The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter, David Everitt

took keen delight in torturing inmates.
    But acting out Nazi-inspired sex fantasies wasn’t enough for Brady. He had other—and far worse—things in mind.
    For several years from the early to mid-1960s, the depraved couple abducted and killed at least four children, ranging in age from ten to sixteen. Generally, it was Hindley who lured the victim into her car. Exactly how much she participated in the actual killing remains a matter of debate, though Brady clearly took the more active role. Their final murder was, in many ways, the most appalling. After snatching a ten-year-old girl named Lesley Ann Downey, they brought her back to Hindley’s house, bound and stripped her, compelled her to pose for pornographic pictures, and then—before killing her—tape-recorded her heart-wrenching screams, cries, and pleas for mercy. Like their other victims, Downey’s corpse was buried on the moors.
    The “Moors Murderers” were finally caught when Brady attempted to recruit a second follower, his teenage brother-in-law, David Smith. In the fall of 1965, Brady picked up a young homosexual, brought him home, and bludgeoned him to death in front of Smith. In effect, this was an act of ritual slaughter—a blood initiation intended to bring Smith into Brady’s murderous fold. But the plan backfired. Smith was so horrified that he notified the police.
    At their 1966 trial, Brady and Hindley had to sit behind bulletproof shields to protect them from an outraged public. When the tape recording of Lesley Ann Downey’s final moments was played in court, not only the jury and spectators but hardened police officers as well wept openly.
    The “Moors Murderers” were sentenced to life in prison, where Hindley died of respiratory failure in November, 2002, at the age of sixty.
    M OTIVES
    In Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece Othello, the villainous Iago sets out to destroy the noble hero for no apparent reason. After all, Iago has nothing to gain from wrecking Othello’s life. And he isn’t really acting out of either envy or revenge. In attempting to explain this character’s vicious behavior, one famous scholar coined the memorable phrase “motiveless malignity.” Iago does terrible things for one reason only—because he’s the embodiment of absolute evil.
    Some people tend to see serial murder in the same way—as pure, unprovoked malignity. And indeed—in terms of such traditional, easily identifiable causes as jealousy and greed—serial killing does appear to be a “motiveless” crime.
    In actuality, however, there is no such thing as a motiveless murder. Everyone has his reasons—even if those reasons are not immediately obvious. What drives the serial killer are dark psychological impulses—perverted passions and monstrous lusts. The twisted needs that dominate his psyche are every bit as real and compelling as more “objective” motives, such as the coveting of wealth or the desire to punish an unfaithful lover.
    Insofar as serial killing is synonymous with lust murder, the primary motive, according to some experts in the field, is rage against women and the desire to inflict pain and suffering on them—in short, sexual sadism. Other specialists, however, insist that the dominant motive behind serial murder is not sex but power—even when the murder involves extreme sexual cruelty. As one sadistic serial killer explained to Special Agent Roy Hazelwood of the FBI ’s Behavioral Science Unit: “The wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence of sadism. One essential impulse: to have complete mastery over another person, to make him/her a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her God. The most important radical aim is to make her suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her.”
    For this reason, some criminologists have begun to regard Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, not as the antitechnological terrorist he