The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online

body! What power I feel at the thought of fire … Oh, what a pleasure, what a heavenly pleasure! I see the flames and no longer is a fire just a daydream. It is the reality of heaven on earth! I love the excitement of the power fire gives me … The mental image is greater than sex!
    —Joseph Kallinger
    3. Animal Torture. Juvenile sadism directed at lower life-forms is nothing new. There have always been children and adolescents (usually male) who enjoy hurting small creatures. Certainly Shakespeare knew about such things. In King Lear, he writes about “wanton boys” who pull the wings off of flies for
    “sport.” And in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the hero finds himself in a one-horse town where a bunch of young loafers are amusing themselves by tying a tin pan to the tail of a stray dog and watching him “run himself to death.”
    As disturbing as such behavior is, however, it pales beside the kinds of cruelties perpetrated by budding serial killers. As an adolescent, Peter Kürten took pleasure from performing intercourse with various animals while simultaneously stabbing them or slitting their throats. At ten, Edmund Kemper buried his family cat alive in the backyard. Afterward, he dug up the carcass, brought it back to his bedroom, cut off the head, and stuck it on a spindle. Three years later, after his mother brought a new cat into the house, Kemper sliced off the top of its skull with a machete, then held its foreleg while it showered him with blood.
    Besides collecting roadkill, little Jeffrey Dahmer liked to nail live frogs to trees, cut open goldfish to see how their innards worked, and perform impromptu surgery on stray dogs and cats. Dennis Nilsen—the so-called British Jeffrey Dahmer—once hanged a cat just to see how long it would take to die. Albert DeSalvo enjoyed trapping house pets in wooden crates and shooting them with a bow and arrow, while Carroll Cole (aka the “Barfly Strangler”) got a kick out of choking the family dog unconscious.
    Other violent psychopaths have disemboweled their pets, burned them alive, fed them ground glass, and cut off their paws.
    According to ASPCA therapist Dr. Stephanie LaFarge, “anyone who hurts animals has the potential to move on to people.” Of course, most boys who commit minor acts of childhood sadism outgrow such behavior and look back with shame at the time they blew up an anthill with a cherry bomb or dismembered a daddy longlegs. By contrast, the cruelties perpetrated by incipient serial killers grow more extreme over time, until they are targeting not stray animals and house pets but other human beings.
    For them animal torture isn’t a stage. It’s a rehearsal.
    I found a dog and cut it open just to see what the insides looked like, and for some reason I thought it would be a fun prank to stick the head on a stake and set it out in the woods.
    —Jeffrey Dahmer
    These two scenes from William Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) depict the transition from animal cruelty to sex murder. In the first, a London street urchin named Tom Nero tortures a dog. In the second, the grown-up Tom has just been apprehended after slitting the throat of his pregnant lover.
    HOW SMART ARE SERIAL KILLERS?
    There’s a simple explanation for the fact that so many serial killers have above-average IQs. Generally speaking, it requires a certain degree of intelligence to get away with repeated acts of homicide. There are plenty of sex criminals who have committed atrocious acts of mutilation-murder. Fortunately, most of them are so sloppy or stupid that they are caught right away and so never have a chance to become serial offenders. “I’ve seen many murderers who might well have gone on to become serial killers,”
    criminal psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis testified, “if they’d had the wits not to get arrested.”
    Still, there’s a tendency to exaggerate the mental capacities of serial killers, particularly since they are so often