evaluation, Berkowitz drew a sketch of a jailed man surrounded by numerous walls. At the bottom he wrote, in classic understatement, “I am not well. Not at all” (Time-Life, 1992b, p. 183).

9.2.3.8Jeffrey Dahmer

The infamous Jeffrey Dahmer admitted to police after his arrest that he murdered 17 men from 1978 to 1991 (Dahmer, 1994; Dvorchak & Holewa, 1991; Masters, 1993; Norris, 1992b). All but the first of his victims were killed in the four-year period from 1987 to 1991 while Dahmer worked night shift as a mixer for the Ambrosia Chocolate Company. Unlike many serial murderers, Dahmer did not own a vehicle and usually travelled by bus or taxi.

Dahmer typically preyed upon homosexual men he picked up in the gay bars along South 2nd Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They were taken back to his place, drugged, and strangled. Dahmer then engaged in necrophilia, mutilation, and cannibalism. The corpses were dismembered and decapitated, and the body parts stored in the kitchen refrigerator or a 57-gallon barrel. Because earlier attempts to create zombies from his victims by drilling holes in their heads and pouring acid inside failed, Dahmer began to boil the flesh from their skulls in a plan to create an elaborate shrine of death.

Dahmer’s first murder took place at his childhood home in Ohio. The next three murders occurred while he was living with his grandmother in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee. He then moved out on his own to first one, and then a second apartment building in Milwaukee. With the exception of the fifth murder, the rest of the killings happened in his second apartment. As Dahmer picked up most of his victims from gay bars, the target backcloth was nonuniform. Two of his victims were encountered in Chicago. Dahmer was an ambusher and the bodies of his victims were kept in his apartment.

When one of his prospective victims escaped, police discovered the hideous remains inside Dahmer’s apartment and arrested him. He subsequently confessed. Determined by the court to be sane (in the legal sense), and found guilty of 16 counts of murder, Dahmer received the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. The judge consecutively structured Dahmer’s parole eligibility so as to forever prevent his release, but ultimately it did not matter. In November 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by a fellow inmate in the maximum-security Columbia Correctional Institution.

9.2.3.9Joel Rifkin

Joel Rifkin murdered New York street prostitutes, soliciting them in Lower Manhattan, strangling them, and then disposing of their remains in isolated locations (Eftimiades, 1993; Pulitzer & Swirsky, 1994a, 1994b). From 1989 to 1993, he killed at least 17 times. Rifkin had very specific victim selection criteria, preferring women who reminded him of the high school girls he knew during

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the 1970s. His murdered victims were dumped, often in 55-gallon oil drums, over a vast area that included Long Island, the rivers of New York City, New Jersey, and upstate New York. For the most part police did not connect the deaths and disappearances of Rifkin’s victims, partly because of the high-risk nature of their occupations, and partly because of his method of body disposal.

Rifkin commuted from Long Island into New York City where he picked up his prostitute victims. The target backcloth for his encounter sites was nonuniform as was, to a lesser extent, that for his body dump sites. The former was constrained by the location of the red-light strolls, and the latter by the geography of the coastline and the degree of urban development.

Rifkin was arrested after a police chase that began when state troopers tried to stop him when they noticed his vehicle did not have a licence plate. They then discovered the decomposing body of his last victim under a tarpaulin in the rear of his pickup truck. During subsequent police interviews, he confessed to a total of 17 murders. Rifkin was found guilty after an unsuccessful insanity defence and sentenced to 25 years-to-life imprisonment. While in jail he wrote, “The Catch 22 of life, if you know you’re crazy, then you’re not” (Pulitzer & Swirsky, 1994b, p. 300).

9.2.3.10 John Collins

John Norman Collins preyed on coeds near the Eastern Michigan University (EMU) in Ypsilanti and was responsible for the Michigan Murders from 1967 to 1969 (James, 1991; Keyes, 1976; Lane & Gregg, 1992; Newton, 1990a). A senior EMU student himself, Collins worked one summer in the administration building and lived at the Theta Chi fraternity house close to campus. This lifestyle made him familiar with both his hunting grounds and potential victims.

Collins was fascinated by the novel Crime and Punishment, and once wrote in an English essay, “It’s not society’s judgment that’s important, but the individual’s own choice of will and intellect” (Keyes, 1976, p. 249). This was a paraphrase of Dostoevsky’s student murderer Raskolnikov who believed that some men have an absolute right to commit wicked and criminal acts.

Collins picked up hitchhiking female students, then sexually assaulted and strangled, shot, stabbed, or beat them. Their decomposed bodies were found dumped on the outskirts of Ypsilanti and neighbouring Ann Arbor. He is believed responsible for a total of eight murders. Eastern Michigan University was Collins’ primary anchor point. The target backcloth for his body dump sites was nonuniform as Collins chose isolated areas in which to dispose of his victims (the area north of EMU was largely undeveloped land). He committed one murder while on vacation in California.

Suspicions about Collins were confirmed through crime scene forensics after he strangled his last victim in the home of his uncle, a Michigan state trooper. On August 19, 1970, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty and

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Collins was sentenced to confinement and hard labour for life in the Southern Michigan State Prison. Obviously, he was not one of those men who stood outside the law.

9.2.3.11 Aileen Wuornos

Aileen Wuornos murdered seven men across central Florida in under 12 months (Epstein, 1992; Kennedy, 1994; Lane & Gregg, 1992; Reynolds, 1992; Scott, 1992). While she has been incorrectly called the first female serial killer, Wuornos was one of the few such women who hunted her murder victims in a predatory fashion (Fox & Levin, 1994; Kelleher & Kelleher, 1998; Scott). A roadside prostitute of no fixed address, she hitchhiked from the Florida interstate entrances and truck stops in an effort to find customers. From November 1989 to November 1990, some of these men became her victims. They were shot and robbed, then their bodies and vehicles dumped in various locations over a vast area that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

The exact locations of her victim encounter and murder sites are not known. Wuornos was nomadic and lived in different motels in various cities, but she appeared to have an anchor point located in Wildwood, Florida. It was from the I-75 truck stop here that she hitchhiked and picked up many of her clients.

After her arrest Wuornos argued self-defence, claiming that each of her seven victims had tried to rape her. She asserted her innocence, emphasizing that she was not a serial killer, only someone who had killed a series of men. Considered a compulsive liar, Wuornos was diagnosed with both borderline and antisocial personality disorders. Following a rather histrionic trial, the jury found Aileen Wuornos guilty of murder and sentenced her to death in the electric chair.

9.2.3.12 Ian Brady and Myra Hindley

The Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, hunted their victims in the Manchester area of England from 1963 to 1965 (Harrison, 1987; Williams, 1967). Brady converted Hindley to his neo-Nazi world view and involved her in a life of sexual sadism, pornography, and petty crime. The two lovers eventually turned to murder, killing five people, all children or teenagers. Brady and Hindley buried the bodies of their victims on Saddleworth Moor about an hour’s drive east of the city, thereby earning the pair their infamous nickname. They moved to an outlying estate during the murder series, and for their last two crimes commuted into Manchester to search for victims.

Police found the corpse of the last victim in a back bedroom of the house where Brady and Hindley lived after receiving a tip from the latter’s brother- in-law who witnessed the attack the night before. Extensive digging on the moors uncovered three of the victims’ remains, though the body of the

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