Watch Mommy Die. Michael Benson
gun: a fearsome .44 bulldog. He shot couples or females alone. Never males alone. Because of the girth of his bullets, he cruelly maimed the victims he didn’t kill.
Like Zodiac, Son of Sam wrote taunting letters to the police and press. But the East Coast version was an upgrade in a way. His prose was written by a deviant poet, exhibiting a well-honed terroristic craft. Stanko was a writer and noticed the difference right away.
The similarities in the messages of mayhem were compelling as well. The chilling taunts of the Zodiac and the Rimbaud-like prose-poetry of Son of Sam bubbled up from the same misogynistic vat.
Berkowitz was caught and arrested, and the police said he was the Son of Sam. But, just as some people believed Zodiac was a team effort, there was a compelling theory that Berkowitz did not act alone. Perhaps Son of Sam, which referred to itself as a group in the letters, was a Devil-worshipping cult, holding meetings in a cave in a park north of the city, a club of death, in which the same .44 was passed around so that every satanic member had an opportunity to kill with it. The killing only stopped when one of them was caught, and he took the rap for everybody.
A writer searched Westchester County in search of this cult and found evidence that it existed—in a park, in a cave decorated with satanic symbolism.
The theories grew wackier. One suggested that the Sam kills were filmed from a van always in the vicinity, those snuff films going for top dollar to the pervs who paid for that junk.
How good could those films be? Stanko wondered—if they did exist. They were shooting at night from a distance. To get any kicks out of the kills, you’d need a camera getting close-ups inside the cars where the carnage was.
At first, Berkowitz confessed to all thirteen shootings. He had a loony tunes tale to tell: Sam was a cranky neighbor who worshipped the Devil, drank blood, and sent messages to Berkowitz via the incessant barking of his dog, Harvey. Berkowitz said he acted alone, and cops, eager to wrap up the nightmare, were eager to believe him.
Later, Berkowitz said he’d only done a couple of the shootings, that others had pulled the .44’s trigger as well. Then he had his throat slashed in prison and claimed to have “found God.”
Stephen Stanko discovered Ted Bundy–land, a vast continent of research on the crown prince of serial killers. There were people who thought Bundy was the most fascinating serial killer of all time. He combined the looks and charm of a swinging bachelor with an unquenchable thirst to kill as many pretty young girls as he could.
Now here was a guy that Stanko could identify with. A chick magnet/snuff artist. Bundy helped launch the career of the legendary true-crime writer Ann Rule, who worked beside him and never sensed the evil.
Bundy was a 1970s serial killer, and the fun part here was the way Bundy continued to lie about and cover up his murders, even as the evidence mounted against him, and his charm and powers of persuasion were such that he always had allies right up until the end.
Although most experts believed Bundy killed at least thirty-five people, when Bundy finally confessed, he admitted to only thirty. He was a rapist, a necrophiliac, and a postmortem surgeon.
After seducing his always lovely victims into a private moment, he took them by surprise—either coming up from behind or sometimes accosting them as they slept—and rapidly bludgeoned them into unconsciousness.
On some occasions, the bludgeoning itself turned out to be fatal; but in some other cases, after they were knocked out, he would become intimate and manually strangle them.
Bundy did not give up his freedom easily. After one of his arrests, he escaped by jumping out a second-story courthouse window. Hurting his ankle in the fall, he limped around free for a short while.
He was a nomadic killer. He killed in the American Northwest, on the salt flats, and in the Rocky Mountains. He killed in Florida, and it was there that he was caught the last time and eventually was pushed into the electric chair. Predictably, he had gone to his execution kicking and screaming.
Stanko thought Bundy’s modus operandi was worthy of extra thought. Hit ’em over the head, knock them out or make them groggy, and then get intimate. There would be a lot less potentially harmful rasslin’ that way.
One of the newest serial killers who was Hall of Fame worthy was “BTK,” another writer of taunting letters. BTK was an acronym for bind, torture, and kill. He did his thing in Wichita, Kansas.
BTK was different, because although FBI profilers would have called it impossible, he ran off a string of murders that terrified Kansas, stopped, and then came back a generation later to create a second nightmare for that city.
The BTK case had some things going for it, in a fetishistic way. Lots of bondage. Dude was into rope—exquisite restraint. Military men knew their knots!
His first kills occurred in a spree: He wiped out most of a family, stringently binding them before asphyxiating them slowly. Found dead were the dad, the mom, and little brother on the main floor, and little sister hanging from the rafters of the basement, her toes only inches above the floor, pants pulled down and smeared with semen. The older siblings came home from school that day and found themselves alone in the world.
That pervy stuff was one thing, but Stephen Stanko really latched onto him because BTK had literary aspirations. The killer wrote letters and sent creepy drawings. He illustrated one of his crime scenes in a graphic and horribly accurate way—like Zodiac and Son of Sam might’ve if they’d had artistic skills. His most troubling drawing was accurate right down to the placement of the furniture in the victim’s bedroom, to the position of the victim’s eyeglasses on top of her dresser.
For almost thirty years, no one had a clue who BTK could be. Might be your next-door neighbor. His career was like a movie sequel. He BTK’d a bunch of victims, hibernated for years, and then came back.
Another reason Stanko liked this case was because it made the straights of Wichita—the cops and the press and the political leaders—seem really stupid. Law enforcement became so desperate, it did silly things.
Those knuckleheads had heard of subliminal advertising, like when movie theaters had inserted single frames of Coke and popcorn during a movie, and supposedly sales went up. It was supposed to work on the subconscious without the conscious mind even knowing it. Like Keystone Kops, the police rigged a TV show about BTK—they knew BTK would be watching.
During the program, which would review in detail all of BTK’s kills and communications, they would subliminally insert a symbol the killer used in his letters, sort of a BTK logo that hadn’t been made public. That was accompanied by a photo of a telephone and a drawing of an Indian chief. Out of that, the killer was supposed to subconsciously understand the message: “BTK, call the chief,” as in the chief of police. BTK did not call.
But he did eventually get caught, a generation later. Dennis Rader did himself in by purposefully leaving clue after clue, until, unaware of the sophistication of cyber sleuthing, his computer gave him up.
Some days when Stephen Stanko came into the library, he studied not a serial killer but a famous murder, such as the murder of Beth Short in 1947 Hollywood, better known as the “Black Dahlia” murder.
This was a good one because there were photos. Beth Short was a rather lazy black-haired starlet who came from New England to Hollywood to be a star. Instead, she ended up floating around Southern California, accepting donations from various escorts.
The last stranger she found herself with tortured her for days, carving her flesh and slicing a Sardonicus-like smile into her cheeks. That brutally inflicted rictus came last, and she drowned in her own blood.
Her remains were drained of blood by her killer. She was surgically sliced in two at the waist and placed in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles.
Stanko stared at the photos of the pale and mutilated form lying obscenely like a broken manikin only a few inches from the sidewalk. The photos were in black and white, and you could feel the