What turns a person into a serial killer? There’s no shortage of theories. Unfortunately none of them is completely convincing.
One of the most intriguing (if controversial) comes from the little-known field of paleopsychology. According to this view, our civilized brains are built on a primitive, animalistic core known as the R-complex. Deep inside every one of us are the savage instincts of our apelike ancestors. For the vast majority of people, this basic, brute nature is kept in check by our more highly evolved faculties—reason, intelligence, and logic. But for various reasons, a small fraction of people are controlled by their primitive brains. In essence, advocates of this view see serial killers as throwbacks—bloodthirsty, Stone Age savages living in the modern world.
Freudian theorists take a similar view, though they talk about the id instead of the R-complex and see serial killers not as latter-day apemen but as profoundly stunted personalities, fixated at an infantile stage of psychosexual development. Because of their traumatic upbringings, compulsive killers never progress beyond the emotional development of a two-year-old. Put a porcelain vase in a toddler’s hands and it will end up in little pieces. Serial killers act the same way. They love to destroy things. To them, a human being is just a breakable object—something to be taken apart for pleasure.
Other explanations run the gamut from the physiological (head injuries, hormonal imbalances, genetic deficiencies) to the sociological (class resentment, overpopulation, too much exposure to media violence). There are even environmental theories. One expert has proposed that serial murderers suffer from a disease caused, among other factors, by toxic pollutants.
Whatever other factors may or may not be involved, one common denominator seems to be that they all have an atrocious family background. The appalling Upbringing of most, if not all, serial killers clearly contributes to their pathology, turning them into people so full of hate and self-loathing that sadistic murder becomes their substitute for intimacy (see Sadism). Still, even a truly dreadful upbringing doesn’t seem to be a sufficient explanation. After all, countless human beings suffer traumatic childhoods without growing up to be serial lust killers.
Ultimately, the root causes of serial murder are unknowable—as mysterious in their way as the sources of Mozart’s musicianship or Einstein’s mathematical genius. Perhaps the only possible answer is the one provided by the great American novelist Herman Melville in his masterpiece Billy Budd. Pondering the depravity of the villainous John Claggart, who sets out to destroy the innocent hero for no discernible reason, Melville concludes that Claggart’s “evil nature” was “not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living” but was “born with him and innate.”
Sometimes, in short, “elemental evil” simply takes a human form.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Bluebeards Serial killer
Reputedly modeled on the fifteenth-century monster Gilles de Rais, the folktale character Bluebeard is a sinister nobleman who murders a succession of wives and stores their corpses in a locked room in his castle. In real life, the term is used to describe a specific type of serial killer who, like his fictional couterpart, knocks off one wife after another.
There are two major differences between a Bluebeard killer and a psycho like Ted Bundy. The latter preys on strangers, whereas the Bluebeard type restricts himself to the women who are unlucky (or foolish) enough to wed him. Their motivations differ, too. Bundy and his ilk are driven by sexual sadism; they are lust murderers. By contrast, the cardinal sin that motivates the Bluebeard isn’t lust but greed. For the most part, this kind of serial killer dispatches his victims for profit.
The most infamous Bluebeard of the twentieth century was a short, balding, red-bearded Frenchman named Henri Landru (the real-life inspiration for Charlie Chaplin’s black comedy Monsieur Verdoux). In spite of his unsightly appearance, Landru possessed an urbane charm that made him appealing to women. It didn’t hurt, of course, that there were so many vulnerable women around—lonely widows of the millions of young soldiers who had perished on the battlefields of World War I.
An accomplished swindler who had already been convicted seven times for fraud, Landru found his victims by running matrimonial Ads in the newspapers. When a suitable (i.e., wealthy, gullible) prospect responded, Landru would woo her, wed her, assume control of her assets, then kill her and incinerate the corpse in a small outdoor oven on his country estate outside Paris. He was guillotined in 1922, convicted of eleven murders—ten women, plus one victim’s teenaged son.
Even more prolific was a German named Johann Hoch, who emigrated to America in the late 1800s. In sheer numerical terms, Hoch holds some sort of connubial record among Bluebeards, having married no fewer than fifty-five women, at least fifteen of whom he dispatched. Like Landru, he never confessed, insisting on his innocence even as the hangman’s noose tightened around his neck.
There are two major differences between a Bluebeard killer and a psycho like Ted Bundy. The latter preys on strangers, whereas the Bluebeard type restricts himself to the women who are unlucky (or foolish) enough to wed him. Their motivations differ, too. Bundy and his ilk are driven by sexual sadism; they are lust murderers. By contrast, the cardinal sin that motivates the Bluebeard isn’t lust but greed. For the most part, this kind of serial killer dispatches his victims for profit.
The most infamous Bluebeard of the twentieth century was a short, balding, red-bearded Frenchman named Henri Landru (the real-life inspiration for Charlie Chaplin’s black comedy Monsieur Verdoux). In spite of his unsightly appearance, Landru possessed an urbane charm that made him appealing to women. It didn’t hurt, of course, that there were so many vulnerable women around—lonely widows of the millions of young soldiers who had perished on the battlefields of World War I.
An accomplished swindler who had already been convicted seven times for fraud, Landru found his victims by running matrimonial Ads in the newspapers. When a suitable (i.e., wealthy, gullible) prospect responded, Landru would woo her, wed her, assume control of her assets, then kill her and incinerate the corpse in a small outdoor oven on his country estate outside Paris. He was guillotined in 1922, convicted of eleven murders—ten women, plus one victim’s teenaged son.
Even more prolific was a German named Johann Hoch, who emigrated to America in the late 1800s. In sheer numerical terms, Hoch holds some sort of connubial record among Bluebeards, having married no fewer than fifty-five women, at least fifteen of whom he dispatched. Like Landru, he never confessed, insisting on his innocence even as the hangman’s noose tightened around his neck.
Tuesday, April 4, 2017
Abdullah Ahmet unsolved crime
An adopted son of the Arif family, a group of Middle Eastern racketeers and armed robbers residing in London’s Stockwell district, Ahmet Abdullah was identified by Scotland Yard as a narcotics dealer, nicknamed “Turkish Abbi.” On March 11, 1991, Abdullah was ambushed by rival mobsters at a betting shop on Bagshot Street, Walworth. Witnesses reported that he begged for his life, then briefly used another of the shop’s patrons as a human shield before fleeing into the street, where Abdullah was shot in the back and fatally wounded.
Suspects Patrick and Tony Brindle were charged with the murder, held over for trial at the Old Bailey court in early 1992. Frightened witnesses to the shooting testified behind screens to conceal their faces, identified only by numbers in court. Patrick Brindle declined to testify, but brother Tony produced evidence that he had been drinking and playing cards in a London pub, The Bell, when Abdullah was shot. The defendants’ mother described her sons as softhearted young men who wept when their parakeet died, and who made a habit of helping elderly women cross the street. Jurors acquitted the brothers on May 16, 1992,
whereupon police pronounced the case closed serial killer.
Suspects Patrick and Tony Brindle were charged with the murder, held over for trial at the Old Bailey court in early 1992. Frightened witnesses to the shooting testified behind screens to conceal their faces, identified only by numbers in court. Patrick Brindle declined to testify, but brother Tony produced evidence that he had been drinking and playing cards in a London pub, The Bell, when Abdullah was shot. The defendants’ mother described her sons as softhearted young men who wept when their parakeet died, and who made a habit of helping elderly women cross the street. Jurors acquitted the brothers on May 16, 1992,
whereupon police pronounced the case closed serial killer.
UNSOLVED SERIAL KILLER
CANNIBALISM SERIAL KILLER
Ever since the Stone Age, human beings have indulged in cannibalism, either for dietary or ritual reasons. The prehistoric hominids known as Homo erectus enjoyed supping on the brains of their fellow cavemen. Aborigines throughout the world, from New Zealand to North America, routinely devoured the hearts of enemy warriors as a way of absorbing their courage. Ceremonial cannibalism was a central feature of the Aztec religion. And Fijians consumed human flesh (which they called puaka balava or “long pig”) just because they liked its taste.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, cannibalism is regarded with such intense abhorrence that when faced with a choice between eating other humans or starving to death, some people have opted for the latter. (This was the case, for example, with several survivors of the famous 1972 plane crash that stranded a party of young Uruguayans in the high Andes.) As a result, of all the horrors associated with serial killer, cannibalism strikes many people as the worst. When Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, set out to create the most monstrous serial killer imaginable, the result was Dr. Lecter, aka “Hannibal the Cannibal,” whose idea of a gourmet meal is human liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti on the side.
In point of fact, however, real-life cannibal killers are relatively few and far between. For reasons that can only be surmised, Germany has produced a disproportionately high percentage of twentieth-century people eaters. During the social chaos of the 1920s, the hideously depraved Fritz Haarmann slaughtered as many as fifty young boys, dined on their flesh, then sold the leftovers as black-market beef. His equally degenerate countryman Georg Grossmann also supplemented his income by peddling human flesh, though his preferred victims were plump young females, whose meat he made into sausages. Yet another postwar German cannibal was Karl Denke, an innkeeper who killed and consumed at least thirty of his lodgers.
At about the same time in America, the sadomasochistic madman Albert Fish was roaming the country, preying on small boys and girls. He was finally executed for the abduction-murder of a pretty twelve-year-old named Grace Budd, parts of whose body he made into a stew. In recent years, the “Milwaukee Monster,” Jeffrey Dahmer, has served as a grotesque reminder that the forbidden urge to consume human flesh may still lurk beneath the surface of supposedly civilized life.
Appalling as they were, Dahmer’s crimes were outstripped by the Russian “Mad Beast,” Andrei Chikatilo, who—with a confirmed body count of fifty-two victims—holds the record as the worst serial killer of modern times. Among his countless atrocities, Chikatilo devoured the genitals of some of his victims—a practice that left him (according to his captors) with a telltale case of bizarre halitosis.
A cannibalistic contemporary of Chikatilo and Dahmer was Arthur Shawcross, whose wildly sadistic tendencies first found free play in the jungles of Vietnam, where (according to his own account) he raped, slaughtered, and cannibalized two peasant women during an army combat mission. Shawcross’s subsequent career of psychopathic violence included the murder of a ten-year-old boy whose genitals he devoured, and the strangulation of a string of prostitutes whose bodies he dumped in the woods in upstate New York. Occasionally, he would sneak back to the body weeks after the murder, then cut out and eat pieces of the decomposing corpse (a particularly abhorrent form of cannibalism technically known as necrophagy).
During the past twenty-five years or so, there have been a number of appalling cannibal killers who might well have become full-fledged serial murderers if they hadn’t been arrested after committing a single atrocity. These include Albert Fentress, a former schoolteacher in Poughkeepsie, New York, who, in the summer of 1979, lured an eighteen-year-old boy into his basement, cut off and ate the victim’s penis, then shot him to death; Issei Sagawa, a Japanese national living in Paris who, in 1981, killed his girlfriend, had sex with her corpse, then dismembered and ate parts of her body; Daniel Rakowitz, who likewise murdered and dismembered his girlfriend, then boiled her into a soup which he allegedly served to homeless people on New York’s Lower East Side in 1989; and Peter Bryan, a British schizophrenic arrested in 2004 after killing a friend and frying his brain for consumption.
Most bizarre of all is undoubtedly Armin Meiwes, a middle-aged German computer technician who, in 2001, advertised for a victim willing to be slaughtered and consumed (see Ads). When a forty-three-year-old man named Bernd-Jürgen Brandes showed up in response to this Internet posting, Meiwes—with Brandes’s full approval—sliced off the latter’s penis. The two men then shared a meal of the severed organ. Brandes was then stabbed to death, dismembered, and frozen for future consumption.
Meiwes was arrested shortly thereafter. Since Germany has no laws against cannibalism, he was charged with murder “for sexual satisfaction” and “disturbing the peace of the dead.” His attorney at his 2004 trial attempted to argue that since Brandes consented (indeed, eagerly cooperated) in his own death, the case should be classified as a mercy killing. The court was not convinced. Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, though in April 2005, prosecutors—objecting to the leniency of the sentence—won an appeal for a retrial.
Despite Meiwes’s claim that he had gotten his cannibalistic urges out of his system—“I had my big kick and I don’t need to do it again,” he declared—there is reason to doubt his word. Certainly, if he had chosen to indulge his unnatural appetites a second time, he would have had a varied menu to choose from. At his trial, a state police inspector testified that Meiwes’s computer files showed that his ad had drawn responses from 204 applicants looking to be his next meal.
In the realm of serial-killer cinema, cannibalism features prominently in Tobe Hooper’s splatter classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, about a family of deranged good ol’ boys who turn unwary teens into barbeque. Like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, Hooper’s movie was inspired by the crimes of Edward Gein. Ostensibly, investigators found unmistakable signs of cannibalism in Gein’s horror house—a human heart in a frying pan, a refrigerator stocked with paper-wrapped body parts. This allegation, however, was just one of many hysterical rumors that floated around in the wake of his crimes. Though Ghoulish Gein committed all sorts of unspeakable acts, cannibalism was apparently not one of them. He did, however, enjoy eating baked beans from a bowl made out of a human cranium.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, cannibalism is regarded with such intense abhorrence that when faced with a choice between eating other humans or starving to death, some people have opted for the latter. (This was the case, for example, with several survivors of the famous 1972 plane crash that stranded a party of young Uruguayans in the high Andes.) As a result, of all the horrors associated with serial killer, cannibalism strikes many people as the worst. When Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, set out to create the most monstrous serial killer imaginable, the result was Dr. Lecter, aka “Hannibal the Cannibal,” whose idea of a gourmet meal is human liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti on the side.
In point of fact, however, real-life cannibal killers are relatively few and far between. For reasons that can only be surmised, Germany has produced a disproportionately high percentage of twentieth-century people eaters. During the social chaos of the 1920s, the hideously depraved Fritz Haarmann slaughtered as many as fifty young boys, dined on their flesh, then sold the leftovers as black-market beef. His equally degenerate countryman Georg Grossmann also supplemented his income by peddling human flesh, though his preferred victims were plump young females, whose meat he made into sausages. Yet another postwar German cannibal was Karl Denke, an innkeeper who killed and consumed at least thirty of his lodgers.
At about the same time in America, the sadomasochistic madman Albert Fish was roaming the country, preying on small boys and girls. He was finally executed for the abduction-murder of a pretty twelve-year-old named Grace Budd, parts of whose body he made into a stew. In recent years, the “Milwaukee Monster,” Jeffrey Dahmer, has served as a grotesque reminder that the forbidden urge to consume human flesh may still lurk beneath the surface of supposedly civilized life.
Appalling as they were, Dahmer’s crimes were outstripped by the Russian “Mad Beast,” Andrei Chikatilo, who—with a confirmed body count of fifty-two victims—holds the record as the worst serial killer of modern times. Among his countless atrocities, Chikatilo devoured the genitals of some of his victims—a practice that left him (according to his captors) with a telltale case of bizarre halitosis.
A cannibalistic contemporary of Chikatilo and Dahmer was Arthur Shawcross, whose wildly sadistic tendencies first found free play in the jungles of Vietnam, where (according to his own account) he raped, slaughtered, and cannibalized two peasant women during an army combat mission. Shawcross’s subsequent career of psychopathic violence included the murder of a ten-year-old boy whose genitals he devoured, and the strangulation of a string of prostitutes whose bodies he dumped in the woods in upstate New York. Occasionally, he would sneak back to the body weeks after the murder, then cut out and eat pieces of the decomposing corpse (a particularly abhorrent form of cannibalism technically known as necrophagy).
During the past twenty-five years or so, there have been a number of appalling cannibal killers who might well have become full-fledged serial murderers if they hadn’t been arrested after committing a single atrocity. These include Albert Fentress, a former schoolteacher in Poughkeepsie, New York, who, in the summer of 1979, lured an eighteen-year-old boy into his basement, cut off and ate the victim’s penis, then shot him to death; Issei Sagawa, a Japanese national living in Paris who, in 1981, killed his girlfriend, had sex with her corpse, then dismembered and ate parts of her body; Daniel Rakowitz, who likewise murdered and dismembered his girlfriend, then boiled her into a soup which he allegedly served to homeless people on New York’s Lower East Side in 1989; and Peter Bryan, a British schizophrenic arrested in 2004 after killing a friend and frying his brain for consumption.
Most bizarre of all is undoubtedly Armin Meiwes, a middle-aged German computer technician who, in 2001, advertised for a victim willing to be slaughtered and consumed (see Ads). When a forty-three-year-old man named Bernd-Jürgen Brandes showed up in response to this Internet posting, Meiwes—with Brandes’s full approval—sliced off the latter’s penis. The two men then shared a meal of the severed organ. Brandes was then stabbed to death, dismembered, and frozen for future consumption.
Meiwes was arrested shortly thereafter. Since Germany has no laws against cannibalism, he was charged with murder “for sexual satisfaction” and “disturbing the peace of the dead.” His attorney at his 2004 trial attempted to argue that since Brandes consented (indeed, eagerly cooperated) in his own death, the case should be classified as a mercy killing. The court was not convinced. Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, though in April 2005, prosecutors—objecting to the leniency of the sentence—won an appeal for a retrial.
Despite Meiwes’s claim that he had gotten his cannibalistic urges out of his system—“I had my big kick and I don’t need to do it again,” he declared—there is reason to doubt his word. Certainly, if he had chosen to indulge his unnatural appetites a second time, he would have had a varied menu to choose from. At his trial, a state police inspector testified that Meiwes’s computer files showed that his ad had drawn responses from 204 applicants looking to be his next meal.
In the realm of serial-killer cinema, cannibalism features prominently in Tobe Hooper’s splatter classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, about a family of deranged good ol’ boys who turn unwary teens into barbeque. Like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, Hooper’s movie was inspired by the crimes of Edward Gein. Ostensibly, investigators found unmistakable signs of cannibalism in Gein’s horror house—a human heart in a frying pan, a refrigerator stocked with paper-wrapped body parts. This allegation, however, was just one of many hysterical rumors that floated around in the wake of his crimes. Though Ghoulish Gein committed all sorts of unspeakable acts, cannibalism was apparently not one of them. He did, however, enjoy eating baked beans from a bowl made out of a human cranium.
The Caliber Serial Killer David Berkowitz
It was the era of New York disco fever—of platform shoes, leisure suits, dancing to the Bee Gees while a mirrored globe spun and flashed overhead. But for a little more than a year, between 1976 and 1977, the disco beat turned into a pulse of fear as a gun-wielding madman prowled the city streets at night. His weapon was a .44 revolver—and at first the tabloids tagged him the “.44-Caliber Serial Killer.”
The terror began on July 29, 1976, when two young women were shot in a parked car in the Bronx. Young people in cars—often dating couples—would continue to be the killer’s targets of choice. On one occasion, however, he gunned down a pair of young women sitting on a stoop. On another, he shot a woman as she walked home from school. Frantically she tried protecting her face with a book—but to no avail. The serial killer simply raised the muzzle of his weapon to the makeshift shield and blasted her in the head. Before his rampage was over, a total of six young New Yorkers were dead, seven more severely wounded.
At the scene of one double murder, police found a long, ranting note from the serial killer. “I am the ‘Son of Sam.’ I am a little brat,” he wrote. From that point on, the serial killer would be known by his bizarre new nickname.
For months, while the city was gripped by panic, police made no headway. When a break finally came, it happened as a result of a thirty-five-dollar parking ticket. On July 31, 1977, when a couple was shot along the Brooklyn shore, a witness noticed someone driving away from the scene in a car that had just been ticketed. Tracing the summons through their computer, the police came up with the name and address of David Berkowitz, a pudgy-faced postal worker living in Yonkers.
When police picked him up, they found an arsenal in the trunk of Berkowitz’s car. Son of Sam had been planning an apocalyptic act of carnage—a kamikaze assault on a Long Island disco.
Under arrest, Berkowitz explained the meaning of his bizarre moniker. “Sam” turned out to be the name of a neighbor, Sam Carr, who—in Berkowitz’s profoundly warped mind—was actually a “high demon” who transmitted his orders to kill through his pet dog, a black Labrador retriever. Insane as this story was, Berkowitz was found mentally fit to stand trial. He was eventually sentenced to three hundred years in the pen, where he has recently undergone a religious conversion and become a jailhouse televan-gelist, preaching the gospel on public-access TV.
The terror began on July 29, 1976, when two young women were shot in a parked car in the Bronx. Young people in cars—often dating couples—would continue to be the killer’s targets of choice. On one occasion, however, he gunned down a pair of young women sitting on a stoop. On another, he shot a woman as she walked home from school. Frantically she tried protecting her face with a book—but to no avail. The serial killer simply raised the muzzle of his weapon to the makeshift shield and blasted her in the head. Before his rampage was over, a total of six young New Yorkers were dead, seven more severely wounded.
At the scene of one double murder, police found a long, ranting note from the serial killer. “I am the ‘Son of Sam.’ I am a little brat,” he wrote. From that point on, the serial killer would be known by his bizarre new nickname.
For months, while the city was gripped by panic, police made no headway. When a break finally came, it happened as a result of a thirty-five-dollar parking ticket. On July 31, 1977, when a couple was shot along the Brooklyn shore, a witness noticed someone driving away from the scene in a car that had just been ticketed. Tracing the summons through their computer, the police came up with the name and address of David Berkowitz, a pudgy-faced postal worker living in Yonkers.
When police picked him up, they found an arsenal in the trunk of Berkowitz’s car. Son of Sam had been planning an apocalyptic act of carnage—a kamikaze assault on a Long Island disco.
Under arrest, Berkowitz explained the meaning of his bizarre moniker. “Sam” turned out to be the name of a neighbor, Sam Carr, who—in Berkowitz’s profoundly warped mind—was actually a “high demon” who transmitted his orders to kill through his pet dog, a black Labrador retriever. Insane as this story was, Berkowitz was found mentally fit to stand trial. He was eventually sentenced to three hundred years in the pen, where he has recently undergone a religious conversion and become a jailhouse televan-gelist, preaching the gospel on public-access TV.
SERIAL KILLER BATHTUBS
Exploring the spooky labyrinth of Buffalo Bill’s basement at the climax of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling happens on a ghastly sight: a “big bathtub . . . almost filled with hard red-purple plaster. A hand and wrist stuck up from the plaster, the hand turned dark and shrivelled, the fingernails painted pink.” Clarice has stumbled onto one of the monster’s former victims, who has been turned into some sort of grotesque tableau.
Like the rest of us, of course, real-life serial killers require an occasional bath and so can’t clog up their tubs with decomposed corpses encased in red-purple plaster of Paris. Some, however, have put their tubs to specialized uses.
For obvious reasons, bathtubs make a handy place to dismember corpses. After picking up a female hitchhiker in January 1973, for example, Edmund Kemper shot her in the head, then drove the body back home, hid it in his bedroom closet, and went to sleep. The next morning, after his mother left for work, he removed the corpse, had sex with it, then placed it in his bathtub and dismembered it with a Buck knife and an axe.
Dennis Nilsen’s tub, on the other hand, was used for a more traditional purpose. He liked to bathe his lovers in it. Of course, they were dead at the time. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, this British serial killer murdered his homosexual pickups partly because he was desperate for companionship. Turning them into corpses was his way of ensuring that they wouldn’t leave in the morning. After strangling a victim, Nilsen would engage in a regular ritual, tenderly cleaning the corpse in his tub, then lovingly arranging it in front of the TV or stereo or perhaps at the dining room table, so he could enjoy its company until it became too decomposed to bear.
And then there is the occasional serial killer who turns his tub into a killing device, like the British Bluebeard George Joseph Smith, the notorious “Brides in the Bath” murderer, who drowned three of his seven wives for their insurance money.
Of course, the most famous of these bathroom fixtures is the shower-tub combo where Janet Leigh meets her brutal end at the hands of Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Thanks to Hitchcock’s Psycho, countless unclad starlets have been butchered by maniacs while soaping up in the shower or relaxing in a bubble bath. Every now and then, a knife-wielding psycho will even pop out of a tub as in Fatal Attraction. But on the whole, these are perils that hardly ever occur outside the movies. For the most part, bathtubs are perfectly safe—as long as you don’t slip on the soap.
Like the rest of us, of course, real-life serial killers require an occasional bath and so can’t clog up their tubs with decomposed corpses encased in red-purple plaster of Paris. Some, however, have put their tubs to specialized uses.
For obvious reasons, bathtubs make a handy place to dismember corpses. After picking up a female hitchhiker in January 1973, for example, Edmund Kemper shot her in the head, then drove the body back home, hid it in his bedroom closet, and went to sleep. The next morning, after his mother left for work, he removed the corpse, had sex with it, then placed it in his bathtub and dismembered it with a Buck knife and an axe.
Dennis Nilsen’s tub, on the other hand, was used for a more traditional purpose. He liked to bathe his lovers in it. Of course, they were dead at the time. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, this British serial killer murdered his homosexual pickups partly because he was desperate for companionship. Turning them into corpses was his way of ensuring that they wouldn’t leave in the morning. After strangling a victim, Nilsen would engage in a regular ritual, tenderly cleaning the corpse in his tub, then lovingly arranging it in front of the TV or stereo or perhaps at the dining room table, so he could enjoy its company until it became too decomposed to bear.
And then there is the occasional serial killer who turns his tub into a killing device, like the British Bluebeard George Joseph Smith, the notorious “Brides in the Bath” murderer, who drowned three of his seven wives for their insurance money.
Of course, the most famous of these bathroom fixtures is the shower-tub combo where Janet Leigh meets her brutal end at the hands of Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Thanks to Hitchcock’s Psycho, countless unclad starlets have been butchered by maniacs while soaping up in the shower or relaxing in a bubble bath. Every now and then, a knife-wielding psycho will even pop out of a tub as in Fatal Attraction. But on the whole, these are perils that hardly ever occur outside the movies. For the most part, bathtubs are perfectly safe—as long as you don’t slip on the soap.
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