In December 1978, police in Chicago investigating the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old youth, Robert Piest, went to the home of a builder named John Wayne Gacy, who had offered Robert Piest a job. As they searched Gacy’s house, the police came upon a trapdoor leading to a ‘crawl space’ under the house. There was a heavy odour of decaying flesh, and the torch beam picked out human bones and fragments of flesh. In all, twenty-eight bodies were discovered in Gacy’s house, all young men. Gacy also admitted to five more murders – bringing his total up to thirty-three, two more than Dean Corll.
Gacy was already known to the police. In March 1978, a young man had fallen into conversation with a fat man in an Oldsmobile, and had accepted an invitation to smoke a joint. The man had clapped a chloroformed rag over his face and driven him to a house; there he had been homosexually raped, flogged and beaten. He woke up in a park, bleeding from the rectum; hospital examination revealed that the chloroform – which had been repeatedly administered to keep him quiet – had permanently damaged his liver. Since the police seemed unable to help, he hired a car and sat by motorway entrances, looking for the Oldsmobile; one day, he saw it, and noted the number. It proved to belong to John Wayne Gacy. Gacy was arrested and charged, but the police had little hope of making the charge stick.
Gacy had already been in prison on a charge of attempted homosexual rape of a youth, and had been twice married. When his second wife left him, in 1976, she had already noticed the peculiar smell that hung about the house. The evidence suggests that Gacy began killing young men – in the course of sadistic homosexual rape – in 1975. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
On 2 January 1981, police in the centre of Sheffield, Yorkshire, noticed a man and a woman in a parked Rover car; since they had been alerted to look out for the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, they asked the man his name. Meanwhile, a check of the car’s licence plates revealed they were stolen. The man was taken to the local police station. Once there, one of the policemen admitted that he had permitted the man – now identified as thirty-five-year-old Peter Sutcliffe, a lorry driver – to get out of the car to urinate near a fuel storage tank. A check near the tank revealed a ball-headed hammer and a knife. Soon afterwards, Sutcliffe confessed to being the man police were seeking for thirteen mutilation murders of women.
Most of the attacks had followed the same pattern. A woman walking alone was struck from behind with a hammer and knocked unconscious – sometimes the skull was shattered. The ‘Ripper’ then raised her clothes and stabbed her repeatedly in the area of the stomach and vagina, sometimes with a knife, sometimes with a screwdriver. In only one case was the victim also raped. Sutcliffe apparently derived his sexual satisfaction from the stabbing.
Eight of the first nine victims – killed between October 1975 and May 1978 – were prostitutes. Sutcliffe explained later that he had a grudge against prostitutes after one of them had swindled him, then made him a laughing stock in a pub. But after the ninth victim he attacked women and girls at random, killing four more and injuring two. One of the biggest police hunts in British criminal history was totally unsuccessful – although Sutcliffe was interviewed several times during the enquiry, his car having been observed in the red light area of Leeds. He was caught by a fortunate accident.
Sutcliffe was a shy, introverted man with few friends; his relationship with his wife Sonia was close but stormy. In the cab of his lorry police discovered a card that read: ‘In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nations, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?’ Again, we observe the element of frantic ego-assertion that is the characteristic of so many modern killers.
Sutcliffe’s defence was insanity – he claimed that, when working as a gravedigger, he heard a voice speaking to him from a tombstone, ordering him to kill prostitutes. The jury chose to disbelieve him, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Perhaps the strangest – and most characteristic – case of the 1970s was that of Ted Bundy. When Bundy was first arrested, in August 1975, he was suspected of a dozen sex murders that had taken place over the past year, the first eight in Seattle, the rest in the area of Salt Lake City. Bundy, an intelligent, personable young law student, had moved from Seattle to Salt Lake City. The events of 14 July 1974 seemed typical of the killer’s method. A polite young man with his arm in a sling approached a girl at a picnic table near Lake Sammanish and asked her if she would help him lift his boat on to a car. She accompanied him, but when he told her the car was at a house up the hill, changed her mind and went back. She saw the young man accost another girl, Janice Ott; he introduced himself as Ted. Janice Ott went with him, and vanished. So did a girl named Denise Naslund on the same afternoon. Their skeletons were found months later on a hillside near Lake Sammanish.
In November 1974, a polite young man accosted a girl named Carol DaRonch in a shopping centre in Salt Lake City, introduced himself as a police officer, and told her there had been an attempt to break into her car. She went with him to inspect it, and agreed to go with him to view a suspect at police headquarters. Once in his car, she was handcuffed, and he tried to knock her out with a crowbar. She managed to jump out, and the man drove off as another car approached.
During the next nine months, more violated corpses were found. In August 1975, Bundy was arrested for acting suspiciously late at night, and Carol DaRonch identified him as the man who had tried to abduct her.
Bundy insisted that his presence in the area where corpses were found was an unfortunate coincidence, and his plausibility and intelligence supported that view. He was a popular prisoner, and conducted his own defence brilliantly. On 30 December 1978, he hoisted himself through a hole in the ceiling and escaped.
Two weeks later, a man walked into the student sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, and violently attacked four girls with a heavy piece of wood; one was shot and raped, and the man also bit her. Another girl was strangled. These two died; two others survived the beatings. In a nearby house, another girl was attacked and her skull fractured. The attacker fled when the phone rang. A few blocks away, Ted Bundy was living in a students’ lodging house, using a false name and stolen credit cards. Shortly afterwards, he left Tallahassee in a stolen car; the car was recognised a few days later, and he was arrested.
At his trial, Bundy remained as charming and plausible as ever, and it was generally agreed that he was an unlikely sex killer, and that most of the evidence against him was purely circumstantial. But the clinching evidence against him came from a dentist, who testified that the teeth marks on the buttocks of one of the Tallahassee victims were identical with Bundy’s dental imprint. The judge who sentenced him said: ‘Take care of yourself young man… You went the wrong way, pardner.’
The key to Bundy’s career of sex crime has been provided in a book called The Only Living Witness by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (Linden Press, 1983). In his interviews with Stephen Michaud, Bundy insists that he is merely ‘speculating’ about the motives of the killer, but the precision of his descriptions makes it clear that this is far more than guesswork. Bundy – who was born in 1946 – was an illegitimate child, who was spoilt by his grandparents, and who was deeply resentful when his mother married a cook in Seattle. He grew up to be a ‘loner’ with a streak of bitterness and resentment. Like most healthy young men, he was highly sexed: ‘But this interest, for some unknown reason, becomes geared towards matters of a sexual nature that involve violence. I cannot emphasise enough the gradual development of this. It is not short-term.’ Sexually shy and repressed, he indulged in fantasies of rape. One evening, walking down a street, he saw a woman undressing in a lighted room. He became a voyeur, and prowled the neighbourhood for hours every night. He tried disabling women’s cars by pulling out the rotor arm from the distributor, or deflating the tyres, but there were always helpful males in the area to help the intended victim get started. His fantasies – like those of Melvin Rees – were of kidnapping a woman and having total control over her. After drinking heavily, the need to play the Peeping Tom became obsessive.
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