Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters Read Online Free Page A

warning us kids to “duck and cover” when the bomb fell hadn’t gotten to us before, then after the Kennedy assassination the world definitely became spooky forever. 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. Twelve is a lot even by today’s standards—academics studying serial homicide describe it as an “extreme” case: more than eight. (How did they come up with that number—why not seven or nine?)
    Things would get worse quickly. The times that followed were hyper-violent. People were being killed everywhere: in their homes, in church, at work, in the streets, overseas at war, in rice paddies, on college campuses, in cotton-belt bayous, in shopping centers, in riots. It was confusing. It was coming to and from all over, and out of it would spring forth occasional monstrous episodes: In 1966 we heard that in Chicago some alcoholic drifter killed eight student nurses in one hot amphetamine-frenzied night of binding, strangling, and stabbing. Three weeks later a crazed collegeboy in Texas climbed a clock tower with a high-powered rifle and gunned down forty-five people, killing sixteen. Then Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were shot months apart, with more street riots in between. And when our boys came home from My Lai as baby killers and Sharon Tate was hacked to death by crazed hippies, we could not imagine it getting any worse. But then the 1970s had not crawled in on us yet.
    The first big case of that decade to reach public notice occurred in May 1971. Again, even by today’s standards, the number was huge; police dug up twenty-six bodies of transient agricultural workers in a California peach orchard. Juan Corona, a labor contractor and a father of four children, was charged with the murders. We did not get it: How can someone kill that many people and nobody noticed it? That they were killed over a prolonged period of time just did not compute. Nor was there much follow-up in the press—it looked like Corona was simply insane, and to boot, according to the press, some kind of closet-homosexual aberrant, while the victims were all transient agricultural workers and Mexicans hardly worth mourning over.
    Likewise two years later, reports of Dean Corll’s murder of twenty-seven transient male youths in Houston also quickly faded, for he was a “white-trash homo,” and he was dead, as were his delinquent runaway victims—no trial, no story, nobody cared. The big wave was yet to come. A recent study of serial homicides in the United States between 1800 and 1995 discovered that 45 percent of known serial homicides would occur in the recent twenty-year period between 1975 and 1995. 5
    In 1976–1977, David Berkowitz was systematically shooting women in Queens, New York, and sending taunting letters à la Jack the Ripper, signed “Son of Sam,” to the police and press. This time everybody noticed when college girls on the way home from school or on dates were being slaughtered. New York City was in a panic. When Berkowitz was captured we were surprised by how mild-mannered, soft, and pudgy the killer looked. Again, he seemed totally insane, claiming to receive orders from a black dog, and that was sufficient explanation for us.
    The whole serial-sequential aspect of these murders somehow slipped by us. These crimes were perceived as inexplicable, sudden explosive acts of deranged monsters, a perception that was still rooted in the 1880s with our experiences of Jack the Ripper. From Jack