The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter Read Free Book Online Page A

portrayed in the media as intellectual prodigies à la Hannibal Lecter—a psychopath so staggeringly erudite that he commits murder to the strains of Mozart and knows Dante by heart in the original Italian.
    Lecter, however, is a purely mythic creation. He is a reflection not of the way serial killers really are but of how they like to think of themselves. In their pathological narcissism—their profoundly misguided sense of their own superiority—serial killers like to imagine that they are criminal masterminds who can outwit the world. Serial killers with genius-level IQs, however, are almost nonexistent. Some, in fact, are profoundly stupid, relying on low criminal cunning rather than brains to elude the law. Ottis Toole, for example—Henry Lee Lucas’s accomplice and the psycho believed responsible for the abduction and murder of little Adam Walsh—had an IQ of 75. Others are profoundly psychotic, lost in their own bizarre worlds of paranoid delusion.
    Even the brightest serial killers are a lot less intelligent than they think. John George Haigh, the infamous British “Acid Bath Murderer” of the 1940s, was a highly intelligent and cultivated man. For all his sophistication, however, he mistakenly believed that the Latin phrase corpus delecti— the legal term for the body of evidence indicating that a crime has occurred—referred to the actual cadaver of a homicide victim. This erroneous belief that a person could not be indicted for murder if no corpse was found eventually led to his undoing.
    Ted Bundy was a law student and rising young figure in the Washington State Republican party.
    Insisting on serving as his own defense lawyer during his murder trial, he turned the proceedings into a travesty and proved the adage that a man who defends himself has a fool for a client.
    Gay serial killer Randy Kraft had an IQ of 129 and made big bucks as a computer consultant. Still, he got himself arrested while driving drunk with a strangled corpse on the passenger seat.
    And when Gary Heidnik—a financial whiz who made a fortune on the stock market—was arrested for keeping chained and tortured “sex slaves” in the basement of his Philadelphia home, the best defense he could come up with at the time of his arraignment was that the women were already there when he moved into the house.
MALE AND FEMALE
    In October 2002, Aileen Wuornos—the Florida hooker who shot seven male motorists in the span of a year—was executed for her crimes. From the time of her arrest, she was widely touted in the media as
    “America’s first female serial killer.” Catchy as that label was, it was completely inaccurate. There have been dozens of female serial killers in our country’s history.
    The phrase “female serial killer” conjures up images of a distaff Jack the Ripper: a lone woman psychopath, coolly stalking and snaring her victims, then butchering and mutilating them in a sex-crazed frenzy. In fact, there are no women who fit that particular model (at least not outside of overheated Hollywood fantasies like Basic Instinct ). When police discover a corpse with its throat slit, its torso cut open, its viscera removed, and its genitals excised, they are justified in making one basic assumption: the perpetrator was a man.
    That doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as a female serial killer. It just means men and women commit serial murder in different ways.
    The sort of atrocities perpetrated by male serial killers—the kind involving rape, mutilation, dismemberment—seem to be a function of particular masculine traits. More specifically, there are unmistakable parallels between this kind of violence—phallic-aggressive, penetrative, rapacious, and (insofar as it commonly gratifies itself upon the bodies of strangers), undiscriminating—and the typical pattern of male sexual behavior. For this reason, it is possible to see sadistic mutilation-murder as a grotesque distortion (or “pathological