Kiss Me, Kill Me by Ann Rule

Author:Ann Rule [Rule, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Murder, Criminology
ISBN: 9781416500032
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2014-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

The Lonely Hearts Killer

Although the phenomenon of serial murder was not widely recognized until the early 1980s—when it was embraced enthusiastically by the media—the first significant modern-day killer of this genre was largely ignored, at least outside the boundaries of Los Angeles, California.

Jack the Ripper was a serial killer. So were Albert Fish, who killed children, and the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo—who some believe was not as prolific a murderer as he is usually portrayed as being—convicted of killing mostly elderly women in the nursing or music professions. There have been many other murderers whose victim tolls were high but who failed to garner sweeping headlines. Even so, all multiple killers were referred to as mass murderers.

That was the term used by even the most sophisticated criminologists—until Pierce it. Brooks, a Los Angeles detective doing research on his off-duty hours, focused on the kind of murderer who picks a specific victim type and literally becomes addicted to murder, taking one or two victims at a time, over a long time, until he is either caught or dead.

The Harvey Glatman case is a classic, made more so because it predated the Boston Strangler—considered by most experts to be the first serial killer in modern culture. Glatman's murders made headlines in Los Angeles and Southern California, but they were largely eclipsed nationally by coverage of Charles Starkweather, the spree killer who traveled west in the late fifties with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, killing anyone who blocked his path or had something he wanted. Starkweather was not a true serial killer: he fell into the category of a "spree killer." Neither was William Heirens of Chicago, the young premed student who killed two adult women and 5-year-old Suzanne Degnan in 1943, scrawling on the wall of one victim in her own lipstick "Catch me before I kill more!" Heirens's victims had no particular profile that singled them out as fitting within certain descriptive parameters.

Pierce Brooks, who may be better known as the prime investigator in the "Onion Field murder" of a fellow law enforcement officer, was never a man to toot his own horn, but I believe he did more to help both police officers and laymen understand the threat of serial murder than anyone I ever knew.

I consider Pierce Brooks my mentor, an outstanding detective whom his subordinates admired, a quiet man whose mind was always working. It was Brooks who called me out of the blue in 1983 and said, "This is Pierce Brooks—you may have heard of me."

I had, but I certainly never expected that a man as revered as he was in law enforcement circles would be calling me. Brooks invited me to participate in the task force that was being formed to set up a tracking system to catch serial killers. It would be called VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), and representatives from the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, and law enforcement agencies in every state in America were prepared to meet at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and see that it succeeded.

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