Free The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter, David Everitt Page A

parked car. Teenagers—who have been telling some version of this story for at least forty years—often accept it as the gospel truth. Folklore scholars, on the other hand, see it as an “urban legend” that reflects the anxieties of adolescent boys and girls who are just confronting the tricky issues of grown-up sexuality. While the folklorists make a valuable point, there may be more reality to the story than they realize. The fact is that the terrifying figure of a lovers’ lane maniac is not purely a figment of the teenage imagination.
    World War II had barely ended when the tiny southwestern town of Texarkana found itself under siege from a night-prowling gunman whose favorite targets were young, unwary lovers. In early March 1946, this masked maniac snuck up on a couple, ordered them out of the car, then—after pistol whipping the young man—subjected the girl to such vicious sexual torture that she begged to be killed. Precisely three weeks later, he struck again, this time shooting both young victims in the back of their heads. Following another three-week hiatus, the “Moonlight Murderer”—as the press dubbed him—killed yet another pair of sweethearts as they returned from a dance at the VFW hall. A massive manhunt was launched, involving local sheriffs, Texas Rangers, and homicide detectives disguised as teenage lovers. But the phantom gunman was never caught.
    Equally elusive was the diabolical gunman known as Zodiac , whose victims included several young couples killed on deserted country roads. A third notorious couple killer, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz , was eventually apprehended—but not before he had shot more than a dozen victims as they sat in their cars on the darkened streets of New York City.
    Teen Terror Legends
    Young people love to give each other the chills with supposedly true stories about psychokillers. Though “The Hookman” is the most famous of these urban folktales, it’s only one of many. Another is “The Boyfriend’s Death,” a story that the teller invariably swears is absolutely, positively true, since she heard it from an unimpeachable source, such as the next-door neighbor of her best friend’s cousin. Typically, the story deals with a teenage couple whose car runs out of fuel one night as they are driving through some remote wooded area. The boy decides to hike into town for gas, telling the girl to make sure to keep the car doors locked, since there is a psycho on the loose. Huddling alone in the car, the girl waits anxiously for her boyfriend’s return. But as the night passes, there is no sign of him. After a while, she hears a strange, scratching noise on the car roof. The next morning, a police cruiser arrives. As the girl is helped out of the car, she looks up and sees her boyfriend’s butchered corpse, swinging upside-down from a tree branch, his fingernails scraping the roof!
    A similar folktale, “The Roommate’s Death,” tells of two young women sharing a suite in a college dorm. Hearing that there is a serial killer at large, they lock themselves into their separate bedrooms. That night, one of the girls hears someone scratching ominously on the connecting door between the two bedrooms. In the morning, she musters up the courage to open the door—and discovers her murdered roommate, her throat cut from ear to ear. The scratching sound had been the victim’s dying effort to get help.
    Other teen folktales about psychokillers include “The Assailant in the Backseat”—about unwary women who discover that they have been driving along with a homicidal maniac hiding in the car—and “The Baby-sitter and the Man Upstairs,” which tells of a baby-sitter who gets menacing calls from a homicidal stranger, only to discover that the calls are coming from the upstairs telephone.
    Anyone who hasn’t heard these stories firsthand may have encountered them in another form, since many of them have been recast as low-budget horror movies like Halloween,