’s fellow students—whom did she go out on dates with? Did she get any strange phone calls at the dormitory where she lived? The police then expanded their questioning to the contacts of other girls on the campus: Whom were they seeing? Had any of them been taken to strange places? Did they have contact with any weird individuals or receive unusual phone calls?

Several girls told the police that they were called by their first name to the communal phone at the dormitory. The caller was a man who said that he got their name from a friend of theirs, without ever mentioning the name of the friend. He said he had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam for three years and that he possessed clairvoyant powers. Would they like to meet him for a Coke? Most of the girls had turned him down and could not remember what name he gave on the phone. Obviously, he was simply calling and asking for a female first name on the chance that somebody with that name was living at the dormitory.

One girl, however, had agreed to see the man. She said she felt sorry for the poor ex-soldier and agreed to meet with him. They sat and talked in the dormitory lounge and then drove out in his car for a Coke. They spent a lot of time talking about the two girls found in the river, but she did not find that unusual—everybody was talking about it on the campus. He drove an old, dirty, beat-up station wagon with children’s clothes in it—she thought he was married. He said only one strange thing to her: “How did you know I would bring you back home and not take you to the river and strangle you?”

The girl described him as a large man, more than six feet tall and heavy—sort of tubby. His hair was thinning and was a blondish-red, sandy color. He had a pale complexion and lots of freckles. The description matched that given by the fifteen-year-old kidnap attempt victim. The police told the college girl that if the man called again, she should agree to meet him at the dormitory and call them immediately.

On May 25, the man called. When police arrived, a large, tubby man was waiting for the girl downstairs in the lobby. He had committed no crime for which the police could arrest him, but they did question him there in the lobby before sending him on his way. He told them that he lived in Salem and that he was in Corvallis to mow a friend’s lawn. He was an electrician by trade and he had a wife and two kids, he told the investigators. He appeared slightly embarrassed but otherwise was calm and cooperative.

Checking into the man’s recent movements, police determined that in January 1968, he had lived in the same neighborhood in Portland where Linda Slawson was selling encyclopedias. In August he moved to Salem and was working a location on the same section of highway where Jan Whitney vanished. Currently he worked only six miles from the point in the river where the bodies were found, and he now lived just blocks away from the downtown shopping center where Karen Sprinker disappeared. He had a juvenile record for sex offenses. And he was an electrician. . . . There were just too many coincidences. And that is how Jerry Brudos came to the attention of the police.