Today’s Tidy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
To get away with gruesome murder again and again, a serial killer has to possess a fairly high degree of fiendish cunning. Snaring a victim is the first challenge he has to meet. Once he has perpetrated his atrocities, he is faced with another, even more pressing problem—what to do with the remains. The solutions of this grisly dilemma range from the straightforward to the diabolically elaborate.
Some serial killers simply leave their victims where they lay, occasionally taking the time to wreak some grotesque indignity on the remains. For example, Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” liked to tie big ornamental bows around the throats of his female victims, as though he were leaving a gift-wrapped present for the police.
DeSalvo’s bizarre bow-tying practice made for an unmistakable “signature.” Understandably enough, many other homicidal maniacs prefer to leave no trace of their identities at all. For some sociopaths, the simplest approach to corpse disposal is the best. Ted Bundy, the Hillside Stranglers, and the Green River Killer, for example, simply dumped the bodies of their victims out in the open—in forests, along riverbanks, on the slopes bordering freeways. Others made perfunctory attempts at concealment, burying the bodies in shallow graves or shoveling dead leaves over the remains. John Wayne Gacy didn’t even bother to leave home. He simply stuck the dead bodies of his young male victims under the crawl space of his house—at last until he ran out of room, at which point he began tossing them into a nearby river.
By contrast, there are some serial killers who go to great lengths to obliterate every trace of their victims, often by immersing the bodies in acid, covering them with Quicklime, or incinerating them in ovens.
Then there are those serial killers whose disposal methods can best be described as wildly (if not insanely) unorthodox. Joe Ball, for example, got rid of his murdered mistresses by feeding their flesh to his pet Alligators, while the monstrous Fritz Haarmann chopped up his victims and sold their flesh to his neighbors, passing it off as black-market beef.
The longer a serial killer remains on the loose, of course, the more proficient he tends to become. With corpse disposal, as with most human skills, practice makes perfect. Special agents of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit describe one serial killer who was thrown into a state of almost panicky confusion when faced with the ravaged remains of his first victim. By the time he committed his second homicide, he had already worked out a sophisticated disposal method, taking four painstaking hours to dismember the body in his bathroom before bagging up the parts and depositing them in supermarket dumpsters.
Of course, there are some serial killers who prefer not to dispose of their victims at all. Both Dennis Nilsen and his American counterpart, Jeffrey Dahmer, were so desperate for companionship that they went to great, highly deranged lengths to keep the corpses close by. Of course, since both men occupied cramped apartments, even they had to face up to the fetid reality after a while and get rid of their rotting house guests. Nilsen’s solution was sublime in its simplicity, if not entirely practical—he chopped up the bodies and flushed the chunks down the toilet, a method that eventually led to his arrest when the plumbing in his apartment building became clogged with gobs of decomposing human flesh.
Jeffrey Dahmer victim
Culled from: The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
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Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).
Here’s today’s entry:
October 13th. More arranging and moving about. We now lie very compact; about three thousand men occupying about three acres, two thirds of which space is included in the streets. I have been peddling coffee at the hospital sheds, made from burnt meal.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost