The Serial Killer Files by Harold Schechter

Mutilator.”
    In later life, he would blame his troubles, rather conveniently, on an incident that occurred in 1943, when
    —during a stint in the army—he was raped in an air-raid shelter by a fellow soldier. The problem with this story—besides the fact that there is no proof of its truth—is that Ginsberg had already been diagnosed as a schizophrenic long before it supposedly happened.
    Discharged from the army in 1947, he soon found himself committed to a mental asylum in Scotland, where he spent six nightmarish months crammed inside a freezing cell with gibbering madmen and subjected to a daily regimen of shock treatments. Shortly after he emerged from this bedlam, he left Great Britain, emigrating first to Canada, then to Australia, where he dropped his birth name and took on the identity that would gain lasting infamy in the annals of crime: William MacDonald.
    In 1960, the thirty-six-year-old MacDonald, living in Brisbane, committed his first murder when he picked up a fifty-five-year-old alcoholic named Amos Hurst. Accompanying Hurst to a sleazy hotel, MacDonald strangled him as they sat together on a bed drinking beer.
    The experience was powerfully stimulating for MacDonald and left with him a craving for more. At the start of 1961, he moved to Sydney. By day, he worked in the post office as a letter sorter, while at night he prowled parks and public toilets, looking for homosexual pickups.
    Six months after arriving in Sydney, he was overcome with the urge to kill. Carrying a bag containing a long-bladed knife and a lightweight plastic raincoat, he lured a forty-one-year-old homeless man named Alfred Reginald Greenfield to a deserted swimming pool and plied him with beer until Greenfield passed out. Then—after donning the raincoat—MacDonald killed the unconscious derelict with dozens of stab wounds to the face and neck, severing his jugular. He then stripped Greenfield naked from the waist down and sliced off his genitals, which he took away with him and threw into the harbor.
    After another six-month hiatus—or “cooling-off period,” in the jargon of criminology—MacDonald’s blood hunger again reached an overwhelming pitch. In November 1941, he butchered another forty-one-year-old male pickup named Ernest Cobbin, slashing the latter’s throat as he sat on a public toilet, then castrating him and carrying away the grisly trophy in a plastic bag, which he later tossed into Sydney Harbor.
    A nearly identical atrocity followed in March 1962. By then, a massive manhunt was under way for the maniac known as the “Mutilator.” Shortly afterward, having been evicted by his landlord and sacked from his job, MacDonald moved to a suburb of Sydney. He took on a new name—Alan Brennan—and opened a sandwich shop. He perpetrated his final horror that November, when he brought a forty-two-year-old derelict, James Hackett, back to his shop. Rendering him stuporous with drink, he butchered and mutilated him. Afterward, he hid the corpse in the basement and—in a panic—fled the city for Brisbane.
    When the badly decomposed corpse was discovered more than a month later, it was mistakenly identified as that of the shop owner, Alan Brennan. The cause of death was given as accidental electrocution. Had MacDonald stayed away, he would have remained free to kill again. Instead, for unexplained reasons, he returned to Sydney, where he soon bumped into an acquaintance named John McCarthy, who was understandably startled to see the supposedly deceased Brennan walking around on the streets. When MacDonald turned and fled, McCarthy notified the press. It wasn’t long before a leading newspaper ran the story under the headline, “THE CASE OF THE WALKING CORPSE.”
    Exhuming the remains of “Brennan,” authorities now determined that the dead man was really James Hackett and that he had been stabbed to death and sexually mutilated. They became convinced that the real Brennan was the notorious “Mutilator.” Before