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

the Ripper to the Boston Strangler, there were many cases in between, but rarely any attempts tograsp exactly what was going on. These homicides were perceived as isolated acts of animalistic depravity, sometimes called “lust murders,” a symptom of the modern industrialized world, we thought.
    It would be Ted Bundy who would define for us the new postmodern serial killer role model. His story first slowly trickled out in Colorado in 1977, when he was linked to seventeen homicides of young women, and then grew into a torrent everywhere after his two escapes and three subsequent murders in Florida. Many of his victims were “respectable” college students, and so was he. As Bundy’s trial in Florida was televised live and the scope of his secret life began to be understood, the concept of a particular type of multiple murderer who kills serially began to take form in popular lore. Ann Rule’s classic account of Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, pioneered a whole new resurgence of true-crime literature. It introduced the general public to the concept of serial murder, even though the term never appeared in the text of her 1980 book.
    Jack the Ripper was always imagined as an aristocrat with a top hat—the best of our society gone worst. The serial killers who followed were portrayed as depraved monsters—freaks of nature—outcasts and drifters whose demented criminal features should have given them away. But not Bundy—he was like so many of us: an attractive college student with typical ambitions who drove a cute Volkswagen bug. He was an updated and egalitarianized version of Jack the Ripper—a killer of superior social qualities attributed to all the young middle-class upwardly mobile professionals taking over America. In other words, unlike serial killers of the past, he was not one of “them” but one of “us.”
    After Bundy, the crimes of Corona, Corll, and the Son of Sam began to take on a different perspective, and when people backtracked, they learned that there had been more serial killings recently than we realized. Near where Bundy started murdering, shoe fetishist Jerry Brudos had killed four women in 1968–1969, cutting off their feet; in Michigan, John Norman Collins murdered seven young women between 1967 and 1969. And apparently there were others who entered guilty pleas, while some never went to trial by reason of insanity, so we never heard much about them. In Santa Cruz, California, John Frazier killed five people in 1970, while Edmund Kemper, also in Santa Cruz, killed eight women between 1972 and 1973; at about the same time, in Santa Cruz once again, Herbert Mullin killed thirteen people. That one California town contributed a huge body count all on its own.
    Toward the end of the 1970s Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono dumped their ten victims on Hollywood hillsides and Wayne Williams threw the last five of his twenty-two victims into the river in Atlanta, while Richard Cottingham cut the heads and hands off his and set their torsos on fire in fleabag hotels in New York City. By now everyone knew what this was. By then the FBI was on it, trying to figure it out by asking the killers themselves what they thought they were doing and why. From those interviews a new system of criminal profiling would emerge. In the meantime, more and more new reports kept coming in, faster and faster:
    In Chicago, a middle-aged man was a successful construction contractor and a respected figure in his community. He led the annual Polish Constitution Day parade and in his spare time he volunteered to entertain sick children at local hospitals, dressed as “Pogo the Clown.” He was a Democratic Party precinct captain and when the president’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, was in Chicago on a community visit, he was one of her escorts. In his house, buried in a basement crawl space, police found the trussed-up corpses of twenty-eight boys and young men. John