Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters Read Online Free

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    While my Cottingham encounter in New York was one of those experiences that one can easily write off as coincidence, my second encounter with a serial killer made me wonder. I questioned the mathematical odds of running into two killers in that manner. One killer I could easily understand, but two made me ask, how many more might there be out there that I did not know about? I wondered what the odds were of walking by a serial killer without ever finding out about it—on the street, waiting in line for burger, browsing for books in a true-crime section, or sitting next to one on a train or bus? I shuddered when I heard somebody explain that serial killers might be strangers—but only to you. They become very familiar with you if they pick you as their target—you are no stranger to them.
    It seemed to me that millions of people move about their daily lives without meeting a serial killer—or at least, without finding out they had met one. Perhaps that is precisely what makes me different from you—that I have uncovered the transparent monsters who had tramped across my path— my serial killers—while you perhaps have not uncovered yours. I pray you never will.
PART ONE
A HISTORY OF MONSTERS

ONE

THE POSTMODERN AGE OF SERIAL HOMICIDE, 1970–2000:
The Silence of the “Less-Dead”
    All creatures kill—there seems to be no exception. But of the whole list man is the only one that kills for fun . . .
— MARK TWAIN

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.
— ROBERT F. KENNEDY 3
The Postmodern Serial Killer
    He was a handsome, athletic, well-spoken young man. He was unfailingly polite and popular, and appeared caring and concerned to those in his proximity. He was educated, sophisticated, and well mannered, a graduate with a university degree in psychology. He had plenty of friends of different ages and romantic relationships with women. Many other women considered him their trusted friend and confidant. An elderly woman he befriended described him as a “lovable rascal.” Another woman, a former police officer who would become America’s leading true-crime writer and who coincidentally knew him, described him as having “old-world gallantry.” He had worked as a suicide counselor at a phone-in crisis clinic and had been recently admitted into law school in Seattle. The state government hired him as a crime-control consultant and he even wrote a rape-prevention handbook for women. He was a hardworking volunteer for the Republican Party, an often-invited dinner guest, and a popular date, and was considered by his elders as somebody worth grooming for a possible future as stategovernor, perhaps even president. He was a necrophiliac who kidnapped, murdered, raped, and mutilated, in that order, twenty college-age women over a period of sixteen months. At one point he kept four of their heads in his apartment. He burned the head of another in his girlfriend’s fireplace. 4 His name was Theodore “Ted” Bundy.
    It is bitterly said that Bundy is our first “postmodern” serial killer. He came at the right time to be that—we would have first heard of him at the end of the 1970s. Back then, we the public did not use the term serial killer, nor had we such a concept in mind despite the fact that such a thing was on the increase and was being puzzled over by experts and police.
    Yes, we knew that more people were being murdered. We had felt it since that Friday afternoon in November 1963 when JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Those of us who were children then remember how all the cartoon TV shows were preempted that afternoon and remained off the air until the next week. The only thing to see on the tube for the first three days were lots of shaken and frightened people. On the third day they put somebody on live TV and showed him being shot dead. Then they broadcast it over and over in replay. If Bert the Turtle