My Serial Killers
Other than reading about them and seeing them on TV, my only experience with serial killers is my two brief personal encounters with them before they were identified and captured. You might think that is what makes me different from you–but don’t be too hasty in your conclusion… I strayed into a serial killer’s hunting grounds as a trespasser and got a bump from a monster.
While my Cottingham encounter in New York was one of those experiences that one can easily write off as coincidence, my second encounter with a serial killer made me wonder. I questioned the mathematical odds of running into two killers in that manner. One killer I could easily understand, but two made me ask, how many more might there be out there that I did not know about? I wondered what the odds were of walking by a serial killer without ever finding out about it–on the street, waiting in line for burger, browsing for books in a true-crime section, or sitting next to one on the train or bus?
pg. i – xx
The Coming Age of Serial Murder
The death of JFK defined for us the halfway point between Pearl Harbor and 9/11–when bad things stopped happening “over there” and began to occur “over here.” The statistics may prove something else, but that is when it really started to feel bad: in November 1963. It was precisely around that time, on the second day after the assassination, that the Boston Strangler was ushering in the new times by raping and killing his twelfth victim, a twenty-three-year-old Sunday school teacher.
pg. 4
Serial Killing: Some Stats’
Eighty percent of all known male serial killers in the United States appeared between 1950 and 1995. Serial killers between 1975 and 1995 accounted for 45 percent of the total of both male and female killers in the United States between 1800 and 1995. Between 1960 and 1990, confirmed serial homicides increased by 940 percent.
p. 19
Who is Killing Our Children?
For the record, a study of 1,498 child murders in California between 1981 and 1990 determined that not stranger serial killers, as John Walsh claimed, but relatives, predominantly parents, are the most frequent killers of children up to age nine.
pg. 26
What’s A Life Worth?
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.
For the press covering serial murder these days it is not the sheer number of snuffed-out lives that count, but their status or visible credit rating–the trade-off comes in at around one SUV in the garage for every five dead hookers in the Dumpster.
pg. 41
The New of Sadism
It is interesting to note that while so many medical, psychiatric, sexual, and philosophical terms refer to ancient Greek gods or Roman-era Latin expressions, sadism is entirely a modern term, taking its name for a late-eighteenth-century persona: the Marquis de Sade.
pg. 67
A Real American Psycho “The Only Ph.D. in Serial Murder” Bundy was so organized that the police never located the crime scenes where his first seventeen victims were actually killed. Six of his victims remain missing to this day. Bundy referred to himself as “the only Ph.D. in serial murder.”
What serial killers from Jack the Ripper to the Boston Strangler are to “then,” Ted Bundy is to “now.” He is the American psycho: the very essence of both fact and myth in a simultaneous representation of everything we know and think we know the new breed of serial killers are. Bundy is special because he was attractive, educated and like us–that is, those of us who represent some kind of middle-class aspirations linked to the promise held out by our belief in a college education and hard work.
pg. 102
“California Apocalypse”
In hindsight one must appreciate both the freewheeling and apocalyptic times that Mullin was living through in the late 1960s and early 1970–and the role California played at their epicenter. With his bizarre behavior, Mullin must have been invisible in the do-your-own-thing rainbow of the Haight-Ashbury hippie culture that swept out of California and engulfed not only the nation but the rest of the Western world. But by the early 1970s it turned bad. Charlie Manson had long before abandoned Haight-Ashbury as a trip gone bad and unleashed his followers to commit a series of horrific murders in Los Angeles before retreating to the remote Death Valley desert. What was celebrated in the green fields of Woodstock was put to death on the black asphalt of Altamont, where during a Rolling Stones performance of “Sympathy for the Devil,” Hell’s Angels bikers beat a spectator to death in front of center stage.
pg. 150
Women as Serial Killers
So far I have been using the pronoun he when referring to serial killers, simply to facilitate the flow of words. However, I should be referring to serial killers as he or she, because one of five serial murderers are women. In fact, they are often more deadly and more prolific than typical male serial killers. Female serial killers are described as the “quiet killers” because they rarely leave bodies dumped by the roadside which alarm the community. Their killing careers last twice as long as men’s: eight years for women to the male serial killer’s average of just over four years.
pg. 209
Teenage Serial Killer
Peter Woodcock’s prize possession was red and white Pee-Wee Herman Schwinn bicycle on which he satisfied his continuing compulsion to wander. He rode the bike to the far reaches of the city, even during the Toronto deep cold winters. He evolved a fantasy in which he led a gang of five hundred invisible boys on bikes called the Winchester Heights Gang. His foster parents were aware of that fantasy and his obsession for the public transit system and compulsion to wander. But nobody knew exactly what the seventeen-year-old Peter did on his long bike rides in the city.
pg. 252
Learning to Kill Again and Again
When disappointed in the results of his attempt to realize his fantasy exactly as imagined, the killer murders again and again, searching to prefect his desperate attempts to consummate his ideal fantasy. In many ways, serial murder is a learning experience from beginning to end.
pg. 283
The First Kill
If indeed the serial killer transforms his old self into a new one by committing his first murder, then his second murder is really only the first murder by the newly reinvented self. That perhaps might account for Brady’s assertion that the second murder is the most exciting. After that , unless the killer can totally transform himself again, with each murder the satisfaction and excitement decline and dissipate. The murders gradually drift out of the killer’s fantasy realm into that of his depressing reality from which he first sought escape.
pg. 302
Surviving a Serial Killer
One very important lesson that comes forth from reviewing accounts of people who were approached by serial killers but disengaged from them is never underestimate your instincts or your intuition. Numerous accounts are given by women who for no explicable reason, other that an intuitive “bad feeling” or “women’s intuition,” refused to walk into a serial killer’s trap. In reality, female intuition or male “gut feeling” is not a sixth sense. You have probably perceived something concrete that spell out danger, but your brain has not caught up with your perception–you do not know yet what is you have seen to have analyzed it logically. That is intuition.
Remember the woman whom Ted Bundy approached on campus wearing a cast and asking to help carry his books to his car? She reported that as she approached his Volkswagen, she noticed that the front passenger seat was missing. For some reason that she could not explain, she suddenly felt afraid and she placed the books on the hood of the car and hurried off, feeling embarrassed by her “irrational” anxiety. It probably saved her life because Bundy had precisely removed the passenger seat to more easily transport his victims, but she had not logically figured that out.
pg. 366
Talking Down a Serial Killer
The FBI suggests that talking is probably the most effective and promising way to defuse a violent situation.
Tell the rapist that perhaps you and he could go for a beer first, suggests the FBI. This is not as stupid as it sounds. Any kind of unanticipated reaction can stall the rapist and give the victim time to set the stage for an escape. Focus on personalizing yourself in the assailant’s perception: “I am a total stranger. Why do you want to hurt me? I have never done anything to hurt you. What if I were somebody you cared about? How would you feel about that?” Keep the dialogue in the present tense, the FBI suggests–serial killers rarely think too far into the future. Do not use lines like, “You will end up in jail if you do this,” for you might only remind the assailant of the necessity of killing you. Above all, do not use the popular feminist appeal, “What if I were your mothers, sister, or daughter?” The assailant might be precisely fantasizing that he is raping and killing his mother, sister, or daughter when he is attacking you.
pg. 377