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Authors: Harold Schechter, David Everitt
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fine, almost feminine features. Women found him hard to resist. On April 3, 1895, Durrant lured one of his lady friends into an empty church, then strangled her, raped her corpse, and hid it in the belfry. Nine days later, he dispatched another young woman in a similar way. It wasn’t long before Durrant—who quickly became known as the “Demon of the Belfry”—was arrested, tried, and condemned to death. Public detestation of Durrant was so intense that, after he was hanged, no cemetery in San Francisco would agree to bury him. His parents had to take his body to Los Angeles for cremation.
Durrant’s contemporary Dr. H. H. Holmes was also catnip to the ladies. A dapper, smooth-talking sociopath, Holmes had no trouble working his seductive charm on scores of young women, an indeterminate number of whom met their ends in the depths of his infamous “Murder Castle.” A model of Gilded Age enterprise, Holmes found a way to make a profit from his crimes by peddling the mounted bones of his victims to local medical schools.
Ted Bundy; from True Crime Trading Cards, Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers; art by Jon Bright
(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)
Theo Durrant hauls a victim to the belfry in this nineteenth-century engraving
The twentieth century produced more than its share of lethal ladies’ men. One of the most notorious was the English psychokiller Neville Heath. Tall, handsome, and charming, Heath looked like a Hollywood version of a British war hero. He was, in fact, a military officer who saw action as an RAF bomber pilot in World War II. Unfortunately, he was also a sadistic sociopath whose taste for bondage and flogging blossomed into full-blown blood lust. In June 1946, a part-time actress named Margery Gardner accompanied Heath to his hotel room for a night of kinky sex. When Gardner’s body was found the next day, the condition of her corpse shocked even hardened policemen. Tied up and suffocated with a gag, she had been savagely whipped with a riding crop. Her nipples had nearly been bitten off, and a poker had been thrust between her legs. Not long afterward, Heath murdered and mutilated another young woman he had met at a Bournemouth hotel. Arrested shortly afterward, he pled not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial, but the jury took less than an hour to convict him. He remained suave to the end. On the day of his hanging, he requested a double whiskey from the warden like a gentleman ordering a drink at a hotel bar.
“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!”
T ED B UNDY ,
on the joy of murder
L ETTERS
There is some dispute as to whether Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski—the antitechnological terrorist responsible for a string of letter bomb attacks between 1978 and his arrest in 1996—can be considered a serial murderer. Some people say he most certainly was: after all, he killed three people and seriously injured almost two dozen more. Others, however, regard him as a revolutionary zealot who resorted to violence as a way of promoting his beliefs. This question remains a matter of debate, but one thing’s for sure—the guy could write. In August 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times, offering to refrain from violence if the paper agreed to publish his tract, “Industrial Society and Its Fate”—a 35,000-word manifesto that (however crackpot in some of its views) is a model of literacy, clarity, and coherence.
Unfortunately, Kaczynski also put his writing skills to less impressive uses. At the same time that he sent his letter to the Times, he also wrote to one of his victims, Dr. David Gelernter of Yale University, taunting the professor as a “techno-nerd.” In this regard, the Unabomber was, in fact, typical of serial killers, a number of whom have taken delight in communicating through taunting missives.
During the height of the “Whitechapel Horrors,” the London
Durrant’s contemporary Dr. H. H. Holmes was also catnip to the ladies. A dapper, smooth-talking sociopath, Holmes had no trouble working his seductive charm on scores of young women, an indeterminate number of whom met their ends in the depths of his infamous “Murder Castle.” A model of Gilded Age enterprise, Holmes found a way to make a profit from his crimes by peddling the mounted bones of his victims to local medical schools.
Ted Bundy; from True Crime Trading Cards, Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers; art by Jon Bright
(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)
Theo Durrant hauls a victim to the belfry in this nineteenth-century engraving
The twentieth century produced more than its share of lethal ladies’ men. One of the most notorious was the English psychokiller Neville Heath. Tall, handsome, and charming, Heath looked like a Hollywood version of a British war hero. He was, in fact, a military officer who saw action as an RAF bomber pilot in World War II. Unfortunately, he was also a sadistic sociopath whose taste for bondage and flogging blossomed into full-blown blood lust. In June 1946, a part-time actress named Margery Gardner accompanied Heath to his hotel room for a night of kinky sex. When Gardner’s body was found the next day, the condition of her corpse shocked even hardened policemen. Tied up and suffocated with a gag, she had been savagely whipped with a riding crop. Her nipples had nearly been bitten off, and a poker had been thrust between her legs. Not long afterward, Heath murdered and mutilated another young woman he had met at a Bournemouth hotel. Arrested shortly afterward, he pled not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial, but the jury took less than an hour to convict him. He remained suave to the end. On the day of his hanging, he requested a double whiskey from the warden like a gentleman ordering a drink at a hotel bar.
“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!”
T ED B UNDY ,
on the joy of murder
L ETTERS
There is some dispute as to whether Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski—the antitechnological terrorist responsible for a string of letter bomb attacks between 1978 and his arrest in 1996—can be considered a serial murderer. Some people say he most certainly was: after all, he killed three people and seriously injured almost two dozen more. Others, however, regard him as a revolutionary zealot who resorted to violence as a way of promoting his beliefs. This question remains a matter of debate, but one thing’s for sure—the guy could write. In August 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times, offering to refrain from violence if the paper agreed to publish his tract, “Industrial Society and Its Fate”—a 35,000-word manifesto that (however crackpot in some of its views) is a model of literacy, clarity, and coherence.
Unfortunately, Kaczynski also put his writing skills to less impressive uses. At the same time that he sent his letter to the Times, he also wrote to one of his victims, Dr. David Gelernter of Yale University, taunting the professor as a “techno-nerd.” In this regard, the Unabomber was, in fact, typical of serial killers, a number of whom have taken delight in communicating through taunting missives.
During the height of the “Whitechapel Horrors,” the London
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