The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence Read Free Page A

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    Crimes like these were regarded as the solitary aberrations of madmen, and scarcely came to the attention of the general public.The crimes of an American mass murderer named Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Henry Howard Holmes, should be noted as an exception.Holmes began as a confidence trickster, and in the late 1880s he built himself a large house in a Chicago suburb that would become known as ‘Murder Castle’.When Holmes was arrested in 1894 for involvement in a swindle, police soon came to suspect that he was responsible for the murder of an associate named Pitezel, and three of Pitezel’s children.Further investigation revealed that Holmes had murdered a number of ex-mistresses, as well as women who had declined to become his mistress.Moreover, as Holmes himself confessed, killing had finally become an addiction which, he believed, had turned him into a monster.The total number of his murders is believed to be twenty-seven, and they qualify him as America’s first serial killer.He was hanged in 1896.
    It was the crimes of Jack the Ripper though – which will be further discussed in the next chapter – that achieved worldwide notoriety and made the police aware that they were confronted by a new type of problem: a killer who struck at random. The murders took place in the Whitechapel area of London between 31 August 1888 and 9 November 1888.The first victim, a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, was found in the early hours of the morning with her throat cut; in the mortuary, it was discovered that she had also been disembowelled.The next victim, another prostitute named Annie Chapman, was found spreadeagled in the backyard of a slum dwelling, also disembowelled; the contents of her pockets had been laid around her in a curiously ritualistic manner – a characteristic that has been found to be typical of many ‘serial killers’.The two murders produced nationwide shock and outrage – nothing of the sort had been known before – and this was increased when, on the morning of 30 September 1888, the killer committed two murders in one night.A letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, boasting of the ‘double event’, was sent to the Central News Agency within hours of the murders.When the biggest police operation in London’s history failed to catch the murderer, there was unprecedented public hysteria.As if in response to the sensation he was causing, the Ripper’s next murder was the most gruesome so far.A twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly was killed and disembowelled in her room; the mutilations that followed must have taken several hours.Then the murders ceased – the most widely held theories being that the killer had committed suicide or was confined in a mental home.From the point of view of the general public, the most alarming thing about the murders was that the killer seemed to be able to strike with impunity, and that the police seemed to be completely helpless.
    The French police found themselves confronting the same frustrations in the mid-1890s when a travelling killer who became known as ‘the Disemboweller of the south-east’ raped and mutilated eleven victims, including three boys.(It is interesting to observe that many sex criminals have been tramps or wandering journeymen; it is as if the lack of domestic security produced an exaggerated and unnatural form of the sex needs.) He was finally caught – after three years – when he attacked a powerfully-built peasant woman, whose husband and children heard her screams.He proved to be twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Vacher, an ex-soldier who had spent some time in an asylum after attempting suicide.The lesson of the case was that Vacher had been able to kill with impunity for three years, although his description – a tramp with a suppurating right eye and paralysed cheek – had been circulated to every policeman in south-east France.
    The failure was doubly humiliating because France was now celebrated throughout