Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (9 page)

Pedro Alonso Lopez is another of the twentieth century’s most prolific serial killers. A native of Colombia, he is believed to have murdered three hundred girls in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. His prostitute mother threw him out of their home at age eight for fondling his younger sister. He was then picked up by a pedophile and sodomized against his will. By the time he was eighteen he had been gang-raped in prison and retaliated by killing three of his assailants. After his release he migrated to Peru, where he killed at least one hundred girls, until he was confronted by an angry mob in a marketplace when he attempted to walk away with a victim. He moved on to Ecuador, where he said girls were “more gentle and trusting, more innocent.” He murdered three girls a week until he was captured in 1980, when a flood exposed some fifty-three buried victims, all girls ages eight to twelve.

In 1999, police in Colombia arrested Luis Alfredo Garavito in connection with the murders of 140 children. Police recovered 114 mutilated bodies of mostly boys between ages eight and sixteen. Garavito was the oldest of seven children. He was repeatedly beaten by his father and raped by two male neighbors. Garavito was also a heavy alcoholic and was treated for depression and suicidal tendencies. He said he committed most of the murders after heavy drinking. Garavito had just five years of schooling and left home at age sixteen, working first as a store clerk and then as a street vendor who sold religious icons and prayer cards. Prosecutors said Garavito found most of his victims on the streets, gaining their confidence by giving them soft drinks and money.
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On March 16, 2000, a Pakistani court in Lahore sentenced Javed Iqbal to death for the murder of more than a hundred children. His three accomplices, including a thirteen-year-old boy identified only as Sabir, also were found guilty. Sabir was sentenced to forty-two years in jail; the other two accomplices were sentenced to death. Iqbal wrote in a letter to the police that he killed the children, who were mostly beggars, in retaliation for the abuse they inflicted on him following a previous arrest when he was accused of sodomy. On October 25, 2001, Iqbal and Sabir were found dead in their cell. Their apparent suicides by poison—as stated by prison authorities—came just four days after Pakistan’s highest Islamic court had agreed to hear Iqbal’s appeal against the death sentence.

South Africa, somewhere between the Third and First Worlds, for some reason has recently hosted a remarkably high number of serial killers in recent years—estimated to be as high as thirty-five. Recently captured or currently believed to be on the loose in South Africa are Lazarus Mazikane and Kaizer Motshegwa, charged with fifty-one rape-murders of women and children in Nasrec; Moses Sithole, thirty-eight victims; Cedric Maake, the Wemmer Pan Killer, twenty-seven victims; Norman Afzal Simons, the Station Strangler, twenty-two victims; Sipho Agmatir Thwala, the Phoenix Strangler, nineteen victims; the River Monster, ten victims; and Simon Majola and Themba Nkosi, the Bruma Lake serial killers, eight victims.
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In 1999, South Africa had a murder rate of 53 per 100,000, compared to 6 per 100,000 in the United States, and apparently has the second-highest rate of serial homicide after the United States.
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China, which is rapidly capitalizing, is also reporting cases of serial murder. Cement truck driver Hua Ruizhuo was executed last year for picking up fourteen prostitutes near the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in Beijing, handcuffing them in his van, raping them, and leaving their bodies in garbage dumps around the city.

A gang of four murderers in the central province of Henan murdered seventy-one people and evaded capture for months in 2000. Their modus operandi was to break into homes using battering rams. Once inside, they killed the inhabitants, frequently castrating male victims with cleavers. They left behind calling cards: cloth masks with eye holes burned out by cigarettes.

In 2001, Duan Guocheng, a twenty-nine-year-old security guard in the Hunan province, was charged with the murders of thirteen women—many of whom were wearing red dresses when they were killed.

In July 2003, two serial killers in separate incidents in China were accused of targeting migratory street workers and vagrants. One twenty-nine-year-old man is charged with killing sixteen vagrants, while another twenty-year-old is charged with killing ten street workers (migratory junk and garbage collectors from rural areas who often live without a permit in major Chinese cities and are disliked by the wealthier urban populace).

Why the Rising Wave of Serial Killing 1970–2000?

While we understand that waves of serial murder come and go, what we do not know is
why
there has been such a rise in cases in the last three decades. Some criminologists suggest that there are not more serial killers, but more potential victims. Steven Egger, who coined the term “linkage blindness” and is the former project director of New York State’s serial killer computer analysis program HALT
*
and the current dean of the School of Health and Human Services at the University of Illinois, is today one of the leading proponents of the victim-driven scenario behind the rise in serial death.

Egger argues that there is an increased incidence of social encouragement to kill a type of person who, when murdered, is “less-dead” than other categories of homicide victims. Prostitutes, cruising homosexuals, homeless transients, runaway youths, senior citizens, and inner-city poor, according to Egger, are perceived by our society as “less-dead” than a white college girl from a middle-class suburb. Egger explains:

The victims of serial killers, viewed when alive as a devalued strata of humanity, become “less-dead” (since for many they were less-alive before their death and now they become the “never-were”) and their demise becomes the elimination of sores or blemishes cleansed by those who dare to wash away these undesirable elements . . .
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The serial murders of five University of Florida students in Gainesville inspired breathless national coverage by
Time
magazine and network television, while the systematic killings of eleven crack-addicted black prostitutes in Detroit hardly made page three anywhere—nobody cared, for they are the “less-dead.”

Certainly when one begins to digest the backgrounds of serial killer victims, it does become evident that a large proportion of victims are prostitutes, inner-city poor, homeless drifters, cruising gays, and runaway kids—all marginalized members of our society about whom few are concerned and whose deaths some even celebrate. As Gary Ridgway, the recently confessed Green River Killer of forty-eight prostitutes, commented to police, “I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing, killing the prostitutes. Here you guys can’t control them, but I can.”

Only the frequent presence of female college students and children among categories of victims preferred by serial killers does the “less-dead” characterization falter. More traditional views argue that the frequent types of victims “facilitate” their own murders by the lifestyles they lead. A serial killer desiring to kill a female can easily lure a prostitute into a vulnerable situation. College girls and children, by virtue of the impetuous nature of youth, become easy targets as well. Traditionalists argue that it is a matter of convenience, not social marginalization, that certain types of victims are selected.

While this callousness toward the underprivileged in our society is not new, Egger argues that our culture today actually encourages the serial murderer to increasingly target the “less-dead.” A killing culture is being defined by true-crime literature, fiction, movie entertainment, and news coverage, which all focus on the serial killer’s skills in eluding the police and the nature of his acts, while the victims are mere props in the story—or worse, justify their own deaths.

Egger, for example, despises the portrayal of the two serial killers in the movie
The Silence of the Lambs,
which essentially introduced into popular culture the concept of serial killers and profiling in the early 1990s. Egger was appalled that audiences identified with the clever, sophisticated, and cultured Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter played by Anthony Hopkins, and that he became the
real
star of the movie, not Jodie Foster as FBI Agent Starling. Egger is concerned that

[i]t was not only the brilliance of Anthony Hopkins that transformed this serial killer from a cruel, sadistic animal to an antihero. Acting skills notwithstanding, the public is preprogrammed to identify with or even laud the role of the serial killer in our society.
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The Chianti-sipping Lecter was a “good” serial killer, while the sexually confused, dirty, poverty-ridden, rural shack-dwelling, pseudotranssexual Buffalo Bill, who kept his victims in a stinking pit and skinned them, was the “bad” serial killer. Buffalo Bill was himself “less-alive.” As one critic pointed out, many would enjoy the company of the cannibal Dr. Lecter at a dinner party (as long as they weren’t on the menu), but who would want to be even seen in public with Buffalo Bill?

Egger argues that such demarcation between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” serial murder paves the way for our society to attach a value to the serial killer, raising him in status above “ordinary” killers who slay their spouses:

For many, the serial killer is a symbol of courage, individuality, and unique cleverness. Many will quickly transform the killer into a figure who allows them to fantasize rebellion or the lashing out at society’s ills. For some, the serial killer may become a symbol of swift and effective justice, cleansing society of its crime-ridden vermin. The serial killer’s skills in eluding police for long periods of time transcends the very reason that he is being hunted. The killer’s elusiveness overshadows his trail of grief and horror.
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Social critic Mark Seltzer also subscribes to a version of this viewpoint. According to him, serial murder culture in the United States has supplanted an earlier uniquely American cultural institution:

Serial murder and its representations have by now largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of the body and of bodily violence in our culture . . . the Western was really about serial killing all along.
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Seltzer links the popularity of true-crime literature, movie-of-the-week crime stories, and news accounts of serial murder to what he calls a Wound Culture—“the public fascination with torn and open bodies and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound.”

This kind of cultural insemination of serial murderers is echoed in historian Angus McLaren’s analysis of the nineteenth-century serial murderer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who killed women coming to him seeking abortions. McLaren proposes that Dr. Cream’s crimes “were determined largely by the society that produced them.” In Cream’s time and place, Victorian London, single pregnant women seeking an abortion were the focus of the most intense scorn and disdain. The serial killer, according to McLaren, rather than being perceived as an outcast disconnected from society, is “likely best understood not so much as an ‘outlaw’ as an ‘oversocialized’ individual who saw himself simply carrying out sentences that society at large leveled.”
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Mark Seltzer suggests that serial killers today are fed and nurtured in a similar cultural dialogue, to which they respond with their own homicidal contributions in a process that he calls “mimetic compulsion.” Or, as once put more simply by the late Robert Kennedy, “society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.”

This kind of culturalist scenario explaining the increased serial murder rate is a perspective rapidly gaining currency as we begin a new millennium.

Today there is a creeping nonchalance toward serial murder cases, especially if the victims are society’s throwaways. The arrest of Gary Ridgway—the Green River Killer—and his guilty plea to the murders of forty-eight prostitutes garnered routine media coverage. Although most can identify Ted Bundy or Andrew Cunanan, few people can identify serial killers with names like Kendall “Stinky” Francois or William Lester Suff, despite their relatively high number of victims.

Twenty-seven-year-old Francois killed eight prostitutes from 1996 to 1998 and stored their corpses in his attic, but he and his victims hardly made the news. Moreover, Francois was doing his killing in Poughkeepsie, New York, a town on the Hudson River halfway between Albany and New York City—too far south to enter the Albany television market and too far north to be covered by the New York City TV footprint. That’s like saying it never happened. And of course, by the end of the 1990s, eight victims was a relatively mediocre performance if numbers count for anything: There was no “hook” to the story—he was not eating his victims, or even taking a bite and spitting it out—he was just strangling them and stacking their corpses in plastic garbage bags up in his attic while his parents complained about the smell. (Dead raccoons, he told them.)

Even William Lester Suff with his thirteen victims in the Lake Elsinore region of California from 1986 to 1992 is relatively obscure, having killed again outside the convenient Los Angeles television footprint. Suff killed drug-addicted street prostitutes and left their bodies behind strip mall garbage Dumpsters, posed so as to call attention to their drug habits. But Suff went on trial in the middle of the O. J. Simpson case; what are thirteen dead crack whores compared to two shiny-white Starbucks victims in Brentwood at the hands of an enraged celebrity? And how about Joel Rifkin, who murdered seventeen street hookers in the New York–Long Island area? The media abandoned his story in the rush to cover the deaths of six “respectably employed” train commuters at the hands of Colin Ferguson. The trial of Joel Rifkin was wrapped up in relative obscurity despite the seventeen murder victims. We might not even know his name if an episode of
Seinfeld
had not made it a butt of jokes.