Serial Killer Quarterly
Vol.1 No.2 Partners in Pain
Grinning Man Press
Serial Killer Quarterly Vol.1 No.2 Partners in Pain
© 2014 Grinning Man Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9938232-0-6
First eBook Edition *August 2014
Published by Grinning Man Press
Editor-in-Chief: Lee Mellor
Editors: Lee Mellor, Aaron Elliott
Art Direction: Jonathan Whitehead, Northbound Creations
Cover Image: William Cook
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The views expressed by the editor-in-chief of Serial Killer Quarterly do not necessarily represent those of its contributing authors, illustrators, or designers. Similarly, the views expressed by individual authors do not necessarily represent those of Grinning Man Press, or any of the other authors. Duplication and/or distribution of any portion of the ‘Partners in Pain’ e-magazine is prohibited by law, and may result in legal action by Grinning Man Press.
In this Issue Vol.1 No.2 Partners in Pain
Introduction to Partners in Pain
A Quick Note on Style
Letters to the Editor
Burke & Hare: Victorian Serial Killers
Cathy Scott
19th Century Edinburgh. Two Irish labourers suffocate victims with pillows, and then sell their skeletons to medical schools.
Corll, Henley & Brooks: The Game of Boys
Dr. Katherine Ramsland
Texas candy salesman recruits teen accomplices to bring him boys to torture, castrate, and rape for hours or days. In 1973, he gets his!
Serial Killer Poetry: Part 1
Anthony Servante
Clark & Bundy: Serial Murder on the Sunset Strip
Kim Cresswell
Myopic single mother falls madly for transvestite, who tells her of his necrophile fantasies. Together they head onto the sunset strip to hunt for heads.
Lake & Ng: Freedom is Better than All Else
Robert J Hoshowsky
Two ex-Marines turned outlaw build survivalist bunker in California mountains. They murder men for money and identity, take women as sex slaves, and incinerate babies.
Serial Killer Poetry: Part 2
Anthony Servante
Duffy & Mulcahy: A Unique and Wicked Bond
Carol Anne Davis
After serving more than ten years for a series of London murders, Railway Rapist
John Duffy rats out his partner in crime: David Mulcahy?
Killer Flicks
Bernardo & Homolka: A Dreamhouse Divided
Curtis Yateman
Baby-faced rapist marries suggestible young blonde. In a house on Lake Ontario, they sexually degrade and murder two teenage girls, capturing it on videotape.
Golay & Rutterschmidt: Hollywood’s Killer Grannies
Aaron Elliott
Greedy Santa Monica grannies take out life insurance policies on indigent men, then cash them in by drugging the vagrants and running over them with cars.
Serial Killer Poetry: Part 3
Anthony Servante
A Preview of the Next Issue: Unsolved in North America
Sources
Introduction to Partners in Pain
With the first issue of Serial Killer Quarterly still cooling on the autopsy table, we find ourselves confronted with the second in this grisly series: Partners in Pain.
In this issue, we will examine 7 cases comprised of 15 serial murders from 19th century Scotland to 21st century Los Angeles. Buckle-up, because this one’s a triple feature, with outstanding articles by the first ladies of true crime: Cathy Scott (The Killing of Tupac Shakur; The Murder of Biggie Smalls), Dr. Katherine Ramsland (The Devil’s Dozen; The Human Predator), and Carol Anne Davis (Sadistic Killers; Couples Who Kill).
These are the stories of those who slay together—man and woman, man and man, woman and woman—though each team’s chemistry is truly unique.
From the moment Grinning Man began conceptualizing this issue, it became obvious that there is something inherently sadistic about serial killer partnerships. In her The Game of Boys,
Katherine Ramsland details the unfathomable suffering—through sodomy, genital mutilation, and psychological torture—of 27 Texan children at the hands of the sinister Candyman
Dean Corll and his teenage accomplices. Robert Hoshowsky tackles two of the most notorious sex slave murderers of all time: ex-Marines Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who kept hapless women locked in a dungeon in the California mountains, eventually killing them along with men and babies.
Curtis Yateman’s sure to be controversial account of the schoolgirl murders perpetrated by the Ken and Barbie Killers
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, reveals a comparable level of perverse brutality. It is a testament to team killers’ callous depravity that the horrific acts of London rapists, John Duffy & David Mulcahy—as described by Carol Anne Davis—actually seem tame by comparison. What accounts for this mutual viciousness? Is it symptomatic of the infamous folie à deux where one deviant feeds off the barbarities of the other, attempting to out do
them, until they climax in a torturous mess of body fluids and death becoming partners in pain?
Originally, staff author Kim Cresswell was eager to pen a piece on England’s chilling duo, Fred and Rosemary West, but realizing that the magazine was already describing some of the worst torture murderers in history, I requested that she put the West case on hold until our Fall 2014 Cruel Britannia
issue. Instead, Kim shares a rare instance of a necrophilic serial killer couple: Sunset Strip Slayers
Doug Clark and Carol Bundy.
Of course, like numerous serial slayers, some team killers are more driven to commit expedient, profit-driven murders. In her feature on Burke and Hare, Cathy Scott reveals an altogether different shade of diabolical duo: those who made their living together in the murder business. Where William Burke and William Hare literally traded the skeletons of their victims to medical schools for money, Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt, as recounted by Aaron Elliott, collected insurance claims on homeless men after fatally crushing them with their car.
In the midst of this madness, LA writer and literary professor, Anthony Servante, will be sweetening things up a bit with a poetry discussion; albeit authored by psychotic shoemaker Joseph Kallinger; Israel Keyes, who Grinning Man featured in 21st Century Psychos
; and the infamous Zodiac Killer whose story will appear in next issue’s Unsolved in North America
.
So without further adieu...let us go now, you and I, with the evening spread out against the sky, like a cadaver stinking on a gurney.
Enjoy (but not too much...),
Lee Mellor
Editor-in-Chief, Serial Killer Quarterly
lee@grinningmanpress.com
A Quick Note on Style
For those of you who haven’t read our debut issue 21st Century Psychos,
I will repeat Grinning Man’s unique stance regarding format and tone. Though our company is based in Montreal, Canada, the online nature of our business model allows us to publish for an international audience. For this reason, we have chosen not to select one style of English over another. American authors are free to lose the u’s
and extra l’s,
while Canadians and Brits can keep them. Thus, our magazines may contain alternate spellings of words such as behavior/behaviour
or travelling/traveling
in different articles. Let’s face it, we inhabit a globalized world, and bickering about correct language at this level is a futile and pedantic pursuit.
Any names followed by a * are pseudonyms, and are typically employed to protect the identities of surviving victims.
You will also observe that the tone of the individual articles in Serial Killer Quarterly range in degrees from the impressionistic/subjective to more traditional journalistic approaches. Though some readers will likely prefer one style over another, we have tried to incorporate a multitude of voices into Serial Killer Quarterly in order to keep the material varied, and to provide numerous lenses through which to view the topic. Charles Manson—incidentally, a psychopathic cult leader, NOT a serial killer—has been quoted as saying: Look down at me and you see a fool; look up at me and you see a god; look straight at me and you see yourself.
In this spirit, we will look from whatever angle our contributors see fit, and maybe, one day, glimpse the full picture.
Letters to the Editor
Please send any communications through email to lee@grinningmanpress.com. Enter Serial Killer Quarterly—Letters to the Editor
into the subject line of your email, and we promise to publish and respond to as many emails as possible in our future issues.’ We also welcome suggestions for new stories, issue themes, films to review etc.
"Finally—a serial killer publication that lives up to its name. Serial Killer Quarterly publishes fascinating accounts of serial murder cases by some of today's top true crime writers.
Must-read material for true crime aficionados."— Gary C. King, bestselling author of Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer, and Driven to Kill.
William Burke & William Hare: Victorian Serial Killers
Two Irish immigrants to Scotland became unlikely killers in the 19th century when greed got the better of them. William Burke and William Hare targeted vulnerable victims, murdered them by suffocation, and sold the cadavers to help stock a nearby medical school’s anatomy classes with corpses. The instructor, a doctor who turned a blind eye to the cause of death, paid even more for bodies if they were in good condition, which Burke and Hare eagerly provided. The pair got away with murder for 11 months before they came under suspicion. All told, Burke and Hare killed 16 victims in Edinburgh beginning in November 1827 in what has become known as the West Port Murders, making them the most famous body peddlers Scotland has ever seen, and the grisliest of Irish imports.
Their method of killing has been termed burking,
a technique they perfected by putting immense pressure on their victims’ chests to prevent the diaphragm from moving up and down, while also covering the mouths and noses to obstruct the air passage.
Burke and Hare did not act alone. Their accomplices were their wives, Helen McDougal and Margaret Maggie
Laird Hare. Maggie ran a boarding house on Tanner’s Close in the city’s grim West Port district, with the type of tenants who were perfect candidates for burking.
The (house’s) entry from the street,
according to historian and author Alexander Leighton, begins with a descent of a few steps, and is dark from the superincumbent land. On proceeding downwards, you come—for the house, which was razed for shame, is no longer to be seen—to a smallish self-contained dwelling of one flat, and consisting of three apartments. One passing down the close might, with an observant eye, have seen into the front room; but this disadvantage was compensated by the house being disjoined from other dwellings, and a ticket, ‘Beds to let,’ as an invitation to vagrants, so many of whom were destined never to come out alive, distinguished it still more.
Burke and Hare hadn’t gone to Scotland to become killers; they’d moved from Northern Ireland to work as laborers. Burke, who had a wife and children in Ireland, abandoned his family and settled in Ulster, Scotland as a navigator for the Union Canal, which was under construction. Coincidentally, Hare also worked on the canal, peddling fish from a cart. Burke met Helen McDougal—a Scotswoman who worked as a weaver, baker and laborer—and they agreed to live as man and wife. Having now become a shoemaker, Burke traveled about the country with McDougal, selling their wares, before the couple lodged at a boarding house in the West Port of Edinburgh. There they became friendly with William and Margaret Hare, who had jointly operated the house since 1826.
In November of 1827, an elderly army pensioner named Donald, who’d lived in the boarding house for a year, passed away from natural causes, owing £4 in back rent. According to BBC radio’s Sexton’s Tales—a series on cemetery stories—to recoup the rent money, Burke and Hare decided to sell his remains to a local anatomy school that desperately needed bodies for dissection. It was a tricky task. First, they needed to move the body, which was placed in a casket for a viewing at the boarding house. In a later confession to police, Burke stated that the coffin lid had been screwed down,
so the pair opened the casket, removed the body, placed it in a box, and substituted sacks full of timber and bark for the corpse before resealing the coffin lid. The
