Harold Schechter - The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers

Author Photo Bela Borsodi

HAROLD SCHECHTER is a professor of American literature and culture, and a national bestselling author renowned for his true-crime writing. His numerous nonfiction books include Fatal, Fiend, Bestial, Deviant, Deranged , and Depraved , He is also the author of several acclaimed historical novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe: Nevermore, The Hum Bug, The Mask of Red Death and The Tell-Tale Corpse . He lives in New York State.

Author Photo Laurie Everitt

DAVID EYERITT is the author of Human Monsters , an encyclopedia of the worlds most infamous murderers. In addition to true-crime writing, he is also a novelist and frequent contributor to The New York Times .

A DS

Back in the old days, desperate singles in search of a mate might turn to a professional matchmaker. Nowadays, they are more likely to look in the personals section of the classified ads or subscribe to an dating service. Of course, when it comes to getting anything that people are peddling in newspapers or onlinewhether its a used car or themselvesit pays to take heed of the old warning: Buyer Beware! Those Handsome SWMs and Sensual DWFs who make themselves look and sound so attractive in their digital photos and printed descriptions might turn out to be very different when you meet them in person.

Occasionally, in fact, they might turn out to be serial killers.

Using classifieds as a way of snaring potential victims is a ploy that dates back at least as far as the early 1900s. Thats when the infamous American fat, fiftyish, and bulldog-ugly. She wasnt lying about being a rich widow, though, since she had murdered at least fourteen husbands after separating them from their life savings.

In France, Gunnesss near contemporary, Henri Landru, known as the Bluebeard of Paris, also found his lover-victims through the newspapers. Some of the classifieds were matrimonial ads in which Landru presented himself as a wealthy widower searching for a mate. In others, he pretended to be a used-furniture dealer looking for merchandise. In either case, if the person who responded was a lonely woman of means, Landru would turn up the charm. The results were always the same. The womans money would end up in his bank account. The woman herself would end up as a pile of ashes in the stove of his country villa.

In the late 1950s, a sexual psychopath and bondage nut named Harvey Murray Glatman (see ) was able to procure victims by posing as a professional photographer and placing ads for female models. After luring an unwary woman into his studio, Glatman would rape her, truss her up, take pictures of her while she screamed in terror, then strangle her. (Glatmans case served as the real-life basis for Mary Higgins Clarks bestselling novel Loves Music, Loves to Dance, whichas the title suggestsdeals with the sometimes perilous world of the personals.)

In more recent times, a vicious sociopath named Harvey Louis Carignan lured young women to their deaths by advertising for employees at the Seattle gas station he managed. Carignans MO earned him the nickname the Want-Ad Killer (the title of Ann Rules 1983 bestselling true-crime book on the subject). At roughly the same time, an Alaskan baker named Robert Hansenwho was ultimately convicted of four savage sex killings, though he was allegedly responsible for seventeenused the personals page of his local newspaper to attract several of his victims. Hansen, who was married with children, would send his family off on a vacation, then take out a classified, seeking women to join me in finding whats around the next bend. After snaring a victim, he would fly her out to the wilderness in his private plane. Then, after raping her at knifepoint, he would strip off her clothing, give her a head start, and (in a sick, real-life duplication of Richard Connells famous short story The Most Dangerous Game) stalk her like an animal.

Even scarier was the wizened cannibal and child killer Albert Fish came across a Situation Wanted ad placed by a young man named Edward Budd, who was looking for a summer job in the country. Masquerading as the owner of a big Long Island farm, the monstrous old man visited the Budd household, intending to lure the youth to an abandoned house and torture him to death. Fish altered his plans when he laid eyes on Edwards little sister, a beautiful twelve-year-old girl named Grace. It was the little girl who ended up dead, dismembered, and cannibalizedand all because her brothers innocent ad brought a monster to their door.

Albert Fish; from 52 Famous Murderers trading cards

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Arguably the most bizarre advertising gambit in the annals of psychopathic sex crime occurred in 2002, when a forty-one-year-old German computer technician, Armin Meiwes, posted an Internet ad that read: Wanted: Well-Built Man for Slaughter and Consumption. Though it is impossible to conceive of a less enticing come-on, it caught the fancy of a forty-two-year-old microchip designer named Bernd-Jrgen Brandes, who showed up at Meiwess door, eager to be butchered. With the victims enthusiastic cooperation, Meiwes cut off Brandess penis, cooked it, then served it up for the two of them to eat together. He then stabbed Brandes through the neck, chopped up the corpse, froze certain parts for future consumption, and buried the rest (see ).

To describe Herr Meiwes as disturbed is clearly an understatement. It must be acknowledged, however, thatin contrast to such wolves-in-sheeps-clothing as Robert Hansen and Albert Fishat least he wasnt guilty of false advertising.

Advertising for Victims

In the 1989 film Sea of Love, a serial killer with a seductive line goes trolling for male victims in the classifieds. When a sucker bites, the killer reels him in, then leaves him facedown on the mattress, a bullet in the back of his skull.

As he did nine years earlier in Cruising, Al Pacino plays a homicide detective who goes undercover to catch the killer. By placing his own ad in the papers, he turns himself into live bait. In the process he plunges into a turbulent affair with Ellen Barkinwho may or may not be the killer.

A riveting thriller, Sea of Love is especially good at conveying the dangerous undercurrents that run beneath the surface of big-city singles life, where lonely people looking for a good catch sometimes end up with a barracuda.

A LLIGATORS

When it comes to getting rid of human remains, most serial killers prefer to keep things simple, relying on such standbys as shallow graves, basement crawl spaces, river bottoms, and remote, densely wooded areas (see ). Occasionally, however, a serial killer may resort to more exotic expedients.

Back in the 1930s, for example, a hard-drinking reprobate named Joe Ball ran a seedy roadhouse called (ironically enough) the Sociable Inn on Highway 181 outside Elmsdorf, Texas. Ball installed a cement pond and stocked it with a brood of five full-grown alligators. To keep his pets fat and happy, Ball fed them a diet of horse meat, live dogs, and human body partsthe remains of various female employees he murdered and dismembered. The exact number of his victims is unknown, since Ball went to his death without confessing. When two sheriffs who were investigating the disappearance of a pretty young waitress named Hazel Brown showed up to question the brutish barkeep, he whipped out a pistol from the drawer beneath his cash register and fired a bullet into his heart.