Serial Killers

Aileen Wuornos was a tragic case of American history gone wrong, a female serial killer whose troubled life spiraled out of control into multiple murders. The Florida coast experienced a streak of chilling killings through the mid to late eighties. Cold case after cold case piled up when the woman prostitute assaulted victims as she stood by the highway assessing the next murder. The thirty-something blonde woman with the harsh brown eyes and stringy blonde hair would only be arrested after seven men were found dead.

Aileen Carol Wuornos claims to have killed men out of a need to make money, but surely someone as risk taking as she was might have avoided murder if she wished. Wuornos maintained that the killings simply rounded out a robbery modus operandi, and perhaps did not acknowledge herself how damaged psychologically she was in order to do that to them. Wuornos communicated to the court and in her trial testimony in a lucid, almost transparent manner about her serial crimes.

The Wuornos case is a bellwether that proves how the image and stereotype of the serial killer can mask the real criminals in the population at large. Born in Michigan in 1956, Aileen Carol Pittman certainly received more than her share of life’s rocky twists and turns. Aileen Wuornos was far from the typical psycho killer, she was an emotionally distraught woman who viewed murder and robbery as her only pathway to day to day security. It is indicated that even from her first suicide attempt she never received adequate psychological counseling. That said, FBI profiling did help nab Wuornos before she could kill anyone else.
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One of the astonishing serial killer stories to come out of the 1960′s and 1970′s of American Criminal History was Edmund Kemper. One of the earliest serial killers, Kemper suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and murdered his own mother as the culmination of a string of intensive and fatal attacks. Often posing as a police officer, Kemper picked up women looking for a ride who were too young and inexperienced to turn him down.

Kemper’s story was a strange one, with traditional serial killer colorations of maternal domination and later serial murders. But the first killings of Edmund Kemper were his own grandparents when he was just 15. This hardly matches the later modus operandi of young female students he murdered later. The initial married couple and the intermittent coeds, then his mother and her friend, then a group of eight random victims represent the body of Kemper’s victim list.

Why did Edmund Kemper want to kill young women? Because it was the only way he felt he could connect to them and “own” them. But Kemper also had been marginalized from normal society early by his institutionalization. Possibly these were unconscious rehearsals for the killing of his mother that was his real aim all along. Once Kemper’s head cleared, perhaps he was done and was ready to meet with the consequences.

What association could he possibly have for the college age women? Unable to get into college himself, was Kemper killing genders “others” who had outpaced him academically? Kemper’s turbulent relationship with his mother underscores the link between her in his mind as a college employee and the co-ed girls he killed.
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Today has come news that the Robert Pickton prosecution has cost some $103 million and is still rising. Canada’s most prolific serial killer has also accounted for one of the most expensive trials in Canadian history – ranking right up there with the Air India trials and public hearings. And that is where the Pickton costs are still coming in.

Serial killer Robert Pickton is now serving life in prison and that too will of course cost taxpayers even more money. But still to be tabulated is the cost for the public inquiry which will be funded by the province of British Columbia. The public inquiry will delve into the whole affair including the police department’s handling of the case and all those missing women over so many years.

Pickton’s legal defence team cost taxpayers $12 million and the crown’s costs came in at around $9 million more. The bulk of the money was spent sorting through the vast Pickton farm for evidence of his crimes and the surrounding police investigation costs. Some of the money was recouped through the sale of Pickton’s assets. Robert Pickton attempted to appeal his six life sentences but was denied by the courts.

Washington D.C. is the American nation’s capital, a paradise of security and armed forces presence and command. Yet in 2002, two men held the city captive while arresting pedestrian traffic with random sniper shots killing random victims with no warning. Indiscriminate selection of victims on the Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. area roads. The random activities of the victims made for serious concern along all social strata.

Local and Interstate 95 kept beltway commuters looking over their shoulder and scattering at the slightest sound. A manhunt failed to catch the killers for several days when the nation watched as gunplay entered into the public domain. The arrest and sentencing of two African American men would once again polarize racial tensions in the area. These would be later classified by some criminologist as hate crimes.

There was no religious affiliation, no gender bias in the killings. People sitting outside the post office or mowing their lawn are equally vulnerable to the sniper. The sniper’s rampage of death was happening in the city, not isolated riverbeds or backwoods roads. “Stealth” poses at the gas pumps become normal to see in the forty mile area centralized in Montgomery County.

John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo kept the people in the nation’s capital watching their rear view mirrors and indoors for three weeks even in an age of media and satellite radar. Amazed Americans watched their news reports every night and marveled that a sniper existed in this day and age without being caught. Authorities desperately sought a way to end this beltway rampage holding so many in fear.
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The so-called “Angel of Death” killer was an inside man, a hospital employee and orderly whose access to unattended hospital patients and means to extinguish their lives proved fatal in double digits for American patients in the Midwest and Southeast. Donald Harvey started his criminal career simply by strangling patients too weak to struggle or using drugs to subdue them when nobody else was near. True to the nature of every serial killer, Harvey continued killing for little or no material gain, and even falsified job information for employment where he could kill again.

Born in Ohio in 1952, Harvey was part of a normal family. Growing up a ‘nice boy”, Donald Harvey won the praise and notice of teachers but not friends. Harvey was not happy to be a factory worker and when nuns noticed his adeptness around the building they suggested instead he train to be a medical orderly. At this time, many religious orders governed medical care in hospitals and medical wards. Harvey enjoyed an advantage to be trained without earning his vocation or showing moral turpitude before being considered for medical training. Soon Harvey would be charged with full care of patients on an unsupervised basis.

A homosexual man, this serial killer came by his moniker of murder because he always seemed to be around when death struck a patient. Yet to the inside atmosphere and world of the nurse or orderly, death was a constant enough attendant to the work life that few made connections until it was much too late for the victims. By using alternate methods in varying deaths converging with patient illnesses and symptoms, much of the initial activity of Donald Harvey passed relatively unnoticed. As medical equipment changed, Harvey disconnected ventilators and poisoned food. Despite discharges from hospitals, Harvey utilized a common trait among serial killers and obtained employment in the same field he would otherwise have been disqualified from.
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The Zodiac Killer was never caught because the law enforcement people in power at the time had used secondary means of catching a first rate criminal. The systems then in place were thought by many to be acceptable to the norms of the time, but criminal minds get away with crimes because their etymology of hate and lust for blood evades the thoughts and behavioral experience of the average policeman from that area in that era. Such law enforcement personnel cannot be expected to grapple with the serial killer type of threat.

The Zodiac Killer is the type of crime that specialized law enforcement agencies were formed to solve. Yet even after decades of forensic evidence and new theoretical modeling systems the Zodiac Killer has never been identified. Yet the improvement of data systems and the records access enjoyed by federal law enforcement today is unparalleled. By changing the approach used to evaluate the Zodiac Killer, a solution may present itself. [Here is an analysis that can clear up why that is].

The Zodiac Killer is thought to have a problem with water. The water comments in the notes indicate there may have been a problem with the killer living in an area that became flooded with water or the ground rose somehow preventing the killer from committing crimes. The Zodiac Killer was operating in a somewhat rural area during an era when options for personal transportation were limited. This could have been an important clue to follow up. Was the water clue a hidden one because in fact the serial killer was not ready to be caught yet?
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The quiet Pacific Northwest in the 1960′s was home to one of the most murderous serial killers in American history. One ordinary boy, a generation earlier, who preferred to play with women’s shoes had become a native. Jerome Henry Brudos, known as the Lust Killer or the Shoe Fetish Murderer, who laid waste to a series of young lives as young women from the Portland, Oregon area, may be one of the most distastefully macabre of a notably violent and insane group of American serial killer criminals.

In 1969, local women in Portland and surrounding areas started to disappear never to return. Strangled corpses started to surface although in circumstances that meant their location was meant to be a secret. A young boy whose mother has emotionally abused him and psychologically rejected him had formed the beginnings of a vicious killer in the making. Assault grew to rape, coercion grew to abduction, cruising escalated to impersonation of a police officer. The fixated footwear fetish of Brudos had trodden into forbidden fields.

Serial killers like Jerome Brudos are truly a menace to society, both for their sophisticated attempts to mask their killing thirst and their flagrant exhibitionism of their aberrant tendencies. Jerry Brudos made no secret of the fact he had a visible gender dysfunction, which only subsided during male stereotypical experiences like (heterosexual) marriage and fatherhood. But as evidenced by earlier sexual experiences, Jerry Brudos seemed to become enabled and sexually aroused by the wearing of young women’s shoes and underwear, possibly in a trans-formative state toward a gender his mother might have found more pleasing.
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