Free The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman Page B

conducted a solitary interview with a serial killer weighing close on three hundred pounds (more than twenty-one stone) and standing six feet nine inches tall – rang three times in fifteen minutes without response when attempting to alert the prison staff that the interview was over. The serial killer (FBI agents do not identify violent offenders who co-operate in Behaviour Research Interviews) whose crimes included the decapitation of most of his victims, was fully aware of the interviewer’s dilemma. ‘I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard,’ he said. The agent bluffed his way through until the warder arrived, and was not harmed; but today all FBI agents work in pairs when interviewing violent offenders in jail.
    Such interviews may last from four to seven hours. One agent talks with the prisoner, while his colleague monitors the conversation. Even so the authorities recognise that there must always be some element of risk involved. Some penal institutions require signed waivers ruling out negotiation in the event of hostage-taking, and/or to release the state from responsibility should death or injury result from the interview. While neither analyst nor offender may claim to enjoy the experience, it can prove beneficial to both parties – if for vastly different reasons. Some murderers who have admitted their crimes find relief in talking freely about them. Others feel flattered to be included in a work of reference. Not a few try to impress the interviewer with their innocence. For the analyst it is a unique opportunity to meet face to face with an offender whose violent, sometimes bizarre crimes are a matter of record: a rare chance to probe the psyche of the kind of serial murderer he may encounter time and again in the investigative years ahead.
    With most serial killers except ‘medical serial killers’ ( see here ), their individual libido is mirrored in the kind of victim they mark down for murder. The heterosexual targets females, homosexuals prey on fellow ‘gays’ and the bisexual serial killer makes no distinction between male and female victims. Ted Bundy, a heterosexual and former law student at the University of Washington in Seattle, was a handsome and intelligent undergraduate who enjoyed normal sexual relationships with a number of female students before he turned Peeping Tom and, ultimately, one of the worst serial killers in United States criminal history.
    At first, whenever opportunity occurred during the four years in which he was an active serial killer (he spent half the time in custody, but twice escaped), Bundy scoured university campuses, student rooming houses and youth hostels searching for ‘look-alike’, attractive female victims. His modus operandi was to use guile, plus his undoubted surface charm, to lure them to a waiting car. The car was almost always stolen; in a sudden Jekyll-and-Hyde switch of character he would club them over the head, abduct and drive them to some lonely spot, then rape and sexually abuse his victims before strangling them and dumping their bodies like so much refuse. ‘Throwaways’, he called them contemptuously.
    After his second escape from custody in 1977, Bundy deteriorated into a drunken, disorganised ‘blitz’ type of serial killer. While he continued to target female students, he now attacked them in a wild ‘overkill’ fashion after breaking in to their quarters. On the night of his penultimate attack in January 1978, he broke into a student rooming house in Tallahassee, Florida, and battered four girls unconscious. One he raped and strangled. He sexually abused another, who died on her way to hospital. A third girl suffered a fractured skull, and the fourth a broken jaw. Bundy fled. Three weeks later he murdered again, and for the last time. His victim was a twelve-year-old schoolgirl whom he abducted, strangled and sexually violated. He was arrested shortly afterwards – not for her murder (the