Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (38 page)

High-dominance women were more promiscuous, sexually adventurous, and uninhibited. Medium-dominance women tended to also be very sexual but usually related to one male partner at a time. Low-dominance women had a very low opinion of sex, engaged in it infrequently, and felt that its only purpose was for reproduction. Maslow noted that the sexual characteristics of each category had nothing to do with sexual desire: While the sex drive was equally intense in each type, the amount of sex that the women actually engaged in differed.

Maslow also discovered that women preferred males who were slightly more dominant than themselves but within the same dominance group. High-dominance women rejected most males because of their lower dominance. One woman who claimed that she could have an orgasm by simply looking at an attractive male explained to Maslow that she couldn’t have an orgasm when having sex with some males because they were too weak and she could not imagine herself “giving in to them.”

Medium-dominance women found high-dominance men too frightening, while low-dominance women found the medium-dominance man intimidating. Each mated with slightly more dominant men but from within their dominance class. For Maslow, this was the normal course of male-female relationships and is often applicable to homosexual relationships as well.

In certain situations, however, partners from different dominance groups mate, and a very severe dynamic emerges in the relationship. The reason that such mating occurs is usually some type of emotional disorder that leads an individual to seek a mate from a different dominance class. High-dominance individuals with personality disorders, needing to sadistically dominate their mate, may seek out partners in lower-dominance categories, while lower-dominance individuals with personality disorders, compelled perhaps to act out an abusive scenario, may seek out higher category mates. Often the result is a slavelike, almost hypnotic relationship between the two parties where one partner totally dominates the other, yet both are desperately dependent upon each other. Sometimes the one vital element that a dominant partner lacks to unleash his or her homicidal fantasies is provided by the submissive partner.

 Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine May Wood

Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine May Wood are a rare case in which two women teamed up in a series of sexual murders. Wood was a recently divorced 450-pound supervisor in a nursing home when she entered into a lesbian relationship with Graham, a nurse’s aide. The dominant Graham told Wood that it would be a sexual thrill to murder six elderly patients in the home so that their last names would spell out the word
murder.
Their spelling game failed when some of the patients did not die as easily as the couple hoped. Nevertheless, using a wet washcloth to suffocate the patients, Graham killed five victims while Wood stood guard. After each murder, the couple immediately retired to a vacant room in the nursing home and had sex. In exchange for her testimony, Wood received a twenty-to-forty-year sentence, while Graham was given six life sentences. (The sixth sentence was for conspiracy to commit murder.)

 Myra Hindley and Ian Brady—“The Moors Murderers”

In England between 1963 and 1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered nine children and youths. When Brady was twenty-three he was working as a stock clerk at a chemical company, where he met a typist—eighteen-year-old Myra Hindley. Myra was described as a perfectly normal girl who loved animals and children and brightly colored lipstick. She fell in love with the “intellectual,” dark, and brooding Brady.

Myra lost her virginity to Brady and became his slavish girlfriend. A converted Catholic, Myra was soon convinced by Brady of the nonexistence of God. She was completely enthralled with the older and “sophisticated” Brady, who read intellectual books, sported black shirts, and was learning German. Myra said, “Within months he had convinced me there was no God at all: He could have told me that the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese and the sun rose in the west, I would have believed him, such was his power of persuasion, his softly convincing means of speech which fascinated me, because I could never fully comprehend, only browse at the odd sentence here and there, believing it to be gospel truth.”

According to Myra, in July 1963 Brady began to talk to her of committing a perfect murder as proof of their superiority. On July 12, Myra and Brady set out to commit their perfect crime. Myra drove a van while Brady followed her on his motorcycle. It was Myra’s job to pick up a female hitchhiker; she was successful in luring sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade into the vehicle. Myra told Pauline that she was on her way to the moors—the bleak, windy, grassy expanses of wasteland outside Manchester. She had lost a glove there, Myra said, and if Pauline would help her find it, she would give her some record albums as a reward. Pauline agreed and the two set out to the deserted moors, followed discreetly by Brady on his motorbike.

At the moors, Brady attacked Pauline, raped her, and cut her throat. Although Myra claims that she was in the van when the rape and murder took place, in an open letter from prison in 1990, Brady stated that Myra also committed sexual acts on Pauline. Afterward, using a spade that they had brought with them in the van for the occasion, Myra and Brady buried Pauline’s body on the moors.

On November 23, 1963, using the same ruse, they murdered a twelve-year-old boy, John Kilbride. Myra stated that Brady raped the boy and strangled him because the knife was too dull to cut his throat. Police were later able to find Kilbride’s grave by identifying prominent land features in a photograph of Myra posing on the grave with her dog. Later when Myra was under arrest and was told that her dog died in police custody, she remarked, “They’re nothing but bloody murderers.”

On June 16, 1964, they murdered another twelve-year-old boy, Keith Bennett, using the same methods. After being raped and strangled, he was buried on the moors and his body, despite numerous efforts, including some with the help of Myra and Brady, has never been found.

It would be a year and a half before the couple would kill again. On December 26, 1965, they kidnapped ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey and took her back to their house. There Brady set up a light and camera and forced the girl to pose for pornographic photographs. Then, turning on a tape recorder to record the child’s screams, Brady raped the girl. According to Brady’s 1990 letter, Myra “insisted upon killing Lesley Ann Downey with her own hands, using a two-foot length of silk cord, which she later used to enjoy toying with in public, in the secret knowledge of what it had been used for.”

In October 1965, Brady decided he wanted to form a gang, and began to talk with Myra’s unemployed brother-in-law, David Smith, about committing a hold-up. On the evening of October 6th, Smith dropped by the house and complained of having no money. Brady suggested: “We’ll have to roll a queer.” He went out and came back later with seventeen-year-old Edward Evans. Brady struck Evans with an ax and strangled him. He made Smith hold the ax so that his fingerprints would be on the weapon and then the two of them wrapped the corpse in plastic and cleaned up the blood. Myra and Brady then went to bed while Smith wandered off home in a state of shock. At home he told his wife what had occurred and they immediately called the police.

The next morning the police raided Brady’s house and found the corpse in a spare bedroom still wrapped in plastic. In the spine of a prayer book, the police found a key to a train station locker where they discovered the pictures and tape recording of Leslie Ann Downey. The tapes were played in court during Ian Brady’s and Myra Hindley’s trial. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The crimes of Brady and Hindley touched so raw a nerve in England that even in 1997 their crimes remain a sensitive issue. When in September, British Royal Academy of Arts held an exhibition of young artists’ works that included a thirteen-foot portrait of Myra Hindley by painter Marcus Harvey, objections were raised. The family of one of Hindley’s victims appealed to the Academy to exclude the work. On the opening day of the show, the portrait was splashed with paint, ink, and eggs and had to be withdrawn for a week for restoration.

Myra Hindley died in prison at the age of sixty in November 2002, while Ian Brady is still confined in a psychiatric facility where he has recently written a book entitled
The Gates of Janus: An Analysis of Serial Murder.

 Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo—Sex, Death, and Videotape

Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo have been called the Ken and Barbie Killers. When arrested, he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-two years old. Paul Bernardo was blond, blue-eyed, tall, athletic, intelligent, and handsome with what many described as an angelic face. Karla also had a head full of thick blond tresses and was blue-eyed, smart, and petite with a well-proportioned body and good looks. He was a university-educated accountant and she was a recent high school graduate who worked as a veterinarian’s assistant. Both were brought up in anonymous middle-class suburbs, attended typically middle-class suburban schools, and frequented typical high school and college student events and parties. Everything about them was typical: Their taste and style were not too high class and not too low class—they were upscale shopping mall mediocre.

They met when Karla was seventeen and Paul was twenty-three, and they engaged in sex within hours of their first encounter. After a several-year engagement, Paul and Karla were married in a lavish, but again entirely mediocre style that could have, and probably did, come from the pages of some popular bridal magazine. They left the church in a horse-drawn carriage and honeymooned in Hawaii.

They settled to live in one of those typical, affluent, middle-sized towns that dot the fertile belt of southern Ontario known as the “Golden Horseshoe” between Toronto and Niagara Falls. They rented a perfect little lakeside Cape Cod–style house for $1,200 a month and furnished it with typically Canadian pine furniture.

Atypically, by the time Paul and Karla left for their honeymoon, they had already together raped, tortured, and murdered two adolescent girls, one of whom was Karla’s fifteen-year-old sister Tammy. Upon their return from Hawaii they kidnapped, raped, and killed a third girl. They recorded all three crimes on videotape.

So perfectly respectable, attractive, and inoffensively middle-class were the couple that nobody suspected them of anything, even though their first victim, Karla’s younger sister, showed signs of anesthetic drug influence and had been raped. Even for hardened police investigators, it was inconceivable that the “Ken and Barbie” couple before them could have had anything to do with the girl’s death.

In 1993, Karla arrived at a hospital with black eyes and a swollen face, accusing her husband, Paul, of severely beating her with a flashlight. Shortly afterward, Paul was arrested for a series of brutal rapes in Toronto, committed more than a year earlier and in which he was not exactly suspected but not cleared either. A sample of his DNA was collected, but it would be more than a year before the overworked and under-funded provincial lab could process and match all the samples.