Examples from the Latter Half of the 20th Century

Two compulsive murderers with different abduction techniques were active during the 1950s. Edward Gein (Schechter, 1989) served as a model for Alfred Hitchcock’s main character in Psycho. Gein had a disturbed relationship with a domineering mother, who constantly told her son stories about the sinful nature of women. Following his mother’s death, he preserved a room in his house as a shrine for her. He began digging up corpses from local cemeteries and later killed and disemboweled two women at his home. After killing an older woman who owned a hardware store, Gein became a suspect and was arrested. The police discovered the victim’s headless corpse hanging upside down in Gein’s home. They also found chairs upholstered with human skin, soup bowls made from victims’ skulls, and a collection of female genitalia in a box. Gein told investigators that he enjoyed dressing up in a vest made of human skin.

Gein’s crude method of abducting victims is in direct contrast to the techniques used by Harvey Glatman (Nash, 1973). This offender was quite intelligent, yet he was lonely and socially introverted, especially with members of the opposite sex. Glatman came from a middle-class background and was a good student, but a morbidly perverse side of him emerged in childhood. For example, he engaged in the dangerous autoerotic practice of tying a rope around his neck to achieve sexual gratification (Resnick, 1997). At age 17, he ordered a girl to undress by threatening her with a toy gun. Sometime later, he was arrested for robbery and spent 5 years in prison. After his release in 1951, Glatman started a small TV-repair business.

The compulsion to kill had been building in Glatman for years, but, because of his discomfort with women, he needed a method to obtain victims that involved minimal interaction with them. In 1957, Glatman set up a photography studio in his home and placed ads in newspapers for models. He told the women that they would be on the cover of detective magazines, which were quite popular at the time. The models allowed Glatman to tie them up, as was typical in most of the pictures on the magazine covers. When they were bound, he raped them at gunpoint, photographed them, killed them by strangling them, and disposed of the bodies in the nearby California desert. He murdered three women with this technique; however, the fourth victim managed to overpower him, and he was arrested.

Albert DeSalvo, commonly known as the “Boston Strangler,” terrorized Boston in the early 1960s (Rae, 1967). DeSalvo grew up in a home with significant abuse and brutality. It is alleged that his father had sex with prostitutes at the home, scenes that were witnessed by some of his children. At an early age, DeSalvo liked to place starving cats in an orange crate with a puppy and watch the cats scratch the dog’s eyes out. He also had voyeuristic tendencies in his youth: “I had a lot of fun climbing up on the roof of the restaurant and watching couples go at it in the rooms, which made me come in my pants, sometimes without even touching myself” (p. 64). DeSalvo joined the army and was stationed in Germany. Here, he began a series of burglaries that were sexually motivated. He married a German woman who found his incessant sexual demands irritating. “I wanted Imgard to make the first move. She never could see her way clear. I felt less than a man in bed with her. She would say I was dirty and sickening, and called me an animal” (p. 75). Notwithstanding marital conflict, DeSalvo maintained a fairly normal family life—at least as seen from a distance— and functioned as a husband and father all through the period when he committed some exceptionally shocking crimes and homicides.

Prior to his spree of strangulation murders, this offender committed a series of sexual molestations that earned him the name “Measuring Man.” DeSalvo would knock on the doors of homes posing as a representative from a modeling agency, an idea he claimed he got from watching a movie. When a woman answered the door, he praised her for her figure and asked whether he could take her measurements and photograph her. He told the victims that they had a good chance of becoming models. While taking their measurements, DeSalvo fondled and molested them. The offender was shocked by the number of women who let him engage in this activity. “I am not educated and these girls was all college graduates, understand me? I made fools of them. I made them ... accept me and listen to me. That was why I was around measuring them” (p. 82).

I know that they look down on people who come from my background. They think they are

better than me. They was all college kids and I never had anything in my life, but I outsmarted them. I was supposed to feel that they was better than me because they was college people.

(p- 85)

At the age of 29, DeSalvo was apprehended for a burglary attempt and sentenced to prison for 2 years.

When he was released (in May 1962), he began knocking on the doors of homes dressed in green work clothes, claiming to be a repairman. This methodology earned him his next title, “Green Man.” The offender told the women who came to the door that he was sent to repair a leaky faucet or a broken appliance. When they let him in, he overpowered them and raped them. DeSalvo’s first rape victim was a 55-year-old woman.

We talked about the work, and she’d let me in. As she walked and I was behind her, I hit her on the head with a lead weight. She fell. I reached over the back of her and I put my arms around her neck, and we fell to the floor together. Her blood was all over me. I got up, took her robe. I had the robe belt, a blue one, and I put it around her neck and it gave me two turns— tightened it good and knotted it and I think it caught into kind of [a] bow, you understand? I left it on her. I think she was alive when I had intercourse with her. (p. 7)

DeSalvo was alleged to have killed 13 women during the 18-month period following the Green Man rapes. He said that the compulsion to kill was irresistible: “When this certain thing comes on me, it’s a very immediate thing. I get up in the morning and I get this feeling, and I tell my wife I am going out on my job, but I am not” (p. 7).

If you ask me why I did that, I would have to say I don’t know. It does not seem that it was me, and yet I know that I did that. But I can’t understand why and no one has ever been able to help me understand it. (p. 54)

The offender described an episode with one victim who was reluctant to open the door since she did not know him. “The door opened a little more. So help me, this thing going to my head, this pressure. I want to say, don’t open the door, but still I want it open, it’s funny” (p. 19). Another time a victim hesitated to let DeSalvo in because she was ready to go out. He told her that the “repairs” would not take much time, and she eventually consented. “I closed the door behind me and even though I fight it all the way, it’s funny, I didn’t want to go in there in the first place. I just didn’t want it to happen” (p. 19).

Another victim, whom he considered rather attractive, opened the door without hesitation when he said he was a repairman. She invited DeSalvo to have coffee and was nice to him.

I really wanted to get out of there and don’t want to do anything to her. She has been very nice to me and I don’t want to hurt her, but I can feel the urge on me like a real push. It is me and I don’t want to hurt this nice person who has been good to me and treated me like a man. (p. 7)

Nevertheless, the compulsion overpowered DeSalvo.

She turned her back on me. I rose. I didn’t really want to do it, but the next thing before she knew it, I had my arms around her neck from in back. She didn’t say anything, she couldn’t. She fall back on top of me. She passed out. I think that she was so surprised and shocked when she see what I do, that she just can’t stand it. She passed out on me. I put her on the bed and looked at her. Naturally, when I saw her the sex thing came on strong.

I opened the robe. I don’t think I took it off. I just think I just opened it. I wanted to see her breast, as I am ... I don’t know exactly but I did reveal her busts. I remember seeing her strip naked on the bed. She was stripped naked. Her leopard pajamas was ripped off or pulled away from her busts and her privates, up over her busts and down around her ankles. Now I say I had intercourse with her while she was unconscious but still alive.

I was thinking about how nice she had been to me and it was making me feel sad. I am sorry about that one, really sorry but she shouldn’t have asked me to stay and then there was the thing I felt. (pp. 109-110)

DeSalvo described his interaction with a 68-year-old victim who triggered hostility in him. He choked her in his usual way when she turned her back and then violated her sexually. But instead of feeling a sense of relief, he became angry.

It was later, right then, when I strangled her with a stocking. I was very, very angry at her, this woman, I don’t know her and she never done nothing to me, but I am very angry and pulled them stockings awful tight. Then I got up and went through the place. Whew! I was mad and went through the place yanking out drawers and throwing clothes around, (pp. 33-34)

His last victim was a young married woman. Instead of ringing the doorbell, DeSalvo broke into her home and abused her sexually. He then apologized and left. This incident eventually led to his arrest, which ended the string of homicides in the Boston area. Following this arrest, he was connected to the prior rapes and molestations. While in jail, DeSalvo told another inmate that he was the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo’s attorney had him plead guilty to the stranglings in order to avoid the death penalty. As part of the plea agreement, the offender gave a detailed statement to the authorities. He was killed in prison by another inmate in 1973.

DeSalvo’s family now questions the validity of his confession. While they concede that he committed the rapes, they do not believe he was capable of multiple murders and contend that he made a false confession for various legal and perhaps psychological reasons. Although most rapists do not progress to sexual homicide (Podolsky, 1966; MacDonald, 1986) and those rapists who do kill mostly murder their victims in order to escape detection, a small subgroup of rapists do escalate their activity to sexual murder (Ressler, Burgess, and Douglas, 1983). DeSalvo certainly could fall within this category. Moreover, he had the background characteristics of a potential sex murderer (Schlesinger, 2001b). It is not completely certain that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler; but if the detailed statements he gave to the authorities were lies, his is probably one of the most dramatic cases of false confession of all time.

During the 1970s, the public, largely as a result of media coverage, became increasingly aware of the repetitive sexual murderer. A well-publicized case was that of the highly intelligent Edmund Kemper, who killed multiple individuals including his grandparents and his mother (Chaney, 1976; Strentz and Hassel, 1970). As a child, Kemper was treated in a cruel manner by his mother, who was a respected college administrator. She made the young Kemper live in the basement and ridiculed him for his enormous (6 ft, 9 in) size. During his youth, Kemper killed cats with a hatchet and kept the dismembered parts in his closet. He once buried a cat alive, then cut off its head and kept it in his bedroom. At age 15, he stabbed his grandparents to death for no apparent reason and was subsequently hospitalized for 6 years and then released as rehabilitated.

Following this disturbed childhood and adolescence, Kemper committed eight sexual murders. Typically, he would pick up hitchhiking women (usually coeds), drive them to a remote location, and stab them to death. He also photographed the corpses, dissected, and had sex with the bodies, and, on several occasions, he decapitated the victims. Although Kemper enjoyed the killings, he described the postmortem paraphiliac activity as even more arousing.

Kemper eventually killed his mother by smashing her skull with a hammer while she slept and then cutting off her head. He raped the decapitated body, cut out the larynx, and threw it down the garbage disposal. He then killed his mother’s friend by smashing her skull with a brick and followed the murder with necrophilia. Afterward, he called the police and confessed.

Notorious multiple murderer Ted Bundy (Rule, 1988) became so well known that his name has almost become synonymous with serial killer. The case became highly publicized for many reasons including the high number of alleged victims (over 40), his geographic mobility, and his pleasing, clean-cut, conservative appearance, superior intellect, and law school background. As a youth, Bundy was obsessed with pornography and progressed to voyeurism, sexual burglary, and sexual homicide. He used a variety of techniques to abduct victims. For example, he would put a fake cast on his arm in order to appear weak and defenseless. After gaining the future victim’s confidence and asking her assistance, he would attack her. Bundy eluded law enforcement for years. He eventually changed his modus operandi (MO) and began randomly breaking into homes and attacking women. Finally, he broke into a sorority house and attacked a number of coeds; this act demonstrated his complete loss of control over his compulsion to kill, as sometimes occurs in compulsive offenders at the end of a killing cycle. Bundy represented himself at his trial and was executed 10 years after his conviction.

Gary Heidnick was a financially successful and self-appointed church bishop who tortured a total of six women in the basement of his home (Englade, 1988). The victims were killed slowly in various sadistic ways. For example, one woman was forced into a pit filled with water and then electrocuted with a live wire. He put dog food and human remains in a food processor and made his victims eat it. Another woman was hung by her wrists and died a slow death over a period of about a week. He drove screwdrivers into the ears of other women and raped and tortured some while forcing others to watch. One woman managed to escape, and Heidnick was apprehended. At his trial, he told the judge that “the women were already there when he first moved into the house. For some reason, the judge failed to believe him” (Schechter and Everitt, 1996, p. 113).

During the 1980s, Andrei Chikatilo committed over 50 murders in the Soviet Union (Lourie, 1993). The Communist authorities wanted to believe that murderers of this type were a product only of the decadent West. However, they were disabused of this notion after arresting the 42-year-old teacher who was married with children. Chikatilo targeted boys, girls, and young women. He lured them away from bus stops or train stations with the promise of a meal. After leading them into the woods, he killed them, often cutting out their tongues, slicing off their noses, gouging out their eyes, and eating their genitals. In one month alone, this offender was alleged to have killed six victims. Chikatilo was arrested in the early 1990 and was charged with 53 murders. When questioned, he said the motive for the killings was not exactly sexual, but they gave him “peace of mind.” He was executed 4 years after his trial.

Another dramatic case of compulsive murder is that of Jeffrey Dahmer (Dvorchak and Howlewa, 1991; Schwartz, 1992), who killed 17 men, most of whom he picked up in gay bars. He drugged them, dismembered them with a saw, and engaged in cannibalism as well as necrophiliac rape. In an attempt to make some victims zombies, he drove holes in their skulls (while they were living) and injected muriatic acid into their brains with a turkey baster. Dahmer was eventually arrested when a young victim managed to escape from his residence. When the police officers went to Dahmer’s home, they found a human head in the refrigerator, several skulls in a closet, various body parts in a barrel, and decomposed hands, bones, and various organs in the freezer. Dahmer had also taken pictures of his victims and their corpses.

As a child, Dahmer dissected roadkill, butchered small animals, nailed cats and frogs to trees behind his house, and once put a dog’s head on a stick. At 18 years of age, he picked up a hitchhiker, killed him, and dismembered the body. The compulsion to kill emerged 8 years later, when he committed his second murder. Two years later, he committed his third and fourth murders; the fifth murder, the next year; 5 years later (in 1991), he killed four people, and he killed eight more the following year.

Dahmer reported wanting “complete control” over his victims and was fascinated by the idea of “the captivity.” He was sexually aroused by eating parts of the bodies; he described this activity as a further step toward achieving gratification—“just as an escalation, trying something new to satisfy” (quoted in Ressler and Schactman, 1997, p. 139). He also engaged in vampirism but did not find it as stimulating as anthropophagy. After serving only several years in prison, Dahmer was killed by another inmate.