The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online Page A

Sunday, Kemper got in a car and headed east. When he reached Colorado, he telephoned his pals on the Santa Cruz police force and confessed. Convicted of eight counts of murder, he was asked what he thought a fitting punishment would be. “Death by torture,” was his reasonable reply. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Q. “What do you think when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?”
A. “One side of me says, ‘I’d like to talk to her, date her.’ The other side of me says, ‘I wonder how her head would look on a stick?’ “
E DMUND K EMPER ,
during a magazine interview
    K IDNEY
    This vital organ has a special significance for crime buffs, since it figures prominently in the case of the most famous serial killer of all time.
    On the evening of September 30, 1888, the anonymous madman who would become known as Jack the Ripper committed two atrocities in quick succession. First, he slit the throat of a Swedish prostitute named Elizabeth Stride. Then—after being interrupted by an approaching wagon—he accosted a forty-three-year-old prostitute named Catherine Eddowes and lured her into a deserted square, where he slashed her windpipe and savaged her body, removing her left kidney.
    Two weeks later—on October 16—a parcel arrived at the home of George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a group of local tradesmen who had organized to assist in the search for the killer. The parcel contained a ghastly surprise—a chunk of kidney (with an inch of renal artery still attached), accompanied by an equally appalling letter addressed to Lusk: “Sir I send you half the kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif I took it out if you only wate a whil longer.” It was signed “Catch me when you can Mister Lusk.”
    The sender’s address on the upper-right-hand corner of the letter said simply: “From Hell.”
    In the weeks since the Ripper first struck, the police had been inundated with letters from cranks claiming to be the killer, and at first, there weremany who declared that this latest communication was nothing but a depraved hoax. The kidney, they proclaimed, had either been taken from a dog or removed from a dissecting room. Examination by a specialist from the London Hospital Museum, however, revealed not only that the kidney was human but that it had come from a middle-aged alcoholic woman who suffered (as did Catherine Eddowes) from Bright’s disease. Moreover, the inch of renal artery still attached to the preserved piece of kidney precisely matched the severed arterial remains in Eddowes’s eviscerated body.
    There seemed little doubt that the ghastly human artifact sent to George Lusk was the real thing—or that the note that accompanied it was an authentic communication from the Whitechapel Butcher. To this day, the “From Hell” letter is regarded as the only apparently genuine message ever sent by the legendary killer.
    K ILLER C OUPLES
    Can a woman live with a man for many years without knowing he is a homicidal sex maniac? Apparently so. Some of the most infamous serial killers in history—among them Albert “Boston Strangler” DeSalvo , Peter Kürten , and Andrei Chikatilo —were married to women who had no inkling of their husbands’ sinister secret lives. It’s possible to feel sorry for such women, who eventually discover, to their uttermost dismay, that they’ve been mated to monsters.
    There is, however, another type of woman who—far from inspiring sympathy—elicits only loathing and disbelief. This is the wife or lover of a serial killer who is not only aware of the horrors her man commits but also actively participates in them.
    Perhaps the most infamous of this breed is Myra Hindley. A shy, twenty-three-year-old typist from Manchester, England, Hindley led an unremarkable life until she hooked up with Ian Brady, a psychopathic creep with a taste for