A new breed of ruthless, random murderers is spreading terror across America … and the FBI warns that their number is growing.
Serial Killers
What could be more frightening than a deadly maniac who chooses strangers for his victims and takes their lives for no apparent reason? What could be more terrifying than a murderer who roams the country in his search for more helpless and unsuspecting victims, and will not cease until he himself is either apprehended or killed? It is a strange phenomenon, but over the last ten years there have been at least 30 so-called “serial murderers”: men who have killed several victims, almost always at random and almost always strangers. And even more terrifying is the fact that law-enforcement officers say the number of these killers is growing.
In Columbus, Georgia, over a period of eight months, seven elderly women were raped and murdered by one man. On death row in Florida, Ted Bundy awaits execution for a fraction of perhaps more than 30 rapes and murders he has committed across the country. In the unsolved case of what Washington State residents are calling the “Green River Killings,” 46 prostitutes have disappeared and are believed to have been murdered; so far 20 bodies have been found. And in what has been the most shocking example of serial murder — at least so far — a drifter in Texas has acknowledged killing more than 360 strangers.
Outwardly, at least, these monsters who prey on women and children give no sign that they are demented killers. Carlton Gary, who has been indicted for three of the Columbus murders of elderly women, was described by a police captain as “an extremely brilliant young man.” On sentencing Ted Bundy to die in the electric chair. Judge Edward Cowart remarked: “You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer, and I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself.”
While serial murderers do not often look the part, neither does one of the world’s leading experts on the subject look hers. A divorced mother of four children, Ann Rule would seem to be more comfortable presiding over her daughter’s Brownie meetings than hanging out with hard-nosed homicide detectives in all-night diners. But Ann Rule has been fascinated by crime since she was a little girl. “Of all my cousins, boys and girls. I was the one who was fascinated with law enforcement,” she says, “and I’d go out and sit in the offices and talk to the deputies in the little jail in Michigan where my grandfather was the sheriff. I can remember that they didn’t have that many homicides in this little county, but I’d listen to them decide how they knew this one is a suicide and not a homicide. And then, if it was a homicide, talking about the person who did it. And I was fascinated — especially by forensic science. How do detectives go from a piece of a button or a fiber or a hair or a drop of blood, and trace it back to a killer?”
Another element that fascinated Ann, and one that would later make her one of the nation’s leading experts on murderers, was the question of what makes somebody a killer. “What is the psycho-pathology of a child growing up; what events turn — and hopefully, we’re all innocent babies to begin with — what turns them into monsters?”
Ann had no indecision about her future. She knew that when she grew up she was “going to be a policewoman.” She never thought that she’d be a writer, “because writing is too hard!” Ann attended Willamette and Oregon State universities. Despite her earlier fears, she graduated with a degree in creative writing, a talent she had discovered in her junior year. Not forgetting her first love, police science, Ann minored in psychology and sociology. To help support herself, she worked at an Oregon reform school for girls and at a youth-service center in Seattle. Immediately after graduation, Ann signed up with Seattle’s police department.
It was to be a whole new world for the inexperienced 21-year-old. “I worked for a year and a half as a policewoman, and I worked bunco, sex crimes. I was a virgin at the time, and I’d be taking sex-crime statements. I’d say, ‘What? He did what?’ I didn’t know half the stuff I was writing down, but I learned after taking enough of those statements.”
While Ann loved working as a police-woman, she was forced to leave the department. Suffering from poor vision, Ann failed the department’s medical exam. It was the biggest disappointment of her life. “I’d go blocks out of my way so I wouldn’t have to drive past the Public Safety Building, because I missed it so much.” Shortly thereafter Ann got married, and for a brief time served as a caseworker for the state. There were four children from her marriage, and to earn some extra cash Ann began to write crime articles for Washington newspapers. She also wrote 30 articles for True Confessions — all of them, she recalls, “made up out of whole cloth, out of my head.” When her marriage failed, Ann had to become serious about her livelihood, and using her police connections, she began to write true crime stories for Fact Detective and True Detective magazines. Using the pseudonym Andy Stack, “because no one will believe that a female knows enough about criminal, investigation,” Ann was to have more than 1,500 crime articles published. It was during this time, while working as a volunteer at a suicide-prevention clinic, that she met a coworker who would change her life.
Did you have any idea when you met him that there was something the matter with Ted Bundy?
No. I worked with him for over a year, every Tuesday night. My shift was from ten at night until two in the morning, on the “crisis” lines. Ted was a work-study student who worked from nine at night until nine in the morning. He was about to graduate with distinction in abnormal psychology at the University of Washington. There would be nights when nobody would call or only a couple of people would call, and Ted and I would talk. I saw nothing that was peculiar about Ted. I had been a policewoman, I’d minored in psychology, I’d worked in a juvenile detention home, I’d been a crime writer, and I’m fairly perceptive about other personalities. But I saw nothing.
The only thing, in retrospect, was that Ted never spoke about sex. There are very few men who, when talking to a woman, sooner or later won’t bring up the subject. When detectives used to say; ‘’Ann, why couldn’t you have spotted him?” I’d say, “You guys are so much weirder than Ted ever was.”
Ted would walk me to my car and be sure that it was safely locked because he didn’t want anything to happen to me on the way home. So when I found out that he was a serial killer — and it took me over four years to accept that fact — there was a certain loss of innocence, there was a lack of confidence in my own judgment.
How are serial murderers different from mass killers?
A mass murderer kills a whole bunch of people in one fell swoop. For instance, Charles Whitman in the University of Texas tower would be a mass murderer. Richard Speck in Chicago is another. Even Charles Starkweather was a mass murderer because he murdered in one killing spree across the country over a period of five days.
But a serial killer kills one or sometimes two at a time over a period of time. Even males work on a pseudo-menstrual cycle, and I have found several serial killers who killed at the same time each month, so that detectives who charted their path could almost predict when the next killing would take place. Also, they may go on for years and years until they either die or they’re caught. They don’t stop.
Do those men who become mass murderers differ from serial killers in their choices of victims?
I think they do. Serial killers murder females, children, homosexuals, old people, bums. I have yet to find a serial killer who kills weight lifters. Mass murderers, they seem to be more random. They go out and they flip out — like Whitman with a brain tumor — and they just kill. But they’re all random. A serial killer rarely, if ever, kills anybody he knows. Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianchi, and the Hillside Strangler did not know any of their victims: whoever was unlucky enough to cross their paths.
How do they kill?
Serial killers are what I call “hands-on” killers-strangulation, stabbing, bludgeoning. It’s rare for them to simply shoot their victims, as in a sniper attack. It usually seems to be a sexual attack of some sort. They are working out a rage in which the hands-on part of it seems to be essential.
Do serial killers have any particular sexual orientation?
I think that they’re either homosexual or bisexual. They have some problems with their sexual identification. In the case of serial killers who kill women, they feel like there’s something missing — some part of them is missing, and it may be insecurity about their masculinity — so that just after they kill, for a little while, they feel whole. It doesn’t last, of course. And the problem gets worse. Unfortunately, the more women they kill, the closer together the periods or killing become.
Do you have a profile of serial killers?
I can give you a profile of the ones I’ve researched. Usually they’re very intelligent — or if they’re not intelligent, they’re street-smart, and it’s almost as good. The dumb ones get caught early on, before they can be titled serial killer. Often they’re very attractive, they’re charismatic, the facade is perfect. Theodore Bundy and Kenneth Bianchi are very handsome. Many of these killers are men that most women would want to date.
What kind of relationships do they have with women?
Usually they have either a wife or a woman that they’re having a so-called “normal” relationship with. So the killing part of them is entirely separate from their regular male-female relationship.
Why is it so difficult to apprehend serial killers?
They travel continually. Where you and I might put ten to 20,000 miles a year on our cars, some of them will put 100,000 to 200,000 miles a year. Harvey Carignan [“The Want-Ad Killer,” who murdered and dismembered several young girls in the Pacific Northwest] had five vehicles at his disposal, and he drove at least 200,000 miles a year, always trolling for a victim, always alert for some victim who might cross his path.
Ann Rule is quite literally a person who knows where the bodies are buried. As she drives through the Seattle suburbs and woodland areas, she points out the spots where some unfortunate victim’s decomposed body was found by the police. There is nothing vicarious about her fascination and interest in murder. Indeed, Ann’s strongest feelings are reserved for the victims and their families. She has a frontier sense of justice and feels that their deaths and sufferings must be avenged.
Despite her strong feelings about punishment, Ann Rule believes it is imperative that we learn as much as possible about the psychology of serial killers. In her books on serial killers Bundy, Jerome Brudos, and Harvey Carignan, Ann has made every effort to learn about their childhoods for some clue to understand what motivates these men to kill.
How does a child grow into a serial killer?
I’ve been dealing with men who kill women, and something happens to them before the age of five, at the hands of a woman, usually. These little boys have been abused, rejected, humiliated, abandoned, or they’ve had a mother or a mother figure who expects more of them than any little boy could ever do. He’s to be superior in every way: he’s to be brilliant and go through school and become a doctor, a lawyer, a president, be socially perfect — and it’s too much of a burden. So here are these little boys who can’t fight back at the abuse.
How does that affect them as they grow older?
The rage stays in, and when they grow up and they’re strong enough, they strike out back at women. Some of them will look at women who resemble the mother figure to kill; others pick women that are the opposite. For example, take the case of Jerome Brudos, “The Lust Killer.” His mother was no-nonsense; she wore those black lace-up shoes, plain dresses. He was taught early on that any sexual interest he had was “naughty.” One time, he brought a pair of beautiful women’s shoes home from the dump, when he was four or five years old. He would put them on and was clomping around in them, like little kids will do. His mother just screamed at him that what he was doing was “evil, wicked.” He didn’t know. He was supposed to throw them away, but he kept them for a while, and she caught him again. Well, later on, when he was a teenager, he developed a fetish for women’s shoes. At first he stole them; then he would knock women down to get them. Eventually, he would kill women and keep their shoes — and in some cases their feet — to fulfill his terrible fantasies. I think it all goes back to his mother’s attitude.
Why are some women attracted to these killers?
What really horrified me when I went down to Bundy’s trial in Miami was that the whole first row, right behind the defense table, were Ted Bundy groupies. There were probably ten or 12 really pretty young girls with dark hair parted in the middle. And I thought, Do they realize that they look just like Ted’s victims? When he would turn around and smile at them, they’d giggle. It was like he was Elvis Presley or a movie star. Since then, I must have had three dozen letters from women who felt sorry for Ted Bundy, who had read my book and still wanted to write to him, and who asked me what they could do to cheer him up. I would write back to them, asking, “Did you read my book? I wasn’t writing about a teddy bear.”
Do these killers have relationships with women when they are on their murder sprees?
Randall Woodfield, “The I-5 Killer,” was very handsome. He was the all-star athlete of Newport, Oregon, the greatest athlete the town ever had, and he was a draft choice for the Green Bay Packers. He was also picked by Playgirl as the “boy next door.” (After Woodfield was arrested, the magazine decided not to run his photograph.] Anyway, I’ve never written about a man who had more women. After he was sentenced to something over 150 years for murders, many young women started writing to him.
So you’d say that even serial killers have their groupies.
All of these murderers in prison who have any publicity at all have their groupies. These women think that they’re going to be the one woman who will make that man happy, who will prove him innocent, or who will lead him on the right path.
What characteristics do they have in common?
The women? I think they run the gamut from women with no egos; to those who feel important because this man, this famous killer, is their man; to women who feel very confident and think, “By golly, I can straighten him out.”
If anybody believes that the concept of serial killings is hype, manufactured by writers such as Ann Rule to sell books, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report dispels such a notion. In 1965, 5.4 percent of all murders in the United States could be considered random and senseless. That is, there was no connection between the victim and the killer. By 1981, more than 17 percent of all murders fell into this category.
Pierce Brooks, a former Los Angeles Police captain of detectives, is another leading authority on serial murder. He was one of the detectives instrumental in solving the famous “Onion Field” case. When Brooks retired from the LAPD, he went to live in Oregon and worked as the chief of a couple of small police departments.
Brooks had been aware of random killers earlier in his police career. One of his famous cases in the fifties involved Harvey Glatman, “The Lonely Hearts Killer.” Brooks realized that killers such as Glatman are able to get away with their crimes because of their mobility. Too often, different police departments in nearby municipalities are unaware of similar kinds of murders not committed in their jurisdictions. A serial killer will work in one area, killing in one pattern — same modus operandi, same type of victim — but as soon as it becomes dangerous to him, he moves on to another locality. Recognizing this, Brooks and a few other homicide specialists came up· with the idea of VICAP
What is VICAP?
VICAP stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. It will involve every police department in the country having a standardized form to fill out for certain kinds of murders — lust murders, murders of young women, murders of children — not the mom-and-pop murders, but the kind of serial murders that we have been talking about. The information will go into a central area, which will be connected to the FBI academy in Quantico. It will be run jointly by the FBI and by law-enforcement officials outside the FBI. The information will go into a computer, but the main key are the crime analysts, who will be able to see a commonality. When I talk to law-enforcement officers, I say, “Will you fill out one more form, if you had a ‘loser,’ and send it in?” They say, “Of course.”
What is a “loser”?
That’s what detectives call a homicide case they can’t solve. Lots of times they may actually know who did it, but they don’t have the physical evidence they need. And since most prosecutors like to have a high percentage of convictions, they will not go into court with a case unless they’ve really got good physical evidence. These “loser” files are usually four feet thick.
Despite the possibility of “turf wars” between the FBI and local law-enforcement authorities, Ann Rule says that she is hopeful about VICAP “It won’t be a deterrent, but I think it’s going to be effective,” she tells us. “It will be better than what we’ve been doing so far — catching these monsters by fluke.”
For those that might be curious about the six men in the header image for this story, we’ll reveal that they are ALL pictures of Theodore Bundy in various personas. He was apparently very charming in all of them, and ain’t that just a bitch? … Even more surprising might be what happens with some of the folks wanting Killer Pen Pals, we think. Someone even has a web site set up for the prisoners. … Confusing? Perhaps. Disturbing? Absolutely. … And yet here we are. … Homo Spaiens are some odd ducks, and not even all of them are birds. … On the upside, VICAP has been wildly successful since 1985, so at least we can keep people looking for literal “pen” pals fishing in a well-stocked pool.
