The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman Page B

interviewed by the press. ‘He was having his hour of glory . . . He was already being referred to as the most heinous killer in history.’ His hour of glory, as it transpired, was no more than that – almost literally. As Knowles was being transferred the next day to a maximum-security jail, he succeeded in picking the lock on his handcuffs and tried to steal the escorting sheriff’s gun. FBI agent Ron Angel, however, was quicker on the draw – and shot Knowles dead.
    Regardless of the type of serial killer concerned, case histories show that most prefer to work alone. There are a number of instances of convicted serial killers working in pairs, but these are a minority group and usually consist of dominant leader and accomplice. As with the loners, serial killers who work in pairs are usually male: the man-woman team, while not unknown, is rare. A serial killer ‘pack’ is rarest of all; these too usually have a dominant leader (like Manson). The alleged Lainz Hospital medical ‘pack’ is unique, in that all its five first-reported members were female. The eight members of the Manson gang convicted of the 1969 murders comprised four of each sex: pack leader Manson, Bruce Davis, Clem Grogan and Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, plus females Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme and Leslie van Houten. No charges were brought against the other two women member of the ‘Family’ – Mary Brunner and Linda Kasabian – who turned state evidence. On the premise that more than two serial killers constitutes a ‘pack’, the Texan homosexual murderer Dean Corll and his two accomplices, teenagers Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, rate among the more notorious. Together they took part in the torture, homosexual rape and murder of some twenty-seven youths in the 1970s. Finally, after Corll ordered Henley to rape and kill a girl of fifteen while Corll sodomised and murdered a male teenager, Henley refused and shot Corll instead. He and Brooks were later imprisoned for life for their part in the previous murders.
    Almost all known instances of serial killers working in pairs have occurred in the United States. They include Patrick Kearney and David Hill, alias ‘The Trashbag Killers’, who murdered thirty homosexuals in Southern California in the late 1970s and put their bodies out for collection in bags, as if theywere normal household refuse. Ex-convicts Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were arrested in Texas in 1983 after a string of murders, of which Lucas was found guilty of eleven. How many Lucas alone may have committed can only be guesswork: he killed for the first time at fifteen, and was fifty-one when finally arrested in 1983. Whilst in custody he ‘confessed’ to more than three hundred murders, but withdrew the ‘confession’ later. (In any event it was worthless: like so many serial killers, Lucas was found to be a compulsive liar.)
    Also in the 1980s Vietnam veteran Leonard Lake and his accomplice, Charles Ng, abducted three women and kept them as their ‘sex slaves’ in a specially-built torture chamber beneath their cabin near Wisleyville, in Calaveras County, California. The three women were murdered when their captors finally tired of them, as were the two young children abducted with their ‘sex slave’ mothers. Seven adult males who were subsequently lured to the cabin were also murdered, robbed and buried there.
    Two murderers who formed a rare ‘mixed’ pair of serial killers were British – Ian Brady and his mistress Myra Hindley, alias ‘The Moors Murderers’. In 1966 they were jointly charged with three murders, two of them the murders of children aged ten and twelve respectively. A unique feature of their trial was that Brady and Hindley stood in a dock protected by bulletproof glass, lest an attempt be made on their lives (there was widespread public outrage over the child murders). Discreetly, the police described the screen as a ‘draught excluder’.