The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (33 page)

Heirens was captured the following June, after the largest manhunt in Chicago’s history. Drugged with sodium pentothal—“truth serum”—he initially claimed that the killings had been committed by an evil alter ego named “George Murman,” short for “Murder Man” (see
Multiple Personality
). To avoid the chair, he agreed to confess to all three slayings in exchange for life in prison. On the day of his formal sentencing, he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself with a bedsheet but was saved by a quick-acting guard. Since the day he entered prison, Heirens—who has recanted his confession and stoutly maintains his innocence—has been a model prisoner, earning a college degree in 1972.

(Fritz Lang’s 1956 thriller,
While the City Sleeps,
features a teenaged “Lipstick Killer” modeled on Heirens and played by a young John Drew Barrymore, future father of the actress Drew Barrymore.)

Of course, not all lipsticked messages left by serial killers have been desperate pleas for help. Richard
Ramirez
—the “Night Stalker,” who terrorized Los Angeles in 1985—used a victim’s lipstick to inscribe an inverted pentagram on the inside of her thigh: a further desecration of her body and a vicious taunt to his pursuers.

Unlike Heirens, Ramirez wasn’t crying out to heaven but invoking the devil.

L
OVERS
’ L
ANE
M
ANIACS

Driving home from the movies one Saturday night, a high school boy and his date pulled into their favorite lovers’ lane to do some necking. The boy turned on the radio for a little mood music. Suddenly, an announcer came on to say that a crazed killer with a hook in place of his right hand had escaped from the local insane asylum. The girl became scared and begged the boy to take her home. He got angry, stepped on the gas, and roared off. When they reached her house, the boy got out of the car and went around to the passenger side to let her out. There, hanging from the door handle, was a bloody hook!

So goes the story of the “Hookman”—a homicidal maniac who preys on adolescents as they make out inside a parked car. Teenagers—who have been telling some version of this story for at least forty years—often accept it as the gospel truth. Folklore scholars, on the other hand, see it as an “urban legend” that reflects the anxieties of adolescent boys and girls who are just confronting the tricky issues of grown-up sexuality. While the folklorists make a valuable point, there may be more reality to the story than they realize. The fact is that the terrifying figure of a lovers’ lane maniac is not purely a figment of the teenage imagination.

World War II had barely ended when the tiny southwestern town of Texarkana found itself under siege from a night-prowling gunman whose favorite targets were young, unwary lovers. In early March 1946, this masked maniac snuck up on a couple, ordered them out of the car, then—after pistol whipping the young man—subjected the girl to such vicious sexual torture that she begged to be killed. Precisely three weeks later, he struck again, this time shooting both young victims in the back of their heads. Following another three-week hiatus, the “Moonlight Murderer”—as the press dubbed him—killed yet another pair of sweethearts as they returned from a dance at the VFW hall. A massive manhunt was launched, involving local sheriffs, Texas Rangers, and homicide detectives disguised as teenage lovers. But the phantom gunman was never caught.

Equally elusive was the diabolical gunman known as
Zodiac
, whose victims included several young couples killed on deserted country roads. A third notorious couple killer, David “Son of Sam”
Berkowitz
, was eventually apprehended—but not before he had shot more than a dozen victims as they sat in their cars on the darkened streets of New York City.

Teen Terror Legends

Young people love to give each other the chills with supposedly true stories about psychokillers. Though “The Hookman” is the most famous of these urban folktales, it’s only one of many. Another is “The Boyfriend’s Death,” a story that the teller invariably swears is absolutely, positively true, since she heard it from an unimpeachable source, such as the next-door neighbor of her best friend’s cousin. Typically, the story deals with a teenage couple whose car runs out of fuel one night as they are driving through some remote wooded area. The boy decides to hike into town for gas, telling the girl to make sure to keep the car doors locked, since there is a psycho on the loose. Huddling alone in the car, the girl waits anxiously for her boyfriend’s return. But as the night passes, there is no sign of him. After a while, she hears a strange, scratching noise on the car roof. The next morning, a police cruiser arrives. As the girl is helped out of the car, she looks up and sees her boyfriend’s butchered corpse, swinging upside-down from a tree branch, his fingernails scraping the roof!

A similar folktale, “The Roommate’s Death,” tells of two young women sharing a suite in a college dorm. Hearing that there is a serial killer at large, they lock themselves into their separate bedrooms. That night, one of the girls hears someone scratching ominously on the connecting door between the two bedrooms. In the morning, she musters up the courage to open the door—and discovers her murdered roommate, her throat cut from ear to ear. The scratching sound had been the victim’s dying effort to get help.

Other teen folktales about psychokillers include “The Assailant in the Backseat”—about unwary women who discover that they have been driving along with a homicidal maniac hiding in the car—and “The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs,” which tells of a baby-sitter who gets menacing calls from a homicidal stranger, only to discover that the calls are coming from the upstairs telephone.

Anyone who hasn’t heard these stories firsthand may have encountered them in another form, since many of them have been recast as low-budget horror movies like
Halloween, When a Stranger Calls,
and
Friday the 13th.
They have also been retold by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand in his popular collections of urban legends, beginning with
The Vanishing Hitchhiker.

Henry Lee Lucas

Portrait of Henry Lee Lucas by Chris Pelletiere

Henry Lee Lucas might be America’s most prolific serial killer. On the other hand, he might be the biggest liar since Baron von Münchhausen. After experiencing a self-described “religious conversion” in prison, he decided to bare his soul and confess to an astronomical number of murders. Later, however, he recanted most of his testimony. Among law enforcement officials, the exact number of his crimes remains a matter of debate. Still, even if Lucas’s final body count falls far short of the five hundred victims he originally claimed, he nevertheless ranks as one of the most depraved serial killers in history.

Subjected to untold horrors by his insanely abusive mother (see
Upbringing
), Lucas began indulging in sadistic depravity while still a child. By thirteen, he was engaging in sex with his older half-brother, who also introduced Henry to the joys of bestiality and
Animal Torture
.
(One of their favorite activities was slitting the throats of small animals, then sexually violating the corpses.)

One year later, he committed his first murder, strangling a seventeen-year-old girl who resisted his efforts to rape her. In 1954, the eighteen-year-old Lucas received a six-year prison sentence for burglary. Soon after his release in 1959, he got into a drunken argument with his seventy-four-year-old
mother and stabbed her to death. (He also confessed to raping her corpse, though he later retracted that detail.)

Receiving a forty-year sentence for second-degree murder, Lucas ended up in a state psychiatric facility. In spite of his own protestations—“When they put me out on parole, I said I’m not ready to go. I told them all, the warden, the psychologist, everybody, that I was going to kill”—he was released after only ten years. Eighteen months later he was back in prison for molesting two teenage girls.

Lucas was discharged from the state pen in 1975. Not long afterward, he met Ottis Toole, a vicious psychopath who became Lucas’s partner in one of the most appalling killing sprees in the annals of American crime. For the next seven years, this deranged duo roamed the country, murdering and mutilating an untold number of victims. Like Lucas, the profoundly depraved Toole also had a taste for
Necrophilia
.
He also indulged in occasional
Cannibalism
(an atrocity that Lucas tended to shun, since he found human flesh too gamy). For much of their odyssey, they were accompanied by Toole’s preadolescent niece, Frieda “Becky” Powell, who became Lucas’s lover, common-law wife, and—ultimately—victim.