The Serial Killer Next Door by Emma Kenny (Sphere £22, 304pp)
The Serial Killer Next Door is available now from the Mail Bookshop
A strong constitution is needed for this book, where you’ll meet Richard Trenton Chase, whose fridge contained human brains, and Tamara Samsonova who ate the body parts of her victim – police alleged ‘she had a particular liking for lungs’.
Robert Hansen abducted 37 women in Alaska.
He’d strip them naked and release them in a forest, where ‘they would be forced to run for their lives as he hunted them like animals with his rifles and bows and arrows’.
Ted Bundy, who in the Seventies killed more than 30 women, mainly college students, and who was sent to the electric chair, aged 42, in 1989, would put his arm in a sling and pretend he needed assistance.
He’d then smash his victim with a crowbar, strangle them with a nylon stocking and cut off their heads.
‘You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body,’ he explained to the court. ‘You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God.’
Serial killers like to think of themselves as all-powerful, devoid of mercy. Israel Keyes, who located his victims in parks, campgrounds and walking trails, took pleasure in the agonising struggle of his prey as they lost consciousness.
He’d photograph them as if they were still alive, and send ransom notes and texts to the families, tormenting them with false hope.
For serial killer David Parker Ray, ‘cries of pain, pleas for mercy – they were music to his ears’. He raped and humiliated women, whipped them and used electric shocks, before dismembering the bodies and discarding them in rivers and ravines.
Killing boosts esteem because, without exception, as we learn from Emma Kenny’s book, mass murderers are all inadequate loners, nondescript, bullied at school, socially awkward, often with speech impediments or acne, with a deep-seated ‘fear of rejection’.
They enjoy the power ‘gained through the infliction of physical and psychological pain and humiliation’.
More than this, when Kenny, therapist and agony aunt on ITV’s This Morning, investigates the matter, she can see with serial killers there is always a horrendous background – a lack of maternal love and comfort in earliest childhood, characterised by cruel or absent parents; wicked stepfathers who were abusive and violent drunks; being taken into care and terrorised by barbaric nuns; exposure to extreme pornography; cruelty to animals, such as torturing frogs or burning cats.
The first female serial killer: Aileen Wuornos
As Kenny concludes, ‘skewed emotional development leads to insecure and muddled attachments’, with people incapable of tender feelings, who show no remorse: hurt people who hurt people.
A prime example is Aileen Wuornos, who killed seven men. In 2003, she was played by Charlize Theron in the Oscar-winning Monster.Â
Aged nine she was trading sex acts for cigarettes. She attempted suicide six times, and was raped multiple times by family members.
Wuornos, now thought of as the first female serial killer, received no legal representation and her execution was a sort of suicide. ‘I deserve to die,’ was all she said.
Kenny controversially argues the death penalty can be a kindness.
British killer Robert Maudsley ‘sadistically tortured’ one of his victims over nine hours.
Maudsley has spent 45 years in solitary confinement in Wakefield Prison, with no amenities or visits – ‘a damning indictment of a system that boasts humanity by banning the death penalty while inflicting decades of suffering and torment on an incarcerated prisoner it does not know what to do with’.
This book, taking us into ‘the darkest corners of the human psyche’, is emphatically not for the fainthearted. Yet, as the ghoulishness mounts, the reader does get to be desensitised – as the killers themselves get to be desensitised.
And what hard work, being a serial killer – to do it repeatedly, ritualistically, out-manoeuvring the authorities, though that is often not difficult.
The police, in Kenny’s accounts, are all too often useless, disbelieving the victims who managed to escape, assuming they are fantasists or high on drugs. Meanwhile, juries find their testimony ‘unbelievable’, because they are so extreme.
Killers are then released on bail to re-offend, or given lenient sentences. When locked up, there is scant psychiatric care or understanding.
Even if Ted Bundy has been played on screen by Mark Harmon, Cary Elwes and Zac Efron, my view is that, outside the imagination of Hollywood, there has never been a good-looking mass murderer.
They are sexually frustrated, bottled-up. They are potato-faced nerds and dweebs who never got kissed, never got noticed.
Israel Keyes was ‘quiet and introspective…The unassuming man who might have waved hello as you fetched your morning paper’. David Parker Ray was known in his community as ‘a polite man who held down a full-time job’.
That’s the mystery at the core of The Serial Killer Next Door: the coexistence of banality and brutality.
