Inside the dark mind of a psychopathic serial killer

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Despite the lack of an official pronouncement, law enforcement authorities believe that the murder and dismemberment two weeks ago of Terri Lynn Bills, 46, and the brutal slaying of Loretta Jo Gates, 30, in 2012 were the work of the same individual, a serial killer who is highly likely to strike again unless apprehended. The women knew each other, and engaged in high risk behaviors such as drug addiction and prostitution. Their murders were remarkably similar as well. In each, the victim was stabbed to death and then cut to pieces. The body parts were disposed of in different locations and some have yet to be found. The state police and profilers from the FBI Behavioral Science Unit have been called in to assist Niagara Falls City Police in bringing the murderer to justice.)

 

Because of their rarity and their often highly personalized method of operation, serial killers are very often the hardest sort of criminal for law enforcement to lay its gloves on. Very often, much of the serial killer’s work is done before police even realize what it is they’re dealing with.

The history of crime is packed with homicidal maniacs the law never caught up to, in some cases despite the fact that the murderers seemingly did everything in their power the lead the police right to their front door.

The man who set the standard for all serial killers to come, Jack the Ripper, terrorized London’s seedy Whitechapel District in the 1880s and murdered at least five and possibly as many as 11 prostitutes, amusing himself by writing letters to Scotland yard and the press and even, at one point, sending a piece of a human kidney taken from one of his victims.

He had fried and eaten the rest of the organ, he wrote.

In his letters, which some historians still argue the authenticity of, Jack the Ripper described details of his crimes that only the killer could food, and even told investigators when he would kill again. But despite the best efforts of history’s first ever serial killer task force, no arrest was made.

The horrific murders simply stopped, and it is speculated that the Ripper died, was institutionalized or emigrated to America or Australia.

In San Francisco during the late 1960s, the Zodiac Killer took a page from the Ripper’s book in both letter writing and eluding the police, despite slaughtering between five and is own claimed 37 people, for the most part young couples parked in lover’s lanes.

The Zodiac killer wrote his letters in a form of code or cypher, and to this day only one of the letters has been decoded. His spelling was atrocious.

"I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES…” he wrote.

Like the Ripper’s killings in Victorian London, the Zodiac murders in Northern California simply stopped. In both cases, publishing houses have worked overtime to rehash the horror and name this or that individual as a possible suspect. You can’t liable a dead person, and the sex angle in these and other serial killer cases guarantees brisk hardcover sales. 

The most popular exhibit at the Cleveland, Ohio, Police Museum is that dedicated to the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, a serial killer who terrorized the city for much of the 1930s. Also known as the Torso Murderer, this individual specialized in dismemberment.

No less a law enforcement superstar than gangbuster Eliot Ness was brought in to trap the madman, but all was for naught. In fact, recent research has indicated that the killer may have simply moved his base of operations from Cleveland to Youngstown prior to the start of World War II and continued on his demonic path as late as 1950.

But it is the serial killers who were caught that are now used by law enforcement as the basis for “profiling” active killers they are trying to bring to justice.

Ted Bundy is perhaps the most studied serial killer in history. Shortly before his execution, after more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 homicides committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. The true victim count remains unknown, and could be much higher.

Handsome and charismatic, Bundy approached his young, female victims in public places, often pretending to be injured or disabled before overpowering and assaulting them at more secluded locations. He sometimes revisited his secondary crime scenes for hours at a time, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and wild animal activity made further interaction impossible. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, and kept some of the severed heads in his apartment for a period of time as souvenirs.

Following his arrest in Florida in 1978, Bundy recounted his career as a thief, confirming to police that he had shoplifted virtually everything of substance that he owned. "The big payoff for me," he said, "was actually possessing whatever it was I had stolen. I really enjoyed having something ... that I had wanted and gone out and taken."

Possession proved to be an important motive for rape and murder as well. Sexual assault, he said, fulfilled his need to "totally possess" his victims. At first he killed the women "as a matter of expediency ... to eliminate the possibility of [being] caught"; but later, murder became part of the "adventure". "The ultimate possession was, in fact, the taking of the life," he said. "And then ... the physical possession of the remains.”

Bundy also confided in Special Agent William Hagmaier of the FBI about the "deep, almost mystical satisfaction" that he took in murder. "He said that after a while, murder is not just a crime of lust or violence," Hagmaier said. "It becomes possession. They are part of you ... [the victim] becomes a part of you, and you [two] are forever one ... and the grounds where you kill them or leave them become sacred to you, and you will always be drawn back to them."

Bundy told Hagmaier he considered himself an "amateur", an "impulsive" killer in his early years, before moving into what he called his "prime" or "predator" phase at about the time of Lynda Healy's murder in 1974. This implied that he began killing well before 1974—though he never explicitly admitted doing so.”

While awaiting execution, Bundy actually did some consulting work for the FBI on serial killer cases, most notably the never solved Green River killings in 1978. Much of what law enforcement now knows about serial killers sprang from the depraved mind of Ted Bundy, whose loquaciousness was a godsend to investigators.