Through the Eyes of Serial Killers: Interviews with Seven Murderers

www.erichickey.com

I lived through four years of horror and suffering, haunted by stories of brutal attacks and images of bodies mutilated by serial killers. It’s like drugs or alcohol — you know it’s bad for you, but for one reason or another you’re addicted. You suffer; you want to quit, but you don’t. In my case I was thirsty — thirsty for more knowledge, discovery, understanding; this despite the harm my thirst sometimes caused me.

I am often asked where my interest in such a horrible subject came from. It’s simple: I didn’t understand all this violence. Even today, I still see the victims being tortured, suffering, terrified, fighting for their lives. How could anyone commit such horrible crimes? And why?

I was only supposed to write one article on serial killers. But the further my research progressed, the more I wanted to understand what could lead such people to destroy the lives of others. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to dig deeper into their motivations. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was looking for answers for myself, to heal my own wounds.

When I was a child, my life was shattered when I was attacked by a merciless repeat offender. At the time, I did not have much hope for survival. Although my attacker was not a murderer, he followed the same progression that serial killers do before they start to kill. His aim was to control his victims, to make them suffer, and to terrorize them. The people he attacked were young and much weaker than he was. Understanding the psychological progression of people toward these crimes was a form of therapy for me.

I hope some of the explanations I put forward here will help ease the pain of victims who have escaped from their attackers. They need to understand that their assault is not about them, that they are not the cause of the problem, that the source lies in certain circumstances that influenced the predator’s life. Because I had to interview criminals who attacked innocent people, I also wanted to understand the psychology of individuals who commit repeated acts of violence.

Before I undertook this study, I had been troubled by one case in particular. In an apartment complex on Paton Island in the suburbs of Montreal, serial killer William Fyfe stabbed a resident to death. Dressed as a workman, he pretended to be a plumber who had come to check the water pipes in the apartments. He knocked on one door after another until a woman alone in her apartment answered. He stole her bank card and forced her to reveal her PIN, then he raped her and killed her. He also attacked a number of women in the west end of greater Montreal in the same manner. As we see in this case, some serial killers can have several motivations. Fyfe was after money, but he also often assaulted his victims sexually. My mother, who has since died of cancer, lived very close to that building, in the same type of apartment complex. What if he had knocked at my mother’s apartment? Thus, in writing this book, excusing what these aggressors have done is the furthest thing from my mind.

But if we want to rid the world of this sort of violence someday, we need to discover where all the hatred that serial killers harbour comes from. Study of the phenomenon of serial killers is ongoing, and we’re learning more every day. In particular, we need to ensure that the early warning signs of these behaviours are widely understood. In this way, we could seek help to stop these acts before they happen, as we already do with other kinds of violent behaviour.

Serial killers represent a very small proportion of the population, but their victims are more numerous than we think, as they are not just those who are murdered; there are also families — spouses, parents, brothers, sisters, and children who will grow up without a mother or a father — as well as friends and neighbours who will afterward live in fear. Predators’ families are also affected by these tragedies, suffering shame, psychological distress, rejection, and guilt. Since each serial killer kills ten people on average, the victims of the fifty or so known serial killers in Canada number in the thousands. In the United States, the FBI believes that about 500 serial killers are at large, other experts estimate the number at between 35 and 100. And there are the unsolved murders that are never attributed to these killers.

Some serial killers have been released after serving their sentences, such as the German killer nurse Wolfgang Lange, who was convicted of ten murders. Or Loren Herzog, who with an accomplice killed at least five young women in California (Herzog later killed himself). Or Pedro Alonso López, a Colombian who raped and killed more than 300 girls in Ecuador and Peru and vowed that he would never stop killing. López’s current whereabouts are unknown.

A serial killer might seem completely normal at first glance, and might well have a wife and children. Unmasking such a person can be very difficult. How can an apparently normal person commit murders in cold blood and torture and massacre innocent people?

In the killer’s upbringing, was there a distress signal? Could something have changed their life if someone had intervened? Could their desire for control have been satisfied in another way? What does the killer feel, deep down, when attacking one of his victims? Why does the killer act differently with people who are close?

Before writing this book, I read for months, from nine o’clock in the morning to eleven at night or until I was exhausted. I read books on particular killers and serial killers in general, on how to interrogate them, on criminology, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, childhood, delinquency, bullying, profiling, sex murders.

My reading on the subject gave me nightmares. I was constantly on guard when I walked down the street. It was painful to read all the details of these murders and see the photographs of the victims. One day I even saw a video of a man being killed and mutilated. Even if I had prepared myself mentally, all this was very difficult. Now I understood why in some movies, when police officers find a mutilated corpse, they suddenly become sick or end up finding a new job. I had experienced it when I went with firefighters to take photos in buildings destroyed by fire. Of course I had to take photos of corpses. We were prepared to do our work. But seeing a corpse was one thing, and this video was another. I was overcome with nausea when I saw the victim being tortured. The attacker pierced his body repeatedly with a screwdriver, turning it under his skin as the life ebbed out of him.

My sleep was anything but restorative. In my dreams I would be running away from someone or something, and then I would wake up in a sweat, agitated. I wanted to abandon the whole project and forget about serial killers, but people around me reminded me of the months of effort I had already devoted to the subject and encouraged me to keep going.

Despite all the books I was reading, for better or for worse, I was not finding all the answers to my questions. Now I understood that the answers were buried within those troubled souls, the serial murderers themselves.

Before writing to serial killers, I consulted specialists — psychiatrists, profilers, professors — including several who are internationally recognized for their expertise in the field. I gradually put aside the books that were giving me nightmares. Meanwhile, if I had questions, Dr. Eric Hickey, professor of criminology at California State University, Fresno, and dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant University, was always available to answer them. Dr. Hickey assists numerous police forces with occupational training and investigations, and was a consultant to the FBI-led UNABOM task force.* As a specialist in serial killers, he works with the FBI and conducts seminars for agencies in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Despite being very busy, he took the time to provide me with detailed explanations, by email or phone. He was an excellent mentor, which facilitated phase two of the project.

I sent my first request for an interview to a Quebec penitentiary. My hope was to interview Clifford Olson, the British Columbian who had murdered eleven children. My request was denied. Then it occurred to me that I had never read an interview with a Canadian serial killer. It seemed to be much less complicated to contact American serial killers. In addition, while my goal was to understand the phenomenon, I was well aware that Canadian inmates could eventually get out of prison, and I didn’t want to get close to such people. In the United States, by contrast, most serial killers would be locked up for life. To make sure that I wouldn’t be left without an interview subject, I first wrote to all the serial killers whose addresses I could find on the Internet: sixty-four men and ten women. In the end I contacted more than eighty serial killers.

I was a little nervous when I mailed my first letters. Not wanting to leave any lingering ambiguity about the reasons for my initiative, I had inserted the expression serial killers here and there in my letters. How would these people react? Would they be insulted? Offended? Would they try to intimidate me? I had taken the precaution of renting a box at the post office. As well, in some of my letters to the most vicious murderers, I used a pseudonym, until I discovered that many incarcerated serial killers communicated with one another.

While some killers were looking for attention, it didn’t seem to be the case with all of them, as I received only some thirty responses. Twelve declined my invitation on grounds that they weren’t guilty or that they had appealed a verdict and therefore couldn’t speak. Despite all that, nineteen of them seemed prepared to co-operate. The end result consisted of magazine and newspaper articles, totalling about forty pages, and two television documentaries.

To my surprise, almost all the letters were polite in tone and their writers came across as open-minded. Some were written in an elegant hand; others were illegible. Some of the writers drew little human figures or elaborate animals.

Only four of the responses were very unpleasant. A killer named Joseph Baldi, for example, was looking for a relationship that was very different from what I had in mind. I would like to love you for my life ok, he wrote to me. His handwriting was legible but a bit childish, and his language was simple-minded. He had drawn two rudimentary faces on the envelope, each divided in two and coloured yellow and orange. He had scribbled something on the back of the envelope that was hard to decipher. I didn’t write back to him.

Bobby Joe Long hoped that a friendship would develop out of our correspondence, and he couldn’t open himself up to me because he had lodged an appeal. I replied that for me the correspondence was strictly professional. He was not pleased with this, and told me so in a rather aggressive tone.

David Bullock was one of the rare serial killers who had attacked people of both sexes. His response was designed to intimidate me. In summary, he said that I would not have the mental strength to interview a serial killer, in a threatening tone. Thus, I called a friend who is an investigator to see if the killer was a danger to me. I scanned and emailed the letter to the investigator. He had the letter analyzed by a graphologist, and assured me that I would not be taking a risk. So I wrote back to David Bullock, and in his response, once again arrogant in tone, he refused my request for an interview. Several months later I tried again, and he sent me a drawing of the face of a fearsome wolf that looked as if it was about to devour me. I was not going to play his game, so I let it drop.

Another killer, a nurse who had poisoned his patients, wrote me a letter that showed that he too was seeking to exercise his power, intelligence, and desire to control everything. I replied that we had different priorities and thanked him. I was looking for murderers who were prepared to open up and who had passed the stage where they wanted to prove to themselves that they could control others.

Yet another, Joe Roy Metheny, wrote to me several times. He always drew someone having sex with a snowball or a woman on the envelope, and accompanied his signature with a blood stain on his stationery.

Herbert Mullin was an interesting case: one of the few serial killers with paranoid schizophrenia. He had heard voices ordering him to kill as many people as possible to ward off catastrophic earthquakes in California. Convicted of thirteen murders, he was not prepared to dredge up past events; he thought this could be damaging to him after all the therapy he had undergone. He was hoping to be released on parole in 2025.

As I said, a number of people wrote to me to proclaim their innocence. One of these was Nathanael Bar-Jonah, who had his own letterhead with a number of drawings representing bandits, love, family, and animals, and a quote:

You may find God in the laughter of your children; the grief of a friend; the opening of forsythias after a long winter; the noisy joyfulness of birds and wind; or the quiet testimony of ants and cobwebs. God’s altar is everywhere and in everything.

T. Byram Karasu

Bar-Jonah said he had been framed by a policeman whose sexual advances he had rejected.

Another man, Carlton Michael Gary, acknowledged having committed a few crimes, but said he had never killed anyone. He was well educated and had an artist’s temperament. His letter was written in large script inclined slightly to the left, and each page was folded individually. Into the envelope he had slipped a photocopy of a newspaper article that proclaimed his innocence, saying his fingerprints and other proof factors didn’t correspond. The article was part of an investigation by British journalist David Rose, who fought to exonerate Gary. But a few years after our initial exchange, a case of rape and murder was attributed to Gary following DNA analysis.

However, the murderers I interviewed never denied their guilt. In opening up to me, they described their motivations, clarified the psychological causes of what they did, explained how to help young people, and talked about preventive security. I hope their testimony will answer many questions that readers have, and evoke others.

Here is an opportunity to get inside these people’s minds and hearts, to understand their personalities, their past, their traumas, explained in their own words.

In the end, no one understands what motivates serial killers better than the serial killers themselves.

* University and Airlines Bomber. The UNABOM case, which gave rise to the name Unabomber, led to the most expensive manhunt in the FBI’s history. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was arrested on April 3, 1996.

While in the jungle of Cambodia and Vietnam, I cut the head from an enemy female that was placing AK-47s in a half-hollowed-out tree.… I came out behind her and swung the machete and cut the head from the body. It bled out quite a lot and it took me two more times to chop the head completely off.… I wired both legs together and dragged the body up the path to the first hut I came to.… I came to another hut.… I saw a young female placing a spring in one of our C-ration cans. She was making a personal bomb! I tapped the door post and motioned her back towards me with the palm of my hand facing down. Like you might half cup the hand in motion. She set down the can and backed towards me and climbed down. I tied her hands behind her with stovepipe wire and blindfolded her plus gagged her. Picked her up and carried her up the side of the hill into the trees and stood her up against a huge teak tree. I untied her and tied her hands behind the tree with part wire and strips of bark. Then returned for that body. When the girl saw me again and the body of the woman she did not flinch. But when I cut the body in half and cut off the right leg at the hip and knee she was shocked. She watched my every move too. I carried the body that was not wanted up next to a large mount and I tapped the outer edge of the mount and the ants came out quickly and covered the body fast and started to tear it apart.… I stripped the skin from the leg (which was about four inches across), then removed the cords and larger veins. Poured water over it and powder rock salt. Placed over the flames and it cooked down somewhat like a roast.… When I went back and picked up the meat I bit into and ripped off a chunk and started to chew.

Arthur Shawcross, the Genesee River Monster, sat across from me in a small room, about six square metres in area, in an American maximum-security prison. As he had requested, he was not handcuffed and we were alone, seated on plastic chairs with metal legs and separated by a small wooden table. The guards observed us through a large window, watching carefully.

After explaining to me how he had cut off and then eaten the vagina of one of his victims, he looked me in the eye and said, Give me your hand.…

CHAPTER 1

NAME: Arthur John Shawcross

NICKNAME: The Genesee River Monster

DATE OF BIRTH: June 6, 1945

MARITAL STATUS: Divorced five times

TIME SPAN OF MURDERS: 1972–1989

NUMBER OF MURDERS: Thirteen — a little boy, a little girl, and eleven prostitutes

CURRENT STATUS: Died of a heart attack, November 10, 2008

It was a clear night in September 2007, the highway dimly lit by the pale glow of the moon. As I drove, my mind was on the challenge the next day would bring. In a few hours, I would conduct my first interview with a serial killer.

Karen Ann Hill’s bloodstained body was found face down on the ground in 1972 in Watertown, New York, a town of 30,535 people (at the time) near the Ontario border. The eight-year-old girl with mid-length chestnut hair had been strangled, raped, and sodomized, and parts of her genitals had been ripped off. Four days later, the decomposed body of ten-year-old Jack Blake was unearthed. He had been killed four months before Hill.

Arthur Shawcross was arrested for the girl’s murder. As part of a plea bargain he revealed where he had buried Blake’s body, and as a result was not charged with his murder but only with Hill’s. Twenty-seven years old at the time, Shawcross was sentenced to twenty-five years, but served only fourteen and a half years before being released for good behaviour. He took a horticulture course in prison and passed with a B.

Everyone in Watertown knew about Shawcross, so it wasn’t surprising that he had so much trouble putting his life back together after he got out of prison. He moved about two hundred kilometres, to Rochester, where a year later police found the bodies of twelve women who had been savagely beaten, strangled, and sometimes mutilated. When Shawcross stopped his car near one victim to urinate, police noticed him and arrested him. He was convicted of the murder of ten women, most of them prostitutes, and sentenced to 250 years in prison. He later confessed to an eleventh murder.

Shawcross piqued my curiosity because he was one of the few serial killers who suddenly changed the kind of person he murdered. Most serial killers have a fixed preference for people of a particular kind to whom they are especially drawn. They could be children, women, men, or people of a particular race, age, or occupation. The victims are usually of the same race as the killer, although I know of one case where a white murderer, Larry Bright, killed only African Americans. These were not hate crimes — Bright was just fascinated by African American women. As for Shawcross, he killed children, then prostitutes, and his last victim was an African American woman. It was an unusual trajectory.

At the time I saw him, he had served seventeen years of his second prison sentence. Reading his profile, I understood why he had been nicknamed the Genesee River Monster. One day, when a woman who had been living in his house for two months and had done housework for him threatened to tell his wife about their relationship, he bludgeoned her to death, decapitated her, and threw her head in the river.

After one of his last murders, Shawcross went back to the scene of the crime to cut off and eat parts of his victim’s genitals. It made me think of The Silence of the Lambs, the 1991 movie loosely based on the extremely morbid story of the 1950s serial killer Ed Gein. The violent beatings Gein sustained from his unemployed, alcoholic father caused his ears to ring into adulthood. His mother abused him psychologically, instilling in him the idea that all women — except, of course, her — were prostitutes and instruments of the devil, and that sex was diabolical. It is not surprising that he never had a girlfriend. In addition to being under the thumb of his mother, who was never satisfied with her two sons, Gein was bullied in school. Much later, his older brother, who had resisted their mother’s influence, was found dead. The authorities suspected that Gein had killed him, but had no proof. He was thirty-seven at the time.

When his mother died, Gein lost his only friend. He left her room intact and blocked it off, while he lived alone in the house, using only the kitchen and his own room. He began to dig up the corpses of women in cemeteries, cut off their heads, and analyze their bodies. Then he shot two women to death with a revolver so that he could examine them in the same way. He was also suspected of killing five other women. He sometimes had sex with their bodies. Serial killers will often keep souvenirs of their victims; Gein had a special talent for souvenirs. He made a variety of objects out of his victims’ body parts — belts, lamps, jewellery, and lampshades out of skin, a salad bowl out of a skull. He made himself a vest from his victims’ skin and a belt out of nipples. However, Gein was a special case, an example showing that madness isn’t necessarily innate but can develop.

The more recent case of Robert Pickton was also somewhat reminiscent of Shawcross. The British Columbia farmer, whose victims were prostitutes, was suspected of mixing human flesh with pork in the sausages he fed to relatives and friends. Shawcross also had a history of cannibalism.

These were the details that led me to want to make contact with Shawcross. By then sixty-two years old, Shawcross agreed to talk to me about the murders of the two children, on the condition that we would be alone in a closed room and he would not be handcuffed. I was so intrigued by the case and by the prospect of meeting him that I accepted his proposition. I was fully aware that he had nothing to lose — no matter what happened he would be in prison until he died. Well, not quite nothing: he did have some privileges, such as a job that provided him with some money. If he acted in bad faith he could be confined to his cell for all but an hour a day. But wouldn’t a fresh piece of flesh be worth it? To have the opportunity to touch a woman after all these years, or even just to frighten her — how long had it been since he had been alone with a woman? While there would be as many as five guards watching us from the other side of the window, it would take him only a few seconds to attack me. Would that give him an emotional charge? Maybe. He was a cannibal — how long it would take him to bite off my ear? Still, I was ready for whatever was going to happen. I took the precaution of not wearing any jewellery — earrings or a necklace — leaving nothing that he could grab or pull on. I didn’t want to take any more risks than necessary.

My hotel, the closest one to the penitentiary, was in the small town of Liberty, New York. When I arrived in Liberty I suddenly felt nervous. I felt like I was alone in the middle of nowhere. The hotel was on one of the main streets of the 4,000-person town — it felt more like an average neighbourhood street in Montreal. There was a Pizza Hut, a coffee shop, a Wendy’s. Some of the buildings were a dull brick colour, like in a western, while others were painted in typical 1980s colours — rose pink, lime green. Many of the large foundations were poorly maintained, looking like old, crumbling garages or sheds. This town did not feel good to me.

There weren’t many places to stay in the area, and this hotel had been recommended to me by the penitentiary’s public relations officer. It occurred to me that Shawcross might also know where I was staying that night. Could he have contacts in town?

So it took some resolve on my part to stay at the hotel. Following the receptionist’s advice, I parked my car some distance away and came back to the hotel by the back door. My room was near this door, which was not bolted. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the stories I had read of serial killers who massacred people in their own homes. One of them, Richard Ramirez, tortured entire families, sometimes tearing out their eyes, raping them, and killing them, but often leaving one terrorized family member alive. Ramirez killed in the name of Satan, with a hammer, a knife, and a gun. Tommy Lynn Sells, Rex Allen Krebs, Timothy Wayne Krajcir, and Anthony Allen Shore also broke into their victims’ houses. I had read too much!

Whether I’m interviewing a professional athlete, a famous musician, or a serial killer, I generally don’t sleep well the night before the interview. I keep getting up to jot down a question or some facts. But on this night it was my fear about the hotel’s unbolted back door that kept me up. I didn’t sleep a wink.

I left my room early in the morning and drove to another small town, Fallsburg, where I took a narrow back road that led to the maximum-security Sullivan Correctional Facility. The penitentiary also housed David Son of Sam Berkowitz, another notorious serial killer. Berkowitz described himself as a member of a satanic cult and was one of the few serial killers who shot his victims with a revolver. This method of killing is rare in serial killers because it doesn’t provide the feeling of intimacy with the victim that most killers seek. However, Berkowitz did find sexual pleasure in masturbating near his victims once they were dead or wounded. He also killed people of both sexes. As Dr. Pierre Gagné, head of forensic psychiatry at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke, explained to me, murders of a sexual nature are generally committed by men who masturbate while fantasizing about violence and human suffering. They feel a need for vengeance and the impression that they are