JESSICA FAIRFIELD

25 year old mother of two beautiful boys. Always wanted to get to collage for criminology to be a crimnal investigater. Can't stop finding their stories to be so hypnotic. Its just too hectic to work, mom, and go to collage, so I decided just because I wasn't in collage didn't stop me from investigating serial killers. Been reading every piece of material I can get my hands on for about 6 years or maybe more now. I've wrote a few killers to really get a feel for who they were besides a serial killer. They are just about as unique as a person can get. So I combined my writing talent with my love for serial killers and sent it to James Gilks. Now here I am!

The History of Serial Killers By Jessica Fairfield

Before the nineteenth century records were immature and times were extremely different. In the time of the great coliseum one of our most evil modern day killers would not even stand out. So long as the selected victims were not royalty or high class their killings could go unrecorded. When seeking out old cases of serial killers one can expect to run into horrific stories of military leaders or royalty who had erratic and sadistic alter egos. Most members of military and royalty did kill a few times yet it was not noted in the history books because it was somewhat normal behavior back then. It took drastic measures to be considered an evil killer before 1800.
After 1800 we begin to see cases of the middle class and lower class, victims and killers alike. This marks the point that punishment for murder became more of an organized and equal system. Society had changed its views on life value but killers were still able to easily get away with their crimes. There was almost no forensics, most evidence in crimes was witness accounts and circumstantial evidence. Innocent men were put to death and savage killers roamed free their whole lives. By late 1800s things improved but it wasn’t until about 1930-1940 that the justice system became just and advancements in collecting and analyzing evidence began to really take off. By this point it took a lucky or smart criminal to get away with murder. As time goes on the system progresses. However the types of killers that naturally pop up have not changed. When one decides to commit murder that is exactly what they intend on doing. Regardless of any advancements in the legal system, killing cannot be prevented or predicted. Usually they will kill until they are stopped. One way or another, to them the urges are all that matter. So there is a repeating pattern amongst serial killers, same insane reasons, methods, etc. Reasoning is usually not sensible to anyone but the perpetrator. It is difficult for everyday citizens to understand serial killers. All humans retain an instinct to kill and usually will when deemed necessary. But, killing for survival is not at all what serial killers are doing. They are killing for a fix or for pleasure. After their first murder they will relive the experience again and again until the beast takes over again. They can be compared with volcanoes. They are there and we cannot change that, they erupt suddenly with cooling off periods in between, and are capable of causing much death and havoc. Since serial killers have always been, we must go back as far as possible when studying them.
In 37 AD Nero Claudius Caesar was born. His mother was the niece of the Emperor Claudius. She became a widow when it is believed she poisoned her husband. Shortly after his death she married the Emperor. As soon as Nero was next in line to be Emperor she poisoned her husband again. Nero became the Emperor. Then Claudius son was also poisoned. For a while Nero was a just leader. His mother was over bearing and trying to run Rome herself so Nero arranged for her death. He then proceeded to rule Rome with a satanic quality. In his view Christians were behind every problem in the world. He killed as many as he could in as many different ways as he could. They’d be staked and then Nero dressed as a beast would attack, chew, shred, and remove their genitals. Once he used burning Christians as torches for a garden party. According to records Nero was responsible for the deaths of saints Peter and Paul. He beat his pregnant mistress to death once. In the end greed is what destroyed him. Rome tired of him confiscating their fortunes, forcing the rich to include him in their wills, robbing temples, and even killing senators for their money. Governor of Gaul vowed to help the people of Rome and plotted an attack on Nero. When his world began to close in on him he committed suicide.
In the mid fifteenth century Giles de Rais de laval Baron de Rais was marshal of France, champion of the maid of Orleans, wealthiest man in all of Europe, and all the while a vulgar killer. But, first he was known as an heroic military leader and the chief lieutenant for Joan of Arc during the 100 year war. When Joan was captured in Paris Giles returned home, ending his military career and beginning the next stage of his life. Home for Giles was a castle in Brittany where he was the Baron. He began to practice Satanism and conjure spirits. In 1432 he began murdering children. His devoted servants brought victims to him, all children, mostly boys. Giles would sodomize, strangle, decapitate, disembowel, and after all that he’d masturbate on the entrails. After an untouchable eight year reign the duke of Brittany stepped in and pressed charges on Giles. The remains of 50 bodies were found in his castle but he was suspected of as many as 140 deaths. On Oct 26, 1440 Giles de Rais was hung above a fire.
Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560 in Hungary at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains to one of Hungary’s most ancient families. By her teens she was involved with torture, devil worship, and incestuous pervasions with several family members. She married in 1575 to an aristocratic warrior named Count Nazady and moved in to his castle with him. He had a torture chamber inside. After her marriage she began her 35 year killing spree. One day after giving a servant a bloody nose she noticed some blood on her hand and thought that her hand suddenly looked younger. She killed the servant then bathed in her blood after which she claimed she felt totally refreshed. Her lust for virgin blood consumed her from that day on. She used her victims blood to drink, bathe and even as cosmetics. She believed virgins blood was the secret to eternal youth. She is suspected of as many as 650 deaths. Most of her victims were peasant women who were either promised a job or outright abducted from off the streets. After meeting Elizabeth they were subject to wild levels of torment which sexually pleased the blood countess. She used whips, scissors, needles, hot branding irons, spike lined cages, her own teeth, and a special made pair of pincers which she used to rip chunks of flesh from the young women. Peasant girls ran low and she began to target more notable victims which eventually led to her arrest in 1610. She was sent to live in a bricked up chamber of her castle. She died of starvation in 1614 by which point she was apparently forgotten.
Later in 1827 we meet a whole different type of killer or killers. William Burke and William Hare were a killer team. It all began when Hare and his wife were running a boarding house. One of the tenants died owing rent money. At the time autopsies were actually illegal in Britain and dedicated medical practitioners were forced to buy bodies from the black market. Hare decided this would be a good way to compensate for the rent he was due and sold the body for £ 7.10.
The pair realized they could make a great and easy living this way but neither felt like digging up bodies. Instead they targeted more of Hare’s tenants The victims were suffocated so the bodies would be in condition and therefore worth more. When they ran out of lodger they began to lure their victims in with promises of alcohol or food. They had killed 15 people before they were finally caught. In Jan 1829 Burke was hung and publicly dissected . 25,000 showed up to watch. Since then ‘to burke’ means to kill for the purpose of dissecting in the English Dictionary.
Jesse Pomeroy was a child killer and mutilator but if that wasn’t bad enough he was just a 12 year old himself. It was Dec of 1871 when Jesse began to lure young boys to remote locations where he beat them, forced them to strip, stabbed them with knives and sewing needles, and eventually killed them. In 1872 he was arrested and placed in a reformatory but released in less then 2 years. Six weeks later Jesse was up to his old tricks. He killed a 10 year old girl and threw her body in a pile of ashes. Five weeks later he lured a four year old boy away and killed him with a penknife. The boys throat was slashed, eyes stabbed, and his genitals nearly severed. He was arrested again in1873 and at the age of 14 he was tried and sentenced to death. Society protested his death sentence so much that it was reduced to life in solitary where he lived until 1932.
H H Holmes or Hermann Mudgett is famous for his “Horror Castle” which he created in Chicago in1893. It literally was a fun house of death. Hermann was known to have suffered a rough childhood, but never the less he was a bright and good looking boy. Yet neighbors remember him as strange. He did not have many friends, but the one he did have he watched fall from a flight of stairs to his death. Once some bullies forced Holmes to stay still while they made a skeleton display in a doctors office touch his face. Hermann was shrieking then but later he contributes his interest in anatomy to this event. After that he began conducting medical experiments on small animals. He graduated from medical school in 1884. By this point the was already a small time criminal. One of his bad habits was taking out insurance on a fake person and finding a dead body to claim the money. By 1886 he moved to Chicago and began using the name Henry Howard Holmes. He found work as a pharmacy assistant with an elderly woman. No surprise, she soon disappeared. Holmes had the pharmacy put in his name. Once he’d acquired enough funds he constructed his Horror Castle across the street. Inspiration for many horror movies is what he really built. The castle had over a hundred rooms connected by secret passage ways, trap doors, fake walls, and concealed shafts. Some rooms were sound proof and had peep holes everywhere. He ran pipes from a gas tank to many rooms and could fill anyone of them with gas from a control panel in his room. He also had his own laboratory where he could dissect, experiment, or destroy bodies. Also he had his own lime pit and mini crematoria. He invited a watchmaker to set up shop in a portion of Holmes pharmacy but he began having relations with the watchmakers wife which the watchmaker found out when his wife turned up pregnant with Holmes kid. He left her and their first daughter behind. Holmes felt he was not ready to be a father so he decided to perform an abortion on her. He succeeded in killing the baby and its mother. Afterwards he killed the couples first daughter as well. He continued to rent out sections for victims to live in. None were ever seen again and Holmes was feeding a regular supply of bodies to the black market. He’d kept up with his insurance frauds as well which is how he was eventually caught. He confessed to 27 murders but the estimated toll was 50. One strange quality of Hermann Mudgett as a serial killer is that he did not target specific victims, he simply killed anyone who was there and an easy target. He was hung at the gallows and requested his body be buried under tons of concrete because he feared someone might want his body for medical research. His story is played out in a comic book by Rick Geary. The murder castle was sold and turned into a museum but before it made a dime it mysteriously caught fire and was completely destroyed.
As the century changed the killers did not. Between 1900-1920s the world had another handful of interesting killers to offer. In Hanover, Germany in 1919 Fritz Harmann (Butcher of Hanover) began his killing. He dressed as a cop and lured his victims to his home where he’d sexually assault them and kill them by biting their throats. All his victims were male. Later that same year he met his lover Hans Grans. Hans played the dominate one, selecting the victims and seeing to it that Fritz was the one doing all the actual abducting and killing. It suspected the pair was killing twice a week. They sold the meat from the bodies to the black market, wore or sold the clothes, and threw the bones into a lake. Once a woman went to police with apiece of meat she thought looked suspiciously like a piece of a human. The authorities responded by telling her she should be grateful for such a fine piece of meat in such hard times.
On June 22, 1924 Fritz was arrested for attempting to molest a little boy. A search of his home turned up several of his victims clothes. On July 24 a group of children found a pile of human remains and the bones were being fished out of the lake by shocked fisherman.
Fritz readily confessed to his crimes and Hans involvement with them. He was charged with 27 murders which he disputed was actually more then 40. He was sentenced to death by beheading and Hans received 12 years imprisonment. After his death his brain was sent to Gottingen University for study. Nothing abnormal showed up. Albert Fish, one of the famous cannibals idolized Fritz and collected newspaper clippings about his crimes.
In 1921 not far away in Berlin, Germany Georg Karl Grossman was committing the same type of murders but on women. Neighbors saw women going in but all they ever saw coming out was Georg and his bundles of meat. Georg did sell some of it to the black market but mainly he used it for hot dogs at his hot dog stand. It ended one night when neighbors called the police to report a woman screaming in his home. When police arrived they found a dead woman in Grossmans bed trussed up. He was sentenced to death but hung himself before his execution date.
The Gorilla Murderer or Earl Leonard Nelson had his killing spree in 1926. Though he only killed for about one year he had a death toll of 22 victims. Earl was born and became an orphan all in the first year of life. Both his parents had died of syphilis. His religious widow grandmother took him in and did her best to instill her strict religious ways into him, and to a degree she did. He grew obsessed with the book of Revelations and thought he himself was Jesus Christ. By 7 years of age he was the neighborhood pest, a dirty little boy who stole from shops and people. When he was 10 he was hit by a trolley while hiding a bike. He was in a coma for a week afterwards. By 14 he dropped out of school. His grandmother died and he went to live with an aunt. There he began to burglarize homes to support his many visits to the brothels. At the age of 18 he was sent to jail for two years for housebreaking. After his release he joined the military but was quickly discharged when the naval mental hospital deemed him a constitutional psychopath. At 22 he met a 58 year old woman named Mary Martin. They fell in love and married but Mary soon discovered her new husband had some quirky tendencies. He took advantage of her as she lay recuperating in a hospital bed. After that Mary decided to end it. A year after the failed marriage Earl attacked a 12 year old girl. He was placed in a mental institution but released after a year and ready to begin killing. On Feb 20, 1926 Earl and the landlady Clara Newman were alone looking at a room Earl claimed to be interested in moving into. Instead he strangled her to death and raped her corpse. During the next few months Nelson traveled between San Francisco and Seattle strangling another 10 landladies to death and raping them afterwards. A manhunt searched along the west coast for the killer. Nelson moved inland and kept up with his killing. Dec 2 he murdered a 49 year old woman in Iowa. On Dec 27 he killed a 23 year old in Kansas, another woman, 28 years of age the very next day. During this last murder he also killed a baby by stuffing a rag down its throat. From April to June he murdered 4 more times, once in Philadelphia, once in Buffalo, once in Detroit and once in Chicago. After all this he headed to Canada where he killed 2 more times before finally getting caught. He swore he was innocent the whole way to his death clutching his bible the whole way.
Peter Kurten (the Vampire of Dusseldorf) began killing on Feb 8, 1929. That night he lured nine year old Rosa Ohliger behind a church and stabbed her to death with a pair of scissors. He went back to the body later that night, soaked it with kerosene and set it ablaze. On Feb 12 Kurten bumped into a drunk then quickly turned and stabbed him to death with scissors. He drank the victims blood. The sight of blood, taste of blood, and smell of blood according to Peter was sexually arousing. On Aug 11 he killed Maria Hahn, a women who he slept with. Aug 24 he lured 2 girls into a meadow, Luise Lenzen, 13, and Gertrud Hamacher, 5. Luise was strangled and stabbed, Gertrud’s throat was slit. Miraculously, both girls lived. Another attempted murder followed these two, but then there was another successful killing. Ida Reuter was beat to death with a hammer on Sept 29. Elizabeth Dorrier was beat to death on Oct 11. Her death was followed by 2 more attempted murders and then one more final murder, Gertrud Alberman who was strangled and stabbed 36 times with a pair of scissors. In May of 1930 he played hero to a woman at a train station when another maniac tried to lure the woman out of sight. Needless to say she was grateful for his help and not alarmed when he invited her to join him at his home for refreshments. The next thing she knew she was in the wood with a strange man and the suddenly his hands were around her neck. She was gasping for air and struggling for her life when just as suddenly he released his grip and asked, “Do you remember where I live in case you ever need my help again?” Wisely the woman told him no and he escorted her out of the wood.
Unbelievably, the victim Maria Budlies never reported the incident but did write a letter to a friend explaining her dance with death. Much by coincidence she addressed the letter wrong and it ended up as a dead letter. A curious postal worker opened it and after reading its contents phoned the police with his discovery.. Police tracked Maria down and she led them to the Vampires lair.
Peter was born into an abusive family and grew up to become an abusive lover and father. After his failed marriage but before the killings began, Peter committed a string of sexual assaults during which he’d strangle his victims almost to death. Then, less then a week before his first killing he began frantically stabbing Frau Apollonia Kuhn with scissors but passersby heard the screams and intervened. Kurten fled the scene. In 1913, 10 years before he married, Peter robbed the home of a man named Peter Klein. While there he slit the throat of Klein’s 8 year old daughter. On his way out he dropped a handkerchief with his PK initials on it. Authorities used it as evidence to convict the father, Peter Klein, of his own daughter’s murder.
The Vampire of Dusseldorf was a huge fan of Jack the Ripper and studied the case in his free time. He wrote a letter to police revealing the locations of 2 of his victims in a copycat move of Jack the Ripper. He confessed to his crimes proudly and in great detail. He entered a plea of insanity which was rejected and he was sentenced to death by beheading. Kurten said he was pleased with the chosen method of death because he’d be alive just long enough to hear his blood gushing from his body.
Edward Gein would have to