Analyzing the Mentality of a Killer

Analyzing the Mentality of a Killer

By Brianna White

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for a Degree in Writing

Journalism Option

12/12/2013

Thesis Advisor: Professor Vastola

Abstract

This is a journalistic, long-feature story exploring and analyzing the minds of three well-known, American serial killers and 21st century, scientific findings that will give the public understandable reason for their sadistic behavior. The three serial killers who are thoroughly discussed in this work are Herman Webster Mudgett – otherwise known as H.H. Holmes, Ted Bundy, and Albert Fish. The upbringing and daily lifestyles of these killers are discussed individually in this analysis and then linked to and explored through recent scientific findings in psychology.

Introduction

In this thesis, I chose to review the early lives, sadistic upbringing and unruly adult behavior of three of America’s well-known serial killers, and to analyze their frames of mind – and that of many other serial killers -- before, during and after their killings. Is it nature or nurture? The underlying question when speculating as it relates to so many of these vicious killers is “Why did they do it?” Most fear what they do not understand and is where the fear for these killers stems. Looking into the chilling eyes of a killer, those like me would only have one desire. That is to successfully analyze a killer’s soul by looking into their chilly, glistening eyes, which can act as a portal to everything unknown. As a human race, we have quite a hard time accepting people that aren’t like us and things that aren’t similar to what we are used to encountering. This analysis is meant to bring a sort of peace and understanding to readers who are like myself and have an itch to understand. This is for the reader who, like me, if given the opportunity to sit down and speaker to a (chained) killer, would use every second balancing between pinpointing their ultimate desire and wisecracking in an attempt at getting the sadist to crack a sincere smile as if to say, “See? You can be joyful in other ways.”

As an extrovert who enjoys laughing and whose conscience speaks the loudest in the room, I find it hard to understand the disposition of one who simply does not have the ability to feel emotionally or to relate to one who does not read social cues. Therefore, this feature, in turn, was also a learning experience. I was able to dig deep enough into my research to hit many otherwise unknown discoveries.

H.H. Holmes

In 1995, a New Jersey collector bought a batch of 100 year-old cylinder recordings. Afterlistening to them all the way through,the collector was extremely surprisedand quite disturbed to find a peculiar message on one of them. One recording was of a man admitting to multiple murders. That man was H.H. Holmes, the U.S’s first serial killer and the world’s first triple digit serial killer.

H.H. Holmes, though born Herman Webster Mudgett, would often be referred to as the Master of Illusion.He opened his own personal “hotel of evil”, which he had designed and built for himself specifically with murder in mind and used it to kill and stash away the bodies of many innocent victims. Holmes is believed to have killed more than two hundred people. However, he only confessed to 27 murders and, unfortunately, only 9 were confirmed.

As a medical student at the University of Michigan, Holmes, like many other students, struggled to pay for his tuition, which around this time was around one hundred to two hundred dollars. This became a huge problem, as the only alternative would be his ineligibility to attend the school. Because he was a dedicated medical student, it wasn’t uncommon for Holmes to stay after class to dissect bodies or to do so after hours when no one was around but the professor. He soon, became the keeper of the dissection corpses. Therefore, inevitably, Holmes was around when the lifeless human bodies used for dissection would come in from unknown and questionable places. Holmes soon became aware that the students bringing these bodies in were getting, in exchange for the bodies, 20% taken off of their tuition expenses. This infected him with an obsession for the collection of human corpses that would last until he died.

A corrupt janitor at the University of Michigan that Holmes was believed to have quite close ties with inspired Holmes to begin digging bodies up from the graveyards and selling them. Holmes willingly took his advice. He went on a digging spree and was believed to have dug up well over 300 bodies and sold them to medical colleges. These casual, yet desperate, exchanges of corpses all took place around the 1890’s, when dissection corpses were quite difficult for medical colleges to obtain.

R.C. Leacock, Holmes’ lab partner and best friend, was well aware of Homes’ corrupt method of getting paid and was willing to get his hands dirty as well if it meant getting a piece of the pie. Leacock often helped dig bodies up and sell them right along with Holmes. However, he didn’t realize that soon he would, too, become a target. Holmes was becoming more and more obsessed with the feeling of receiving profit for bodies that were already lifeless. This was only the gateway drug to an even more addicting habit for him. When Holmes began to run into issues with digging up the bodies (people noticing the dug up graves, or people beginning to watch the graveyards, etc.), he got the idea to begin killing people on his own and receiving profit from the corpses. It wasn’t long before Holmes began to fantasize about murdering his best friend, Leacock and taking out life insurance on him and the family. In trying this new method he needed to stick to someone he knew and someone who trusted him. However, instead, H.H. Holmes got an even better idea. Holmes faked his death. He killed R.C. Leacock, dumped the body for the insurance company to find, posing Leacock as himself, and took out 20,000 of his own life insurance. As a man who barely stood 5’7’’ and happened to weigh around 150 lbs,Holmes ‘ ability to murder another grown man who happened to be slightly larger than him would suggest he was quite skillful, which was necessary in order for him to have gotten away with his crimes for as long as he did.

In 1886, H.H. Holmes, who was then a self-proclaimed‘pharmacist’, who would later be known as the first serial killer in the United States, bought a Chicago drugstore that was smack-dab in the middle of where the World’s Fair would be taking place soon. At that particular time, the property was owned by a cancer-stricken man named E.S. Holton. When Holton died, Holmes bought up surrounding property until he'd acquired about an entire city block. He deliberately renovated the buildings and turned them into a hotel just in time for the 1893 World's Fair; however, this was no ordinary hotel. Most of the rooms and all of the bedrooms in the hotel were windowless.The stairways would often lead to a dead-end with a trap door for the victim to fall through or a cliff to fall off of and then fall into a cement pit or a burning furnace. The hallways in the hotel ended in dead ends to make it almost impossible for victims to conjure an escape route. Holmes also built gas jets into hotel-room walls and a wooden disposal chute in each room.Holmes fooled curious investors into thinking he was going into the glass business so that they would support Holmes’ idea of building an adult person-sized, glass kiln in the basement. When Holmes was finished, his hotel was the perfect place to murder people. And that's exactly what he knew he would do.

For much of 1893, H.H. Holmes tortured and killed an untold number of innocent people at his hotel. This, for the most part, included young women visiting the Chicago for the World's Fair. Strangely, the first floor of the “Murder Castle” remained a proper drugstore. Every day, customers purchased tonics and medicine directly downstairs, unaware of the horrors taking place directly above them.

Holmes, a smart and skillful man, knew of the many difficulties for women when it related to finding employment, especially around this time period. Holmes used this knowledge to his advantage and, therefore, set up a ladies employment agency. It wasn’t long before he started to have sex with the young women he ‘helped employ’, kill them and then dispose of his femaleclients in his new glass kiln. He committed his last murder the day a reporter naively paid him for a private confession.

Fortunately, Holmes was eventually incarcerated in the Moyamensing Prison and remained there for several months. Erik Larson, a well-known author who wrote a notableBiography of the Holmes tale, indicates that “his humid, whitewashed cell wasnine feet by 14 feet, with a barred window and an electric lamp for light”. Holmes was well-behaved and despite the daily journalized andbroadcasted discoveries of all of his horrendous and sadistic crimes, his prison guards took a liking to him. Some of them even, strangely, did favors for him, which included delivering the newspaper to him daily. This allowed him to could keep up with the details of the pending investigation. As the amount of evidence the media exposed began to increase, he realized that he'd have to come up with a better confession than he was preparing to give. Holmes was always scheming.

Holmes had done a good job inkeeping up with the news each day as the newspapers were delivered to him, and had shifted the details of his story as the situation demanded. He played games and adjusted his strategy to whatever seemed necessary to move them around like pawns in some game he played to please himself. Such a manner of man made the detectives uneasy. No one could know from what he said what was true or false, and worse, no one knewwhat he might’ve been planning next.

On June 3, 1895, Holmes was tried for conspiracy to defraud an insurance company, and because the sentence would be light his attorneys advised him to plead guilty, which he did. The sentencing was delayed for a later date.

Soon, a skillful and well-known detective around this time, Detective Frank Geyer was assigned to Holmes’ case. On June 26, Detective Geyer set out by train in search of some of the human remains hidden by Holmes, after hearing of and discovering Holmes’ many rental properties all over the U.S. Geyer traveled everywhere from the Midwest to Canada in search of the remains of any of his victims.

In Indianapolis, Geyerlearned from a random witness who had apparently neighbored one of Holmes’ rental properties, that a “man with children at this place” had asked for the loan of a spade to plant potatoes in the cellar and had brought only a bed, mattress and large trunk to live in the house. A woman, who most believe was the landlord, identified Holmes from a photograph as the man who had rented that specific house. Geyer went there in search of some hardcore evidence in an attempt tobring the families of Holmes’ missing victims to somewhat of a peace. Luckily, Geyer discovered that the house had a dark cellar accessible via a trap door, and found an area of soft dirt on the floor. When he pushed a shovel into it, a horrible stench arose and that’s when he knew he'd come to the right spot. His long, dark journey had produced what he'd both hoped for and had feared- human remains. After digging three feet, he found a small arm bone. Confidently, Geyer employed an undertaker to take charge of the digging and discovering. In short order, they exhumed the corpses of two unclothed 13 year-old girls, who they believed were Nellie and Alice Pitezel, two of Holmes’ youngest victims. Geyer then went to the smaller outlying towns, going through them as systematically as he had done in Indianapolis.

Not too long after, in Irvington, Geyer struck pay dirt. A man who had rented a house in October remembered Holmes on account of his manner, which he described as extremely rude and abrupt. The man recalled that a boy had been with this irascible short-term tenant. Relieved and certain that he was close to a possible discovery. Geyer proceeded to the rental property. There was no disturbance in the floor of the cellar that he could find, which discouraged him at first, but there was a trunk in a small alcove, and near it some disturbed dirt. Geyer dug into the area but found nothing. In a barn, he found a coal stove. Immediately remembering Holmes' earlier purchase of a large stove, which he'd then abandoned, Detective Geyer suspected that this was a clue. On top of the stove were splattered and smudged stains that looked like dried blood. Geyer temporarily left the rental property. However, he returned when he heard there was news. A doctor who had poked around showed him pieces of a charred bone— the bones turned out to be part of a skull and a femur— thathe said had belonged to a male child. They had found it in a pipe hole in the chimney. Geyer dismantled the chimney and found more human remains— a complete set of teeth and a piece of jaw, identified by a dentist as being from a boyseven toten-years-old.Geyer, based on scientific studies, and the similarities between the bones and the physical structure of the boy, soon identified him as the young boy who was seen with Holmes in Irvington. These were two out of many difficult discoveries.

Thankfully, Holmes was soon put on trial for murder, and confessed to 27 murders (in Chicago, Indianapolis and Toronto) and six attempted murders. He was hanged on May 7, 1896, in Philadelphia. It was reported that when the executioner had finished all the preliminaries of the hanging, he asked, "Ready, Dr. Holmes?", to which Holmes said, "Yes. Don't bungle." However, the executioner did “bungle”. Unfortunately for Holmes, his neck did not snap immediately; he instead died slowly and painfully of strangulation over the course of about 15 minutes. Holmes’ only request was to be buried under a large concrete plank so that his body would not be dug up and dissected.

Ted Bundy

Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy was an American serial killer, rapist and kidnapper who had necrophilia, and assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. Bundy was born November 24, 1946 in Burlington, Vermont to Eleanor Louise Cowell. His birth father has never been indefinitely identified. Bundy’s birth certificate claims paternity belongs to a salesman and Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall. However, Cowell second-guessed this when she claimed a sailor, whose name may have been Jack Worthington, seduced her.

In 1951 Louise met a charismatic Johnny Culpepper Bundy, a hospital cook, at an adult singles night at Tacoma's First Methodist Church. They married that year and Johnny formally adopted Ted. Johnny and Louise later conceived four children of their own. Although Johnny tried to include his stepson in camping trips and other family activities, Ted remained distant from his stepfather. He later complained to his girlfriend that Johnny wasn't his real father, "wasn't very bright", and "didn't make much money.

Bundy later told reporters that he “chose to be alone" as an adolescent because he was unable to understand interpersonal relationships. He claimed that he had no natural sense of how to develop friendships. "I didn't know what made people want to be friends," he said. "I didn't know what underlay social interactions.” Bundy, overall, was incapable of reading social cues. However, contrary to his statement, classmates from Woodrow Wilson High School said that Bundy was "well known and well liked" there. They described him as "a medium-sized fish in a large pond.” As Bundy was often described, before and after his murders, as charming and quite charismatic, the story his classmates told was more believable to the public.

In high school, Ted Bundy lacked any close or real friendship relationships. However, in 1967,Bundy fell in love with his new girlfriend and tried hard to impress her.It would even get to the point of Bundy grossly exaggerating his ownaccomplishments. He also tried to gain her approval with a summer scholarship to Stamford University that he won although his academic success there was less than impressive.

By 1968,Bundy’s girlfriend decided they lacked any real future together and came to the conclusion that was not husband material. She ended the relationship and broke Bundy's heart. This caused Bundy’s obsession toward her to haunt him for years to come. Bundy soon began to suffer from extreme depression over the break up and eventually dropped out of school. As if losing his girlfriend wasn’t enough, it was during this time that he learned the truth about his family- his parents were actually his grandparents. This meant that who he knew all this time as his sister was actually his mother. This confused Bundy locked him further into the prisons of anxiety and depression. To add to his hardships, Bundy was also getting a whispered reputation by those close to him for being a petty thief. As unexpected as it seems, it was during this phase of his life that Bundy’s shyness was replaced with false bravado and he returned to college, gracefully excelled in his major, and earned a bachelor's degree in Psychology.In August 1975, police attempted to stop Bundy for a basic driving violation. However, he aroused suspicion when he tried to get away by turning his car lights off and speeding through stop signs. After a long high-speed chase,authorities finally stopped himand his Voltz-Wagon was searched thoroughly. Police found handcuffs, an ice pick, crowbar, pantyhose with eye-holes cut out along with other questionable items. The police also saw that the front seat on the passenger side of his car was missing, which ultimately caused them to detain him.