Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (23 page)

She did phone the police at one stage, giving a false name and saying that the murders had been committed by her boyfriend, but they refused to believe that a woman was involved in the deaths and thought she was a crank. They were so dismissive of her on the phone that they alienated her completely. After all, Carol was desperate for attention, a few words of praise.

They’d later find that bullets had been fired from guns like the ones she’d bought - and would find that a woman exactly matching her description had bought the box that one of the dead girl’s heads was later found in. But they didn’t attempt to track her down, convinced that they were looking for a man.

In fairness to the police, Carol sounded confusingly edgy, hurt and arrogant on the phone. After all, Doug, the love of her life, was still having sex with other women. She’d given up her children and her colleagues didn’t like her. Plus Jack Murray was alternately ignoring her or just using her to give him head. The desperately needy Carol had always tried to romanticise her relationships, but even she had to admit that her Prince hadn’t arrived.

As a result she was only sleeping for five hours a night and was sometimes drinking to elevate her
mindset
. She was also taking tranquillisers in an ever increasing dose.

She had good reason to be depressed and guilty and afraid, for she was now joining Doug in molesting her eleven-year-old neighbour Theresa. Carol had originally refused to have sexual relations with the child but Doug had accused her of being jealous of the well built and outwardly mature looking eleven-year-old. He and Carol took the girl into the shower with them and to bed where Doug would ultimately take her virginity.

Carol would rationalise that the child didn’t seem to mind, conveniently blocking out the fact that lonely children are desperate to please outwardly friendly adults. Carol took photographs of her lover and little Theresa engaged in various sexual acts.

The couple took the girl to the cinema and to burger restaurants and on shopping expeditions where they paid for everything. On other occasions Doug took Theresa out in the car and asked her to pick him out the wildest prostitutes. He sometimes had sex with them in the front seat whilst Theresa watched from the back.

Carol often had oral sex with Doug and Theresa, just
as her father had had oral sex with her and her eleven-year-old sister. Theresa’s mother saw Carol as a homely woman, a matronly type, and had no idea that her child was being abused.

On the 20th June 1980 Carol and Doug were out cruising late when they saw a cute teenager hanging around. They offered her a lift and she hesitated but then accepted. The seventeen-year-old said she was called Cathy and accepted forty dollars, her price for giving Doug oral sex.

She went down on him with Carol sitting in the back of the car. Carol had her gun ready. Doug had suggested that Carol might like to kill the next victim so that she would be as involved in the murders as he. What happened next is open to dispute - Carol would later claim that Doug changed his mind and shot the girl himself. Doug would say that Carol did it. She would be found guilty of this teenager’s death.

One of the killers shot Cathy through the head but she continued to struggle. Doug snapped at Carol that she mustn’t freak out, but Carol calmly reminded him that she was a nurse who saw blood and death all the time. She was now as caught up in her role as a killer as she’d been in her role as the all-American mom.

She got into the front seat of the car and undressed the badly injured teenager. The girl was bleeding and writhing and soon making the death rattle, but the two sociopaths were impervious. Carol simply put Doug’s jacket over Cathy so that no one would see what was going on. They drove to a quiet area and dumped her naked body. Presumably, given that they’d stripped her, they abused her corpse.

That same month - on 23rd June 1980 - Doug went out driving on his own and paid a twenty-year-old prostitute called Exxie Wilson to get into the car with him. He drove to a car park where she started to give him oral sex. At the point of orgasm he shot the mildly retarded young woman through the back of the head. She bit him in her death throes and he was so angry that he threw her out of the car, ripped off her clothes and used a knife to hack off her head. He left the torso where it was and bagged the still warm head.

He then drove back to the area where he’d picked her up and found her friend Karen Jones who he feared could identify him. He shot her in the head then dumped the body, before taking Exxie’s head back to Carol’s apartment. He had sex with it then put it in her freezer for future fun.

Carol would later say that she found the head gross - but if that’s true she didn’t say so to her lover. Instead she got out her makeup kit and prettified the thawing head so that Doug could have sex with it again. She then bought a chest for them to hide the head in, wearing gloves when she went to buy the piece of furniture. They dumped the chest and its
grisly
contents in an alley where it would be found by a horrified passer-by.

Carol had hoped that these shared acts would make Doug love her more - but instead he seemed to like her less and would only sleep with her as part of a
threesome
with eleven-year-old Theresa. He spent more time at other women’s houses leaving Carol to drink alone or phone her sons at their grandparents house. The grandparents kept wanting to send the children home and Carol said this wasn’t a safe place for them just now.

In desperation, she called her former lover Richard, the writer, and told him all about Doug and his killing spree. Then she had second thoughts and called back saying that the murders were fictitious, that she was writing a short story with that plot and wanted to know if it sounded tenable. Given her drinking, her
mood swings and her tranquilliser dependence, Richard was not surprised by the content of this call.

More lonely and friendless than she’d ever been, Carol went to her garage and injected and ingested insulin and tranquillisers. It was more of a cry for help than a genuine attempt to end it all for she called her work saying that she planned to take her own life. She also left a ‘goodbye-cruel-world’ note for Doug. She was found semi-conscious and taken to hospital by the paramedics where she had her stomach pumped out. Jack Murray reluctantly drove her home the next morning, bringing a female friend with him to keep Carol at bay.

Carol’s morality slipped even lower now and she brought eleven-year-old Theresa to Jack and let him fondle her. But she wouldn’t let him have sex with her, saying that this privilege belonged only to Doug.

Doug continued to treat Carol like shit and Carol began to go to bits. She also found out that Jack had taken a great deal of money from their joint account and that he
had lied about what he spent it on. Her work performance became so poor that no one wanted to share a shift with her. She had always talked nervously nineteen to the dozen and now - on 3rd August 1980 - she went to the country and western club and began to tell Jack that Doug had killed several girls and that she had been involved.

Jack, in turn, told the group he was with. They urged him to contact the police, but he seemed to have a change of heart and said he was sure that Carol was only joking. In truth, he’d probably realised that if she went to the police she’d tell them that he’d fondled an eleven-year-old girl and asked if he could have
intercourse
with her.

Later Carol said she wanted to talk to Jack in his van. He agreed and got inside with her where she allegedly offered to perform his favourite sexual act, that of
licking
his anus. He took off his trousers and lay down on his stomach and she shot him through the head. But he didn’t die immediately so she shot him again.

Carol then began to stab him through the back and the buttocks. She would later say that she did this to make it look as if Jack had been attacked by a total
psycho
. It’s more likely that she was venting her rage on him for all of the insults, the stolen money, the lies about leaving his wife and the broken dates.

She then realised that both the bullets in his head could be traced to her gun - so she cut his head off. It’s
likely that she also carried out this act to gain Doug’s approval. After all, he had cut off Exxie’s head. Carol left Jack’s bloody torso in the van, where it swelled up horribly in the heat and became discoloured. It would be several days before it was found.

Meanwhile she proudly told Doug of what she’d done - but he reminded her that she’d left the shells in the van and that these could be traced to her. He told her that she wasn’t bright enough to get away with murder without him. He now started to sleep with one of Jack’s former girlfriends, pouring salt into Carol’s emotional wounds.

Carol’s mood deteriorated further, though when she was told of Jack’s death she acted as if she were devastated, screaming and crying and wailing that it couldn’t be true. Deciding that he’d had enough, Doug said that he was leaving her. Carol, who feared being alone, begged him not to go but he was adamant.

Back at work, she started to arrive late and was unable to concentrate. Finally she blurted out to a colleague that Doug had killed several women and that she couldn’t take any more. She verbally handed in her resignation and her terrified co-workers didn’t exactly beg her to stay. Instead they rushed to the phone and called
the police - but by the time they arrived at the hospital the killer was on her way home.

At home, Carol phoned the police herself and asked a detective to meet her that lunchtime for a coffee. It was clear that she wanted to control the way she turned herself in. And given Carol’s level of emotional neediness she probably managed to convince herself it might turn into a romantic date.

The detective agreed - but the police who had been to the hospital arrived at her home just then. They arrested her as she put together a bag filled with evidence against her lover. This evidence included photographs of Doug in sexually compromising positions with eleven year old Theresa - Carol was about to make him pay for spurning her. She was immediately taken into custody, as was an outwardly calm Doug.

Carol was edgy and over talkative but lucid when the police arrived and insisted on giving them the underwear that Doug had kept as trophies from his victims. She willingly admitted that she’d killed Jack and cut off his head, saying that he was ‘an asshole who deserved to die.’ She also told of the sex sessions Doug had had with Theresa, though it’s unclear if at this stage she admitted her part in the child’s abuse. Photos would be discovered
of herself and Theresa together and the little girl would ultimately testify in court that Carol had been involved in many of the sexual acts. Doug Clark’s supporters believe that Carol was given immunity against her paedophiliac crimes in return for testifying against Doug.

Even now, Carol was intent on finding herself a new man, openly propositioning one of the police officers. She talked in great detail about her sex life and said that killing was fun. When she was accompanied back to her apartment by police officers to gather further evidence she asked if they would have sex with her, explaining that it might be years before she had access to a man again. They declined.

Carol apparently found it difficult to orgasm and needed up to an hour of manual stimulation to get there, so it’s clear that she wasn’t a nymphomaniac. It seems that she wanted sex for what it represented to her - the chance to be held close, to feel as if she mattered to someone for a while. Both of her parents had constantly told her that she was fat and ugly but she could convince herself that she was desirable as she lay in a man’s reassuring arms.

Meanwhile, Doug denied that he’d committed any of the murders. Instead he said that Carol and Jack had
committed them - but Jack’s wife was able to give her dead husband an alibi for three of the homicides. Jack clearly hadn’t cut off his own head, so Doug admitted that Carol had done that. Doug added that his only crime was to help her dispose of Jack’s head in a dumpster. (It has never been found.)

A bloody footprint found at one murder scene matched Doug’s boots and traces of blood in Doug’s car were matched to other girls that had been killed - and the girl he had stabbed but failed to kill would identify him. Later this stabbing would be removed from Doug Clark’s record as it transpired the girl had originally given a very different description of her assailant and had only been able to identify Doug Clark after being hypnotised by the authorities to supposedly recover her memory.

In prison awaiting trial, Carol received a letter from a male prisoner who was in the same institute as Doug. She wrote back and was soon smearing her vaginal juices on the notepaper and telling him she’d done so. Even in jail she was desperate to hook a man.

Her attitude to Doug varied from one day to the next, so that sometimes she said she’d act insane and take the full blame for the murders. At other times she
said that she’d act middle class so that no one would believe she was involved with the deaths. She wrote to him ‘Remember I look innocent. Impression is worth as much as facts.’ Carol the homicidal accomplice had transmogrified into Carol the jailhouse lawyer. When it came to a sense of her own identity she was in some ways a blank slate, ready to be written upon.

Ironically she stabilised in jail because, as her estranged sister Vicky would later put it, she no longer had to make any decisions. It’s indicative of her lonely life that whilst she was awaiting trial she didn’t have a single visitor.