Peter Vronsky - Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

Serial Killers

Female Serial Killers

I LLUSTRATIONS

www.sonsofcainserialkillers.com

In the beginning was the Word.

JOHN, 1:1

When I encountered my first serial killer in 1979, I did not know there was such a thing. The term serial killer did not exist except in the close-knit world of FBI behaviorists and homicide investigators who in the 1970s were dealing with a sudden surge of unsolved murders, across different jurisdictions, that appeared to be linked to single unknown perpetrators. Ted Bundy, who killed at least thirty-six college-aged women across six states, would emerge from that era as the prototypical postmodern serial killer. But in the movies, in true crime and fiction literature, in the news media, in popular culture, even in forensic psychiatry, there was no agreed-upon term for what Ted Bundy was, or for what I encountered, the way we have the word for it today: serial killer.

My brief chance encounter with onethe first of my three random encounters with different serial killers before they were identified and capturedoccurred on a December Sunday morning in New York. I was stranded in the city over a weekend and needed to find an inexpensive place to stay until Monday. I decided to try a hotel on the far west end of 42nd Street on the farthest fringe of the Times Square district.

Unlike the tourist- and family-friendly version today, in the 1970s the neighborhood around Times Square and 42nd Street (nicknamed Forty-Deuce or the Deuce) was very nasty, a teeming souk of hard-core porn adult bookstores, peep shows, grind house movie theaters, knife stores, massage parlors, strip joints, live sex acts, souvenir shops, hot dogs and hand jobs, street drugs, junkie bars, flophouse welfare hotels and prostitutes of every age, shape and gender. It was New Yorks neon-lit Whitechapel, with its own Ripper too, as I was about to find out.

There were forty thousand prostitutes working the streets and storefront parlors of New York in 1979, so many that the NYPD at one point had to put up barricades along the sidewalks of Eighth Avenue to keep the girls and their pimps from spilling over into the road and blocking traffic.

Unless you were briskly on your way to or from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, you were on the Deuce for one of four reasons: to buy, sell, be sold or be hunted if you were stupid or careless enough. There were 2,092 murders in New York in 1979 and 2,228 in the year after that. In 1990, murders would climb to a record high of 2,605.

As I approached the hotel that Sunday morning at daybreak, I thought I had a pretty good idea as to what I might be getting into. I had been to New York many times before on movie and documentary projects and shot all sorts of edgy things. Sometimes Id stayed in one of the fleabag hotels around Times Square but this was the first time I had ever wandered off the map as far as Tenth Avenue, into the adjoining neighborhood that since the 1880s had been called Hells Kitchen. Today its bursting with foodie fad restaurants and hip little bars and the neighborhood has been renamed a more upscale and condo-friendly Clinton. But in the 1970s it was definitely still Hells Kitchen. Between 1968 and 1986 the Westies, an Irish gang, killed between sixty and one hundred victims there, carving their corpses into pieces in the tenement house bathtubs where today all the cozy, cute little restaurants are.

I wasnt sure I wanted to stay the night there, but it was conveniently close to the film lab I needed to go to the next morning before catching my plane home, and it was cheap. So before committing myself by checking into this medium-sized five-story hotel, I decided to take a walk around the hallways and stairways, scout it out and see for myself just how bad it was and who or what might be lurking in the corridors.

As I waited in the small lobby for the elevator, it seemed to be stopped forever on an upper floor. It was annoying. I was young and impatient. When the elevator finally came down and the doors slid open, I took an extra-hard look at the jerkoff who had kept me waiting for what seemed like ages, although probably it wasnt longer than a minute.

He looked like... well, like anybody. Ordinary. Just another white guy in his early thirties. The only odd thing about him was that despite the cold he had a sheen of feverish perspiration on his forehead. As he got off the elevator he walked into me as if I was not therewalked through mebonking me on the knee and shin with a soft-sided bag that felt as if it had bowling balls in it: rounded, hard and heavy. He didnt say anything, apologize or even give me a glance back. He looked so ordinary that if I had been asked to describe him for a police composite sketch, I could not have. But as hed annoyed me, I did give him enough of a look to later recognize him if I saw him again, even if I couldnt describe him from scratch. My last glimpse of him was from inside the elevator as the door closed on me. His back was turned to me and he was strolling calmly toward the door to the street with his bag dangling at his side.