Evil Psychopaths, page 16
Dahmer had, by this time, already killed his second victim, Steven Toumi, in a hotel room in September that year. He had picked him up in a gay bar and the two went to a hotel to drink and have sex. When he woke up next morning, Dahmer found Tuomi dead. He stuffed his body into a large suitcase, took it to the basement of his grandmother’s house, had sex with it and masturbated over it before dismembering it and disposing of it in the rubbish.
His third victim was fourteen-year-old Native American, Jamie Doxtator and the fourth was Richard Guerro in March 1988.
His grandmother began to object to the noise and partying in Dahmer’s room in the basement and so he moved into his own apartment in September, 1988. The next day he picked up thirteen-year-old Laotian boy called Sinthasomphone, who agreed to pose for photographs for $50. By grim coincidence, he was the older brother of a boy Dahmer would kill in 1991.
But he did not kill Sinthasomphone and, when the boy returned home, his parents realised he had been drugged. The cops picked Dahmer up on charges of sexual exploitation of a child and second-degree sexual assault. He pleaded guilty, claiming he thought the boy was older.
However, even as he awaited sentencing, he struck again, killing Anthony Sears, a handsome black model. Dahmer boiled the skull to remove the skin and painted it grey. He still had it when he was arrested.
In court, Dahmer put on the kind of manipulative performance only a psychopath can and he escaped the prison sentence being demanded by the prosecution, receiving five years’ probation. He was also ordered to spend a year in the House of Correction under ‘work release’, which meant he went to work during the day and returned to jail at night. In spite of a letter from Dahmer’s father, pleading with the judge not to release him without treatment, he was released after just ten months and went to live with his grandmother, before moving into his rooms in the Oxford apartments in May 1990.
Exactly a year later, a naked fourteen-year-old Laotian, Konerak Sinthasomphone, was found wandering on the streets of the Milwaukee neighbourhood in which Dahmer’s flat was located. He talked to a couple of women, but was largely incoherent, having already been drugged by Dahmer. The police were called and took the boy back to Dahmer’s flat to investigate. Dahmer told them, however, that Konerak was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend and that they had had a drunken argument. The police handed the boy over to Dahmer, noting a strange smell in the apartment. Dahmer killed Konerak a few hours later.
From September 1987 to July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer killed sixteen men, the majority of them black. Their ages ranged from fourteen to thirty-one and they all lived high-risk lifestyles.
The killing process was always the same. He picked his victim up at a gay bar, lured him back to the basement to pose for photographs, usually in return for payment, and then he would offer him a drugged drink, strangle him, masturbate on the body or even have sex with it. He would then cut the corpse up and get rid of it. He would take photographs throughout and would also sometimes boil the skull, to remove the flesh and then paint it grey to look like plastic, keeping it and other body parts as mementos. He began experimenting with various chemical methods and acids to dispose of the flesh and bones which would be poured down a drain or flushed away in the toilet. He often preserved the genitals in formaldehyde.
He told police that he also ate some of the flesh of his victims, claiming that by doing so, they would come alive in him again. He experimented with seasoning and meat tenderisers. Eating human meat gave him an erection, he said, and his fridge contained strips of human flesh.
Before they died, he sometimes tried to perform a kind of lobotomy on his victims. After drugging them, he would drill a hole in their skulls and inject muriatic acid into their brains. He was trying to create a functioning zombie-like creature that he could exercise ultimate control over and control, after all, was really what it was all about. Needless to say, most died during this procedure, but one, apparently, survived for a few days.
On 29 January 1992, the jury was selected for Dahmer’s trial. He was indicted on seventeen charges of murder, later reduced to fifteen, to which he pled guilty, against the advice of his legal team, but claiming insanity. His counsel had to pursue the argument that only a person who was insane could have committed Dahmer’s crimes. The prosecution, on the other hand, had to prove that he was legally insane, an evil psychopath who murdered his victims in cold blood and with malice aforethought.
Security in the courthouse was unlike that for any trial in Milwaukee’s history. A sniffer dog was brought in to search for bombs and everyone entering the courtroom was searched and checked with a metal detector. A barrier, eight feet high, made of steel and bullet-proof glass was erected around the place where Dahmer would sit, to protect him from the public.
The jury deliberated for five hours before deciding that Jeffrey Dahmer should go to prison and not hospital. He was found sane and guilty on all fifteen charges.
On the day of his sentencing, he read out a statement, an apology of a kind. 'Your Honour, it is now over. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn't ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. This was a case to tell the world that I did what I did, but not for reasons of hate. I hated no one. I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness, and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused . . . Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins...I ask for no consideration.’
He got none. He was given fifteen life sentences, a total of 957 years in prison.
They sent him to the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin where, for his own safety, he was kept apart from the general prison population. The segregation was not entirely successful, however, as he was attacked by a razor-wielding Cuban one day while leaving the prison chapel. His wounds, however, were superficial.
On the whole, though, he was a model prisoner, becoming a born-again Christian, and gradually persuading the prison authorities to allow him more contact with other inmates. This proved costly for him.
One day, he was paired with two other dangerous inmates on a work detail. One was Jesse Anderson, a white man who had murdered his wife and blamed it on a black man. The other was Christopher Scarver, a black schizophrenic doing time for first-degree murder who suffered from delusions that he was God. It was a volatile combination, Scarver being partnered with one man, Dahmer, who had killed so many black men and another, Anderson, who had tried to blame a black man for a murder he had committed.
On the morning of 28 November 1994, the guard left the three men to get on with their work. He came back twenty minutes later to find Dahmer and Anderson lying in pools of blood. Dahmer’s skull had been smashed in with a broom handle and he was pronounced dead at eleven minutes past nine in an ambulance on the way to hospital.
Ted Bundy
On 7 June 1977, Ted Bundy, vicious serial killer of young women, was visiting the library at the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen during a recess in his trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell in January 1975. Bundy had trained as a lawyer and was doing some research. In a brief unguarded moment, he took advantage of an open window, even though it was a couple of floors up, and jumped, slightly injuring his ankle in the process. He was not wearing handcuffs or leg-irons and so was able to blend in with the shopping crowds in the ski resort of Aspen in Colorado. He walked towards Aspen Mountain, climbing to the top, but lost his way and missed two trails that would have led him to his destination, the town of Crested Butte. On a trail on the mountain, he met one of the search party, but the smooth-talking Bundy easily talked his way out of the difficult situation and carried on his way.
The authorities had immediately set up road blocks at all the town’s main exits, but Ted was no fool. He knew that to try to leave town would result in certain capture. His main chance lay in staying where he was for the time being. Bloodhounds were brought in to sniff him out and a massive search team of 150 people began combing the town.
He lived off food he found in holiday cabins and camper vans for a few days but realised that he needed a car to make good his escape. He knew it would be alright because he believed himself to be invincible, better than everyone else and certainly better than the people who were scouring Aspen for him. On 13 June, having been on the run for six days, he stole a Cadillac but his erratic driving at a checkpoint alerted two deputies to him. He was recognised and re-arrested.
However, he was determined to get away and six months later he did, with murderous consequences.
He was being held in a jail at Glenwood Springs, Colorado where he had managed to accumulate $500 and had acquired a hacksaw blade that he later claimed had been given to him by another inmate. Using the blade, he sawed through the fixings for a small metal plate in the ceiling. Over a period of time, he had been dieting, trying to lose enough weight to be able to squeeze through the narrow opening in the ceiling. He had to be very careful and on one occasion, had come close to discovery when an inmate informed the prison authorities that he had heard someone moving around above him, but the matter was not investigated.
He knew he had to make his move soon when he was told that the trial, due to start on 9 January 1978, was to be held in Colorado Springs. Consequently, he would be moved to another prison for the duration. On 3 January, he bundled up books and files under his blanket to make it look as if he was sleeping in his bed, put on the warmest clothes he could find, removed the metal plate from the ceiling and squeezed up through the hole into the roof-space. He crawled to a spot directly above the linen closet of an apartment occupied by one of the jailers, dropped down into the apartment and strolled out of the prison.
It was bitterly cold and snowing, but he had soon stolen a car, an MG. The MG broke down in a blizzard in the mountains but with the snowstorm raging around him he succeeded in getting a lift from a passing car into the town of Vail. From Vail he took a bus to Denver and then booked a ticket on the 8.55 am flight to Chicago. Meanwhile, back at the prison, they did not discover his absence until noon that day, some seventeen hours after he had walked out the door. He had a good start on them.
From Chicago, he took a train to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he caught up on some sleep at the YMCA and watched a football game on television in a bar. He then stole a car and drove to Tallahassee in Florida where he rented a room in a boarding house, calling himself Chris Hagen. It was 8 January 1978.
Bundy lived off petty theft for a while, shoplifting and purse-snatching. He also stole a student identity card in the name of Kenneth Misner, using it to obtain a birth certificate and social security card. He was set up.
By the time of his initial arrest back in 1975, Ted Bundy had killed more than twenty women, beginning in May 1973 when he had murdered a hitch-hiker. His method was almost always the same. He would pretend that he was incapacitated somehow, wearing a plaster cast on an arm or using crutches and would seek help to carry something, such as books, to his car. When they arrived at the vehicle, he would bludgeon them with a crowbar and bundle them into the car. On one occasion, eight different witnesses came forward to tell police about a man called Ted, his left arm in a sling, who had been approaching people looking for help unloading his sailing boat from the back of his car. One told how she went with him, but on arriving at the car found that there was no boat. Many of them were students and the remains of a number of them were never found. He sometimes decapitated his victims with a hacksaw and kept several of the heads in his room or apartment. Some victims were disposed of on Taylor Mountain in Utah and he confessed to visiting the bodies long after death, applying make-up, lying with them and having sex with them. This would continue until putrefaction had set in.
Once again, as he hid out in Tallahassee in January 1978, he felt the need to return to his old habits. Conveniently, his room was in a building close to Florida State University and much of his time was spent wandering around the campus, even going unnoticed to lectures.
On the night of 14 January, he broke into the Chi Omega sorority house where he took the lives of two sleeping women students – Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman – bludgeoning and strangling them. Levy was also sexually assaulted. He also bludgeoned, but did not kill, two other students as they lay in bed. Within half-an-hour, he was running out of the door of the building. As he did so, another student, Nita Neary, who was returning from a party, caught sight of him running down the stairs. She had been surprised to discover the door to the building lying open and had heard commotion in the rooms above. Hearing footsteps approaching, she ducked back out of sight in a doorway. Bundy, a blue woollen cap pulled low over his eyes and holding a log with a piece of cloth wrapped around it, bolted down the stairs and out of the door.
Nita ran upstairs and rushed to the room of a friend, telling her of the strange man she had seen. The two girls then went to the housemother’s room to report the incident, but en route were shocked by the sight of one of the girls Bundy had failed to kill, staggering along a corridor, blood dripping from her head. They then found the other survivor, again with serious head wounds.
When police arrived, they found the two dead girls. Lisa Levy had been battered about the head with the log the man had been carrying and had then been strangled. There were bite marks on her buttocks and on her nipples. Her attacker had also sexually assaulted her with a bottle of hairspray. The other dead girl had been beaten severely on the head and then strangled with a pair of tights but had not been sexually assaulted or bitten.
Bundy was not finished for the night, however. A few blocks away, he broke into a house, beating and seriously injuring another student, Cheryl Thomas. Police arriving from the Chi Omega house, only minutes away, found her sitting on her bed, blood pouring from head wounds and a mask at the foot of her bed. It would prove to be identical to a mask taken from Bundy’s car when he had been arrested in August 1975.
There was little evidence – only some hair samples on the mask and the teeth marks on Lisa Levy’s body. Forensic science was not as sophisticated as it is today and, anyway, Ted Bundy was completely unknown to the Florida police.
A few weeks later, he struck again. Twelve-year-old Kimberley Leach from Lake City was reported missing. Last seen getting into a car, her body was found in a state park at Suwannee County eight weeks later. A few days earlier, however, a fourteen-year-old girl had a narrow escape when she was approached by a man claiming to be from the Fire Department. Fortunately for her, her brother turned up and she climbed into his car and drove off. The brother was suspicious of the man’s story and took down the registration of the van he was driving. The girl’s father, a policeman, had the number checked, finding it belonged to a man called Randall Regan whose licence plates had recently been stolen. When he discovered that the vehicle had also been stolen, the officer took his children to the police station to show them mug-shots of various villains, amongst which was a picture of Ted Bundy. They recognised him instantly as the man who had approached the girl.
Bundy, meanwhile, was on the move again, heading for Pensacola in a stolen car, an orange Volkswagen Beetle. Officer David Lee spotted this striking-looking car at 10 pm on 15 February and when he ran a check on the car’s registration, found it to be stolen. He set off in pursuit, his blue lights on.
Initially, Bundy fled, but then pulled into a petrol station where he stopped. Officer Lee ordered him out of the car, shouting at him to lie on the ground. As he tried to put the cuffs on Bundy, however, the killer spun round onto his back and began to struggle. He managed to push the policeman off, scrambled to his feet and ran away. Lee took aim and fired his gun at the fleeing figure. He missed, but Bundy staggered and fell to the ground, pretending to have been hit. Officer Lee approached him, but again Bundy got up and started fighting. This time, however, the policeman overcame him, managing to get the handcuffs on him. Bundy was soon in custody again and this time there would be no escape.
They linked him to the disappearance of Kimberley Leach through evidence found in the van he had used – there were fibres of material that originated from his clothes – her blood type was found on the van’s carpet and Bundy’s semen and blood type were found on her underwear. He was charged with her murder and shortly after, with the murders of the two Chi Omega girls.
His past began to emerge. He had been born at a home for unmarried mothers in Vermont and though the true identity of his father remains unknown, many have suspected over the years that his mother Louise’s violent and abusive father, Samuel Cowell, was actually his father. Back then, however, Samuel and his wife, Eleanor, pretended that Bundy was in fact their child. For the first part of his life, therefore, he believed that his mother was his sister.
In 1951, now living in Tacoma with relatives, Louise met and married a man called Bundy and Ted was adopted by him, taking his surname. Bundy was a good pupil at his school but remained shy and introverted, later claiming that he did not understand social behaviour and found it impossible to make friends. He also became fascinated with images of sexual violence and had evolved into a petty crook, twice being arrested for theft.
At Seattle’s University of Washington in 1967, he befriended a fellow student, Stephanie Brooks, but she ended the relationship following her graduation. Bundy is said to have changed around this time, becoming much more assertive and focused. He found work managing the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign while he studied psychology at Washington University. He did well, graduating as an honours student. He also began a relationship with an unmarried mother, Elizabeth Kloepfer, that would continue for six years.
