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

sadomasochistic porn and Nazi paraphernalia. Before long, Hindley was dressing up in S.S. regalia and posing for Brady’s obscene photos—a kinky but relatively harmless pastime compared to the horrors that followed. Beginning in July 1963, the perverted pair murdered a series of children, then buried the corpses in the desolate moors outside Manchester. In the case of one of their victims—a pretty ten-year-old girl named LeslieAnn Downey—the couple forced the child to pose for pornographic pictures, then tape-recorded her tormented pleas before killing her. When the tape was played at the 1966 trial of the Moors Murderers , spectators and jurors alike wept uncontrollably.

    Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; from Bloody Visions trading cards
    (© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)
    Like Brady and Hindley, some deadly duos are unmarried lovers who enjoy serial murder the way other couples savor candle-lit dinners and romantic weekends at a country inn. The “Lonely Hearts Killers,” Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, committed an indeterminate number of homicides in the late 1940s (they confessed to three but were suspected of twenty), including the murder of a two-year-old girl. Right to the bitter end, Beck persisted in seeing their vile affair as a storybook romance, vowing undying love for her sleazeball companion even as she was being led to the chair.
    Carol Bundy took romantic devotion to even more hideous lengths. In the early 1980s, Bundy was the live-in lover of Douglas Clark, a psychopathic killer of prostitutes and necrophiliac dubbed the “Sunset Strip Slayer.” Among his various pleasures, Clark liked to lure young women into his car, shoot them in the temple while they were fellating him, then carrytheir decapitated heads home for further fun and games. On at least one occasion, Bundy helped out by playing beautician—applying lipstick and makeup to one of the heads and giving it a pretty hairdo. As soon as she was done, her boyfriend took the head into the bathroom and used it for oral sex. “We had a lot of fun with her,” Bundy later confessed. “I made her up like a Barbie.”
    In the early 1990s, Barbie was invoked again in the case of a killer couple. Only this time, the doll’s name was connected not to a victim but to one of the perpetrators.
    Known as the “Ken and Barbie” killers because of their golden good looks, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were a Canadian husband-wife team, perfectly matched in their mutual depravity. Their first victim was Homolka’s own fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy. In December 1990, after a Christmas Eve dinner in the Homolka home, Paul plied the teenager with tranquilizer-laced drinks. Once she was out cold, he videotaped Karla as she performed oral sex on her little sister. Bernardo then raped the young girl while Karla held a drug-soaked cloth over Tammy’s mouth to keep her unconscious. Unfortunately, the drug—an animal sedative called halothane stolen from the veterinary clinic where Karla worked—caused the girl to throw up and choke to death on her own vomit.
    In the following two years, the monstrously depraved pair kidnapped and videotaped the rape, sexual torture, and murder of two more Ontario teenagers: fifteen-year-old Kirsten French and fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy, who was strangled by Bernardo with an electrical cord while she clutched a teddy bear Homolka had given her for comfort.
    Eventually, the pair was arrested. Bernardo was sent to prison for life. In exchange for her full cooperation, Homolka received a lenient sentence. To the outrage of many of her countrymen, she was released in July 2005, after serving twelve years for her role in the atrocities.
    There are other cases of husbands and wives who share a taste for serial murder—couples who add spice to their marriage by indulging in unspeakable crime. Between 1978 and 1980, Charlene Gallego helped procure teenage victims for her sadistic