How to wing it!

Image via Wikipedia

Hi everyone, we’ve had a comment which unfortunately doesn’t show because we had to change our comment system but here it is:

thanks im doing an esa for school on him you gave me so new info if you post anything about ted bundy or charels manson that whould be great!!!

I certainly will ! Actually I have written a lot about Ted Bundy and I wanna direct you to a couple of the articles I wrote:

What is a psychopath?  Read here.

Where to find serial killer info online. Read here.

Burn, Bundy, Burn – On the twentieth anniversary of Ted Bundy’s execution. Read here.

I have never written about Charles Manson because he wasn’t really a serial killer and I never found him that interesting – but I hope you can use these links to study more for your essay.

Thanks for your nice comment!

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Christopher Wilder, Most Wanted picture, Image via Wikipedia

Hello peeps! Today I’m going to write about a killer named Christopher Wilder. He is rather typical of the kind of person I usually write about in that he was a sexual sadist but he is also atypical in that he was a serial killer who turned spree killer in the end of his rampage.

Let’s start going through his background. He was born in Australia and almost died at birth. His father was American and his mother was Australian. At age 2 he almost drowned in a swimming pool. In the 60s he was found guilty of taking part in a gang rape and he was put on probation and received electroshock therapy; it is believed that this therapy only increased his sexual aggressive appetite.

In 68 he married but his wife left – having been with him in married “bliss” for a week! He moved to Florida in 69 and actually made …

quite a lot of money in real estate and developed an interest in photography. However, his sexual problems were quite clear during the seventies where he went in and out of jail for different sexual offences. Already at this early stage, he had sort of an MO in place: He’d pretend to be a professional photographer and lure young women into his truck where he’d assault them. Oddly enough, he would never be jailed for these crimes.

Then in 1982, he was charged with forcing two teenage girls to pose nude. His parents posted bail and Wilder would never get sentenced for this offense. The hearing would be in 1984; Wilder was dead by then. Actually his murder spree was quite short – from February to April 84 – but the hunt for him was very intense because he’d kill at a high rate during this short time span.

Rosario Gonzalez was the first known victim. Wilder was racing a Porsche 911 in the IMSA GTU class and Gonzalez was a model. She has never been found – neither has Wilder’s former girlfriend Elizabeth Kenyon who disappeared shortly after Gonzalez. Because Wilder knew both victims, he thought it better to run.

21-year old Terry Ferguson would be the next victim. He kidnapped her from a mall in Satellite Beach and dumped her body. The next unfortunate young woman had declined to be photographed by him and he’d wrapped her up in a blanket and held her in a motel room where he glued her eyes shut and assaulted her numerous times. He applied copper wires to her feet and passed electric currents through them. This young lady was a fighter, however, and she managed to lock herself in the bathroom where she started screaming. Wilder quickly fled . The girl had to search for help herself as her screams incredibly went unnoticed.

Already the next day Wilder approached 24 year old Terry Walden and told her he was a pro photographer. She declined to be photographed but two days later she disappeared. After dumping her body, he transferred his stolen license plates to her Mercury Cougar and then he murdered 21 year old Suzanne Logan.

Next two victims were 18-year old Sheryl Bonaventura and 17-year old Michelle Korfman who were both tortured before death. Like all of Wilder’s victims, they were young and beautiful.

The next victim 16-year old Tina Marie Risico was special in that she was kept alive to help Wilder lure other victims into his truck. Her mind has been so damaged by Wilder’s assaults that she not only helped him catch a new victim but she didn’t even try to escape although she had to chance.

The next victim – lured to Wilder by Tina Marie – was 16-year old Dawnette Wilt. At this point Wilder was on the FBI’S Most Wanted List. Dawnette was raped numerous times and then taken into the woods where she was stabbed and shot. She miraculously survived and by the time Wilder returned to the scene to make sure she was really dead, she had disappeared.
Healing in the hospital where she could give police more clues. She said Wilder was heading for Canada.

33-year old Beth Dodge  was the last victim and she was murdered only because Wilder needed her vehicle. He then drove Tina Marie to Logan Airport in Boston and bought her a ticket to LA. Wilder’s vehicle description was now broadcast out to law enforcement officials and on April 13th – after a failed attempt to kidnap another woman – his luck ran out. He stopped at a gas station and were approached by two police officers who had recognized him. Wilder reached into the car for his .357 Magnum and one of the troopers grabbed Wilder from behind. Wilder shot himself in the stomach, also injuring the trooper.

That’s where Wilder’s insane spree ended. He died instantly from his wounds. He left a personal estate of $2 million and is thought to have murdered many more women than the eight ones described.

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Quite frankly it’s gotta be the best serial killer movie ever made. It depicts the search for missing teenager Robert Piest who disappeared from outside the Nisson’s pharmacy in Des Plaines, Illinois in the late seventies. After a very intense investigation police would find a total of 28 bodies in local business man John Wayne Gacy‘s crawlspace and he claimed to have disposed of others in the nearby Des Plaines river, including the body of Robert Piest.

This movie is a must for true crime fans but also for regular film watchers. It’s exciting, thrilling, frightening and the actors (especially Brian Dennehy as John Wayne Gacy) do a fantastic job.

Thumbs up!

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There’s nothing like kicking back in the sun and reading about serial killers and stalkers. Well, for people like me, anyway. Former FBI profiler John Douglas is of course an expert in this field and he has written several excellent books. I can’t remember how many times I’ve read “Anatomy of Motive” but it’s more times than I can count on one hand. Douglas describes different kinds of dangerous offenders, analyzes their motives and tracks the escalation of the psychopathic behavior in the cases described.

If you’ve got a few hours to spare, check out this captivating book.

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Criminology is the part of social science that deals with the study of crime both in society and in the individual.

It’s a big hobby of mine and I know that the readers who frequence this blog a lot might think I am just a normal (or abnormal) serial killer freak who likes the gory stuff and the pics and the VW Bug replicas you can collect online. That’s not the case though.

I am really interested in what makes a criminal. Environment, genetics ? Or an evil beyond our control? It’s fascinating to study about sadism, murder, people who do indespicable things.

Much much more on criminology later..

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Dorothea Puente: Killing for profit.

Dorothea Puente is an American serial killer who is perhaps not very well known unless you are a real crime nerd like myself.

She was born in 1929 to poor, alcoholic parents living in California.

Her father died when she was only four years old and her mother died when she was six. For a while Dorothea in an orphanage but was later taken in by relatives.

Puente married when she was 16 and had two daughters. She sent one daughter to live with relatives and she put the other one up for adoption. For some reason her husband had enough and left her.

This is when Dorothea began forging checks but she was caught quite quickly and sentenced to a year in jail of which she served six months. When she got out she married once more and would stay married for the next 14 years.

She was not done with the criminal world, however. In 1960 she was once more arrested, this time for owning and running a brothel and having served 90 days in a Sacramento jail, she was once more arrested, this time for vagrancy and she got another 90 days in jail.

When Dorothea got out, she started working for the elderly and also begin to manage boarding houses. She got divorced from her husband of 14 years and married a Mexican man, thus getting the surname Puente which was later to become infamous.

The marriage lasted only a couple of years after which Dorothea Puente started spending a lot of time at local bars looking for men who received benefits. She would then forge their signatures in order to steal their money. When she was caught, she was charged with 34 counts of fraud.

In 1981 Puente rented an upstairs apartment at 1420 F Street in Sacramento and she turned it into a boarding house.

This is when people mysteriously started to vanish. They would arrive at the boarding house on F Street and then disappear. First of all a lady called Ruth Monroe died from an overdose of Tylenol and her death was labeled a suicide. Many of the people living at the boarding house were either homeless, alcoholic’s or drug addicts and Dorothea Puente appeared a nice, grandmotherly type of woman. Her appearance had many people fooled since she looked like a woman in her 70′s but she was actually quite a few years younger.

In November 1988 police received a tip and dug up a body buried in the lawn at 1426 F Street. A total of seven bodies would be found and Puente was charged with nine murderers ( two bodies were located elsewhere) of which she got convicted of three and she is serving two life sentences at Central California Women’s facility in California.

It is frightening to me that somebody would kill nine innocent people just to be able to get to their money. I suppose that’s the sign of a true psychopath.

I have not been able to find a lot of information about Dorothea Puente, except a small article in the New York Times published in December of 1993 and another article also from the New York Times with the headline “No cause determined in deaths of boarders“.

If you know where I can find more material about her, such as books or articles, a comment will be greatly appreciated.

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It’s time for another post about a serial killer. This time I’m going to write a little about Jerome Brudos who was born in South Dakota in 1939. He was the youngest kid in the family and got off on the wrong foot (no pun intended) with his mom already from birth because she wanted to have a little girl. This is where the creepy stuff starts: she would dress him up in dresses and make fun of him.

One day little Jerome found a pair of high heeled shoes and brought them home to play with. His mom got angry and made him promise not to wear the shoes again. When she caught him once more, she burned the shoes in front of him. This seems to have sparked something inside the little boy who became obsessed with high heeled shoes, somehow intertwining his shoe fetish with anger and sex inside his mind.

He married in 1961 and moved to Salem, Oregon where he fathered two children. He made odd demands on his wife, making her clean the house naked wearing only high heel shoes and at the same time he started getting blackouts and headaches. He would steal women’s underwear which he would wear underneath his clothes and he would still be on the lookout for high heeled shoes.

One day he set up an intercom on the garage door. Then his wife couldn’t enter without being let in. His violent fantasies were becoming more than fantasies. From 1968 to 69 Jerome Brudos murdered four young women and he would sometimes dress in women’s clothing during the murders. The killings were gruesome. He would cut off breasts and feet and masturbate over the dead bodies while wearing high heels.

He was caught when police started interviewing local coeds who had seen him acting suspiciously. Brudos was sentenced to life in prison and died there in March 2006.

It interests me how such a childhood event can spark such a strong emotion inside a child’s mind. Surely there must have been other factors at play. I have read that Jerome’s mother was very dominating and had hysterical fits quite often. If you fuel that with an emotion of being unwanted, born in the wrong body and being belittled for being who you are, I suppose you do have a recipe for a very dangerous individual.

It’s also interesting how many serial killers seem to have had dominating mothers, have been cruel to animals, have stolen either underwear or other objects belonging to other people and have experienced bouts of headaches.

One trait that seems to appear in all of these kinds of people is a complete lack of remorse and lack of empathy. I sometimes wonder if such a mind is more easily created these days where children are often the focus of the family and the center of even their parent’s universe? For today’s kids it’s often about “me” instead of “us”. But perhaps such a deviant mind is not made out of selfishness alone. Perhaps it’s one ugly mixture of bad genes, bad environment and a form of evil that we cannot control.

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I was up at 6 AM this morning – yes I am reaching the age when I have to get up real early to, you know – and I stayed up because it was such a beautiful morning.

I’ve actually got a pretty good morning routine down. I wash up, have breakfast while I check my email accounts, blogs, Bloggersbase account, Facebook and other pages I like to visit.

I like the quiet of the morning.

Not too many plans for the day except that I would like to get out a bit, perhaps even catch the train to a town nearby and get a change of scenery.
I also have to get out on my bike, perhaps..if it’s not too windy.

And I need to finish watching “The Iceman, Confessions of a mafia hit man” which is a documentary about hit man Richard Kuklinski. There are twelve parts of circa 10 mins each on Youtube and I have watched about half of them. I had to take a break – which is kinda rare for me – but it was just too gruesome. The man just sits there and talks about killing people by cyanide, shooting, stabbing, beating..as if he is reading from his grocery list. I can handle a lot of things but his cold manner is just horrible to watch.

I’m not usually interested in watching documentaries about hit men. I am mainly interested in serial-, mass- or spree killers but there’s something about this guy that interests me.

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His name sounds like something out of a horror movie and I always feel he should have lived in the 1800s in a cottage in the middle of the dark woods but in fact Joachim Kroll lived in Laar, a district of Duisburg, Germany and his killing spree went on from the mid-50s to 1976 when he was caught and arrested.

Kroll was a monster who preyed on young girls who he would rape and kill.
He was also a cannibal who would carve strips of meat off his dead victims and bring it home to eat.

On the street where he lived he was known as uncle Joachim and he would befriend little girls with dolls and candy – he looked like a kind and non-threatening man but inside his apartment were several inflatable dolls that he would strangle during intercourse. He had never been good at approaching adult women and so he started raping when he was in his twenties.

He would usually hunt for girls a bit away from his own neighborhood so as not to arouse suspicion but what finally got him caught was that he picked up a four year old girl from a playground in Duisburg.

At this point there was a monster loose in the area known as the Ruhr Hunter – but the hunter himself was not really interested in making the news and being in the papers. As cruel as it may sound, he was interested in saving money – and living out his sexual fantasies.

Joachim Kroll was caught in quite the same manner as the British serial killer Dennis Nilsen who cluttered up the drains with human remains. One of Kroll’s neighbors discovered that the buildings drains was all stopped up and asked Kroll if he knew what it was about and when Kroll answered “it’s guts”, the police were called. They went inside Kroll’s apartment and found a slaughterhouse. There were human remains in the freezer and on the stove. Kroll was eventually sentenced to life and died of a heart attack at age 58.

Kroll never showed any remorse and he is a good example of the compulsive serial killer who is addicted to murder and has combined sexuality and violence inside his mind and must react to this addiction. From what I have understood, it’s like any other addiction where the person becomes agitated and anxious if he doesn’t get what he craves for. Of course this sort of addiction is much, much worse because it has such tremendous consequences for other human beings.

A serial killer such as Joachim Kroll is quite rare, though. Most killers don’t evolve into cannibals but it seems that with the right – or wrong – environment, some psychological damages and perhaps some bad genes, it is possible to breed absolute evil.

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I am a criminology nerd. I love studying about deviant personalities. Bundy has always been one of my favorites due to his apparent charm and extreme lack of remorse for the crimes he committed. I just remain in awe of such callousness.

Here’s part one of a German documentary about Ted Bundy: Die Gefährlichsten Serienkiller der USA.

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