Sons of Cain Read online

  ALSO BY PETER VRONSKY

  Serial Killers

  Female Serial Killers

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Peter Vronsky

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vronsky, Peter, author.

  Title: Sons of Cain: a history of serial killers from the stone age to the present/Peter Vronsky.

  Description: New York : Berkley, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017046780 | ISBN 9780425276976 | ISBN 9780698176140 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Serial murderers—History.

  Classification: LCC HV6505.V76 2018 | DDC 364.152/3209—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046780

  First Edition: August 2018

  Cover images: Lycaon Transformed into a Wolf from Metamorphoses by Ovid, 1589, Hendrick Goltzius, Wikimedia Commons; Vlad Ţepeş, the Impaler, Prince of Wallachia, Wikimedia Commons; England, Whitby, fan in costume in archway on 100th anniversary of publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, 1997, Dod Miller/Photonica World/Getty Images; H. H. Holmes, Wikimedia Commons; Jack the Ripper Letter © PA Images/Alamy Stock; Marie Becker, 1905, Wikimedia Commons; Myra Hindley, 1966 © Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo; Serial Killer Andrei Chikatilo, Terry Smith/Contributor/The LIFE Images Collection/ Getty Images; David Berkowitz © Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo; Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer © PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo

  Cover design by Emily Osborne

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Version_1

  In memory of Dave Walker, murdered at the Gate of Death in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, February 14, 2014.

  _______________

  “I want a Tibetan sky funeral with flagellants beating themselves to the song.”

  CONTENTS

  Also by Peter Vronsky

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I On the Origin of the Species: The Evolution of Serial Killers

  1. Serial Killers: A Brief Introduction to the Species

  2. Genesis: The Stone Age Reptilian Zombie Serial-Killer Triune Brain

  3. Psychopathia Sexualis: The Psychology of the Lust Serial Killer in Civilized Society

  II Serial Killer Chronicles: The Early Forensic History of Monsters

  4. The Dawn of the Less-Dead: Serial Killers and Modernity

  5. Lupina Insania: Criminalizing Werewolves and Little Red Riding Hood as Victim, 1450–1650

  6. Malleus Maleficarum: The Great Witch Hunt as a Serial-Killing-Woman Hunt

  7. The Rippers Before Jack: The Rise of Modern Serial Killers in Europe, 1800–1887

  8. Back in the USA: The Rise of the Modern American Serial Killer

  9. Slouching Toward Whitechapel: Sex Crimes in Britain Before Jack the Ripper

  III The New Age of Monsters: The Rise of the Modern Serial Killer

  10. Raptor: Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel Murders, 1888

  11. The French Ripper: The Forensics of Serial Murder in the Belle Epoch, 1897

  12. Red Tide Rising: Serial Killers in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, 1900–1950

  13. American Gothic: The “Golden Age” of Serial Killers, 1950–2000

  14. Diabolus in Cultura: Serial-Killing Rape Culture “Sweats,” the “Greatest Generation,” and Their Sons of Cain

  Conclusion: Pogo Syndrome: Thinking Herds of Crazies in the Twilight of the Golden Age of Serial Killers

  Afterword: “Serial Killers Need Hugs Too”

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Index

  About the Author

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  www.sonsofcainserialkillers.com

  I

  On the Origin of the Species: The Evolution of Serial Killers

  ONE

  Serial Killers: A Brief Introduction to the Species

  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 one—the first of my three random encounters with different serial killers before they were identified and captured—occurred 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 York’s 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 1979,1 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 2,605.2 It was dangerous. On the single block of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, an average 2,250 crimes were being reported annually, more than on any other block in New York, and 30 to 40 percent of the offenses were serious Part I felonies (homicide, forcible rape, robbery).3

  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 documenta
ry projects and shot all sorts of edgy things. Sometimes I’d 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 Hell’s Kitchen. Today it’s 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 Hell’s 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 there—walked through me—bonking 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 didn’t 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 he’d annoyed me, I did give him enough of a look to later recognize him if I saw him again, even if I couldn’t 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.

  It was an entirely random encounter with a monster who had brutally bound, gagged, raped, tortured and killed two street prostitutes in his room upstairs, sawed off their heads and hands and stuffed the severed body parts in a bag. As I was approaching the lobby of the hotel, he laid their headless torsos in the pools of thickening blood on the mattress, soaked them in lighter fluid and set it all on fire. He then left with his bag of body parts and calmly took the elevator down as I was impatiently waiting and fuming in the lobby below.

  Of course, I did not know any of that at the time.

  MONSTRUM

  He had come to my attention in the first place only because he had annoyed me. I would not have noticed him otherwise. I surmise today—as a profiler might—that he was holding the elevator door at his floor until he was satisfied that the fire was spreading. He would have obsessively craved that kind of complete control over his crime scene that serial killers seek in their futile attempts to be fulfilled by what they do. It’s all about control for them. That is intrinsic to serial killers.

  Taking an elevator down was a reckless act, especially after setting a fire, as it meant he would have to go by the front desk to exit. That kind of recklessness is also intrinsic to serial killers. I would have taken the stairs, but then I am not a serial killer.

  In the end, that brazenness would lead to his arrest. Six months later, in May 1980, he returned to a New Jersey motel where less than three weeks earlier he had tortured and murdered another prostitute and jammed her handcuffed, battered and mutilated corpse under a bed to be found by a housekeeper the next morning. None of the motel staff noticed or remembered him. That is how forgettable he was. It was only when motel employees, already spooked by the previous murder, heard a woman screaming in his room that police were called.

  That was how thirty-three-year-old Richard Francis Cottingham, aka “the Times Square Torso Ripper,” was apprehended and identified. His victim, Leslie Ann O’Dell, an eighteen-year-old prostitute, was rescued and survived to testify at his trial.

  Richard Cottingham, who upon his arrest told police, “I have problems with women,” had been raised in a stable, upper-middle-class, strict Catholic family in New Jersey. Mom was a housewife while Dad was an insurance company executive in Manhattan. Their son “Richie” was a high school track star and appeared to be well-behaved. After graduating, Richard became gainfully employed as a computer console operator at the offices of Blue Cross Insurance in midtown Manhattan. Like his father, he would commute to work from his home in New Jersey, where he lived with his wife and three children. But he had a whole other secret life too. He had two mistresses, both nurses, who did not know about each other, and a string of casual girlfriends, favorite escorts and random pickups, and once in a while, whenever he got the urge for it, he would torture, rape and kill one of them. He killed at least three of the women he had been acquainted with. He preferred, however, random victims he would pick up on the streets or in bars. Working a shift from four p.m. to midnight, Cottingham committed his savagely sadistic murders between dates with his mistresses, his hours at Blue Cross and his commute home to his family in Lodi, New Jersey.

  Cottingham was eventually convicted of five murders, and recently (in 2010) he suddenly pleaded guilty to a sixth murder, committed forty-three years ago. He is suspected in at least an additional thirty to fifty unsolved murders in New York and New Jersey between 1967 and 1980. (See Richard Cottingham crime scene photos and other illustrations for Sons of Cain on www.sonsofcainserialkillers.com.)

  After literally bumping into him in the lobby that morning, I rode upstairs and smelled the smoldering fire and caught a glimpse of smoky mist and tiny cinders swirling in the corridor just as the fire alarms began to sound. The hotel was evacuated before I saw any heavy, dense smoke or flames, and I exited by a stairwell into an indoor parking garage and out onto 42nd Street just as the fire department was pulling up out front. I did not hang around in the cold to watch, and I walked away in a “New York minute” to stay somewhere else, without learning what had taken place.

  The next morning, when I arrived at the film lab, I glanced at the newspapers strewn around the reception room. The headlines screamed about fire and headless torsos. While I realized that the hotel fire was where I had been the previous morning, I did not immediately connect the guy on the elevator to any of it. I did not have the familiarity we all do today with the phenomenon of serial killers and what they do, to form an immediate connection in my mind between the jerkoff with the bag of “bowling balls” and the murders upstairs. Nobody thought that way back then. It was only much later, after Cottingham had been arrested and I first saw his picture in the papers, that it all suddenly fell into place. It was the jerkoff who had kept me waiting! I immediately recognized him. Only then did the “bowling balls” suddenly take on a different meaning.

  One of the two headless victims in the hotel room, estimated by the medical examiner to be in her teenage years, was never identified and remains a Jane Doe to this day. But police were able to identify the second victim a month after the murder. She had worn leather high-heeled Philippe Marco sandals, an exclusive brand, which police were able to trace to a store in Paramus, leading them to believe that the victim lived in New Jersey. Police then focused on reports of missing women in New Jersey from around the date of the murder and eventually linked spinal X-rays and a caesarean scar on the torso to hospital records belonging to twenty-two-year-old Deedeh Goodarzi, an upscale escort living in Trenton. In 1978, she had given birth by caesarean section to a baby girl, whom she immediately gave up to the state of New Jersey for adoption, nineteen months before her murder.

  After Deedeh was identified, her mug shots from prostitution arres
ts were widely published. She was indeed upscale, elegant and tastefully dressed in her arrest photos, with sultry dark looks, full lips, long black hair and beautiful almond-shaped eyes. When Deedeh failed to return home, there were people in New Jersey who cared enough about her to quickly report her missing to police, which helped investigators to zero in on her hospital records.

  She was reported in the media to have been born in Kuwait, raised by her grandparents there and brought to the United States at the age of fourteen by her father, who had immigrated here earlier. She lived a troubled life in Long Island and New York City. She dropped out of high school and ran away from home around the age of sixteen. Deedeh ended up working as a marginally upscale “call girl” escort in New York, Florida, Nevada and California before settling in Trenton, New Jersey.

  Her sad story, her face and eyes would haunt me for decades afterward. At twenty-two she was only a year younger than I was when she was murdered. I marveled at how long a road Deedeh must have traveled to her encounter with a serial killer, just mere hours before my own road led me to my encounter with the same killer.

  I wondered what happened to her head, with which I had been bumped, with those beautiful eyes and that flowing dark hair. What did Cottingham do with it? As hard as police searched in the vicinity of the hotel for the missing heads, even sending down divers off the rotting piers on the nearby Hudson River, they never found them. Cottingham had taken the heads with him to some final secret place.

  Over the decades since, I occasionally wondered what happened to the baby girl Deedeh had given up for adoption, like a tiny soul in an escape capsule, desperately launched to safety from the chaos of her mother’s unhappy life, nineteen months before her savage murder, the only trace of herself she left behind. I wondered if the girl had survived the maw of a state adoption system, what trajectory she had been thrown on, where she had landed and whether she would ever know anything of her birth mother’s identity and fate. I imagined her drifting through life like crash debris left floating in the wake of chaos and murder.