Fiendish Killers

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  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE: CANNIBALS

  Sawney Bean

  Alferd Packer

  Ed Gein

  Joachim Kroll

  Andrei Chikatilo

  Gary Heidnik

  Ed Kemper

  Armin Meiwes

  PART TWO: SERIAL KILLERS

  Jack the Ripper

  Albert Fish

  H. H. Holmes

  Pedro Alonso Lopez

  Luis Alfredo Gavarito

  Anatoly Onoprienko

  Ahmad Suradji

  Peter Manuel

  John Wayne Gacy

  Wayne Williams

  Arthur Shawcross

  John Christie

  Earle Nelson

  PART THREE: WICKED TEAMS

  Lucas and Toole

  The Hillside Stranglers

  The Honeymoon Killers

  Leopold and Loeb

  Burke and Hare

  The Papin Sisters

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

  Fred and Rosemary West

  Angels of Death

  Bonnie and Clyde

  Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray

  PART FOUR: FIENDISH WOMEN

  Velma Barfield

  Audrey Marie Hilley

  Kristen Gilbert

  Dorothea Puente

  Karla Faye Tucker

  Sue Basso

  Celeste Beard

  Winnie Ruth Judd

  I Don’t Like Mondays

  PART FIVE: FIENDISH DOCTORS

  Doctor William Palmer

  Doctor Thomas Neill Cream

  Doctor Crippen

  Doctor John Bodkin Adams

  Doctor Josef Mengele

  Doctor Jeffrey MacDonald

  Doctor Michael Swango

  Doctor Harold Shipman

  PART SIX: VAMPIRES

  Gilles de Rais

  Elizabeth Bathory

  Arnold Paole

  Peter Plogojowitz

  Peter Kurten

  Vampire Killer of Sacramento

  Vampiroids

  PART SEVEN: CHILD FIENDS

  Mary Bell

  Willie Boskett

  Jesse Pomeroy

  Jessica Holtmeyer

  Joshua Phillips

  The Murder of James Bulger

  Menendez Brothers

  PART EIGHT: SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

  Columbine Massacre

  History of School Massacres

  Virginia Tech

  Introduction

  Imagine a kindly, grey-haired old man walking down the street hand-in-hand with an adorable little girl. Passers-by wouldn’t think anything of it, presuming that the six-year-old was simply taking a stroll to the shops with her grandfather. However, envisage a crime of unparalleled revulsion when the body of Grace Budd and many more young children are discovered brutally murdered by possibly one of the most deranged human beings ever encountered – Albert Fish. What drives a person into becoming a psychopathic predator? Although medical research would like to say they have the answers, can you ever really get inside the mind of a fiendish killer?

  While the human brain is conditioned into accepting that men commit atrocious acts of murder, it is hard for us to comprehend when the serial killer turns out to be a female or, even worse, a child. Unfortunately, in reality, women have proved to be just as cold-blooded as their counterparts, whether it is out of monetary gain, revenge, pressure or just sheer depravity.

  The Countess Elizabeth Báthory is probably the first woman to go down in history as being motivated by bloodlust. She quite openly bathed in the blood of her virgin victims in the hope that she would retain her youthful looks. Hélène Jegado was a French domestic servant and serial poisoner, who murdered at least twenty-three people with arsenic between the years 1833 and 1851. Another female serial killer was Jeanne Weber, who strangled ten children, including her own, eventually killing herself in her own prison cell.

  Mary Flora Bell was just eleven years old when she wanted to ‘hurt’ someone. The product of a broken home, she went through her childhood being angry and the only way she knew how to vent her anger was through killing.

  Jesse Harding Pomeroy, dubbed the ‘Boy Fiend’, was one of the youngest serial killers ever known. Though hardly fourteen, he brutally tortured his victims and took great pleasure in seeing them writhe in agony.

  So what turns these people into such barbaric, fiendish killers? We are all born with the capability to hurt other human beings under certain circumstances, but it is hard to understand why one person can control this emotion and another individual doesn’t know when to stop. There have been extensive studies and discussions regarding the difference between the normal person (non-killer) and the serial killer, and gradually certain factors arose that seemed to effect behaviour patterns. One disturbing factor is that when a killer is finally apprehended the person who committed such atrocities can appear to be ‘normal’. Society would like to think that there is something wrong with a person who displays extreme violence as there are few things more repellent to human nature than the concept of a serial killer.

  It is fair to say that serial killers are composed of all types of people from all walks of life. They can be males, females, young or old, single or pairs of killers and from any ethnic background. It could be your next-door neighbour, your best friend, or the nurse that so tenderly looked after you in hospital – history has shown it can be anyone. The serial killer’s background seems to play a large part in their behaviour and helps us understand what drives them to inflict pain on others. In the case of many sadistic murderers, their childhood has been a series of abuse at the hands of their parents. Although this is in no way the sole excuse, it is certainly an undeniable factor in many of their backgrounds. Abuse in infancy can often have disastrous results because the child does not learn how to trust, developing traits of insecurity and a lack of social interaction. All they have known from adults, is domination and control, which is something that they carry with them into adulthood. There are usually three common denominators that occur in the childhood of the majority of serial killers: they are bedwetters beyond the age of ten, there is a tendency to inflict suffering on animals and finally there is a predisposition to arson.

  It could be said that some serial killers are just born ‘bad’, as in the case of Edmund Kemper. From a very early age he showed signs of sadistic violence by beheading his sister’s dolls, taking great pleasure in the art of execution. He said of himself:

  It was an urge . . . a strong urge, and the longer I let it go the stronger it got, to where I was taking risks to go out and kill people . . .

  Kemper was the product of a broken and abusive home, who was c
onstantly put down by his overbearing mother. If he failed to do as she wished, she would lock him in the basement of their house for hours on end. He grew up timid and resentful, fearing his own inadequacies, and by the age of ten Kemper had graduated to living targets – he cut the head off the family cat.

  The study of serial killers has also shown that many of them suffered severe head injuries at a young age. The case of Phineas Gage in 1848 is a prime example of the drastic changes in character, following a serious accident. Gage worked on the Rutland and Birmingham Railway and, one day in September 1848, he was tamping down the blasting powder for a controlled charge, when he inadvertently sparked an explosion. The force of the blast blew his tamping iron right through his head. It went in point-first under his left cheek bone, taking his eye out on its way through his brain, eventually coming out through the top of his skull. It landed several yards away, leaving Gage lying on the floor in a convulsive heap. Amazingly, even though the left side of his brain had been completely destroyed, minutes later Gage was able to stand up and speak. His fellow workers watched both horrified and yet amazed, convinced that the accident would have killed him. Within two months Gage was able to walk, speak and appeared normal in every way, with the exception of his character, which had changed beyond recognition. His friends simply said that he was ‘no longer Gage’. In place of the friendly, diligent worker, was a foul-mouthed and inveterate liar.

  Albert Fish, who was mentioned earlier, also received a head injury when he fell out of a cherry tree at the age of seven. This left him with headaches and dizzy spells but, more significantly, he started to display violent tendencies.

  The frontal lobe in the brain is what can simply be termed as the ‘stop button’, which acts as a conscience in a ‘normal’ human being. When this lobe is damaged the power of logic is greatly impaired, reducing such actions as self-control, planning, judgement and the balance between right and wrong and good and evil. If only this were the case in all serial killers, it would make the explanation far easier to understand. However, over half of all confessed serial killers state that they knew perfectly well what they were doing – before, during and after their crime. Some even confess to what they were doing was wrong and even contemplated never doing it again. It seems, though, that the thrill derived from murder is comparable to a narcotic fix, which seems to satisfy the killer’s senses for a while. But like a drug, the fix wears off and they have the overwhelming desire to kill again.

  Statistically, serial killers can be categorised into males from lower- to middle-class backgrounds between the ages of eighteen to mid-thirties. However, there will always be the exception to the rule and many serial killers defy that standard. For example Ray and Faye Copeland were two of the most unlikely serial killers in memory who killed several workers on their farm. Faye was sixty-nine and her husband, Ray, was seventy-five at the time of their killings. Not only did they keep a diary of all their victims, but Faye took pleasure in making a quilt for a bed out of articles of their clothing.

  Again, according to standard profile, a serial killer works on his own. However, there have been many examples of killers who have worked in pairs, once again disproving this theory. Perhaps one of the most notorious killer pairs was Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, also known as ‘The Hillside Stranglers’. They were cousins who inflicted terror in Southern California during the 1970s. Martha Beck, an obese woman with a hatred of other females, and Raymond Fernandez, a conman who procured money and valuables from gullible single women, met in 1947 and formed another unique but deadly coupling.

  Mass murderers tend to come under a different category to the serial killer in that they are generally apprehended shortly after the event. Very often they will turn themselves into the authorities or, on some occasions, take their own lives. The mass murderer is usually someone who aspires to more than they can achieve and blame other people for their lack of success. They often feel excluded from the society to which they desperately wish to belong, and develop an irrational hatred of that group of people. Very often they choose to die in the violence which is directed at the group they feel oppresses or threatens them. The mass murderer is usually seen as a deranged soul who is out to annihilate their avengers, whether it is through unemployment, loneliness, a family breakup or simply a reprimand from someone in a superior position. Unlike the serial killer, it is very rare that we ever hear of a mass murderer having the opportunity to carry out a second series of killings.

  Cannibalism, or the eating of human body parts, has been around for a long time, but when it is done out of sheer pleasure, it makes the thought even more horrifying. The first recorded killer cannibal was a man called Sawney Beane, who lived in the late sixteenth century. He lived in a cave with his wife, fourteen children and twenty-two grandchildren, who all survived by eating the flesh of any travellers who passed by. Of course in recent years, cannibalism has been glorified by the film world in the stories of Hannibal Lecter, a psychoanalyst with a taste for human flesh. But perhaps what many people don’t realise is that Lecter’s story was loosely based around the characters of real-life models – Albert Fish, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein. It is fair to say that the truth about real-life cannibals is far scarier than their fictional counterparts.

  They love the night, they drink blood, they want to meet you . . . yes, real vampires do exist and Fiendish Killers gives gory details of their shocking stories. We have all heard about Dracula, but did you know that his character was based on a real-life, fifteenth-century vampire by the name of Vlad ‘The Impaler’ Tepes, who loved nothing more than to impale his victims on stakes. Arnod Paole, who told his wife he had fears of a premature death, came back to haunt the living in the form of a vampire in the eighteenth century. When his body was exhumed, not only did they find fresh blood on his lips, but when a stake was plunged through his heart, the wound spurted fresh blood and the corpse cried out in pain.

  Although there can never be a strictly accurate guideline that can be followed, police investigators try to follow some sort of pattern when trying to track down a killer. It is imperative that they keep an open mind, because it would be too easy just to dismiss a person because he or she didn’t fit into their profile. As the police delve deeper into the phenomenon of the fiendish killer, all too often the secrets behind their actions are actually buried with their victims.

  PART ONE: Cannibals

  Sawney Bean

  The notorious Alexander ‘Sawney’ Bean was a Scottish cannibal who, along with his incestuously bred extended family, is reputed to have robbed, murdered, dismembered, pickled and eaten at least 1,000 travellers in the remote part of Ayrshire where the clan lived. After surviving for over twenty-five years in this way, Bean’s reign of terror eventually came to an end when he and his evil brood were discovered and captured by an army of soldiers led by King James VI of Scotland (who later became James I of England). They were brought to justice, and their horrific punishment described in the Newgate Calendar, a record of criminals that passed through Newgate Prison in London during that period. However, some believe that the account of the Bean clan’s crimes is wildly exaggerated, and that although there may be some basis of truth to the legend, it is essentially a myth. Be that as it may, today, the story of Sawney Bean has become part of Scottish folklore, and is certainly illustrative of the barbaric lawlessness of the area at the time.

  Cannibal cave dwellers

  Alexander Bean was said to have been born in East Lothian, the son of a ditch digger and hedge trimmer. The young boy, nicknamed ‘Sawney’, followed in his father’s footsteps and took up the family trade, but his apprenticeship was short-lived. He had a vicious nature that alienated him from other people, and showed little appetite for regular work. Soon, he felt that the life of an honest labourer was not for him, and decided to make his living in other ways. Having met a young woman, described in the Newgate Calendar as equally vicious, they went to live in a cave by the sea at Bannane Head, near Galloway in
what is now South Ayrshire. This cave was flooded each day by the tide, and was 183 metres (200 yards) deep, with many passages and corridors extending a long way into the rockface. Because the entrance was so often blocked by water, few people knew it was there, and thus the Beans lived there undetected for many years. Today, the cave has been identified as Bennane Cave, which is situated between Ballantrae and Girvan in Ayrshire.

  It was not long before the Beans had children: eight sons and six daughters. Between them, the sons and daughters incestuously produced more progeny: eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters, all of them living in the damp cave together. None of them went out to work, but all survived by a particularly grisly means: they robbed passing travellers and then murdered them, bringing the bodies of their victims back to the cave to rip them apart and eat them. Legend has it that the Beans did not even bother to cook the human meat, but simply tore it to shreds with their teeth, like animals. In a barely more civilised ritual, they took to pickling the leftovers, which sometimes washed up on the local beaches.

  Lynch mob

  Not surprisingly, the local villagers and townspeople began to notice the travellers and others who went missing, not to mention the unsavoury body parts that occasionally appeared on the beach. By this time there were forty-eight mouths in the Bean family to feed, so the death toll of travellers and wanderers who had the misfortune to pass by the cave and were never seen again, was beginning to go up rapidly. However, according to the Newgate source, nobody living in the area realised that there was a tribe of vicious cannibals living in the cave. This was, apparently, because the Beans always stayed at home during the day, and only came out at night to commit their evil crimes.

  As the murders increased, the local townspeople began to agitate to find the culprits, and soon several individuals were arrested and charged with murder. A number of innkeepers were accused of the murders, often because they had been the last people to see the victims alive. In some cases, the suspects were even lynched, but to no avail: the murders continued to take place, and the mystery of who was behind them remained unsolved.