The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (60 page)

On the face of it (as it were), casting Theron—one of the most glamorously beautiful women on the planet—as the coarse-featured, case-hardened Wuornos made about as much sense as deciding that Brad Pitt would be perfect in the role of Quasimodo. Aided, however, by a brilliant makeup job, Theron completely transformed herself into the swaggering, foul-mouthed man-hater, winning a well-deserved Oscar for her performance.

To get an idea of just how uncannily convincing she is in the role, viewers can compare her to the actual Wuornos in Broomfield’s powerful documentary, a follow-up to his equally fine 1993 film,
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.

T
HE
W
RONG
M
AN

There’s only one thing worse than being arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit: being executed for it. And when the crime in question is serial murder, the outrage is compounded. Not only is an innocent man put to death, but the real culprit remains at large and continues to get away with murder.

Unfortunately, cases like this have occurred from time to time. One of the most egregious was that of Timothy Evans, a dim-witted English truck driver convicted of the brutal murder of his wife and baby daughter in 1950. The chief prosecution witness against Evans was his downstairs neighbor—a quiet, eminently respectable gentleman named John Reginald Christie. Three years after Evans was hanged at London’s Pentonville Prison, Christie
vacated his flat at 10 Rillington Place. The tenants who replaced him immediately noticed a foul odor emanating from somewhere in the kitchen. Tracing its source to a hollow section of wall, they tore off the wallpaper, peered inside, and discovered the decomposed remains of three women shoved into a concealed cupboard. Another body—that of Christie’s wife—was found under the floorboards, and two more female corpses were unearthed in the backyard. Altogether, the quiet little man had committed eight murders—four of them following Evans’s execution. Christie himself was hanged in July 1953. Another thirteen years would pass before the British government finally admitted it had made an error in Evans’s case and granted him a posthumous pardon.

Fatal mistakes of this kind can happen anywhere, of course. But they are particularly common in totalitarian nations, where “justice” is meted out with alarming speed. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi authorities periodically picked up and executed suspected deviants for a series of lust murders taking place in the town of Kupenick, just east of Berlin. The real culprit, however—a sociopath named Bruno Ludke—wasn’t identified until 1943, by which time he had, according to his own admission, committed an astonishing eighty-five murders.

A similar story took place in the former USSR. In 1978, the savaged corpse of a teenage girl was found in a forest outside the industrial city Rostov-on-Don. The Soviet police quickly arrested and executed a known sex offender. Unfortunately, they shot the wrong man. By the time they identified the right one—Andrei
Chikatilo
, the “Mad Beast of Rostov”—he had butchered more than fifty women and children.

The Milquetoast Murderer

The story of John Reginald Christie and his fall-guy neighbor, Timothy Evans—one of the most sensational cases in the annals of modern British crime—is told with understated power in Richard Fleischer’s absorbing 1970 film,
10 Rillington Place.
Shot on location at the actual murder house (which was torn down the following year to make way for a parking garage), the movie achieves its genuinely creepy power by presenting the sensational
facts of the case in a subdued, low-key manner, consistent with the apparent drabness of the killer himself.

Richard Attenborough—who went on to achieve fame as the Oscar-winning director of
Gandhi
and other high-prestige pictures—turns in a striking performance as the homicidal Milquetoast who raped and murdered eight women over a thirteen-year span, storing their corpses in and around his flat at the infamous address. Equally good are John Hurt as the pathetically dim-witted Evans and Judy Geeson as his wife, Beryl. Highly recommended for those who enjoy subdued, tasteful psycho films. If you’re looking for hardcore gore—forget about it.

X C
HROMOSOME

During the 1960s, some scientists tried to establish a link between violence and excessive masculinity. According to their research, the presence of an extra Y (or male) chromosome made a man more prone to violent crime (see
Y Chromosome
).

Nowadays, this theory isn’t given much credence. Interestingly, however, there
has
been a documented case of a serial killer suffering from the opposite defect. Bobby Joe Long, who murdered ten women in the 1970s, had an extra X (or female) chromosome in each cell of his body. As a result, his glands produced an inordinate amount of the female hormone estrogen, causing him to grow breasts during puberty.

His humiliation over this condition may well have contributed to his mental imbalance—though it was certainly not his only problem. Wildly accident prone, Long suffered a string of grievous
Head Injuries
throughout his life. And like so many serial killers, he was also subjected to what sociologists like to call “negative parenting.” Among other things, his mother slept in bed with him until he was thirteen.

X
EROX

Contrary to popular belief, most serial killers are happy to commit their crimes in utter obscurity. They enjoy living in the shadows, where they can pursue their unspeakable pleasures without drawing attention to their identities.

Other serial killers, however, are the opposite. They are publicity hounds. Their perverted pleasure is reinforced by playing mind games with the police and the media. This often takes the form of written taunts—a phenomenon that dates at least as far back as the
Jack the Ripper
case. Sending such letters is the psycho-killer’s way of thumbing his nose at his pursuers, of displaying his supposed superiority. “Catch me if you can,” these messages seem to jeer.

Of course, with advances in modern forensic science, sending an original letter runs its risks—the stationery, for example, might be traced back to the store where it was sold, and from there to the purchaser. One way to get around this problem is to send a copy. That’s exactly what happened in the case of the self-styled
BTK
Strangler—though this precaution actually ended up giving police an intriguing lead in the case.

As he terrorized the city of Wichita by binding, torturing, and killing at least seven victims, BTK kept up a steady one-way correspondence with the media. On February 10, 1978, he sent a letter to a local TV station in which he claimed to have murdered seven victims and petulantly asked, “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?” The letter, however, was not an original but a Xerox.

In the fall of 1984, a member of the task force set up to identify the elusive serial killer took this piece of evidence to the Xerox company headquarters in Syracuse, New York. Technicians there determined that it was a fifth-generation copy, making it impossible to trace. They were, however, able to establish exactly
where
the killer made his copy. The Xerox machine was located at the Wichita State University library. Unfortunately, without any other leads, the police couldn’t use this information to narrow down the number of suspects any further.

The investigation continued to spin its wheels until 2003 when the BTK Strangler decided to contact the media once again. Included in his new set of correspondence were other Xeroxed items: photocopies of a woman’s driver’s license along with copies of photos of her dead body. The killer had
been fond of taking mementoes from the scenes of his crimes, so it wasn’t surprising that he had held on to this woman’s license. What
was
surprising was the identity of the woman. Vicki Wegerle had been found murdered in 1986, nine years after the last known BTK killing. Until they received this package, the police had no idea that Wegerle was another one of the Strangler’s victims.

When they finally made an arrest in the case the following year, they had another murder to add to killer’s résumé of terror.

The Xerox company also figured in the case of the worst episode of
Mass Murder
in Hawaiian history. On November 2, 1999, a disgruntled forty-one-year-old copy machine repairman named Bryan Uyesugi went on a rampage at his workplace, slaughtering seven of his fellow Xerox employees with a semi-automatic handgun. Despite defense efforts to portray him as mentally incompetent—the old “tormented by demons” ploy—Uyesugi was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. His appalling act has earned him everlasting infamy in the annals of Hawaiian crime as the “Xerox Killer.”

X-R
ATED

According to the experts from the
FBI
’s Behavioral Science Unit, perhaps as many as 80 percent of serial killers display a fondness for hardcore pornography, particularly movies and books featuring violent, sadomasochistic sex. Of course, this isn’t exactly the world’s most startling finding. Indeed, it would be far more surprising to learn that
Horton Hears a Who
was Henry Lee
Lucas
’s favorite book or that Jeffrey
Dahmer
was a big fan of the Nancy Drew series.