Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (40 page)

OTHER TYPES OF FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS

BLACK WIDOWS

Black widows are probably the most common type of female serial killer. These women focus on victims with whom they establish extensive relationships—their husbands, children, and lovers. Almost 85 percent of these types of serial killers use poison to murder their victims.
¹²⁸
Their motive is material gain—they acquire or inherit the property of their victims or collect on their insured lives.

ANGELS OF DEATH

Angels of death are women who kill victims in their care: nurses who kill babies, patients, or elderly victims, or childcare workers who murder children in their care. Their motives range from profit to the attention and praise they get when they revive a patient who suffers a medical emergency they secretly induce. Others derive a sense of power and thrill from taking life. Some are missionaries, believing that certain types of patients do not deserve to live, while others have a misguided sense of mercy, believing that they save their patients from unnecessary suffering by killing them.

MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME BY PROXY

Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Munchausen was an eighteenth-century German baron and mercenary officer in the Russian cavalry. On his return from the Russo-Turkish wars, the baron entertained friends and neighbors with stories of his many exploits. Over time, his stories grew more and more expansive, and finally quite outlandish. Munchausen became somewhat famous after a collection of his tales was published.

Almost a century later, an unusual behavior pattern among young men gained recognition in the writings of Charcot. In 1877, he described adults who, through self-inflicted injuries or bogus medical documents, attempted to gain hospitalization and treatment. Charcot called this condition
mania operativa passiva.

Seventy-four years later, in 1951, Asher described a similar pattern of self-abuse in which individuals fabricated histories of illness. These fabrications invariably led to complex medical investigations, hospitalizations, and at times needless surgery. Remembering Baron von Munchausen and his apocryphal tales, Asher named this condition
Munchausen syndrome.

Today, Munchausen syndrome is a recognized psychiatric disorder. The American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(
DSM III-R
) describes it as the “intentional production of physical symptoms.”

The term
Munchausen syndrome by proxy
(MSBP) was coined in a 1976 report describing four children who were so severely abused that they were dwarfed. In 1977, Meadow described a somewhat less extreme form of child abuse in which mothers deliberately induced or falsely reported illnesses in their children. He also referred to this behavior as MSBP.
¹²⁹

In an extreme case of MSBP, Marybeth Tinning in Schenectady, New York, was arrested after eight of her children died one-by-one between 1972 and 1985. The children all appeared to succumb to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and authorities at first did not suspect the apparently loving mother who grieved for her children.

Marybeth responded to all these deaths with a round of dramatic funeral announcements and a gathering of all her friends and relatives. Both her birth and death announcements put her in the center of attention. One relative said, “Every funeral was a party for her, with hardly a tear shed.”

Concerned relatives forced a careful autopsy when the eighth child in Marybeth’s care, her nine-month-old daughter, died of what appeared to be SIDS once again. The autopsy revealed that the child was in fact suffocated.

Marybeth Tinning confessed to the murder of the infant and to the murders of two other children, but not the others. She also confessed that she was attempting to poison her husband. In 1987, Tinning was sentenced to twenty years to life.

Kathryn A. Hanon, an investigator with the Orlando Police Department and a specialist in Munchausen syndrome by proxy abuse cases, writes: “MSBP offenders are uncharacteristically calm in view of the victims’ baffling medical symptoms, and they welcome medical tests that are painful to the children. They also maintain a high degree of involvement in the care of their children during treatment and will excessively praise the medical staff. They seem very knowledgeable of the victims’ illnesses, which may indicate some medical study or training. They may also have a history of the same illnesses being exhibited by their victims.”
¹³⁰

The Spree Serial Killer: A New Emerging Breed of Murderer

Serial killers were at one time called “mass killers.” But today a mass murderer is an individual who at some point “snaps” mentally and explodes in a murderous rage, killing multiple victims during a single incident. Sometimes such mass slaughters begin with the offender killing members of his own family or other people close to him before proceeding to other victims. Often these outbreaks are nothing more than a form of selfish suicide, where the mass killer intends to take others with him into his own death.

Only half of all mass killers survive their outbreaks—the other half are shot by police or commit suicide when they run out of either victims or ammunition. These outbreaks of killing usually last for short periods of time, anywhere from a few minutes to a day, with the killer rarely going to sleep after he commits his first homicide. The killer proceeds from murder to murder in a nonstop fashion. Charles Whitman, who shot sixteen people from a clock tower in Texas; James Huberty, who killed twenty-one victims at a McDonald’s restaurant in California; Colin Ferguson, who killed six people on a commuter train in New York; and Columbine teenage gun-men Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed twelve fellow students and a teacher, are all mass killers.

Spree killers, on the other hand, tend to stretch their killing out over a longer period of time, stopping to rest and sleep and often changing locations. Generally speaking, spree killers often murder while committing other felonies. The killing is secondary to their other crimes. Frequently they are escapees from justice and are highly mobile. They do not fit the classic serial killer pattern: There is no cooling-off period where they slip back into their daily routine lives and identities before going out to secretly kill again. Spree killers are often identified outlaws on the run and they do not lead the double life of a serial killer. Usually spree killers commit their crimes over a period of a few weeks before they are apprehended or killed.

Now, however, we are seeing a new category emerging—the spree serial killer. These are serial killers who live only one identity—that of a killer. They seem to have no cooling-off period; they do not return to a normal routine but remain focused on evading capture and perpetuating their compulsion to kill. Often they are fugitives, but the reasons for their flight are not other crimes, but their very acts of serial murder.

These murderers become more difficult to discern from the typical serial killer because ostensibly, by killing multiple victims on different days, they meet the classic definition of a serial killer. There are, however, subtle differences. Typical serial killers have a cycle in which their desire to kill grows and builds, and is followed by a period of depression and release after the murder. (See Chapter 8.) Some serial killers promise themselves during this postkill period that they will never murder again. They go back to the patterns of their normal life after the murder—they return home to their families, they report to work the next day, and so on. Before long they begin the cycle anew. The spree serial killer might not go through this cycle—instead he immediately launches into preparing for his next murder; he becomes a “full-time” killer and makes no attempt to lead a “normal” life.

What spree killers share with mass murderers is a mental “snapping” point of no return. They bear stress and pressure for months or years, but once something triggers their killing they never return back to their previous lives.

The murders by Andrew Cunanan in 1997 and more recently the Washington, D.C., beltway sniper killings in 2002 define this category of spree serial killer, but like everything in the history of serial homicide, it is not exactly new. Christopher Wilder, Alton Coleman, and Paul John Knowles are serial killers in the past who today can be reclassified as spree serial killers. They remained highly focused on killing, committed felonies in order to sustain their killing careers, and led no routine life or maintained no identity other than that of serial killer.

Wilder is a particularly interesting personality because he became a spree serial killer after his first series of murders were uncovered. Until then he maintained an identity as a wealthy Florida builder, photographer, and amateur race car driver. Once discovered, he abandoned all that and hit the road as a fugitive, continuing to commit new murders until police shot him dead.

 Andrew Cunanan

More than any other killer, Andrew Cunanan made us recognize this category of spree serial killers when he murdered Gianni Versace on the morning of July 15, 1997. The fifty-year-old fashion mogul was returning to his house in Miami Beach after having a coffee and buying some newspapers at a local cafe. As Versace approached the gates of his house on Ocean Drive, twenty-seven-year-old Cunanan stepped up from the sidewalk and fired a shot through Versace’s left cheek with a powerful .40-caliber handgun. With Versace collapsed on the ground, Cunanan coldly fired a second shot through the back of his head.

A hotel security camera around the corner recorded the presumed assassin running down the street, and witness statements had him entering a municipal parking garage a few blocks away from Versace’s house. In the garage, police found a pickup truck with clothing and Andrew Cunanan’s passport. The truck belonged to another murder victim, killed six weeks earlier. At that murder scene, in New Jersey, police found a vehicle belonging to yet a third murder victim, killed in Chicago five days previously. And in Chicago, police had found yet another vehicle that connected Cunanan to a double homicide in Minnesota. A trail of murder victims’ automobiles (and the same handgun) linked Andrew Cunanan to five murders across the United States between April 29 and July 15, 1997. On July 23, the manhunt for Cunanan ended when he shot himself dead while holed up in a houseboat he had broken into moored several miles away from the scene of Versace’s murder.

Andrew Cunanan had been almost universally described as a serial killer, for indeed he killed five victims on five different dates. Others, however, categorize him as a spree serial killer. His first two victims were both individuals he knew and was close to. He never attempted to cover his identity as a murderer, and after his first killing he lived on the road as an “outlaw.” Moreover, Cunanan’s murders lacked a consistent serial killer’s signature—the subconscious imprint of a definitive, elaborate, identifiable, and evolving fantasy that a serial killer leaves on each of his victims. For example, Cunanan’s victim in Chicago, believed to be a stranger, was extensively mutilated, tortured, and bound by Cunanan, while his victim in New Jersey was quickly shot for his vehicle, with no sexual fantasies involved. Because the victim was apparently killed for only his vehicle, some clinicians describe that murder as “serial functional.” Versace’s “execution-style” murder also differed radically from the murder in Chicago. As a matter of fact, had Cunanan’s friendship with the first two victims not tied him to those murders, and vehicles and ballistics not linked him to the other three homicides, investigators might not have been inclined to link the murders. (On the other hand, confusing matters is the fact that both Versace and the Chicago victim, developer Lee Miglin, were both high-profile, middle-aged, extremely wealthy entrepreneurs. Victim selection is also part of a “signature.”)

Finally, when Cunanan was discovered at the houseboat by a caretaker and knew that his capture would be imminent, he shot himself dead—a typical conclusion for a serial spree killer.

There is, of course, one question in the midst of all this—what happens when a spree killer does not get apprehended? Does he at some point “cool down”? Does he then return to a killing cycle again? The psychological histories of both mass and serial killers are remarkably similar in their buildup of “stressors” before they commit their first murder. Fantasy and sex, however, play a lesser role in the classical spree–mass killer profile. This is not so in the case of spree serial killers, whose psychopathology parallels those of classic serial killers.

Andrew Phillip Cunanan was born on August 31, 1969 and grew up in Rancho Bernardo, California, an upper-middle-class suburban community in the hills north of San Diego. He was the youngest son of Filipino Modesto Cunanan and Italian Marie Ann Celino. His father was a retired US navy officer who became a stockbroker. Andrew had two older sisters and a brother.