Read Online Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky - Free Book Online Page B

three decades, while not as big as once thought, is nevertheless real—and worse, it is not our first. It merely follows several previous waves of serial killer epidemics over the last hundred years, each bigger than the last. Jenkins identified two previous periods during which there were surging waves of serial homicides: 1911–1915 and 1935–1941. He found that the FBI list, while duplicating some of the more modern serial homicide cases, entirely overlooked the existence of earlier ones. 40
    The FBI study, for example, lists a total of thirteen serial homicide cases in a twenty-five-year period between 1900 and 1924. But by merely looking through back issues of the New York Times , Jenkins identified a wave of seventeen cases just in the short period of five years between 1911 and 1915! Clearly the FBI was underestimating the prevalence of serial murder in America in earlier years.
    Henry Lee Moore, for example, between 1911 and 1912, was a traveling serial killer who murdered more than twenty-three people—entire families. But little is known about him—he is a mere footnote. In September 1911, using an axe, Moore killed six victims in Colorado Springs—a man, two women, and four children. In October he killed three people in Monmouth, Illinois, and then he slaughtered a family of five in Ellsworth, Kansas, the same month. In June 1912, he killed a couple in Paola, Kansas, and several days later he killed seven people, including four children, in Villisca, Iowa. Moore then returned home to Columbia, Missouri, where he murdered his mother and grandmother. At this point he was arrested and prosecuted in December 1912. But Moore was not immediately linked to the previous crimes until a federal agent investigating the Villisca homicides was informed by his father, a warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary with contacts throughout the prison system, of the nature of Henry Lee Moore’s crimes in Missouri.
    In another case, in Atlanta between May 1911 and May 1912 twenty light-skinned black women were murdered on the streets in Jack-the-Ripper-style mutilations. Between May 20 and July 1, 1911, the unknown killer murdered the first seven victims—one every Saturday night like clockwork.
    In Denver and Colorado Springs in 1911–1912, seven women were bludgeoned to death with the perpetrator never being caught.
    Between January 1911 and April 1912, forty-nine victims were killed in unsolved axe murders in Texas and Louisiana. Very similar to the Moore murders, entire families were wiped out: a mother and her three children hacked to death in their beds in Rayne, Louisiana, in January 1911; ten miles away in Crowley, Louisiana, three members of the Byers family in February 1911; two weeks later, a family of four in Lafayette. In April the killer struck in San Antonio, Texas, killing a family of five. All the victims were killed in their beds at night and nothing was stolen from their homes. In November 1911 the killer returned to Lafayette and killed a family of six; in January 1912 a woman and her three children were killed in Crowley. Two days later, at Lake Charles, a family of five were killed in their beds, and a note was left behind: “When He maketh the Inquisition for Blood, He forgetteth not the cry of the humble—human five.”
    In February 1912 the killer murdered a woman and her three children while they slept in their beds in Beaumont, Texas. In March, a man and a woman and her four children were hacked to death in Glidden, Texas, while they slept. In April a family of five were killed in San Antonio again, and two nights later, three were killed in Hempstead, Texas. The murders were never solved.
    In New York City a “ripper” killed a five-year-old girl on an errand inside her apartment building on March 19, 1915. He sent taunting letters to the victim’s mother and the police, signing himself as “H. B. Richmond, Jack-the-Ripper” and threatening to