Talking With Serial Killers 2. The World's Most Evil Killers Tell Their Stories

232 Pages·2005·1.18 MB·English

Talking with Serial Killers II
is dedicated to my lovely wife Tatiana
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to my colleagues and friends: Steve Morris (co-editor and
publisher with me of The New Criminologist), Phillip Simpson, Kirstie
McCallum, Sarah Brown, Ruth Sands, Simon Beal (webmaster of TNC), my
parents, Patrick and May, and Martin Balaam.
Much gratitude is also extended to all of the professionals who have assisted
me in the writing of this book.
For John Wayne Gacy: Joseph R Kozenczak, former Chief of Police, Des
Plaines PD, Judge Louis B Garippo and attorney William Kunkle.
For Kenneth Bianchi: Frances Piccione (Bianchi’s adoptive mother). Kenneth
Bianchi, Veronica ‘VerLyn’Compton, Professor Donald T Lunde, MA, MD,
Professor David Canter, Professor Elliot Leyton, Judge Roger Boren,
Bellingham PD, LAPD Homicide, Captain Lynde Johnston, Rochester PD
Homicide, Det Richard Crotsley LAPD Homicide, Agent Robert Beams FBI,
Katherine Yronwode, Whatcom Security Agency, former SOCO Bellingham PD
Robert Knudsen, the staff at Western Washington Correctional Centre for
Women (WWCCW) and the Washington State Penitentiary (WSP) Walla Walla.
William Heirens: The Vienna Correctional Centre, Ill, William Heirens,
Dolores Kennedy, attorney Thomas Epach and Betty Finn (sister of Suzanne
Degnan).
John Cannan: the Avon and Somerset Police, DCI Bryan Saunders, Dorset
Police, SO II Metropolitan Police – DCI Jim Dickie and DI Stuart Ault, John
Cannan, Professor David Canter, Mrs Cannan, Robin Odell and Sharon Major.
Patricia Wright: Arletta Wright and Patricia Wright.
Finally, to all of my staff at www.newcriminologist.co.uk, my publisher John
Blake and Lucian Randall, along with the many thousands of readers who
enjoyed the prequel to this book: Talking with Serial Killers.

Christopher Berry-Dee,
Co-editor/publisher, The New Criminologist
www.newcriminologist.co.uk
Southsea, Hampshire,
June 2005
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Case Study 1: John Wayne Michael Gacy
1: Living up to Expectations
2: Hunting… and Hunted
3: Bodies of Evidence
4: Into the Net
5: Judge and Executioner

Case Study 2: Kenneth Alessio Bianchi
1: Liar, Liar…
2: Police Make a Killing
3: The Truth Will Out
4: Acting Up
5: Femme Fatale

Case Study 3: William George Heirens
1: Daylight Robberies
2: Without a Clue

Case Study 4: John David Guise Cannan
1: Prince Charming
2: True Lies
3: Desperately Seeking Suzy
4: Sex Drive
Case Study 5: Patricia Wright
1: Insufficient Evidence
2: Paying a Premium

Copyright
Introduction
With 5 per cent of the world’s population, the United States produces more
serial killers than the rest of the world, accounting for 76 per cent of the
total. Europe produces the second-highest number of serial killers at 17 per cent.
England leads with 28 per cent of the European total, followed by Germany with
27 per cent.
California has the highest serial homicide rate in the USA, followed by New
York, Texas and Illinois, while Maine has the lowest.
Over 90 per cent of serial killers are white males, usually from low-to middle-
class backgrounds; these men are usually intelligent but, as students, have
generally had difficulty in focusing. Most have experienced a traumatic
childhood, often having been abused psychologically, physically or sexually.
Typically, they may have been raised in unstable families, often with criminal,
psychiatric and alcoholic histories. As a result, children raised in such families
often spend a great deal of time on their own with many of them indulging in
animal cruelty at a very young age.
Most people who suffer as children grow out of it and become upstanding,
decent human beings. But serial killers such as John Cannan, Kenneth Bianchi
and John Gacy, who all suffered as children, repeat the same mistakes over the
course of their lives. They cannot make their transition into adulthood; they have
trouble making the transition in middle age and, at the very time they feel they
should be reaching the pinnacle of success, they find they are sliding downhill
fast. They want to feel important, they want to feel special; they crave the sense
of power, dominance and control. But they simply cannot achieve it in any
respectable way, so they kill, torture, sodomise and dismember, and this makes
them feel good about themselves.
The typical sado-serial killer appears extraordinarily ordinary. He’s a white,
middle-aged man who has an insatiable appetite for power, control and
dominance, and he kills not for money, nor for revenge, but because it makes
him feel good. He does it because he enjoys trawling for prey, entrapping them,
restraining and torturing them; he has fun killing, because he likes the thrill, the
excitement and the exhilaration that he gets from squeezing the last gasp of
breath from his dying victim’s body.
Killers such as John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Bianchi, and most of those who
appeared in the prequel to this book Talking with Serial Killers, enjoy the
suffering on the part of the victim, and they try to make it slow and painful. It
makes them feel superior to the extent that it makes their victims feel inferior.
Sixty-five per cent of serial homicide victims are women. In the USA, there
are, at most, 200 victims of sexual serial killers a year. That number, although
very large, pales into insignificance compared with almost 18,000 single-victim
murders in the USA on a yearly basis. The problem is not serial murder, it is
domestic violence, or workplace homicide, or two guys going into a bar, where
one takes out a gun and shoots the other.
The problem, on the other hand, is that serial murderers amass a large body
count – a small number of men who do a lot of damage. They may kill five, ten
or even twenty or more. Some of them have killed hundreds, and that is enough
to terrify anyone.
Randy Kraft drugged many of his victims and then inserted cocktail sticks
into their penises, or car door handles into their bodies, and flayed them alive.
And, as we will soon learn, John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo
Buono also inflicted terrible, extended suffering upon their hapless prey.
It is this sadistic impulse that feeds the real and fragile ego of the sado-sexual
serial murderer who desires so much, so desperately, to achieve a sense of power
over other human beings – sexual sadism is the means by which that happens.
JOHN WAYNE MICHAEL GACY
17 March 1942–10 May 1994
Smaller than I imagined, he bustles into the interview room, shackled and
scrubbed as clean as a new pin. He smells of cheap disinfectant; a prison
odour not unlike that exuded by a mortuary attendant. He has a slight, almost
effeminate lisp. Potato-faced, round-shouldered, porcine blue eyes, he is two
inverted cones joined together, bulging at his gut, a repugnant sight indeed.
I have some patience for killers like Kenneth Bianchi because they are at least
able to communicate at length. However, for this doughy monster, a creature that
tortured and slaughtered at least 33 young boys, I have little time at all.
Gacy, among all other serial killers I have met, repulses me the most with his
presence; his self-important attitude, declaring, ‘I grant you an audience at my
behest,’ was all too apparent.
His handshake was like touching a damp cloth, his fingers feminine, the nails
oh so carefully manicured like the words in his day-to-day diary, so well clipped
and cleaned for the observer’s consumption.
It was not so much his catalogue of mind-sickening crimes that troubled me,
it was more this gutless bisexual who degraded the word ‘humanity’ that turned
my stomach; how weak and pathetic can a ‘real’ man be?
Christopher, I wish you much success in your current project. Former
Chief of Detectives, later Chief of Police, Des Plaines PD, Joseph R
Kozenczak (the officer who captured John Wayne Gacy), to the author,
June 1995
In his book A Passing Acquaintance, former Chief of Detectives and, later, Chief
of Police of the Des Plaines PD Joe Kozenczak chillingly writes, ‘Gacy, to the
casual observer, was a pillar of the community. He was active in the Jaycees (the
Junior Chamber of Commerce) for whom he dressed as a clown and entertained
children. He was a precinct captain for the Democratic Party, and a member of
the local lighting commission. But Gacy had an odious hobby: he forced boys to