Milwaukee born in 1960, Jeffrey Dahmer moved to Ohio with his family at age six. In 1968 he was sexually molested by a neighbor boy in rural Bath Township. Unreported at the time, the childhood incident may play a pivotal role in understanding Dahmer's subsequent crimes; likewise, the ferocious arguments between his parents (later divorced) clearly demonstrated to Dahmer that home was no safe haven for a child.
By age 10, Dahmer was "experimenting with dead animals: decapitating rodents, bleaching chicken bones with acid, nailing a dog's carcass to a tree and mounting its head on a stake. In June 1978, days after his graduation from high school, Dahmer crossed the line from morbid "experimentation" to murder. He was living alone at the time, his parents having separated and fled, neither one thinking to take Jeff along. His victim was hitchhiker Steven Hicks, whom Dahmer took home for a drink and some laughs. When Hicks tried to leave, Dahmer crushed his skull with a barbell, strangled him to death, then dismembered and buried his corpse.
That first slaying shocked Jeffrey back to a semblance of normality. He took a brief shot at college, then signed up for a six-year term of military service, but the army discharged him after barely two years, fed up with his heavy drinking. (Later speculation on his possible link to several unsolved murders in Germany, committed while Dahmer was stationed there, produced no concrete evidence.) In 1982, he moved into his grandmother's house in West Allis, Wisconsin. That August, Dahmer logged an arrest for indecent exposure at the state fair. Identical charges were filed in September 1986 when two boys accused Dahmer of masturbating in public. Convicted of disorderly conduct in that case, he received a one-year suspended sentence with orders for counseling.
On September 15, 1987, Steven Tuomi vanished in Milwaukee, the mystery unsolved until Dahmer confessed to his murder in 1991. James Doxtator was the next to die, in January 1988, followed by Richard Guerrero on March 24. By September 1988, Jeffrey's odd hours and the stench of his "experiments" had become too much for his grandmother, and he was asked to move out. On September 25 he found an apartment on Milwaukee's North 25th Street.
The next day, Dahmer lured a Laotian boy to his flat, fondled him, and offered cash for a nude modeling session. Police were called, and Dahmer was charged with sexual assault. Convicted in January 1989, he remained free pending a formal sentencing scheduled for May. Meanwhile, on March 25, Dahmer slaughtered victim Anthony Sears.
Sentenced to one year in jail, Dahmer was released after serving 10 months. The death parade resumed with Edward Smith in June 1990. July's victim was Raymond Smith (no relation to Edward). Ernest Miller and David Thomas were butchered in September. Dahmer bagged Curtis Straughter in February 1991. Errol Lindsey joined the list in April, followed by Anthony Hughes in May.
By that time, Dahmer had conceived the bizarre notion of creating "zombies" who would be his live-in sex toys, obedient to his every whim. Instead of using voodoo, Jeffrey opted for a more direct approach, drilling holes in the selected victim's skull, then dribbling caustic liquids into the wounds in an effort to destroy the subject's conscious will. Needless to say, the weird approach to neurosurgery had a 100 percent failure rate, and none of Dahmer's favored "patients" survived.
One almost got away, however. Konerak Sinthasomphone was a brother of the youth Dahmer molested in 1988. Missing from home on May 16, 1991, he was next seen the following day - naked, dazed, and bleeding from head wounds - when neighbors reported his plight to Milwaukee police. Officers questioned Dahmer who described Konerak as his adult homosexual lover, and since Konerak spoke no English, they returned the youth to Dahmer's custody… and to his death. (When news of the blunder broke, following Dahmer's arrest on murder charges, the two patrolmen were briefly suspended from duty, then reinstated when they threatened civil suits against the city.)
The juggernaut rolled on: Matt Turned killed on June 30; Jeremiah Weinberger on July 7; Oliver Lacy on July 15; Joseph Brandehoft four days later. In addition to raping, murdering, and dismembering his victims, Dahmer also sampled cannibalism with at least one corpse, though he denied it was his common practice. Tracy Edwards was lucky, escaping from Dahmer's apartment on July 22 with handcuffs still dangling from one wrist. He flagged a squad car down and led police back to Dahmer's flat at the Oxford Apartments, where the dissected remains of 11 victims were found in acid vats and the refrigerator. In a touch reminiscent of another Wisconsin necrophile, Edward Gein, Dahmer had built a makeshift altar in his bedroom, decorated with candles and human skulls.
By August 22, 1991, Dahmer had been charged with 15 counts of murder. At his trial, beginning on January 30, 1992, Dahmer filed a plea of guilty but insane. Two weeks later, on February 15, jurors found him sane and responsible for his actions. The court imposed 15 consecutive life sentences, thus requiring Dahmer to serve a minimum of 936 years. (He was subsequently charged with the Hicks murder, in Ohio, but was never brought to trial.)
In prison, Dahmer refused offers of protective custody despite the many threats against his life. On July 3, 1994, another convict tried to slash his throat in the prison chapel, but Dahmer emerged from the incident with only minor scratches and refused to press charges. Five months later, on November 28, he was cleaning a bathroom adjacent to the prison gym when another member of the work detail, 25-year-old Christopher Scarver, grabbed an iron bar from a nearby exercise machine and smashed Dahmer's skull, killing him instantly. A second inmate, 37-year-old Jesse Anderson, was mortally wounded in the same attack, dying two days later. A racial motive was initially suspected in the murder since Scarver, like many of Dahmer's victims, was black, but a closer look determined that the killer was deranged, believing himself to be the "son of God," acting out his "father's" command.
"I REALLY SCREWED UP THIS TIME."
JEFFREY DAHMER
TO HIS FATHER
Sunday 23 October 2011
John Wayne Gacy
John Gacy, Sr., was an alcoholic tyrant in his home, a crude exaggeration of the famous "Archie Bunker" character with every trace of humor wiped away. He took no pains to hide his disappointment with the son who bore his name, inflicting brutal beatings for the least offense, occasionally picking up the boy and hurling him across the room. In more pacific moments, he was satisfied to damn John, Jr., as a "sissy" who was "dumb and stupid," useless in the scheme of things. In time, the "sissy" portion of his groundless accusations would appear to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Chicago born in March 1942, Gacy grew up doubting his own masculinity, taking refuge from sports and other "manly" activities through precocious hypochondria. Struck on the head by a swing at age eleven, he suffered periodic blackouts for the next five years until their cause - a blood clot on his brain - was finally dissolved with medication. Deprived of one affliction, he developed - or imagined - another, settling on the symptoms of a heart ailment that seemed to come and go, depending on his mood.
After graduation from business college, Gacy became a shoe salesman, but he had his sights on better things. He married a coworker, whose parents owned a fried chicken restaurant in Waterloo, Iowa, and Gacy stepped into a ready-made role as the restaurant's manager. He was a whiz kid on the job, belying everything his father had to say about his intellect and drive, ascending to a post of admiration and respect among the local Jaycees. His wife and friends were absolutely unprepared for John's arrest, in May of 1968, on charges of coercing a young employee into homosexual acts spanning a period of months. Those accusations were still pending when Gacy hired a teenage thug to beat the prosecution's witness, and more charges were filed. Striking a bargain, Gacy pled guilty to sodomy, and the other felony counts were dismissed. Sentenced to ten years in prison, he proved himself a "model prisoner" and was released in eighteen months.
With the state's permission, Gacy moved back to Chicago, where he established himself as a successful building contractor. Divorced while in prison, he soon remarried, settling in a middle-class neighborhood where he was popular with his neighbors, the host of elaborate holiday theme parties. On the side, he was active in Democratic politics - once posing for photos with the wife of President Jimmy Carter - and as "Pogo the Clown," performing in full makeup at children's parties and charity benefits. Few of his new acquaintances knew anything about the Iowa arrest, and those who heard a rumor were assured that John had merely done some time for "dealing in a little porn."
On February 12, 1971, Gacy was charged with disorderly conduct in Chicago, on the complaint of a boy he attempted to rape. The accuser, a known homosexual, failed to appear in court for Gacy's hearing, and the charges were dismissed. Parole officers in Iowa were never notified of the arrest or accusation, and Gacy was formally discharged from parole on October 18, 1971.
By his own estimate, the first murder occurred less than three months later, on January3, 1972. The victim, picked up at a bus terminal, remains unidentified, but his death was typical of Gacy's future approach. In searching for prey, Gacy sometimes fell back on young friends and employees, more often trolling the streets of Chicago for hustlers and runaways. Like the Hillside Strangler, he would sometimes flash a badge and gun, "arresting" his intended victim. Others were invited to the Gacy home for drinks, a game of pool, and John would show them "tricks" with "magic handcuffs," later hauling out the dildo and garrote. When he was finished, John would do the "rope trick" - strangulation - and his victim would be buried in a crawlspace underneath the house. In later years, as he ran out of space downstairs, he started dumping bodies in a nearby river.
Planting corpses in the crawlspace had its drawbacks, notably a rank, pervasive odor that the killer blamed on "sewer problems." Gacy's second wife was also in the way, her presence limiting his playtime to occasions when she left the house or traveled out of town, but when their marriage fell apart, in 1976, Gacy was able to accelerate his program of annihilation. Between April 6, and June 13, 1976, at least five boys were slaughtered at Gacy's home, and there seemed to be no end in sight. On October 25 of that year, he killed two victims at once, dumping their bodies into a common grave. As time went on, his targets ranged in age from nine to twenty, covering the social spectrum from middle-class teens to jailbirds and prostitutes.
Not all of Gacy's victims died. In December 1977, Robert Donnelly was abducted at gunpoint, tortured and sodomized with a dildo in Gacy's house of horror, then released. Three months later, 26-year-old Jeffrey Rignall has having a drink at Gacy's home when he was chloroformed and fastened to "the rack," a homemade torture device similar to one used by Dean Corll in Houston. Gacy spent several hours raping and whipping Rignall, applying the chloroform with such frequency that Rignall's liver suffered permanent damage. Regaining consciousness beside a lake in Lincoln Park, Rignall called police at once, but it was mid-July before they got around to charging Gacy with a misdemeanor. The case was still dragging on five months later, when Gacy was picked up on charges of multiple murder.
On December 12, 1978, Robert Piest disappeared from his job at a Chicago pharmacy. Gacy's construction firm had lately remodeled the store, and Piest had been offered a job with the crew, informing coworkers of his intention to meet "a contractor" on the night of his disappearance. Police dropped by to question Gacy at his home, and they immediately recognized the odor emanating from his crawlspace. Before they finished digging, Gacy's lot would yield 28 bodies, with five more recovered from rivers nearby. Of the 33 victims, nine would remain forever unidentified.
In custody, Gacy tried to blame his murderous activities on "Jack," an alter-ego (and coincidentally, the alias he used when posing as a cop). Psychiatrists dismissed the ruse, and the defendant was convicted on all counts at his 1980 murder trial. Life sentences were handed down on 21 counts of murder, covering deaths that occurred before June 21, 1977, when Illinois reinstated capital punishment. In the case of twelve victims murdered between July 1977 and December 1978, Gacy was sentenced to die. After fourteen years on death row, the "killer Clown" was finally executed by lethal injection in 1992.
Chicago born in March 1942, Gacy grew up doubting his own masculinity, taking refuge from sports and other "manly" activities through precocious hypochondria. Struck on the head by a swing at age eleven, he suffered periodic blackouts for the next five years until their cause - a blood clot on his brain - was finally dissolved with medication. Deprived of one affliction, he developed - or imagined - another, settling on the symptoms of a heart ailment that seemed to come and go, depending on his mood.
After graduation from business college, Gacy became a shoe salesman, but he had his sights on better things. He married a coworker, whose parents owned a fried chicken restaurant in Waterloo, Iowa, and Gacy stepped into a ready-made role as the restaurant's manager. He was a whiz kid on the job, belying everything his father had to say about his intellect and drive, ascending to a post of admiration and respect among the local Jaycees. His wife and friends were absolutely unprepared for John's arrest, in May of 1968, on charges of coercing a young employee into homosexual acts spanning a period of months. Those accusations were still pending when Gacy hired a teenage thug to beat the prosecution's witness, and more charges were filed. Striking a bargain, Gacy pled guilty to sodomy, and the other felony counts were dismissed. Sentenced to ten years in prison, he proved himself a "model prisoner" and was released in eighteen months.
With the state's permission, Gacy moved back to Chicago, where he established himself as a successful building contractor. Divorced while in prison, he soon remarried, settling in a middle-class neighborhood where he was popular with his neighbors, the host of elaborate holiday theme parties. On the side, he was active in Democratic politics - once posing for photos with the wife of President Jimmy Carter - and as "Pogo the Clown," performing in full makeup at children's parties and charity benefits. Few of his new acquaintances knew anything about the Iowa arrest, and those who heard a rumor were assured that John had merely done some time for "dealing in a little porn."
On February 12, 1971, Gacy was charged with disorderly conduct in Chicago, on the complaint of a boy he attempted to rape. The accuser, a known homosexual, failed to appear in court for Gacy's hearing, and the charges were dismissed. Parole officers in Iowa were never notified of the arrest or accusation, and Gacy was formally discharged from parole on October 18, 1971.
By his own estimate, the first murder occurred less than three months later, on January3, 1972. The victim, picked up at a bus terminal, remains unidentified, but his death was typical of Gacy's future approach. In searching for prey, Gacy sometimes fell back on young friends and employees, more often trolling the streets of Chicago for hustlers and runaways. Like the Hillside Strangler, he would sometimes flash a badge and gun, "arresting" his intended victim. Others were invited to the Gacy home for drinks, a game of pool, and John would show them "tricks" with "magic handcuffs," later hauling out the dildo and garrote. When he was finished, John would do the "rope trick" - strangulation - and his victim would be buried in a crawlspace underneath the house. In later years, as he ran out of space downstairs, he started dumping bodies in a nearby river.
Planting corpses in the crawlspace had its drawbacks, notably a rank, pervasive odor that the killer blamed on "sewer problems." Gacy's second wife was also in the way, her presence limiting his playtime to occasions when she left the house or traveled out of town, but when their marriage fell apart, in 1976, Gacy was able to accelerate his program of annihilation. Between April 6, and June 13, 1976, at least five boys were slaughtered at Gacy's home, and there seemed to be no end in sight. On October 25 of that year, he killed two victims at once, dumping their bodies into a common grave. As time went on, his targets ranged in age from nine to twenty, covering the social spectrum from middle-class teens to jailbirds and prostitutes.
Not all of Gacy's victims died. In December 1977, Robert Donnelly was abducted at gunpoint, tortured and sodomized with a dildo in Gacy's house of horror, then released. Three months later, 26-year-old Jeffrey Rignall has having a drink at Gacy's home when he was chloroformed and fastened to "the rack," a homemade torture device similar to one used by Dean Corll in Houston. Gacy spent several hours raping and whipping Rignall, applying the chloroform with such frequency that Rignall's liver suffered permanent damage. Regaining consciousness beside a lake in Lincoln Park, Rignall called police at once, but it was mid-July before they got around to charging Gacy with a misdemeanor. The case was still dragging on five months later, when Gacy was picked up on charges of multiple murder.
On December 12, 1978, Robert Piest disappeared from his job at a Chicago pharmacy. Gacy's construction firm had lately remodeled the store, and Piest had been offered a job with the crew, informing coworkers of his intention to meet "a contractor" on the night of his disappearance. Police dropped by to question Gacy at his home, and they immediately recognized the odor emanating from his crawlspace. Before they finished digging, Gacy's lot would yield 28 bodies, with five more recovered from rivers nearby. Of the 33 victims, nine would remain forever unidentified.
In custody, Gacy tried to blame his murderous activities on "Jack," an alter-ego (and coincidentally, the alias he used when posing as a cop). Psychiatrists dismissed the ruse, and the defendant was convicted on all counts at his 1980 murder trial. Life sentences were handed down on 21 counts of murder, covering deaths that occurred before June 21, 1977, when Illinois reinstated capital punishment. In the case of twelve victims murdered between July 1977 and December 1978, Gacy was sentenced to die. After fourteen years on death row, the "killer Clown" was finally executed by lethal injection in 1992.
Jack the Ripper
The horrors began in the early morning hours of August 31, 1888. At roughly 3:45A.M., while walking down a deserted, dimly lit street in London's East End, a market porter named George Cross stumbled upon what he took to be a tarpaulin-wrapped bundle. Peering closer, he saw that the sprawling heap was the butchered body of a woman, later identified as a forty-two year old prostitute named Mary Anne Nicholls. Her throat had been slashed, her belly slit, her vagina mutilated with stab wounds.
Though no one could have suspected it at the time, the savage murder of Mary Anne Nicholls was a grisly landmark in the history of crime. Not only was it the first in a string of killings that would send shock waves throughout London and eventually the world, but it also signified something even more momentous - the dawn of the modern age of serial sex-murder.
A week after the Nicholls atrocity, the mutilated remains of Annie Chapman, a wasted forty-seven-year-old prostitute suffering from malnutrition and consumption, were discovered in the rear of a lodging house a half mile from the site of the first murder. Chapman's head was barely attached to her body - the killer had severed her neck muscles and nearly succeeded in sawing through her spinal column. She had also been disemboweled.
The true identity of the killer would never be known. However, several weeks later, the Metropolitan Police received a letter by a writer who claimed to be the culprit and signed his note with a sinister nom de plume. The name caught on with the public. From that point on, the mad butcher of Whitechapel would be known by this grisly nickname - Jack the Ripper.
Two days after police received the Ripper's letter, the killer cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute name Elizabeth Stride. Before he could commit any further atrocities on the victim, he was interrupted by the sounds of an approaching wagon. Hurrying away, the Ripper encountered Catherine Eddowes, a forty-three-year-old prostitute who had just been released from a police station, where she had spent several hours sobering up after having been found lying drunk on the pavement. The Ripper lured her into a deserted square, where he slit her throat. Then, in the grip of a demoniacal frenzy, he disfigured her face, split her body from rectum to breastbone, removed her entrails, and carried off with her left kidney.
The final crime committed by the Ripper was also the most hideous. On the evening of November 9, he picked up a twenty-five year old Irish prostitute named Mary Kelly, three months pregnant, who took him back to her room. Sometime in the middle of the night, he killed her in bed, then spent several leisurely hours butchering her corpse - disemboweling her, slicing off her nose and breasts, carving the flesh from her legs.
Following this outrage, the Whitechapel horrors came to an abrupt end. The Ripper vanished forever, stepping out of history into the realm of myth.
Since then, armchair detectives have proposed a host of suspects, from a kosher butcher to an heir apparent to the English throne. Most of these "solutions" make for colorful reading, but the Ripper's true identity remains what it has been for a hundred years - a tantalizing, probably insoluble mystery. Ripper Theories
There is a basic (and disheartening) law of police work: if a case isn't cracked right away, then the odds of ever solving it rapidly shrink to zero. So the chances of coming up with the solution to a hundred year old crime are essentially less than nil. Still, that hasn't stopped a host of armchair detectives from offering up theories on the most tantalizing murder mystery of all - who was the knife-wielding serial prostitute killer known as Jack the Ripper? For the most part, these theorists are harmless cranks, like the people who spend their time trying to prove that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, or that Amelia Earhart ended up in a Japanese nunnery. The most likely truth is that - like virtually every other serial killer in history - the Ripper was undoubtedly a complete nonentity whose only remarkable trait was a staggering capacity for violence. But - as is so often the case with reality - that simple explanation is infinitely less satisfying than more colorful alternatives. Following are some of the more entertaining hypotheses put forth by various "Ripper-ologists":
The Mad Russian. Supposedly Rasputin himself wrote a book called Great Russian Criminals in which he claimed that Jack the Ripper was actually a Russian doctor named Pedachenk, who was dispatched to London by the tsarist police in an effort to create consternation in England and embarrass the British authorities.
The Black Magician. The Ripper was actually Dr. Roslyn D'Onston Stephenson, a self-styled conjurer obsessed with the occult, who supposedly committed the East End murders as part of a satanic ritual.
The Jewish Slaughterman. A shochet, or Kosher butcher, decided to use his carving skills on women of the night.
Jill the Ripper. The homicidal maniac was not a man at all but a demented London midwife.
The Lodger. An unnamed boarder in London roominghouse acted suspiciously at the time of the Ripper murders and might have been the East End fiend. Although the vaguest of the Ripper solutions, this theory has distinguished itself as the basis for four entertaining movies, including an early Hitchcock thriller.
The Deadly Doctor. A man named Dr. Stanley committed the murders as an act of revenge, after his son contracted syphilis from a prostitute.
The Lethal Lawyer. A failed attorney named Montague John Druit committed the Ripper crimes, then drowned himself in the Thames.
The Polish Poisoner. A multiple murderer named Severin Klosowski (aka George Chapman), who poisoned three of his wives, presumably committed the Whitechapel slayings out of his pathological hatred of womankind in general.
The Evil Aristocrat. HRH Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence - Queen Victoria's grandson and heir to the British throne - went on a killing spree after he was maddened by syphilis.
The Crazed Cotton Merchant. A diary that surfaced in the early 1990s "revealed" that the Ripper was a drug-addicted businessman named James Maybrick. Unfortunately, the diary was declared a hoax by renowned document experts.
Though no one could have suspected it at the time, the savage murder of Mary Anne Nicholls was a grisly landmark in the history of crime. Not only was it the first in a string of killings that would send shock waves throughout London and eventually the world, but it also signified something even more momentous - the dawn of the modern age of serial sex-murder.
A week after the Nicholls atrocity, the mutilated remains of Annie Chapman, a wasted forty-seven-year-old prostitute suffering from malnutrition and consumption, were discovered in the rear of a lodging house a half mile from the site of the first murder. Chapman's head was barely attached to her body - the killer had severed her neck muscles and nearly succeeded in sawing through her spinal column. She had also been disemboweled.
The true identity of the killer would never be known. However, several weeks later, the Metropolitan Police received a letter by a writer who claimed to be the culprit and signed his note with a sinister nom de plume. The name caught on with the public. From that point on, the mad butcher of Whitechapel would be known by this grisly nickname - Jack the Ripper.
Two days after police received the Ripper's letter, the killer cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute name Elizabeth Stride. Before he could commit any further atrocities on the victim, he was interrupted by the sounds of an approaching wagon. Hurrying away, the Ripper encountered Catherine Eddowes, a forty-three-year-old prostitute who had just been released from a police station, where she had spent several hours sobering up after having been found lying drunk on the pavement. The Ripper lured her into a deserted square, where he slit her throat. Then, in the grip of a demoniacal frenzy, he disfigured her face, split her body from rectum to breastbone, removed her entrails, and carried off with her left kidney.
The final crime committed by the Ripper was also the most hideous. On the evening of November 9, he picked up a twenty-five year old Irish prostitute named Mary Kelly, three months pregnant, who took him back to her room. Sometime in the middle of the night, he killed her in bed, then spent several leisurely hours butchering her corpse - disemboweling her, slicing off her nose and breasts, carving the flesh from her legs.
Following this outrage, the Whitechapel horrors came to an abrupt end. The Ripper vanished forever, stepping out of history into the realm of myth.
Since then, armchair detectives have proposed a host of suspects, from a kosher butcher to an heir apparent to the English throne. Most of these "solutions" make for colorful reading, but the Ripper's true identity remains what it has been for a hundred years - a tantalizing, probably insoluble mystery. Ripper Theories
There is a basic (and disheartening) law of police work: if a case isn't cracked right away, then the odds of ever solving it rapidly shrink to zero. So the chances of coming up with the solution to a hundred year old crime are essentially less than nil. Still, that hasn't stopped a host of armchair detectives from offering up theories on the most tantalizing murder mystery of all - who was the knife-wielding serial prostitute killer known as Jack the Ripper? For the most part, these theorists are harmless cranks, like the people who spend their time trying to prove that there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, or that Amelia Earhart ended up in a Japanese nunnery. The most likely truth is that - like virtually every other serial killer in history - the Ripper was undoubtedly a complete nonentity whose only remarkable trait was a staggering capacity for violence. But - as is so often the case with reality - that simple explanation is infinitely less satisfying than more colorful alternatives. Following are some of the more entertaining hypotheses put forth by various "Ripper-ologists":
The Mad Russian. Supposedly Rasputin himself wrote a book called Great Russian Criminals in which he claimed that Jack the Ripper was actually a Russian doctor named Pedachenk, who was dispatched to London by the tsarist police in an effort to create consternation in England and embarrass the British authorities.
The Black Magician. The Ripper was actually Dr. Roslyn D'Onston Stephenson, a self-styled conjurer obsessed with the occult, who supposedly committed the East End murders as part of a satanic ritual.
The Jewish Slaughterman. A shochet, or Kosher butcher, decided to use his carving skills on women of the night.
Jill the Ripper. The homicidal maniac was not a man at all but a demented London midwife.
The Lodger. An unnamed boarder in London roominghouse acted suspiciously at the time of the Ripper murders and might have been the East End fiend. Although the vaguest of the Ripper solutions, this theory has distinguished itself as the basis for four entertaining movies, including an early Hitchcock thriller.
The Deadly Doctor. A man named Dr. Stanley committed the murders as an act of revenge, after his son contracted syphilis from a prostitute.
The Lethal Lawyer. A failed attorney named Montague John Druit committed the Ripper crimes, then drowned himself in the Thames.
The Polish Poisoner. A multiple murderer named Severin Klosowski (aka George Chapman), who poisoned three of his wives, presumably committed the Whitechapel slayings out of his pathological hatred of womankind in general.
The Evil Aristocrat. HRH Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence - Queen Victoria's grandson and heir to the British throne - went on a killing spree after he was maddened by syphilis.
The Crazed Cotton Merchant. A diary that surfaced in the early 1990s "revealed" that the Ripper was a drug-addicted businessman named James Maybrick. Unfortunately, the diary was declared a hoax by renowned document experts.
Henry Lee Lucas
America's most controversial murderer was born August 23, 1936, at Blacksburg, Virginia. The Lucas family home was a two-room, dirt-floor cabin in the woods outside of town, where Henry's alcoholic parents brewed bootleg whiskey, his mother doing occasional turns as the neighborhood prostitute. Viola Lucas ran her family with a rod of iron, while husband Anderson Lucas - dubbed "No Legs" after his drunken encounter with a freight train - dragged himself around the house and tried to drown his personal humiliation in a non-stop flow of liquor.
The Lucas brood consisted of nine children, but several were farmed out to relatives, institutions, and foster homes over the years. Henry was one of those "lucky" enough to remain with his parents, and mother Viola appears to have hated the child from the moment of birth, seizing every opportunity to make his life a living hell on earth. Both Anderson and Henry were the targets of her violent outbursts, man and boy alike enduring wicked beatings, forced to witness the parade of strangers that were called upon to share Viola's bed. Sickened by one such episode, Anderson Lucas dragged himself outside to spend a night in the snow, there contracting a fatal case of pneumonia.
Henry survived, after a fashion, but his mother's cruelty seemed to know no bounds. When Lucas entered school, in 1943, she curled his stringy hair in ringlets, dressed him as a girl, and sent him off to class that way. Barefoot until a kindly teacher bought him shoes, Henry was beaten at home for accepting the gift. If Henry found a pet, his mother killed it, and he came to understand that life - like sex - was cheap. When Henry's eye was gashed, reportedly while playing with a knife, Viola let him suffer until doctors had to surgically remove the withered orb, replacing it with glass. On one occasion, after he was beaten with a piece of lumber, Henry lay semi-conscious for three days before Viola's live-in lover - "Uncle Bernie" - took him to a local hospital for treatment.
Bernie also introduced the boy to bestiality, teaching Henry to kill various animals after they were raped and tortured. At age 15, anxious to try sex with a human being, Lucas picked up a girl near Lynchburg, strangled her when she resisted his clumsy advances, and buried her corpse in the woods near Harrisburg, Virginia. (The March 1951 disappearance of 17-year-old Laura Burnley would remain unsolved for three decades, until Lucas confessed the murder in 1983.)
In June 1954, a series of burglaries around Richmond earned Lucas a six-year prison term. He walked away from a road gang on September 14, 1957, and authorities tracked him to his half-sister's home, in Tecumseh, Michigan, three months later. A second escape attempt, in December 1957, saw Lucas recaptured the same day, and he was discharged from prison on September 2, 1959.
Back in Tecumseh, Henry was furious when his 74-year-old mother turned up on the doorstep, nagging him incessantly with her demands that he return to Blacksburg. Both of them were drinking on the night of January 11, 1960, when she struck him with a broom and Henry struck back with a knife, leaving her dead on the floor. Arrested five days later, in Toledo, Ohio, Lucas confessed to the murder and boasted of raping his mother's corpse, a detail he later retracted as "something I made up." Convicted in March 1960, he drew a term of 20 to 40 years in prison. Two months later, he was transferred to Ionia's state hospital for the criminally insane, where he remained until April 1966. Paroled on June 3, 1970, Lucas went back to Tecumseh and moved in with relatives.
In December 1971, Henry was booked on a charge of molesting two teenaged girls. The charge was reduced to simple kidnapping at his trial, and Lucas went back to the state pen at Jackson. Paroled in August 1975, over his own objections, Henry found brief employment at a Pennsylvania mushroom farm, then married Betty, the widow of his cousin, in December 1975. Three months later, they moved to Port Deposit, Maryland, and Betty divorced him in the summer of 1977, charging that Lucas molested her daughters by a previous marriage.
Meanwhile, according to Henry's confessions, he had already launched a career of random murder, traveling and killing as the spirit moved him, claiming victims in Maryland and farther afield. In late 1976, he met 29-year-old Ottis Toole at a Jacksonville, Florida, soup kitchen. The homosexual Toole was an arsonist and serial killer in his own right, and they hit it off immediately, swapping grisly tales of their adventures in homicide. Over the next six and a half years, Lucas and Toole were fast friends, occasional lovers and frequent traveling companions, taking their murderous act on the road.
A bachelor once again by 1978, Lucas moved in with Toole's family in Jacksonville. There, he met Toole's niece and nephew, Frieda and Frank Powell, falling slowly in love with the ten-year-old girl who called herself Becky. In 1979, Lucas and Toole were hired by a Jacksonville roofing company, Southeast Color Coat, but they often missed work as they answered the call of the highway. Two years later, after Toole's mother and sister died a few months apart, Becky and Frank were placed in juvenile homes. Lucas helped spring them both, and they made a quartet on the road, Frank Powell witnessing deeds that would drive him into a mental institution by 1983.
Authorities came looking for Becky Powell in January 1982, and she fled westward with Lucas. In Hemet, California, they met Jack and O'Bere Smart, spending four months with the couple as house guests and hired hands, refinishing furniture to earn their keep. In May, O'Bere Smart had a brainstorm, dispatching Lucas and Powell to care for her 80-year-old mother, Kate Rich, in Ringgold, Texas.
Henry and Becky arrived on May 14, spending four days with Rich and cashing two $50 checks on her back account before relatives booted them out of the house. Thumbing their way out of town, they were picked up by Ruben Moore and invited to join his religious commune - the All People's House of Prayer - near Stoneburg, Texas. Becky made the grave mistake of slapping Lucas, and he stabbed her on the spot, dismembering her corpse and scattering its parts around the desert.
Back in Stoneburg the next morning, Lucas explained that Becky had "run off" with a truck driver. Kate Rich dropped from sight three weeks later, on September 16, and police grew suspicious when Lucas left town the next day, his car found abandoned in Needles, California on September 21. An arsonist burned Rich's home on October 17, and deputies were waiting when Lucas surfaced in Stoneburg the following day. Held on a fugitive warrant from Maryland, he was released when authorities there dropped pending charges of auto theft.
Chafing under sporadic surveillance, Lucas huddled with Ruben Moore on June 4, 1983, declaring an intent to "clear his name" by finding Powell and Rich, wherever they might be. He left a pistol with Moore, for safe-keeping, and rolled out of town in a wheezing old junker. Four days later, Moore was summoned to fetch him from San Juan, New Mexico, where his car had given up the ghost. Returning to Stoneburg on June 11, Lucas was jailed as an ex-con possessing a handgun. Four nights later, he summoned the jailer, pressing his face to the bars of his cage as he whispered, "I've done some bad things."
Over the next 18 months, Lucas confessed to a seemingly endless series of murders, bumping his estimated body-count from 75 to 100, then from 150 to 360, tossing in murders by friends and associates to reach a total "way over 500." Ottis Toole, then serving time on a Florida arson charge, was implicated in many of the crimes, and Toole chimed in with more confessions of his own. Some of the crimes, said Lucas, were committed under orders from a nationwide Satanic cult, the "Hand of Death." which he joined at Toole's request. Toole sometimes ate the flesh of victims they had killed, but Lucas abstained. His reason: "I don't like barbecue sauce."
Detectives from around the country gathered in Monroe, Louisiana, in October 1983, comparing notes and going home convinced that Toole and Lucas were responsible for at least 69 murders. A second conference at Monroe, in January 1984, raised the total to 81. By March 1985, police in 20 states had "cleared" 90 murders for Lucas alone, plus another 108 committed with Toole as an accomplice. Henry stood convicted in nine deaths - including a Texas death sentence on one of the unsolved "I-35 murders" - and he was formally charged with 30 others across the country. Dozens of officers visited Lucas in jail, and he also toured the country under guard, visiting crime scenes, providing details from memory. A California tour, in August 1984, "cleared" 14 unsolved cases. Five months later, in New Orleans, Lucas solved five more. In the first week of April 1985, he led a caravan across the state of Georgia, closing the books on ten murders.
Lucas was barely home from that trip when the storm broke, on April 15. Writing for the Dallas Times-Herald, journalist Hugh Aynesworth prepared a series off headline articles, blasting the "massive hoax" that Lucas had perpetrated, misleading homicide investigators and the public, sometimes with connivance from the officers themselves. According to Aynesworth, over-zealous detectives had prompted Lucas with vital bits of information, coaching him through his confessions, deliberately ignoring evidence that placed him miles away from various murder scenes at the crucial moment. From jail, Lucas joined in by recanting his statements across the board. Aside from his mother, he claimed to have slain only two victims - Powell and Rich - in his life. By April 23, he was denying those crimes, despite the fact that he led police to Becky's grave, while Rich's bones had been recovered from his stove, at Stoneburg.
From the beginning, officers had been aware of Henry's penchant for exaggeration. One of his first alleged victims, a Virginia school teacher, was found alive and well by police. Some of his statements were clearly absurd, including confessions to murders in Spain and Japan, plus delivery of poison to the People's Temple cultists in Guyana. On the other hand, there were also problems with Henry's reaction. Soon after the Aynesworth story broke, Lucas smuggles a letter to authors Jerry Potter and Joel Norris, claiming that he had been drugged and forced to recant. A local minister, close to Lucas since his 1983 "conversation," produced a tape recording of Henry's voice, warning listeners not to believe the new stories emerging from prison.
The most curious part about Henry's new tale was the role of Hugh Aynesworth, himself. In his newspaper series, Aynesworth claimed to have known of the "hoax" - hearing the scheme from Henry's own lips - since October 1983. A month later, on November 9, Aynesworth signed a contract to write Henry's biography. In September 1984, he appeared on the CBS-TV "Nightwatch" program, offering no objections as videotapes of the Lucas confessions were aired. As late as February 1985, Aynesworth published a Lucas interview in Penthouse magazine, prompting Henry with leading remarks about Lucas "killing furiously" and claiming victims "all over the country" in the 1970s. Through it all, the Times-Herald maintained stony silence, allowing the "hoax" to proceed, while dozens (or hundreds) of killers remained free on the basis of Henry's "false" confessions.
In retrospect, the Aynesworth series smells strongly of sour grapes. A clue to the author's motive is found in his first article, with a passing reference to the fact that Lucas had signed an exclusive publishing contract - with a Waco used-car dealer - shortly after his June 1983 arrest. The prior existence of that contract scuttled Aynesworth's deal, concocted five months later, and prevented him from winning fame as Lucas's biographer. The next best thing, perhaps would be to foul the waters and prevent competitors from publishing a book about the case. (It is worth noting that Aynesworth omits all mention of his own contract with Lucas, while listing carious authors who tried to "cash in" on the "hoax.")
Aynesworth produced an elaborate time-line to support his "fraud" story, comparing Henry's "known movements" with various crimes to discredit police, but the final product is riddled with flaws. Aynesworth rules out numerous murders by placing the Lucas-Toole meeting in 1979, while both killers and numerous independent witnesses describe an earlier meeting, in late 1976. (In fact, Lucas was living with Toole's family in 1978, a year before Aynesworth's acknowledged "first meeting.") The reporter cites pay records from Southeast Color Coat to prove that the killers seldom left Jacksonville, but office manager Eileen Knight recalls that they would often "come and go." (At the same time, Aynesworth places Lucas in West Virginia while he was working in Florida, the same error of which he accuses police.) According to Aynesworth, Lucas spent "all the time" between January and March 1978 with girlfriend Rhonda Knuckles, never leaving her side, but his version ignores the testimony of a surviving witness, tailed by Lucas across 200 miles of Colorado and New Mexico in February of that last year. The woman remembers Henry's face - and she recorded his license number for police - but her story is lost in Aynesworth's account. At one point, Aynesworth is so anxious to clear Henry's name that he lists one victim twice on the time-line, murdered on two occasions, four days apart, in July 1981.
Authorities reacted in various ways to Henry's turn-around. Arkansas filed new murder charges against him on April 23, eight days after his change of heart, and other jurisdictions remain unimpressed by his belated pleas of innocence. In Marrero, Louisiana, relatives of victim Ruth Kaiser point out that Lucas confessed to stealing a stereo after he killed the 79-year-old woman: a theft that was never reported and therefore could not have been "leaded" by police. As they recalled, "He described things we had forgotten about, details that never appeared in the paper and that we never put in a police report."
Investigator Jim Lawson, of the Scotts Bluff County sheriff's office, in Nebraska, questioned Lucas in September of 1984, regarding the February 1978 murder of schoolteacher Stella McLean. "I purposely tried to trick him several times during the interview," Lawson said, "but to no avail. We even tried to 'feed' him another homicide from our area to see if he was confessing to anything and everything in an effort to build a name for himself, but he denied any participation in the crime."
Commander J.T. Duff, intelligence chief for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, describes Henry's April 1985 tour thus: "Lucas was not provided with any information of directions to any of the crime scenes, but gave the information to law enforcement. When a crime scene was encountered, Lucas voluntarily and freely gave details that only the perpetrator would have "known."
By November 1985, police in 18 states had reopened 90 "Lucas cases," but what of the other 108? And what of the telephone conversation between Lucas, in Texas, and Toole, in Florida, monitored by police in November 1983? At the time, Henry and Ottis had not seen or spoken to each other in at least seven months, deprived of any chance to work up a script, but their dialogue lends chilling support to the later confessions.
Lucas: Ottis I don't want you to think I'm doing this as a revenge.
Toole: No. I don't want you to hold anything back about me.
Lucas: See we got so many of them Ottis. We got to turn up the bodies. Now this boy and girl I don't know anything about.
Toole: Well maybe that's the two I killed my own self. Just like that Mexican that wasn't going to let me out of the house. I took an ax and chopped him all up. What made me - I been meaning to ask you. That time when I cooked some of those people. Why'd I do that?
Lucas: I think it was just the hands doing it. I know a lot of the things we one in human sight are impossible to believe.
Indeed. And yet, the victims were dispatched, if not by Toole and Lucas, then by someone else. The truth may never be revealed, but in the meantime, Henry's jailers are convinced of his involvement in at least 100 homicides.
On June 26, 1998, then governor of Texas, George W. Bush commuted his death sentence to life without the possibility of parole. The true number of murders he committed is still unknown.
"Sex is one of my downfalls.
I get sex any way I can get it.
If I have to force somebody to do it, I do... I rape them;
I've done that.
I've killed animals to have sex with them,
and I've had sex.....
While they're alive."
HENRY LEE LUCAS
The Lucas brood consisted of nine children, but several were farmed out to relatives, institutions, and foster homes over the years. Henry was one of those "lucky" enough to remain with his parents, and mother Viola appears to have hated the child from the moment of birth, seizing every opportunity to make his life a living hell on earth. Both Anderson and Henry were the targets of her violent outbursts, man and boy alike enduring wicked beatings, forced to witness the parade of strangers that were called upon to share Viola's bed. Sickened by one such episode, Anderson Lucas dragged himself outside to spend a night in the snow, there contracting a fatal case of pneumonia.
Henry survived, after a fashion, but his mother's cruelty seemed to know no bounds. When Lucas entered school, in 1943, she curled his stringy hair in ringlets, dressed him as a girl, and sent him off to class that way. Barefoot until a kindly teacher bought him shoes, Henry was beaten at home for accepting the gift. If Henry found a pet, his mother killed it, and he came to understand that life - like sex - was cheap. When Henry's eye was gashed, reportedly while playing with a knife, Viola let him suffer until doctors had to surgically remove the withered orb, replacing it with glass. On one occasion, after he was beaten with a piece of lumber, Henry lay semi-conscious for three days before Viola's live-in lover - "Uncle Bernie" - took him to a local hospital for treatment.
Bernie also introduced the boy to bestiality, teaching Henry to kill various animals after they were raped and tortured. At age 15, anxious to try sex with a human being, Lucas picked up a girl near Lynchburg, strangled her when she resisted his clumsy advances, and buried her corpse in the woods near Harrisburg, Virginia. (The March 1951 disappearance of 17-year-old Laura Burnley would remain unsolved for three decades, until Lucas confessed the murder in 1983.)
In June 1954, a series of burglaries around Richmond earned Lucas a six-year prison term. He walked away from a road gang on September 14, 1957, and authorities tracked him to his half-sister's home, in Tecumseh, Michigan, three months later. A second escape attempt, in December 1957, saw Lucas recaptured the same day, and he was discharged from prison on September 2, 1959.
Back in Tecumseh, Henry was furious when his 74-year-old mother turned up on the doorstep, nagging him incessantly with her demands that he return to Blacksburg. Both of them were drinking on the night of January 11, 1960, when she struck him with a broom and Henry struck back with a knife, leaving her dead on the floor. Arrested five days later, in Toledo, Ohio, Lucas confessed to the murder and boasted of raping his mother's corpse, a detail he later retracted as "something I made up." Convicted in March 1960, he drew a term of 20 to 40 years in prison. Two months later, he was transferred to Ionia's state hospital for the criminally insane, where he remained until April 1966. Paroled on June 3, 1970, Lucas went back to Tecumseh and moved in with relatives.
In December 1971, Henry was booked on a charge of molesting two teenaged girls. The charge was reduced to simple kidnapping at his trial, and Lucas went back to the state pen at Jackson. Paroled in August 1975, over his own objections, Henry found brief employment at a Pennsylvania mushroom farm, then married Betty, the widow of his cousin, in December 1975. Three months later, they moved to Port Deposit, Maryland, and Betty divorced him in the summer of 1977, charging that Lucas molested her daughters by a previous marriage.
Meanwhile, according to Henry's confessions, he had already launched a career of random murder, traveling and killing as the spirit moved him, claiming victims in Maryland and farther afield. In late 1976, he met 29-year-old Ottis Toole at a Jacksonville, Florida, soup kitchen. The homosexual Toole was an arsonist and serial killer in his own right, and they hit it off immediately, swapping grisly tales of their adventures in homicide. Over the next six and a half years, Lucas and Toole were fast friends, occasional lovers and frequent traveling companions, taking their murderous act on the road.
A bachelor once again by 1978, Lucas moved in with Toole's family in Jacksonville. There, he met Toole's niece and nephew, Frieda and Frank Powell, falling slowly in love with the ten-year-old girl who called herself Becky. In 1979, Lucas and Toole were hired by a Jacksonville roofing company, Southeast Color Coat, but they often missed work as they answered the call of the highway. Two years later, after Toole's mother and sister died a few months apart, Becky and Frank were placed in juvenile homes. Lucas helped spring them both, and they made a quartet on the road, Frank Powell witnessing deeds that would drive him into a mental institution by 1983.
Authorities came looking for Becky Powell in January 1982, and she fled westward with Lucas. In Hemet, California, they met Jack and O'Bere Smart, spending four months with the couple as house guests and hired hands, refinishing furniture to earn their keep. In May, O'Bere Smart had a brainstorm, dispatching Lucas and Powell to care for her 80-year-old mother, Kate Rich, in Ringgold, Texas.
Henry and Becky arrived on May 14, spending four days with Rich and cashing two $50 checks on her back account before relatives booted them out of the house. Thumbing their way out of town, they were picked up by Ruben Moore and invited to join his religious commune - the All People's House of Prayer - near Stoneburg, Texas. Becky made the grave mistake of slapping Lucas, and he stabbed her on the spot, dismembering her corpse and scattering its parts around the desert.
Back in Stoneburg the next morning, Lucas explained that Becky had "run off" with a truck driver. Kate Rich dropped from sight three weeks later, on September 16, and police grew suspicious when Lucas left town the next day, his car found abandoned in Needles, California on September 21. An arsonist burned Rich's home on October 17, and deputies were waiting when Lucas surfaced in Stoneburg the following day. Held on a fugitive warrant from Maryland, he was released when authorities there dropped pending charges of auto theft.
Chafing under sporadic surveillance, Lucas huddled with Ruben Moore on June 4, 1983, declaring an intent to "clear his name" by finding Powell and Rich, wherever they might be. He left a pistol with Moore, for safe-keeping, and rolled out of town in a wheezing old junker. Four days later, Moore was summoned to fetch him from San Juan, New Mexico, where his car had given up the ghost. Returning to Stoneburg on June 11, Lucas was jailed as an ex-con possessing a handgun. Four nights later, he summoned the jailer, pressing his face to the bars of his cage as he whispered, "I've done some bad things."
Over the next 18 months, Lucas confessed to a seemingly endless series of murders, bumping his estimated body-count from 75 to 100, then from 150 to 360, tossing in murders by friends and associates to reach a total "way over 500." Ottis Toole, then serving time on a Florida arson charge, was implicated in many of the crimes, and Toole chimed in with more confessions of his own. Some of the crimes, said Lucas, were committed under orders from a nationwide Satanic cult, the "Hand of Death." which he joined at Toole's request. Toole sometimes ate the flesh of victims they had killed, but Lucas abstained. His reason: "I don't like barbecue sauce."
Detectives from around the country gathered in Monroe, Louisiana, in October 1983, comparing notes and going home convinced that Toole and Lucas were responsible for at least 69 murders. A second conference at Monroe, in January 1984, raised the total to 81. By March 1985, police in 20 states had "cleared" 90 murders for Lucas alone, plus another 108 committed with Toole as an accomplice. Henry stood convicted in nine deaths - including a Texas death sentence on one of the unsolved "I-35 murders" - and he was formally charged with 30 others across the country. Dozens of officers visited Lucas in jail, and he also toured the country under guard, visiting crime scenes, providing details from memory. A California tour, in August 1984, "cleared" 14 unsolved cases. Five months later, in New Orleans, Lucas solved five more. In the first week of April 1985, he led a caravan across the state of Georgia, closing the books on ten murders.
Lucas was barely home from that trip when the storm broke, on April 15. Writing for the Dallas Times-Herald, journalist Hugh Aynesworth prepared a series off headline articles, blasting the "massive hoax" that Lucas had perpetrated, misleading homicide investigators and the public, sometimes with connivance from the officers themselves. According to Aynesworth, over-zealous detectives had prompted Lucas with vital bits of information, coaching him through his confessions, deliberately ignoring evidence that placed him miles away from various murder scenes at the crucial moment. From jail, Lucas joined in by recanting his statements across the board. Aside from his mother, he claimed to have slain only two victims - Powell and Rich - in his life. By April 23, he was denying those crimes, despite the fact that he led police to Becky's grave, while Rich's bones had been recovered from his stove, at Stoneburg.
From the beginning, officers had been aware of Henry's penchant for exaggeration. One of his first alleged victims, a Virginia school teacher, was found alive and well by police. Some of his statements were clearly absurd, including confessions to murders in Spain and Japan, plus delivery of poison to the People's Temple cultists in Guyana. On the other hand, there were also problems with Henry's reaction. Soon after the Aynesworth story broke, Lucas smuggles a letter to authors Jerry Potter and Joel Norris, claiming that he had been drugged and forced to recant. A local minister, close to Lucas since his 1983 "conversation," produced a tape recording of Henry's voice, warning listeners not to believe the new stories emerging from prison.
The most curious part about Henry's new tale was the role of Hugh Aynesworth, himself. In his newspaper series, Aynesworth claimed to have known of the "hoax" - hearing the scheme from Henry's own lips - since October 1983. A month later, on November 9, Aynesworth signed a contract to write Henry's biography. In September 1984, he appeared on the CBS-TV "Nightwatch" program, offering no objections as videotapes of the Lucas confessions were aired. As late as February 1985, Aynesworth published a Lucas interview in Penthouse magazine, prompting Henry with leading remarks about Lucas "killing furiously" and claiming victims "all over the country" in the 1970s. Through it all, the Times-Herald maintained stony silence, allowing the "hoax" to proceed, while dozens (or hundreds) of killers remained free on the basis of Henry's "false" confessions.
In retrospect, the Aynesworth series smells strongly of sour grapes. A clue to the author's motive is found in his first article, with a passing reference to the fact that Lucas had signed an exclusive publishing contract - with a Waco used-car dealer - shortly after his June 1983 arrest. The prior existence of that contract scuttled Aynesworth's deal, concocted five months later, and prevented him from winning fame as Lucas's biographer. The next best thing, perhaps would be to foul the waters and prevent competitors from publishing a book about the case. (It is worth noting that Aynesworth omits all mention of his own contract with Lucas, while listing carious authors who tried to "cash in" on the "hoax.")
Aynesworth produced an elaborate time-line to support his "fraud" story, comparing Henry's "known movements" with various crimes to discredit police, but the final product is riddled with flaws. Aynesworth rules out numerous murders by placing the Lucas-Toole meeting in 1979, while both killers and numerous independent witnesses describe an earlier meeting, in late 1976. (In fact, Lucas was living with Toole's family in 1978, a year before Aynesworth's acknowledged "first meeting.") The reporter cites pay records from Southeast Color Coat to prove that the killers seldom left Jacksonville, but office manager Eileen Knight recalls that they would often "come and go." (At the same time, Aynesworth places Lucas in West Virginia while he was working in Florida, the same error of which he accuses police.) According to Aynesworth, Lucas spent "all the time" between January and March 1978 with girlfriend Rhonda Knuckles, never leaving her side, but his version ignores the testimony of a surviving witness, tailed by Lucas across 200 miles of Colorado and New Mexico in February of that last year. The woman remembers Henry's face - and she recorded his license number for police - but her story is lost in Aynesworth's account. At one point, Aynesworth is so anxious to clear Henry's name that he lists one victim twice on the time-line, murdered on two occasions, four days apart, in July 1981.
Authorities reacted in various ways to Henry's turn-around. Arkansas filed new murder charges against him on April 23, eight days after his change of heart, and other jurisdictions remain unimpressed by his belated pleas of innocence. In Marrero, Louisiana, relatives of victim Ruth Kaiser point out that Lucas confessed to stealing a stereo after he killed the 79-year-old woman: a theft that was never reported and therefore could not have been "leaded" by police. As they recalled, "He described things we had forgotten about, details that never appeared in the paper and that we never put in a police report."
Investigator Jim Lawson, of the Scotts Bluff County sheriff's office, in Nebraska, questioned Lucas in September of 1984, regarding the February 1978 murder of schoolteacher Stella McLean. "I purposely tried to trick him several times during the interview," Lawson said, "but to no avail. We even tried to 'feed' him another homicide from our area to see if he was confessing to anything and everything in an effort to build a name for himself, but he denied any participation in the crime."
Commander J.T. Duff, intelligence chief for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, describes Henry's April 1985 tour thus: "Lucas was not provided with any information of directions to any of the crime scenes, but gave the information to law enforcement. When a crime scene was encountered, Lucas voluntarily and freely gave details that only the perpetrator would have "known."
By November 1985, police in 18 states had reopened 90 "Lucas cases," but what of the other 108? And what of the telephone conversation between Lucas, in Texas, and Toole, in Florida, monitored by police in November 1983? At the time, Henry and Ottis had not seen or spoken to each other in at least seven months, deprived of any chance to work up a script, but their dialogue lends chilling support to the later confessions.
Lucas: Ottis I don't want you to think I'm doing this as a revenge.
Toole: No. I don't want you to hold anything back about me.
Lucas: See we got so many of them Ottis. We got to turn up the bodies. Now this boy and girl I don't know anything about.
Toole: Well maybe that's the two I killed my own self. Just like that Mexican that wasn't going to let me out of the house. I took an ax and chopped him all up. What made me - I been meaning to ask you. That time when I cooked some of those people. Why'd I do that?
Lucas: I think it was just the hands doing it. I know a lot of the things we one in human sight are impossible to believe.
Indeed. And yet, the victims were dispatched, if not by Toole and Lucas, then by someone else. The truth may never be revealed, but in the meantime, Henry's jailers are convinced of his involvement in at least 100 homicides.
On June 26, 1998, then governor of Texas, George W. Bush commuted his death sentence to life without the possibility of parole. The true number of murders he committed is still unknown.
"Sex is one of my downfalls.
I get sex any way I can get it.
If I have to force somebody to do it, I do... I rape them;
I've done that.
I've killed animals to have sex with them,
and I've had sex.....
While they're alive."
HENRY LEE LUCAS
Wayne Williams
The curious and controversial string of deaths that sparked a two-year reign of terror in Atlanta, Georgia, has been labeled "child murders," even though a suspect - ultimately blamed for the 23 of 30 "official" homicides - was finally convicted only in the deaths of two adult ex-convicts. Today, about two decades after that suspect's arrest, the case remains, in many minds, an unsolved mystery.
Investigation of the case began, officially, on July 28, 1979. That afternoon, a woman hunting empty cans and bottles in Atlanta stumbled on a pair of corpses, carelessly concealed in roadside undergrowth. One victim, shot with a .22-caliber weapon, was identified as 14-year-old Edward Smith, reported missing on July 21. The other was 13-year-old Alfred Evans, last seen alive on July 25; the coroner ascribed his death to "probable" asphyxiation. Both dead boys, like all of those to come, were African-American.
On September 4, Milton Harvey, age 14, vanished during a neighborhood bike ride. His body was recovered three weeks later, but the cause of death remains officially "unknown." Yusef Bell, a nine-year-old, was last seen alive when his mother sent him to the store on October 21. Found dead in an abandoned school November 8, he had been manually strangled by a powerful assailant.
Angel Lenair, age 12, was the first recognized victim of 1980. Reported missing on March 4, she was found six days later, tied to a tree with her hands bound behind her. The first female victim, she had been sexually abused and strangled; someone else's panties were extracted from her throat.
On March 11, Jeffrey Mathis vanished on an errand to the store. Eleven months would pass before recovery of his skeletal remains, advanced decomposition ruling out a declaration on the cause of death. On May 18, 14-year-old Eric Middlebrooks left home after receiving a telephone call from persons unknown. Found the next day, his death was blamed on head injuries, inflicted with a blunt instrument.
The terror escalated that summer. On June 9, Christopher Richardson, 12, vanished en route to a neighborhood swimming pool. Latonya Wilson was abducted from her home on June 22, the night before her seventh birthday, bringing Federal agents into the case. The following day, 10-year-old Aaron Wyche was reported missing by his family. Searchers found his body on June 24, lying beneath a railroad trestle, his neck broken. Originally dubbed an accident, Aaron's death was subsequently added to the growing list of dead and missing blacks.
Anthony Carter, age nine, disappeared while playing near his home on July 6, 1980; recovered the following day, he was dead from multiple stab wounds. Earl Terrell joined the list on July 30, when he vanished from a public swimming pool. Skeletal remains discovered on January 9, 1981, would yield no clues about the cause of death.
Next up on the list was 12-year-old Clifford Jones, snatched off the street and strangled on August 20. With the recovery of his body in October, homicide detectives interviewed five witnesses who named his killer as a white man, later jailed in 1981 on charges of attempted rape and sodomy. Those witnesses provided details of the crime consistent with the placement and condition of the victim's body, but detectives chose to ignore their sworn statements, listing Jones with other victims of the "unknown" murderer.
Darren Glass, an 11-year-old, vanished near his home on September 14, 1980. Never found, he joins the list primarily because authorities don't know what else to do with his case. October's victim was Charles Stephens, reported missing on the 9th and recovered the next day, his life extinguished by asphyxiation. Capping off the month, authorities discovered skeletal remains of Latonya Wilson on October 18, but they could not determine how she died.
On November 1, nine-year-old Aaron Jackson's disappearance was reported to police by frantic parents. The boy was found on November 2, another victim of asphyxiation. Patrick Rogers, 15, followed on November 10. His pitiful remains, skull crushed by heavy blows, were not unearthed until February 1981.
Two days after New Year's, the elusive slayer picked off Lubie Geter, strangling the 14-year-old and dumping his body where it would not be found until February 5. Terry Pue, 15, went missing on January 22 and was found the next day, strangled with a cord or piece of rope. This time, detectives said that special chemicals enabled them to lift a suspect's fingerprints from Terry's corpse. Unfortunately, they were not on file with any law enforcement agency in the United States.
Patrck Baltazar, age 12, disappeared on February 6. His body was found a week later, marked by ligature strangulation, and the skeletal remains of Jeffrey Mathis were discovered nearby. A 13-year-old, Curtis Walker, was strangled on February 19 and found the same day. Joseph Bell, 16, was asphyxiated on March 2. Timothy Hill, on March 11, was recorded as a drowning victim.
On March 30, Atlanta police added their first adult victim to the list of murdered children. He was Larry Rogers, 20, linked with younger victims by the fact that he had been asphyxiated. No cause of death was determined for a second adult victim, 21-year-old Eddie Duncan, but he made the list anyway, when his body was found on March 31. On April 1, ex-convict Michael McIntosh, age 23, was added to the roster on grounds that he, too, had been asphyxiated.
By April 1981, it seemed apparent that the "child murders" case was getting out of hand. Community critics denounced the official victims list as incomplete and arbitrary, citing cases like the January 1981 murder of Faye Yearby to prove their point. Like "official" victim Angel Lenair, Yearby was bound to a tree by her killer, hands behind her back; she had been stabbed to death, like four acknowledged victims on the list. Despite those similarities, police rejected Yearby's case on grounds that (a) she was a female - as were Wilson and Lenair - and (b) that she was "too old" at age 22, although the last acknowledged victim had been 23. Author Dave Dettlinger, examining police malfeasance in the case, suggests that 63 potential "pattern" victims were capriciously omitted from the "official" roster, 25 of them after a suspect's arrest supposedly ended the killing.
In April 1981, FBI spokesmen declared that several of the crimes were "substantially solved," outraging blacks with suggestions that some of the dead had been slain by their own parents. While that storm was raging, Roy Innis, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, went public with the story of a female witness who described the murders as the actions of a cult involved with drugs, pornography, and Satanism. Innis led searchers to an apparent ritual site, complete with large inverted crosses, and his witness passed two polygraph examinations, but by that time police had focused their attention on another suspect, narrowing their scrutiny to the exclusion of all other possibilities.
On April 21, Jimmy Payne, a 21-year-old ex-convict, was reported missing in Atlanta. Six days later, when his body was recovered, death was publicly attributed to suffocation, and his name was added to the list of murdered "children." William Barrett, 17, went missing May 11; he was found the next day, another victim of asphyxiation.
Several bodies had, by now, been pulled from local rivers, and police were staking out the waterways by night. In the predawn hours of May 22, a rookie officer stationed under a bridge on the Chattahoochee River reported hearing "a splash" in the water nearby. Above him, a car rumbled past, and officers manning the bridge were alerted. Police and FBI agents halted a vehicle driven by Wayne Bertam Williams, a black man, and spent two hours grilling him and searching his car, before they let him go. On May 24, the corpse of Nathaniel Cater, a 27-year-old convicted felon, was fished out of the river downstream. Authorities put two and two together and focused their probe on Wayne Williams.
From the start, he made a most unlikely suspect. The only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers, Williams still lived with his parents at age 23. A college dropout, he cherished ambitions of earning fame and fortune as a music promoter. In younger days, he had constructed a working radio station in the basement of the family home.
On June 21, Williams was arrested and charged with the murder of Nathaniel Cater, despite testimony from four witnesses who reported seeing Cater alive on May 22 and 23, after the infamous "splash." On July 17, Williams was indicted for killing two adults - Cater and Payne - while newspapers trumpeted the capture of Atlanta's "child killer."
At his trial, beginning in December 1981, the prosecution painted Williams as a violent homosexual and bigot, so disgusted with his own race that he hoped to wipe out future generations by killing black children before they could breed. One witness testified that he saw Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater on May 21, a few hours before "the splash." Another, 15 years old, told the courts that Williams had paid him two dollars for the privilege of fondling his genitals. Along the way, authorities announced the addition of a final victim, 28-year-old John Porter, to the list of victims.
Defense attorney tried to balance the scales with testimony from a woman who admitted having "normal sex" with Williams, but the prosecution won a crucial point when the presiding judge admitted testimony on 10 other deaths from the "child murders" list, designed to prove a pattern in the slayings. One of those admitted was the case of Terry Pue, but neither side had anything to say about the fingerprints allegedly recovered from his corpse in January 1981.
The most impressive evidence of guilt was offered by a team of scientific experts, dealing with assorted hairs and fibers found on certain victims. Testimony indicated that some fibers from a brand of carpet found inside the Williams home (and many other homes, as well) had been identified on several bodies. Further, victims Middlebrooks, Wyche, Cater, Terrell, Jones, and Stephens all supposedly bore fibers from the trunk liner of 1979 Ford automobile owned by the Williams family. The clothes of victim Stephens also allegedly yielded fibers from a second car - a 1970 Chevrolet - owned by Wayne's parents. Curiously, jurors were not informed of multiple eyewitness testimony naming a different suspect in the Jones case, nor were they advised of a critical gap in the prosecution's fiber evidence.
Specifically, Wayne Williams had no access to the vehicles in question at the times when three of the six "fiber" victims were killed. Wayne's father took the Ford in for repairs at 9:00A.M. on July 30, 1980, nearly five hours before Earl Terrell vanished that afternoon. Terrell was long dead before Williams got the car back on August 7, and it was retuned to the shop the next morning (August 8), still refusing to start. A new estimate on repair costs was so expensive that Wayne's father refused to pay, and the family never again had access to the car. Meanwhile, Clifford Jones was kidnapped on August 20 and Charles Stephens on October 9, 1980. He defendant's family did not purchase the 1970 Chevrolet in question until October 21, 12 days after Stephen's death.
On February 27, 1982, Wayne Williams was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to a double term of life imprisonment. Two days later, the Atlanta "child murders" task force officially disbanded, announcing that 23 of 30 "list" cases were considered solved with his conviction, even though no charges had been filed. The other seven cases, still open, reverted to the normal homicide detail and remain unsolved to this day.
In November 1985, a new team of lawyers uncovered once-classified documents from an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, conducted during 1980 and 1981 by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A spy inside the Klan told GBI agents that Klansmen were "killing the children" in Atlanta, hoping to provoke a race war. One Klansman in particular, Charles Sanders, allegedly boasted of murdering "List" victim Lubie Geter, following a personal altercation. Geter reportedly struck Sanders's car with a go-cart, prompting the Klansman to tell his friend, "I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna choke the black bastard to death." (Geter was, in fact, strangled, some three months after the incident in question.) In early 1981, the same informant told GBI agents that "after twenty black-child killings, they, the Klan, were going to start killing black women." Perhaps coincidentally, police records note the unsolved murders of numerous black women in Atlanta in 1980-82, with most of the victims strangled. On July 10, 1998, Butts County Superior Court Judge Hal Craig rejected the latest appeal for a new trial in Williams's case, based on suppression of critical evidence 15 years earlier.
Investigation of the case began, officially, on July 28, 1979. That afternoon, a woman hunting empty cans and bottles in Atlanta stumbled on a pair of corpses, carelessly concealed in roadside undergrowth. One victim, shot with a .22-caliber weapon, was identified as 14-year-old Edward Smith, reported missing on July 21. The other was 13-year-old Alfred Evans, last seen alive on July 25; the coroner ascribed his death to "probable" asphyxiation. Both dead boys, like all of those to come, were African-American.
On September 4, Milton Harvey, age 14, vanished during a neighborhood bike ride. His body was recovered three weeks later, but the cause of death remains officially "unknown." Yusef Bell, a nine-year-old, was last seen alive when his mother sent him to the store on October 21. Found dead in an abandoned school November 8, he had been manually strangled by a powerful assailant.
Angel Lenair, age 12, was the first recognized victim of 1980. Reported missing on March 4, she was found six days later, tied to a tree with her hands bound behind her. The first female victim, she had been sexually abused and strangled; someone else's panties were extracted from her throat.
On March 11, Jeffrey Mathis vanished on an errand to the store. Eleven months would pass before recovery of his skeletal remains, advanced decomposition ruling out a declaration on the cause of death. On May 18, 14-year-old Eric Middlebrooks left home after receiving a telephone call from persons unknown. Found the next day, his death was blamed on head injuries, inflicted with a blunt instrument.
The terror escalated that summer. On June 9, Christopher Richardson, 12, vanished en route to a neighborhood swimming pool. Latonya Wilson was abducted from her home on June 22, the night before her seventh birthday, bringing Federal agents into the case. The following day, 10-year-old Aaron Wyche was reported missing by his family. Searchers found his body on June 24, lying beneath a railroad trestle, his neck broken. Originally dubbed an accident, Aaron's death was subsequently added to the growing list of dead and missing blacks.
Anthony Carter, age nine, disappeared while playing near his home on July 6, 1980; recovered the following day, he was dead from multiple stab wounds. Earl Terrell joined the list on July 30, when he vanished from a public swimming pool. Skeletal remains discovered on January 9, 1981, would yield no clues about the cause of death.
Next up on the list was 12-year-old Clifford Jones, snatched off the street and strangled on August 20. With the recovery of his body in October, homicide detectives interviewed five witnesses who named his killer as a white man, later jailed in 1981 on charges of attempted rape and sodomy. Those witnesses provided details of the crime consistent with the placement and condition of the victim's body, but detectives chose to ignore their sworn statements, listing Jones with other victims of the "unknown" murderer.
Darren Glass, an 11-year-old, vanished near his home on September 14, 1980. Never found, he joins the list primarily because authorities don't know what else to do with his case. October's victim was Charles Stephens, reported missing on the 9th and recovered the next day, his life extinguished by asphyxiation. Capping off the month, authorities discovered skeletal remains of Latonya Wilson on October 18, but they could not determine how she died.
On November 1, nine-year-old Aaron Jackson's disappearance was reported to police by frantic parents. The boy was found on November 2, another victim of asphyxiation. Patrick Rogers, 15, followed on November 10. His pitiful remains, skull crushed by heavy blows, were not unearthed until February 1981.
Two days after New Year's, the elusive slayer picked off Lubie Geter, strangling the 14-year-old and dumping his body where it would not be found until February 5. Terry Pue, 15, went missing on January 22 and was found the next day, strangled with a cord or piece of rope. This time, detectives said that special chemicals enabled them to lift a suspect's fingerprints from Terry's corpse. Unfortunately, they were not on file with any law enforcement agency in the United States.
Patrck Baltazar, age 12, disappeared on February 6. His body was found a week later, marked by ligature strangulation, and the skeletal remains of Jeffrey Mathis were discovered nearby. A 13-year-old, Curtis Walker, was strangled on February 19 and found the same day. Joseph Bell, 16, was asphyxiated on March 2. Timothy Hill, on March 11, was recorded as a drowning victim.
On March 30, Atlanta police added their first adult victim to the list of murdered children. He was Larry Rogers, 20, linked with younger victims by the fact that he had been asphyxiated. No cause of death was determined for a second adult victim, 21-year-old Eddie Duncan, but he made the list anyway, when his body was found on March 31. On April 1, ex-convict Michael McIntosh, age 23, was added to the roster on grounds that he, too, had been asphyxiated.
By April 1981, it seemed apparent that the "child murders" case was getting out of hand. Community critics denounced the official victims list as incomplete and arbitrary, citing cases like the January 1981 murder of Faye Yearby to prove their point. Like "official" victim Angel Lenair, Yearby was bound to a tree by her killer, hands behind her back; she had been stabbed to death, like four acknowledged victims on the list. Despite those similarities, police rejected Yearby's case on grounds that (a) she was a female - as were Wilson and Lenair - and (b) that she was "too old" at age 22, although the last acknowledged victim had been 23. Author Dave Dettlinger, examining police malfeasance in the case, suggests that 63 potential "pattern" victims were capriciously omitted from the "official" roster, 25 of them after a suspect's arrest supposedly ended the killing.
In April 1981, FBI spokesmen declared that several of the crimes were "substantially solved," outraging blacks with suggestions that some of the dead had been slain by their own parents. While that storm was raging, Roy Innis, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, went public with the story of a female witness who described the murders as the actions of a cult involved with drugs, pornography, and Satanism. Innis led searchers to an apparent ritual site, complete with large inverted crosses, and his witness passed two polygraph examinations, but by that time police had focused their attention on another suspect, narrowing their scrutiny to the exclusion of all other possibilities.
On April 21, Jimmy Payne, a 21-year-old ex-convict, was reported missing in Atlanta. Six days later, when his body was recovered, death was publicly attributed to suffocation, and his name was added to the list of murdered "children." William Barrett, 17, went missing May 11; he was found the next day, another victim of asphyxiation.
Several bodies had, by now, been pulled from local rivers, and police were staking out the waterways by night. In the predawn hours of May 22, a rookie officer stationed under a bridge on the Chattahoochee River reported hearing "a splash" in the water nearby. Above him, a car rumbled past, and officers manning the bridge were alerted. Police and FBI agents halted a vehicle driven by Wayne Bertam Williams, a black man, and spent two hours grilling him and searching his car, before they let him go. On May 24, the corpse of Nathaniel Cater, a 27-year-old convicted felon, was fished out of the river downstream. Authorities put two and two together and focused their probe on Wayne Williams.
From the start, he made a most unlikely suspect. The only child of two Atlanta schoolteachers, Williams still lived with his parents at age 23. A college dropout, he cherished ambitions of earning fame and fortune as a music promoter. In younger days, he had constructed a working radio station in the basement of the family home.
On June 21, Williams was arrested and charged with the murder of Nathaniel Cater, despite testimony from four witnesses who reported seeing Cater alive on May 22 and 23, after the infamous "splash." On July 17, Williams was indicted for killing two adults - Cater and Payne - while newspapers trumpeted the capture of Atlanta's "child killer."
At his trial, beginning in December 1981, the prosecution painted Williams as a violent homosexual and bigot, so disgusted with his own race that he hoped to wipe out future generations by killing black children before they could breed. One witness testified that he saw Williams holding hands with Nathaniel Cater on May 21, a few hours before "the splash." Another, 15 years old, told the courts that Williams had paid him two dollars for the privilege of fondling his genitals. Along the way, authorities announced the addition of a final victim, 28-year-old John Porter, to the list of victims.
Defense attorney tried to balance the scales with testimony from a woman who admitted having "normal sex" with Williams, but the prosecution won a crucial point when the presiding judge admitted testimony on 10 other deaths from the "child murders" list, designed to prove a pattern in the slayings. One of those admitted was the case of Terry Pue, but neither side had anything to say about the fingerprints allegedly recovered from his corpse in January 1981.
The most impressive evidence of guilt was offered by a team of scientific experts, dealing with assorted hairs and fibers found on certain victims. Testimony indicated that some fibers from a brand of carpet found inside the Williams home (and many other homes, as well) had been identified on several bodies. Further, victims Middlebrooks, Wyche, Cater, Terrell, Jones, and Stephens all supposedly bore fibers from the trunk liner of 1979 Ford automobile owned by the Williams family. The clothes of victim Stephens also allegedly yielded fibers from a second car - a 1970 Chevrolet - owned by Wayne's parents. Curiously, jurors were not informed of multiple eyewitness testimony naming a different suspect in the Jones case, nor were they advised of a critical gap in the prosecution's fiber evidence.
Specifically, Wayne Williams had no access to the vehicles in question at the times when three of the six "fiber" victims were killed. Wayne's father took the Ford in for repairs at 9:00A.M. on July 30, 1980, nearly five hours before Earl Terrell vanished that afternoon. Terrell was long dead before Williams got the car back on August 7, and it was retuned to the shop the next morning (August 8), still refusing to start. A new estimate on repair costs was so expensive that Wayne's father refused to pay, and the family never again had access to the car. Meanwhile, Clifford Jones was kidnapped on August 20 and Charles Stephens on October 9, 1980. He defendant's family did not purchase the 1970 Chevrolet in question until October 21, 12 days after Stephen's death.
On February 27, 1982, Wayne Williams was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to a double term of life imprisonment. Two days later, the Atlanta "child murders" task force officially disbanded, announcing that 23 of 30 "list" cases were considered solved with his conviction, even though no charges had been filed. The other seven cases, still open, reverted to the normal homicide detail and remain unsolved to this day.
In November 1985, a new team of lawyers uncovered once-classified documents from an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, conducted during 1980 and 1981 by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A spy inside the Klan told GBI agents that Klansmen were "killing the children" in Atlanta, hoping to provoke a race war. One Klansman in particular, Charles Sanders, allegedly boasted of murdering "List" victim Lubie Geter, following a personal altercation. Geter reportedly struck Sanders's car with a go-cart, prompting the Klansman to tell his friend, "I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna choke the black bastard to death." (Geter was, in fact, strangled, some three months after the incident in question.) In early 1981, the same informant told GBI agents that "after twenty black-child killings, they, the Klan, were going to start killing black women." Perhaps coincidentally, police records note the unsolved murders of numerous black women in Atlanta in 1980-82, with most of the victims strangled. On July 10, 1998, Butts County Superior Court Judge Hal Craig rejected the latest appeal for a new trial in Williams's case, based on suppression of critical evidence 15 years earlier.
Edmund Kemper
The product of a broken and abusive home, belittled by a shrewish mother who occasionally locked him in the basement when he failed to meet her standards of behavior, Edmund Kemper grew up timid and resentful, nursing a perception of his own inadequacy that gave rise to morbid fantasies of death and mutilation. As a child, he often played a "game" in which his sisters took the part of executioners, with Kemper as their victim, writhing in imaginary death throes when they "threw the switch." Preoccupied with visions of decapitation and dismemberment he cut the head and hands off of his sister's doll - a modus operandi that he would repeat, as an adult, with human victims.
Before the age of ten, Kemper graduated to living targets, burying the family cat alive and subsequently cutting off its head, returning with the gruesome trophy to his room, where it was placed on proud display despite his tender age, he brooded over fantasies of love and sex, with violence playing an inevitable role. Unable to express affection in a normal way, he showed the warning signals of a latent necrophile. One afternoon, discussing Edmund's childish crush upon a grade-school teacher, Kemper's sister asked him why he did not simply kiss the woman. Kemper answered, dead-pan, "If I kiss her, I would have to kill her first." A second family cat fell victim to his urges, this one hacked with a machete, pieces of the carcass hidden in his closet until they were accidentally discovered by his mother.
Branding her son "a real weirdo," Kemper's mother first packed him off to live with her estranged husband, and then - after running away - the boy was delivered to his paternal grandparents, residing on a remote California ranch. There, in August 1963, fourteen-year-old Kemper shot his grandmother with a .22-caliber rifle, afterward stabbing her body repeatedly with a kitchen knife. When his grandfather came home, Kemper shot the old man as well, leaving him dead in the yard.
Interrogated by authorities, Kemper could only say that "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma." He regretted not stripping her corpse, and this statement, along with the motiveless violence displayed in his actions, got Kemper committed to the state's maximum-security hospital in Atascadero. In 1969, a 21-year-old behemoth grown to six-foot-nine and some 300 pounds, Kemper was paroled to his mother's custody over the objections of the state psychiatrists.
During Kemper's enforced absence, his mother had settled in Santa Cruz, a college town whose population boasted thousands of attractive co-eds. For the next two years, through 1970 and '71, Kemper bided his time, holding odd jobs and cruising the highways in his leisure time, picking up dozens of young female hitchhikers, refining his approach, his "line," until, he knew that he could put them totally at ease. Some evenings, he would frequent a saloon patronized by off-duty policemen, rubbing shoulders with the law and soaking up their tales of crime, becoming friendly with a number of detectives who would later be assigned to track him down.
On May 7, 1972, Kemper picked up two 18-year-old roommates from Fresno State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. Driving them to a secluded cul-de-sac, he stabbed both girls to death, then took their bodies home and hid them in his room. Delighted with his "trophies," Kemper took Polaroid snapshots, dissected the corpses, and sexually assaulted various organs before finally tiring of the game. Bundling the remains into plastic bags, he buried the truncated bodies in the Santa Cruz mountains, tossing the heads into a roadside ravine.
Four months later, on September 14, Kemper offered a ride to 15-year-old Aiko Koo. Suffocating her with his large hands, Kemper raped her corpse on the spot and then carried it home for dissection. Koo's severed head was resting in the trunk of Kemper's car next morning, when he met with state psychiatrists and they pronounced him "safe," recommending that his juvenile record be sealed for Kemper's future protection. Following the interview, he buried Koo's remains near a religious camp located in the mountains.
Another four months passed before the "Co-ed Killer" struck again, on January 9, 1973. Picking up student Cindy Schall, Kemper forced her into the trunk of his car at gunpoint, then shot her to death. Driving back to his mother's house, he carried the corpse to his room, and there had sex with it in his bed. Afterward, Kemper dissected Schall's head buried it in the back yard of his mother's home.
By this time, various remains of Kemper's victims had been found and officers were on the case. Apparently, none of them had the least suspicion that their friend, Ed Kemper, was the man they sought, and some felt comfortable enough in Kemper's company to brief him on the progress of their homicide investigation. Smiling, often springing for the next round, Kemper was all ears.
On February 5, 1973, Kemper picked up Rosalind Thorpe, 23 and another hitchhiker, Alice Lin. Both young women were shot to death in the car, then stacked in the trunk like so much excess luggage. Driving home, Kemper ate dinner and waited for his mother to retire before stepping outside and decapitating both corpses as they lay in the trunk. Unsatisfied, he carried Lin's body inside and sexually assaulted it on the floor. Returning to the car, he chopped her hands off as a casual afterthought.
With spring's arrival, Kemper's frenzy escalated, coming back full circle to his home and family. He toyed with the idea of killing everybody on his block, as "a demonstration to the authorities," but finally dismissed the notion. Instead, on Easter weekend, Kemper turned upon his mother, hammering her skull in as she slept. Decapitating her, he raped the headless corpse, then jammed her severed larynx down the garbage disposal. ("This seemed appropriate," he told police, "as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.") Her head was propped on the mantle for use as a dartboard.
Still not sated, Kemper telephoned a friend of his mother's, Sally Hallett, and invited her over for a "surprise" dinner in his mother's honor. Upon her arrival, Kemper clubbed her over the head, strangled her to death, and then decapitated her. The headless body was deposited in his bed, while he wandered off to sleep in his mother's room.
On Easter Sunday, Kemper started driving East, with no destination in mind. He got as far as Colorado before pulling over to a roadside telephone booth and calling police in Santa Cruz. Several attempts were necessary before his friends would accept his confession, and local officers were dispatched to make the arrest while Kemper waited patiently in his car.
In his detailed confession, Kemper admitted slicing flesh from the legs of at least two victims, cooking it in a macaroni casserole and devouring it as a means of "possessing" his prey. He also acknowledged removing teeth, along with bits of hair and skin from his victims, retaining them as grisly keepsakes, trophies of the hunt. Described as sane by state psychiatrists, Kemper was convicted on eight counts of murder. Asked what punishment he considered fitting for his crimes, the defendant replied, "Death by torture." Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole.
Since his incarceration, Kemper has been very busy. In 1988, he and John Wayne Gacy took part in interviews via satellite. Kemper is also part of an FBI program aimed to build the FBI's profiling system. He was led in a series of interviews by agent Robert Ressler. Edmund Kemper is now the model prisoner at his facility.
Q. "What do you think when you see a pretty girl
Walking down the street?"
A. "One side of me says, 'I'd like to talk to her, date her.'
The other side of me says, 'I wonder how her head
would look on a stick?'"
EDMUND KEMPER
Before the age of ten, Kemper graduated to living targets, burying the family cat alive and subsequently cutting off its head, returning with the gruesome trophy to his room, where it was placed on proud display despite his tender age, he brooded over fantasies of love and sex, with violence playing an inevitable role. Unable to express affection in a normal way, he showed the warning signals of a latent necrophile. One afternoon, discussing Edmund's childish crush upon a grade-school teacher, Kemper's sister asked him why he did not simply kiss the woman. Kemper answered, dead-pan, "If I kiss her, I would have to kill her first." A second family cat fell victim to his urges, this one hacked with a machete, pieces of the carcass hidden in his closet until they were accidentally discovered by his mother.
Branding her son "a real weirdo," Kemper's mother first packed him off to live with her estranged husband, and then - after running away - the boy was delivered to his paternal grandparents, residing on a remote California ranch. There, in August 1963, fourteen-year-old Kemper shot his grandmother with a .22-caliber rifle, afterward stabbing her body repeatedly with a kitchen knife. When his grandfather came home, Kemper shot the old man as well, leaving him dead in the yard.
Interrogated by authorities, Kemper could only say that "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma." He regretted not stripping her corpse, and this statement, along with the motiveless violence displayed in his actions, got Kemper committed to the state's maximum-security hospital in Atascadero. In 1969, a 21-year-old behemoth grown to six-foot-nine and some 300 pounds, Kemper was paroled to his mother's custody over the objections of the state psychiatrists.
During Kemper's enforced absence, his mother had settled in Santa Cruz, a college town whose population boasted thousands of attractive co-eds. For the next two years, through 1970 and '71, Kemper bided his time, holding odd jobs and cruising the highways in his leisure time, picking up dozens of young female hitchhikers, refining his approach, his "line," until, he knew that he could put them totally at ease. Some evenings, he would frequent a saloon patronized by off-duty policemen, rubbing shoulders with the law and soaking up their tales of crime, becoming friendly with a number of detectives who would later be assigned to track him down.
On May 7, 1972, Kemper picked up two 18-year-old roommates from Fresno State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. Driving them to a secluded cul-de-sac, he stabbed both girls to death, then took their bodies home and hid them in his room. Delighted with his "trophies," Kemper took Polaroid snapshots, dissected the corpses, and sexually assaulted various organs before finally tiring of the game. Bundling the remains into plastic bags, he buried the truncated bodies in the Santa Cruz mountains, tossing the heads into a roadside ravine.
Four months later, on September 14, Kemper offered a ride to 15-year-old Aiko Koo. Suffocating her with his large hands, Kemper raped her corpse on the spot and then carried it home for dissection. Koo's severed head was resting in the trunk of Kemper's car next morning, when he met with state psychiatrists and they pronounced him "safe," recommending that his juvenile record be sealed for Kemper's future protection. Following the interview, he buried Koo's remains near a religious camp located in the mountains.
Another four months passed before the "Co-ed Killer" struck again, on January 9, 1973. Picking up student Cindy Schall, Kemper forced her into the trunk of his car at gunpoint, then shot her to death. Driving back to his mother's house, he carried the corpse to his room, and there had sex with it in his bed. Afterward, Kemper dissected Schall's head buried it in the back yard of his mother's home.
By this time, various remains of Kemper's victims had been found and officers were on the case. Apparently, none of them had the least suspicion that their friend, Ed Kemper, was the man they sought, and some felt comfortable enough in Kemper's company to brief him on the progress of their homicide investigation. Smiling, often springing for the next round, Kemper was all ears.
On February 5, 1973, Kemper picked up Rosalind Thorpe, 23 and another hitchhiker, Alice Lin. Both young women were shot to death in the car, then stacked in the trunk like so much excess luggage. Driving home, Kemper ate dinner and waited for his mother to retire before stepping outside and decapitating both corpses as they lay in the trunk. Unsatisfied, he carried Lin's body inside and sexually assaulted it on the floor. Returning to the car, he chopped her hands off as a casual afterthought.
With spring's arrival, Kemper's frenzy escalated, coming back full circle to his home and family. He toyed with the idea of killing everybody on his block, as "a demonstration to the authorities," but finally dismissed the notion. Instead, on Easter weekend, Kemper turned upon his mother, hammering her skull in as she slept. Decapitating her, he raped the headless corpse, then jammed her severed larynx down the garbage disposal. ("This seemed appropriate," he told police, "as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.") Her head was propped on the mantle for use as a dartboard.
Still not sated, Kemper telephoned a friend of his mother's, Sally Hallett, and invited her over for a "surprise" dinner in his mother's honor. Upon her arrival, Kemper clubbed her over the head, strangled her to death, and then decapitated her. The headless body was deposited in his bed, while he wandered off to sleep in his mother's room.
On Easter Sunday, Kemper started driving East, with no destination in mind. He got as far as Colorado before pulling over to a roadside telephone booth and calling police in Santa Cruz. Several attempts were necessary before his friends would accept his confession, and local officers were dispatched to make the arrest while Kemper waited patiently in his car.
In his detailed confession, Kemper admitted slicing flesh from the legs of at least two victims, cooking it in a macaroni casserole and devouring it as a means of "possessing" his prey. He also acknowledged removing teeth, along with bits of hair and skin from his victims, retaining them as grisly keepsakes, trophies of the hunt. Described as sane by state psychiatrists, Kemper was convicted on eight counts of murder. Asked what punishment he considered fitting for his crimes, the defendant replied, "Death by torture." Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole.
Since his incarceration, Kemper has been very busy. In 1988, he and John Wayne Gacy took part in interviews via satellite. Kemper is also part of an FBI program aimed to build the FBI's profiling system. He was led in a series of interviews by agent Robert Ressler. Edmund Kemper is now the model prisoner at his facility.
Q. "What do you think when you see a pretty girl
Walking down the street?"
A. "One side of me says, 'I'd like to talk to her, date her.'
The other side of me says, 'I wonder how her head
would look on a stick?'"
EDMUND KEMPER
Ed Gein
Ed Gein may be America's most famous murderer, although his name is seldom heard and barely recognized today. Four decades have passed since he first made the headlines, but Gein is will with us, in spirit. His crimes inspired the movie Psycho and its sequels, spinning off in later years to terrify another generation as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then even more recently, Silence of The Lambs. (The latter film, billed as "a true story," changed literally everything except the grim décor of Gein's peculiar residence.) While other slayers have surpassed Gein's body-count and notoriety, America has never seen his equal in the field of mental aberration.
Gein was born August 8, 1906, in LaCrose, Wisconsin, but his family soon moved to a farm outside Plainfield. His father held jobs as a tanner and carpenter when he wasn't working the farm, and Gein's mother emerged as the dominant parent, settling most family decisions on her own. Devoutly religious, she warned her two sons against premarital sex, but Gein recalled that she was "not as strong" in her opposition to masturbation. Ed's father died in 1940, and his brother Henry was lost four years later, while fighting a marsh fire. His mother suffered a stroke that same year, and a second one killed her in 1945, following an argument with one of her neighbors. Alone at last, Gein nailed her bedroom shut and set about "redecorating" in his own inimitable style.
From childhood, Gein had been ambiguous about his masculinity, considering amputation of his penis on several occasions. With Christine Jorgenson much in the headlines, Gein considered transsexual surgery, but the process was costly and frightening. There must be other ways, he thought, of "turning female" on a part-time basis.
Between 1950 and 1954, Gein haunted three local cemeteries, opening an estimated nine or ten graves in his nocturnal raids. He might remove whole corpses or settle for choice bits and pieces; a few bodies were later returned to their resting place, but Ed recalled that there were "not too many." Aided in the early days by "Gus," a simple-minded neighbor, Gein continued excavations on his own when his assistant died. At home, he used the ghoulish relics as domestic decorations. Skulls were mounted on the bedposts, severed skullcaps serving Gein as bowls. He fashioned hanging mobiles out of noses, lips, and labia, sporting a belt of nipples around the house. Human skin was variously utilized for lamp shades, the construction of waste baskets, and the upholstery of chairs.
The choicer bits were specially preserved for Gein to wear at home. For ceremonial occasions, such as dancing underneath the moon, he wore a human's scalp and face, a skinned-out "vest" complete with breasts, and female genitalia strapped above his own. By "putting on" another sex and personality, Gein seemed to find a measure of contentment, but his resurrection raids eventually failed to satisfy a deeper need.
On December 8, 1954, 51-year-old Mary Hogan disappeared from the tavern she managed in Pine Grove, Wisconsin. Authorities found a pool of blood on the floor, an overturned chair, and one spent cartridge from a .32-caliber pistol. Foul play was the obvious answer, and while deputies recall Ed Gein as a suspect in the case, no charges were filed at the time. (Three years later, the shell casing would be matched to a pistol found in Gein's home.)
On November 16, 1957, 58-year-old Bernice Worden disappeared from her Plainfield hardware store under strikingly similar circumstances. There was blood on the floor, a thin trail of it leading out back, where the victim's truck had last been seen. Worden's son recalled that Gein had asked his mother for a date, and on the day before she disappeared, Ed mentioned that he needed anti-freeze. A sales receipt for anti-freeze was found inside the store, and deputies went looking for their suspect. What they found would haunt them all for the remainder of their lives.
Inside a shed, behind Gein's house, the headless body of Bernice Worden hung from the rafters, gutted like a deer, the genitals carved out along with sundry bits of viscera. A tour of the cluttered house left searchers stunned. Worden's heart was found in a saucepan, on the stove, while her head had been turned into a macabre ornament, with twine attached to nails inserted in both ears. Her other organs occupied a box, shoved off to moulder in a corner. Deputies surveyed Gein's decorations and his "costumes," counting skins from ten skulls in one cardboard drum, taking hasty inventory of implements fashioned from human bones.
In custody, Gein readily confessed the Hogan and Worden murders, along with a series of unreported grave robberies. Confirmation of the latter was obtained by opening three graves: in one, the corpse was mutilated as described by Gein; the second held no corpse at all; a casket in the third showed pry-marks, but the body was intact, as Gein remembered.
On January 16, 1958, a judge found Gein insane and packed him off to Central State Hospital, at Waupun, Wisconsin. A decade later, Ed was ordered up for trial, with the proceedings held in mid-November 1968. Judge Robert Gollmar found Gein innocent by reason of insanity, and he returned to Waupun, where he died in 1984.
Gein willingly confessed the murders and was tried for one, but were there others? And, if so, how many?
Brother Henry was suggested, by Judge Gollmar, as a likely victim, inasmuch as there was no autopsy or investigation of his death. However that may be, there is a stronger case for murder in the disappearance of a man named Travis and his unnamed male companion, last seen at the time they hired Ed Gein to be their hunting guide. One victim's jacket was recovered from the woods near Plainfield, and while Gein professed to know the whereabouts of Travis's body - blaming his death on "a neighbor" - police never followed up on the case. The search of Gein's home turned up two "fresh" vaginas, removed from young women, that could not be matched to existing cemetery record. Judge Gollmar suggests that one likely victim was Evelyn Hartley, abducted from LaCrosse on a night when Gein was visiting relatives, two blocks from her home. A pool of blood was found in the family garage after she vanished, with the trail disappearing at curbside. Mary Weckler was reported missing a short time late, from Jefferson, Wisconsin, with a white Ford seen in the area. When searchers scoured Gein's property, they found a while Ford sedan on the premises, though no one in Plainfield could ever recall Ed driving such a car. No other evidence exists to name Gein's victims, but if he did not dispose of Hartley and Wechler, he must have killed two other women, their names still unknown.
Ed Gein may be America's most famous murderer, although his name is seldom heard and barely recognized today. Four decades have passed since he first made the headlines, but Gein is will with us, in spirit. His crimes inspired the movie Psycho and its sequels, spinning off in later years to terrify another generation as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then even more recently, Silence of The Lambs. (The latter film, billed as "a true story," changed literally everything except the grim décor of Gein's peculiar residence.) While other slayers have surpassed Gein's body-count and notoriety, America has never seen his equal in the field of mental aberration.
Gein was born August 8, 1906, in LaCrose, Wisconsin, but his family soon moved to a farm outside Plainfield. His father held jobs as a tanner and carpenter when he wasn't working the farm, and Gein's mother emerged as the dominant parent, settling most family decisions on her own. Devoutly religious, she warned her two sons against premarital sex, but Gein recalled that she was "not as strong" in her opposition to masturbation. Ed's father died in 1940, and his brother Henry was lost four years later, while fighting a marsh fire. His mother suffered a stroke that same year, and a second one killed her in 1945, following an argument with one of her neighbors. Alone at last, Gein nailed her bedroom shut and set about "redecorating" in his own inimitable style.
From childhood, Gein had been ambiguous about his masculinity, considering amputation of his penis on several occasions. With Christine Jorgenson much in the headlines, Gein considered transsexual surgery, but the process was costly and frightening. There must be other ways, he thought, of "turning female" on a part-time basis.
Between 1950 and 1954, Gein haunted three local cemeteries, opening an estimated nine or ten graves in his nocturnal raids. He might remove whole corpses or settle for choice bits and pieces; a few bodies were later returned to their resting place, but Ed recalled that there were "not too many." Aided in the early days by "Gus," a simple-minded neighbor, Gein continued excavations on his own when his assistant died. At home, he used the ghoulish relics as domestic decorations. Skulls were mounted on the bedposts, severed skullcaps serving Gein as bowls. He fashioned hanging mobiles out of noses, lips, and labia, sporting a belt of nipples around the house. Human skin was variously utilized for lamp shades, the construction of waste baskets, and the upholstery of chairs.
The choicer bits were specially preserved for Gein to wear at home. For ceremonial occasions, such as dancing underneath the moon, he wore a human's scalp and face, a skinned-out "vest" complete with breasts, and female genitalia strapped above his own. By "putting on" another sex and personality, Gein seemed to find a measure of contentment, but his resurrection raids eventually failed to satisfy a deeper need.
On December 8, 1954, 51-year-old Mary Hogan disappeared from the tavern she managed in Pine Grove, Wisconsin. Authorities found a pool of blood on the floor, an overturned chair, and one spent cartridge from a .32-caliber pistol. Foul play was the obvious answer, and while deputies recall Ed Gein as a suspect in the case, no charges were filed at the time. (Three years later, the shell casing would be matched to a pistol found in Gein's home.)
On November 16, 1957, 58-year-old Bernice Worden disappeared from her Plainfield hardware store under strikingly similar circumstances. There was blood on the floor, a thin trail of it leading out back, where the victim's truck had last been seen. Worden's son recalled that Gein had asked his mother for a date, and on the day before she disappeared, Ed mentioned that he needed anti-freeze. A sales receipt for anti-freeze was found inside the store, and deputies went looking for their suspect. What they found would haunt them all for the remainder of their lives.
Inside a shed, behind Gein's house, the headless body of Bernice Worden hung from the rafters, gutted like a deer, the genitals carved out along with sundry bits of viscera. A tour of the cluttered house left searchers stunned. Worden's heart was found in a saucepan, on the stove, while her head had been turned into a macabre ornament, with twine attached to nails inserted in both ears. Her other organs occupied a box, shoved off to moulder in a corner. Deputies surveyed Gein's decorations and his "costumes," counting skins from ten skulls in one cardboard drum, taking hasty inventory of implements fashioned from human bones.
In custody, Gein readily confessed the Hogan and Worden murders, along with a series of unreported grave robberies. Confirmation of the latter was obtained by opening three graves: in one, the corpse was mutilated as described by Gein; the second held no corpse at all; a casket in the third showed pry-marks, but the body was intact, as Gein remembered.
On January 16, 1958, a judge found Gein insane and packed him off to Central State Hospital, at Waupun, Wisconsin. A decade later, Ed was ordered up for trial, with the proceedings held in mid-November 1968. Judge Robert Gollmar found Gein innocent by reason of insanity, and he returned to Waupun, where he died in 1984.
Gein willingly confessed the murders and was tried for one, but were there others? And, if so, how many?
Brother Henry was suggested, by Judge Gollmar, as a likely victim, inasmuch as there was no autopsy or investigation of his death. However that may be, there is a stronger case for murder in the disappearance of a man named Travis and his unnamed male companion, last seen at the time they hired Ed Gein to be their hunting guide. One victim's jacket was recovered from the woods near Plainfield, and while Gein professed to know the whereabouts of Travis's body - blaming his death on "a neighbor" - police never followed up on the case. The search of Gein's home turned up two "fresh" vaginas, removed from young women, that could not be matched to existing cemetery record. Judge Gollmar suggests that one likely victim was Evelyn Hartley, abducted from LaCrosse on a night when Gein was visiting relatives, two blocks from her home. A pool of blood was found in the family garage after she vanished, with the trail disappearing at curbside. Mary Weckler was reported missing a short time late, from Jefferson, Wisconsin, with a white Ford seen in the area. When searchers scoured Gein's property, they found a while Ford sedan on the premises, though no one in Plainfield could ever recall Ed driving such a car. No other evidence exists to name Gein's victims, but if he did not dispose of Hartley and Wechler, he must have killed two other women, their names still unknown.
The CIA and Acid
LSD was invented in Switzerland by Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz pharmaceuticals. It did not spontaneously appear among the youth of the Western world as a gift from the God of Getting' High. The CIA was on to acid long before the flower children.
So, for that matter, were upstanding citizens like Time-Life magnate Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who openly sang the praises of their magical mystery tours during the early sixties. Henry, a staunch conservative with close connections to the CIA, once dropped acid on the golf course and then claimed he had enjoyed a little chat with God.
While the cognoscenti had the benefit of tuned-in physicians, other psychedelic pioneers took their first trips as part of CIA-controlled research studies.
At least one person committed suicide after becoming an unwitting subject of a CIA LSD test, crashing through a high-story plate-glass window in a New York hotel as his Agency guardian watched. (Or perhaps the guardian did more than watch. In June 1994 the victim's family had his thirty-year-old corpse exhumed to check for signs that he may have been thrown out that window.) Numerous others lost their grip on reality.
MK-ULTRA was the code name the CIA used for its program directed at gaining control over human behavior through "covert use of chemical and biological materials," as proposed by Richard Helms. The name itself was a variation on ULTRA, the U.S. intelligence program behind Nazi lines in World War II, of which the CIA's veteran spies were justly proud.
Helms later became the CIA director and gained a measure of notoriety for his Watergate "lying to Congress" conviction and a touch of immortality in Thomas Powers's aptly named biography, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Helms founded the MK-ULTRA program and justified its notable unethical aspects with the rationale, "We are not Boy Scouts."
At the time, the spook scientists suspected that LSD had the potential to reprogram the human personality. In retrospect, they were probably right - Timothy Leary spoke in similar terms, though he saw unlimited potential for self-improvement in this "reprogramming." The CIA and the military simply couldn't figure out how to harness the drug's power. Thank goodness. Their idea was not to open "the doors of perception" but to convert otherwise free human beings into automatons.
"We must remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD," spoke no less an authority figure on matters psychedelic than John Lennon. "They invented LSD to control people and what it did was give us freedom."
Or did it? The acid-tripping intersection between the CIA and the counterculture is one of the areas where the on-the-record facts about MK-ULTRA meld into the foggy region of conspiracy theory. It has been suggested, even by prominent participants in the counterculture, that with LSD the CIA found the ultimate weapon against the youth movement.
Officially, the MK-ULTRA program ran from 1953 to 1964, at which time it was renamed MK-SEARCH and continued until 1973. However, U.S. intelligence and military operations with that same purpose had been ongoing at least since World War II and likely chugged ahead for many years after MK-ULTRA's publicly stated conclusion. MK-ULTRA encompassed an undetermined number of bizarre and often grotesque experiments. In one, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron received CIA funding to test a procedure he called "depatterning." This technique, Cameron explained when he applied for his CIA grant (through a front group called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology), involved the "breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient's behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks," in addition to LSD. Some of his subjects suffered brain damage and other debilitations. One sued the government and won an out-of-court settlement in 1988.
Then there was operation "Midnight Climax," in which prostitutes lured unsuspecting johns to a CIA bordello in San Francisco. There they slipped their clients an LSD mickey while Agency researchers savored the "scientific" action from behind a two-way mirror, a pitcher of martinis at the ready.
Author John Marks, whose The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is on of the most thoroughgoing volumes yet assembled on U.S. government mind-control research, readily admits that all of his source material comprised but ten boxes of documents - but those took him a year to comprehend despite the aid of a research staff.
Marks writes that he sought access to records of a branch of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, the Office of Research and Development (ORD), which took over behavioral (i.e., mind control) research after MK-ULTRA's staff dispersed.
Marks was told that ORD's files contained 130 boxed of documents relating to behavioral research. Even if they were all released, their sheer bulk is sufficient to fend off even the most dedicated - or obsessed - investigator. To generate such an intimidating volume of paper must have taken considerable time and effort. Yet curiously, the CIA has always claimed that its attempts to create real-life incarnations of Richard Condon's unfortunate protagonist Raymond Shaw - the hypnotically programmed assassin of The Manchurian Candidate - were a complete bust.
If their demurrals are to be trusted, then this particular program constitutes one of the least cost-effective deployments of taxpayer dollars in the history of the U.S. government, which is rife with non-cost-effective dollar deployments.
The CIA's most effective line of defense against exposure of their mind-control operations (or any of their operations, for that matter) has always been self-effacement. The agency portrays its agents as incompetent stooges, encouraging the public to laugh at their wacky attempts to formulate cancer potions and knock off foreign leaders.
Under this cover story, MK-ULTRA's research team was nothing but a bunch of ineffectual eccentrics. "We are sufficiently ineffective so our findings can be published," quipped one MK-ULTRA consultant.
Despite the findings of a Senate committee headed by Ted Kennedy that U.S. mind-control research was a big silly failure and even though Marks - whose approach is fairly conservative - acknowledges that he found no record to prove it, the project may have indeed succeeded.
"I cannot be positive that they never found a technique to control people," Marks writes," despite my definite bias in favor of the idea that the human spirit defeated the manipulators."
A sunny view of human nature, that. And indeed a consoling one. But the human spirit, history sadly proves, is far from indomitable. The clandestine researchers explored every possible means of manipulating the human mind. The CIA's experiments with LSD are the most famous MK-ULTRA undertakings, but acid was not even the most potent drug investigated by intelligence and military agencies. Nor did they limit their inquiries to drugs. Hypnosis, electronic brain implants, microwave transmissions and parapsychology also received intense scrutiny. Marks, Kennedy, and many others apparently believe that the U.S. government failed where all-too-many far less sophisticated operations - from the Moonies to Scientology to EST - have scored resounding triumphs. Brainwashing is commonplace among "cults," but not with the multimillion-dollar resources of the United States government's military and intelligence operations?
For that matter, the (supposed) impetus for the program was the reported success of communist countries in "brainwashing." The word itself originally applied to several soldiers who'd fought in the Korean War who exhibited strange behavior and had large blank spots in their memories - particularly when it came to their travels through regions of Manchuria. Those incidents were the inspiration for Condon's novel, in which a group of American soldiers are hypnotically brainwashed by the Korean and Chinese communists and one is programmed to kill a presidential candidate.
Interestingly, the belief that one's psyche is being invaded by radio transmissions or electrical implants is considered a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. But there is no doubt that the CIA contemplated using those methods and carried out such experiments on animals, and the way these things go it would require the willful naivete of, say, a Senate subcommittee to maintain that they stopped there. Even Marks ,who exercises the journalistic wisdom to stick only to what he can back up with hard documentation, readily acknowledges that the clandestine researchers "probably" planted electrode experiments "went far beyond giving monkeys orgasms," one of the researchers' early achievements.
The ultimate goal of mind control would have been to produce a Manchurian Candidate assassin, an agent who didn't know he (or she) was an agent - brainwashed and programmed to carry out that most sensitive of missions. Whether the program's accomplishments reached that peak will probably never be public knowledge. So we are left to guess whether certain humans have been "programmed to kill." In 1967, Luis Castillo, a Puerto Rican arrested in the Philippines for planning to bump off Ferdinand Marcos, claimed (while in a hypnotic trance) that he had been implanted with a posthypnotic suggestion to carry out the assassination. Sirhan Sirhan, convicted as the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, showed unmistakable symptoms of hypnosis. A psychiatrist testifying in Sirhan's defense said that the accused assassin was in a trance when he shot Kennedy, albeit a self-induced one. Author Robert Kaiser echoed that doctor's conclusions in his book RFK Must Die! Others, of course, have offered darker conjectures regarding the origins of Sirhan's symptoms.
James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, also had a known fascination with hypnosis, and, more recently, British lawyer Fenton Bressler has assembled has assembled circumstantial evidence to support a theory that Mark David Chapman, slayer of John Lennon, was subject to CIA mind control. Way back in 1967, a book titled Were We Controlled?, whose unknown author used the pseudonym Lincoln Lawrence, stated that both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were under mind control of some kind. The book may have had at least a trace of validity: Something in the book convinced Oswald's mother that the author was personally acquainted with her son.
Did MK-ULTRA spin off a wave of history-altering assassinations - did it whelp a brood of hypnoprogrammed killers? The definitive answer to that question will certainly never reach the public. We are left, with John Marks, to hope on faith alone that it did not, but always with the uneasy knowledge that it could have.
Perhaps not through assassinations, and perhaps not even intentionally, MK-ULTRA definitely altered a generation. John Lennon was far from the only sixties acid-hero to make the connection between the mood of the streets and the secret CIA labs. "A surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse to deflate the political potency of the youth rebellion," write Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain in Acid Dreams, their chronicle of both the clandestine and countercultural sides of the LSD revolution.
"By magnifying the impulse toward revolutionism out of context, acid sped up the process by which the Movement became unglued," the authors continue. "The use of LSD among young people in the U.S. reached a peak in the late 1960s, shortly after the CIA initiated a series of covert operations designed to disrupt, discredit, and neutralize the New Left. Was this merely a historical coincidence, or did the Agency actually take steps to promote the illicit acid trade?"
The tale of Ronald Stark, told by lee and Shlain, may provide the connection between the CIA and the Left. Stark was a leading distributor of LSD in the late 1960s - the same time acid use was at its heaviest - and apparently a CIA operative. The Agency has never admitted this, but an Italian judge deciding in 1979 whether to try Stark for "armed banditry" in relation to Stark's many contacts with terrorists (among other things, Stark accurately predicted the assassination of Aldo Moro) released the drug dealer after finding "an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs" that Stark had worked for the CIA "from 1960 onward."
"It could have been," mused Tim Scully, the chief of Stark's major LSD-brewing outfit (a group of idealistic radicals called the Brotherhood who grew to feel exploited by Stark), "that he was employed by an American intelligence agency that wanted to see more psychedelic drugs on the street." But Lee and Shlain leave open the possibility that Stark may have been simply one of the world's most ingenious con artists - a possibility acknowledged by most everyone to come in contact with Stark.
The CIA's original "acid dream" was that LSD would open the mind to suggestion, but they found the drug too potent to manage. Sometime around 1971, right before MK-ULTRA founder and, by then, CIA director Richard Helms hung up his trenchcoat and stepped down from the CIA's top post, he ordered the majority of secret MK-ULTRA documents destroyed due to "a burgeoning paper problem." Among the eradicated material, Lee and Shlain report, were "all existing copies of a of a classified CIA manual titled LSD: Some Un-Psychedelic Implications."
There exists today no on-paper evidence (that anyone has yet uncovered) that MK-ULTRA was the progenitor of either a conspiracy to unleash remote-controlled lethal human robots or to emasculate an entire generation by oversaturating it with a mind-frying drug. But MK-ULTRA was very real and the danger of a secret government program to control the thoughts of its citizens, even just a few of them at a time, needs no elaboration.
So, for that matter, were upstanding citizens like Time-Life magnate Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, who openly sang the praises of their magical mystery tours during the early sixties. Henry, a staunch conservative with close connections to the CIA, once dropped acid on the golf course and then claimed he had enjoyed a little chat with God.
While the cognoscenti had the benefit of tuned-in physicians, other psychedelic pioneers took their first trips as part of CIA-controlled research studies.
At least one person committed suicide after becoming an unwitting subject of a CIA LSD test, crashing through a high-story plate-glass window in a New York hotel as his Agency guardian watched. (Or perhaps the guardian did more than watch. In June 1994 the victim's family had his thirty-year-old corpse exhumed to check for signs that he may have been thrown out that window.) Numerous others lost their grip on reality.
MK-ULTRA was the code name the CIA used for its program directed at gaining control over human behavior through "covert use of chemical and biological materials," as proposed by Richard Helms. The name itself was a variation on ULTRA, the U.S. intelligence program behind Nazi lines in World War II, of which the CIA's veteran spies were justly proud.
Helms later became the CIA director and gained a measure of notoriety for his Watergate "lying to Congress" conviction and a touch of immortality in Thomas Powers's aptly named biography, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Helms founded the MK-ULTRA program and justified its notable unethical aspects with the rationale, "We are not Boy Scouts."
At the time, the spook scientists suspected that LSD had the potential to reprogram the human personality. In retrospect, they were probably right - Timothy Leary spoke in similar terms, though he saw unlimited potential for self-improvement in this "reprogramming." The CIA and the military simply couldn't figure out how to harness the drug's power. Thank goodness. Their idea was not to open "the doors of perception" but to convert otherwise free human beings into automatons.
"We must remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD," spoke no less an authority figure on matters psychedelic than John Lennon. "They invented LSD to control people and what it did was give us freedom."
Or did it? The acid-tripping intersection between the CIA and the counterculture is one of the areas where the on-the-record facts about MK-ULTRA meld into the foggy region of conspiracy theory. It has been suggested, even by prominent participants in the counterculture, that with LSD the CIA found the ultimate weapon against the youth movement.
Officially, the MK-ULTRA program ran from 1953 to 1964, at which time it was renamed MK-SEARCH and continued until 1973. However, U.S. intelligence and military operations with that same purpose had been ongoing at least since World War II and likely chugged ahead for many years after MK-ULTRA's publicly stated conclusion. MK-ULTRA encompassed an undetermined number of bizarre and often grotesque experiments. In one, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron received CIA funding to test a procedure he called "depatterning." This technique, Cameron explained when he applied for his CIA grant (through a front group called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology), involved the "breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient's behavior by means of particularly intensive electroshocks," in addition to LSD. Some of his subjects suffered brain damage and other debilitations. One sued the government and won an out-of-court settlement in 1988.
Then there was operation "Midnight Climax," in which prostitutes lured unsuspecting johns to a CIA bordello in San Francisco. There they slipped their clients an LSD mickey while Agency researchers savored the "scientific" action from behind a two-way mirror, a pitcher of martinis at the ready.
Author John Marks, whose The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is on of the most thoroughgoing volumes yet assembled on U.S. government mind-control research, readily admits that all of his source material comprised but ten boxes of documents - but those took him a year to comprehend despite the aid of a research staff.
Marks writes that he sought access to records of a branch of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, the Office of Research and Development (ORD), which took over behavioral (i.e., mind control) research after MK-ULTRA's staff dispersed.
Marks was told that ORD's files contained 130 boxed of documents relating to behavioral research. Even if they were all released, their sheer bulk is sufficient to fend off even the most dedicated - or obsessed - investigator. To generate such an intimidating volume of paper must have taken considerable time and effort. Yet curiously, the CIA has always claimed that its attempts to create real-life incarnations of Richard Condon's unfortunate protagonist Raymond Shaw - the hypnotically programmed assassin of The Manchurian Candidate - were a complete bust.
If their demurrals are to be trusted, then this particular program constitutes one of the least cost-effective deployments of taxpayer dollars in the history of the U.S. government, which is rife with non-cost-effective dollar deployments.
The CIA's most effective line of defense against exposure of their mind-control operations (or any of their operations, for that matter) has always been self-effacement. The agency portrays its agents as incompetent stooges, encouraging the public to laugh at their wacky attempts to formulate cancer potions and knock off foreign leaders.
Under this cover story, MK-ULTRA's research team was nothing but a bunch of ineffectual eccentrics. "We are sufficiently ineffective so our findings can be published," quipped one MK-ULTRA consultant.
Despite the findings of a Senate committee headed by Ted Kennedy that U.S. mind-control research was a big silly failure and even though Marks - whose approach is fairly conservative - acknowledges that he found no record to prove it, the project may have indeed succeeded.
"I cannot be positive that they never found a technique to control people," Marks writes," despite my definite bias in favor of the idea that the human spirit defeated the manipulators."
A sunny view of human nature, that. And indeed a consoling one. But the human spirit, history sadly proves, is far from indomitable. The clandestine researchers explored every possible means of manipulating the human mind. The CIA's experiments with LSD are the most famous MK-ULTRA undertakings, but acid was not even the most potent drug investigated by intelligence and military agencies. Nor did they limit their inquiries to drugs. Hypnosis, electronic brain implants, microwave transmissions and parapsychology also received intense scrutiny. Marks, Kennedy, and many others apparently believe that the U.S. government failed where all-too-many far less sophisticated operations - from the Moonies to Scientology to EST - have scored resounding triumphs. Brainwashing is commonplace among "cults," but not with the multimillion-dollar resources of the United States government's military and intelligence operations?
For that matter, the (supposed) impetus for the program was the reported success of communist countries in "brainwashing." The word itself originally applied to several soldiers who'd fought in the Korean War who exhibited strange behavior and had large blank spots in their memories - particularly when it came to their travels through regions of Manchuria. Those incidents were the inspiration for Condon's novel, in which a group of American soldiers are hypnotically brainwashed by the Korean and Chinese communists and one is programmed to kill a presidential candidate.
Interestingly, the belief that one's psyche is being invaded by radio transmissions or electrical implants is considered a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. But there is no doubt that the CIA contemplated using those methods and carried out such experiments on animals, and the way these things go it would require the willful naivete of, say, a Senate subcommittee to maintain that they stopped there. Even Marks ,who exercises the journalistic wisdom to stick only to what he can back up with hard documentation, readily acknowledges that the clandestine researchers "probably" planted electrode experiments "went far beyond giving monkeys orgasms," one of the researchers' early achievements.
The ultimate goal of mind control would have been to produce a Manchurian Candidate assassin, an agent who didn't know he (or she) was an agent - brainwashed and programmed to carry out that most sensitive of missions. Whether the program's accomplishments reached that peak will probably never be public knowledge. So we are left to guess whether certain humans have been "programmed to kill." In 1967, Luis Castillo, a Puerto Rican arrested in the Philippines for planning to bump off Ferdinand Marcos, claimed (while in a hypnotic trance) that he had been implanted with a posthypnotic suggestion to carry out the assassination. Sirhan Sirhan, convicted as the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, showed unmistakable symptoms of hypnosis. A psychiatrist testifying in Sirhan's defense said that the accused assassin was in a trance when he shot Kennedy, albeit a self-induced one. Author Robert Kaiser echoed that doctor's conclusions in his book RFK Must Die! Others, of course, have offered darker conjectures regarding the origins of Sirhan's symptoms.
James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, also had a known fascination with hypnosis, and, more recently, British lawyer Fenton Bressler has assembled has assembled circumstantial evidence to support a theory that Mark David Chapman, slayer of John Lennon, was subject to CIA mind control. Way back in 1967, a book titled Were We Controlled?, whose unknown author used the pseudonym Lincoln Lawrence, stated that both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were under mind control of some kind. The book may have had at least a trace of validity: Something in the book convinced Oswald's mother that the author was personally acquainted with her son.
Did MK-ULTRA spin off a wave of history-altering assassinations - did it whelp a brood of hypnoprogrammed killers? The definitive answer to that question will certainly never reach the public. We are left, with John Marks, to hope on faith alone that it did not, but always with the uneasy knowledge that it could have.
Perhaps not through assassinations, and perhaps not even intentionally, MK-ULTRA definitely altered a generation. John Lennon was far from the only sixties acid-hero to make the connection between the mood of the streets and the secret CIA labs. "A surprising number of counterculture veterans endorsed the notion that the CIA disseminated street acid en masse to deflate the political potency of the youth rebellion," write Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain in Acid Dreams, their chronicle of both the clandestine and countercultural sides of the LSD revolution.
"By magnifying the impulse toward revolutionism out of context, acid sped up the process by which the Movement became unglued," the authors continue. "The use of LSD among young people in the U.S. reached a peak in the late 1960s, shortly after the CIA initiated a series of covert operations designed to disrupt, discredit, and neutralize the New Left. Was this merely a historical coincidence, or did the Agency actually take steps to promote the illicit acid trade?"
The tale of Ronald Stark, told by lee and Shlain, may provide the connection between the CIA and the Left. Stark was a leading distributor of LSD in the late 1960s - the same time acid use was at its heaviest - and apparently a CIA operative. The Agency has never admitted this, but an Italian judge deciding in 1979 whether to try Stark for "armed banditry" in relation to Stark's many contacts with terrorists (among other things, Stark accurately predicted the assassination of Aldo Moro) released the drug dealer after finding "an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs" that Stark had worked for the CIA "from 1960 onward."
"It could have been," mused Tim Scully, the chief of Stark's major LSD-brewing outfit (a group of idealistic radicals called the Brotherhood who grew to feel exploited by Stark), "that he was employed by an American intelligence agency that wanted to see more psychedelic drugs on the street." But Lee and Shlain leave open the possibility that Stark may have been simply one of the world's most ingenious con artists - a possibility acknowledged by most everyone to come in contact with Stark.
The CIA's original "acid dream" was that LSD would open the mind to suggestion, but they found the drug too potent to manage. Sometime around 1971, right before MK-ULTRA founder and, by then, CIA director Richard Helms hung up his trenchcoat and stepped down from the CIA's top post, he ordered the majority of secret MK-ULTRA documents destroyed due to "a burgeoning paper problem." Among the eradicated material, Lee and Shlain report, were "all existing copies of a of a classified CIA manual titled LSD: Some Un-Psychedelic Implications."
There exists today no on-paper evidence (that anyone has yet uncovered) that MK-ULTRA was the progenitor of either a conspiracy to unleash remote-controlled lethal human robots or to emasculate an entire generation by oversaturating it with a mind-frying drug. But MK-ULTRA was very real and the danger of a secret government program to control the thoughts of its citizens, even just a few of them at a time, needs no elaboration.
High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program
In an Arctic compound 200 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska, the Pentagon has erected a powerful transmitter designed to beam more than a gigawatt of energy into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Known as Project HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the $30 million experiment involves the world's largest "ionospheric heater," a prototype device designed to zap the skies hundreds of miles above the earth with high-frequency radio waves. Why irradiate the charged particles of the ionosphere (which when energized by natural processes make up the lovely and famous phenomenon known as the Northern Lights)? According to the U.S. Navy and Air Force, co-sponsors of the project, "to observe the complex natural variations of Alaska's ionosphere." That, says the Pentagon, and also to develop new forms of communications and surveillance technologies that will enable the military to send signals to nuclear submarines and to peer deep underground.
Opponents of HAARP - a coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans, Alaskan citizens, and, of course, conspiracy trackers - believe that the military has even more Strangelovian plans for this unusual hardware, applications ranging from Star Wars missile-defense schemes to weather modification plots and perhaps even mind-control experiments.
The HAARP complex is situated within a 23-acre lot in a relatively isolated region near the town of Gakona. When the final phase of the project was completed in 1997, the military had erected 180 towers, 72 feet in height, forming a "high-power, high-frequency phased array radio transmitter" capable of beaming in the 2.5-to-10-megahertz frequency range, at more than 3 gigawatts of power (3 billion watts). According to the navy and air force, HAARP "will be used to introduce a small, known amount of energy into a specific ionospheric layer" anywhere from several miles to several tens of miles in radius. Not surprisingly, navy and air force PR (posted on the official HAARP World Wide Web Internet site, an effort to combat the bad press the project has generated), downplays both the environmental impacts of the project and purported offensive uses of the technology.
However, a series of patents owned by the defense contractor managing HAARP project suggests that the Pentagon might indeed have more ambitious designs. In fact, one of those patents was classified by the navy for several years during the 1980s. The key document in the bunch is i. Patent number 4,686,605, considered by HAARP critics to be the "smoking raygun," so to speak. Held by ARCO Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), the ARCO subsidiary contracted to build HAARP, this patent describes an inospheric heater very similar to the HAARP heater. In the APTI patent - subsequently published on the Internet by foes of HAARP - Texas physicist Bernard J. Eastlund describes a fantastic offensive and defensive weapon that would do any megolomaniacal James Bond supervillain proud. According to the patent, Eastlund's invention would heat plumes of charged particles in the ionosphere, making it possible to, for starters, selectively "disrupt microwave transmissions of satellites" and "cause interference with of even total disruption of communications over a large portion of the earth." But like his hopped-up ions, Eastlund was just warming up. Per the patent text, the physicist's "method and apparatus for altering a region in the earth's atmosphere" would also:
"Cause confusion of or interference with or even complete disruption of guidance systems employed by even the most sophisticated of airplanes and missiles";
"Not only . . . interfere with third-party communications, but [also] take advantage
of one or more such beams to carry out a communications network at the same
time. Put another way, what is used to disrupt another's communications can be
employed by one knowledgeable of this invention as a communications network
at the same time";
"Pick up communication signals of others for intelligence purposes";
Facilitate "missile or aircraft destruction, deflection, or confusion" by lifting large
regions of the atmosphere "to an unexpectedly high altitude so that missiles
encounter unexpected and unplanned drag forces with resultant destruction or
deflection of same."
If Eastlund's brainchild sounds like a recipe for that onetime cold war panacea, the Strategic Defense Initiative (AKA Star Wars), it's probably no coincidence. The APTI/Eastlund patent was filed during the final days of the Reagan administration, when plans for high-tech missile defense systems were still all the rage. But Eastlund's blue-sky vision went far beyond the usual Star Wars prescriptions of the day and suggested even more unusual uses for his patented ionospheric heater.
"Weather modification," the patent states, "is possible by . . . altering upper atmospheric wind patterns or altering solar absorption patterns by constructing one of more plumes of particles which will act as a lens or focusing device." As a result, an artificially heated ionosphere could focus a "vast amount of sunlight on selected portions of the earth."
HAARP officials deny any link to Eastlund's patents or plans. But several key details suggest otherwise. For starters, APTI, holder of the Eastlund patents, continued to manage the HAARP project. During the summer of 1994, ARCO sold APTI to E-Systems, a defense contractor known for counter-surveillance projects. E-Systems, in turn, is currently owned by Raytheon, one of the world's largest defense contractors and maker of the SCUD-busting Patriot missile. All of which suggests that more than just simple atmospheric science is going on in the HAARP compound.
What's more, one of the APTI/Eastlund patents singles out Alaska as the ideal site for a high-frequency ionospheric heater because "magnetic field lines. . . which extend to desirable altitudes for the invention, intersect the earth in Alaska." APTI also rates Alaska as an ideal location given its close proximity to an ample source of fuel to power the project: the vast reserves of natural gas in the North Slope region - reserves owned by APTI parent company ARCO.
Eastlund also contradicts the official military line. He told National Public Radio that a secret military project to develop his work was launched during the late 1980s. and in the May/June 1994 issue of Microwave News, Eastlund suggested that "The HAARP project obviously looks a lot like the first step" toward the designs outlined in his patents.
Is HAARP capable of anything on Eastlund's wish list? The military says no, pointing out that the power levels used in the Alaskan transmitter are too low to achieve Eastlund's goals. That may well be true - Eastlund's designs call for more powerful bursts of high-frequency radio waves than the HAARP prototype will be able to muster. However, the project's own environmental impact reports warn that the HAARP transmissions could pose a danger to airplanes up to four miles away. And according to Far Smith, editor of the environmental magazine, Earth Watch Journal, the energy that drives HAARP could be a thousand times more powerful than the military's most powerful PAVE PAWS over-the-horizon radars, which emit "incidental" sidelobe radiation that can disrupt cardiac pacemakers up to seven miles away and cause the "inadvertent detonation" of bombs and flares in passing aircraft. The official HAARP "fact sheet" reassures jittery paranoiacs that the effects of ionospheric heating will always dissipate in a matter of minutes. Yet good soldier Eastlund boasts in his patent that the radiation "can also be prolonged for substantial time periods so that it would not be a mere transient effect that could be waited out by an opposing force.
"Thus," he continues, "this invention provides the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the earth's atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level. . . in a manner more precise and better controlled than heretofore accomplished by the prior art. . . the detonation of nuclear devices of various yields at various altitudes."
Eastlund's patent really trips into conspiratorial territory in its References Cited section. Two of the sources documented by Eastlund are New York Times articles from 1915 and 1940 profiling none other than Nikola Tesla, a giant in the annals of conspiratorial history. Tesla, a brilliant inventor and contemporary of Edison, developed hundreds of patents during his lifetime and is often credited with inventing radio before Marconi, among a host of other firsts. Of course, mainstream science has never fully acknowledged Tesla's contributions, and his later pronouncements (he vowed that he had developed a technology that could split the earth asunder) have left him straddling that familiar historical territory where genius meets crackpot. Not surprisingly, fringe science and conspiracy theory have made Tesla something of a patron saint. Whenever talk radio buzz or Internet discussion turns to alleged government experiments to cause earthquakes or modify weather, references to government-suppressed "Tesla Technology" are sure to follow.
Judging from the APTI patent, Tesla was a major inspiration for the Eastlund ionospheric heater. The first New York Times article, dated September 22, 1940, reports that Tesla, then eighty-four years old, "stands ready to divulge to the United States Government the secret of his 'teleforce,' with which, he said, airplane motors would be melted at a distance of 250 miles, so that an invisible Chinese Wall of Defense would be built around the country." Quoting Tesla, the Times story continues: "'This new type of force,'" Mr. Tesla said, "'would operate through a beam one hundred-millionth of a square centimeter in diameter, and could be generated from a special plant that would cost no more than $2,000,000 and would take only about three months to construct.'" The second New York Times story, dated December 8, 1915, describes one of Tesla's ideas to Eastlund's invention are remarkable, and by extension the overlap between Tesla and HAARP technology is downright intriguing.
Apparently, APTI and the Pentagon are taking Eastlund's - and by extension, Tesla's - ideas seriously. As authors Nicholas J. Begich and Jeane Manning point out in the 1996 book, Angels Don't Play This HAARP, another of the Eastlund/APTI patents outlines a technology for transmitting electrical energy a la Tesla's war-and-peace project.
On the conspiracy circuit, any nexus between Tesla and Tesla-like military plans is likely to be as explosive as a warhead passing through one of Eastlund's ion plumes. From here their speculation about HAARP tends to rocket into somewhat thinner air. In Angels Don't Play This HAARP, which is subtitled, "Advances in Tesla Technology," authors Begich and Manning suggest that in addition to modifying the weather, the military's Tesla-HAARP technology might be used as a form of mass mind-control.
"The impact of RF [radio-frequency transmissions] on human physiology," they write, "is well known to the air force and has been described in publications dating back to 1986." If Begich and Manning don't conclusively prove a connection between HAARP and government schemes to "disrupt mental processes" via pulsed radio-frequency transmissions, they do dig up a motherlode of elitist pontification by cold warriors obsessed with controlling the American hoi polloi. Zbigniew Brzezinski - former National Security Advisor to President Carter - puffed in 1970 that a "more controlled and directed society" would evolve, one in which the "elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control." Infuriating and outrageous, yes. But it doesn't actually prove anything about the goals of HAARP.
Even more interesting, but still not the smoking gun that some HAARP critics believe it to be, are the forecasts of geophysicist Gordon J. F. McDonald, a vintage cold war strategist who comes off sounding like Dr. Strangelove on speed. Begich and Manning quote a McDonald precis calling for electronic pulses aimed at broad geographic regions. "In this way," McDonald explains, "one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of a very large populations in selected regions over an extended period . . . . No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades." (Never a lover of subtlety, McDonald titled a chapter on weather modification in one of his books, "How to Wreck the Environment." Clearly, mind control has been the Holy Grail of anal-retentive national security obsessors since the days of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. And it certainly wouldn't be surprising to find the Pentagon toying with that notion in Alaska, although the evidence for it hasn't surfaced (yet).
On the farthest fringes of speculation, HAARP has attained that ultimate status of conspiracy theory template, onto which any ideology, philosophy, or pathology can attach its own interpretation and customized "facts." It comes as no shock to find UFOs circling these outer limits of HAARPology: the HAARP frequencies are the radio frequencies associated with UFO appearances and abductions, say some theorists, suggesting either than alien UFOs use a similar technology or that UFOs are a government hoax implemented with HAARP-like hardware, or both. Beyond UFOs, other theorists claim that HAARP is a "death ray" with northern exposure, is responsible for various recent earthquakes and power outages in the Western United States, is a plot to implement a "genetic reprogramming" of the human race, or ultimately represents a battle between earthly villains and New Age "ascended masters" from dimensions beyond.
Back on earth, the fact remains that HAARP certainly isn't the simple science fair project described by its Pentagon handlers. To quote HAARP's godfather, Bernard Eastlund, "HAARP is the perfect first step toward a plan like mine. . . . The government will say it isn't so, but if it quacks like a duck and it looks like a duck, there's a good chance it is a duck."
Opponents of HAARP - a coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans, Alaskan citizens, and, of course, conspiracy trackers - believe that the military has even more Strangelovian plans for this unusual hardware, applications ranging from Star Wars missile-defense schemes to weather modification plots and perhaps even mind-control experiments.
The HAARP complex is situated within a 23-acre lot in a relatively isolated region near the town of Gakona. When the final phase of the project was completed in 1997, the military had erected 180 towers, 72 feet in height, forming a "high-power, high-frequency phased array radio transmitter" capable of beaming in the 2.5-to-10-megahertz frequency range, at more than 3 gigawatts of power (3 billion watts). According to the navy and air force, HAARP "will be used to introduce a small, known amount of energy into a specific ionospheric layer" anywhere from several miles to several tens of miles in radius. Not surprisingly, navy and air force PR (posted on the official HAARP World Wide Web Internet site, an effort to combat the bad press the project has generated), downplays both the environmental impacts of the project and purported offensive uses of the technology.
However, a series of patents owned by the defense contractor managing HAARP project suggests that the Pentagon might indeed have more ambitious designs. In fact, one of those patents was classified by the navy for several years during the 1980s. The key document in the bunch is i. Patent number 4,686,605, considered by HAARP critics to be the "smoking raygun," so to speak. Held by ARCO Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), the ARCO subsidiary contracted to build HAARP, this patent describes an inospheric heater very similar to the HAARP heater. In the APTI patent - subsequently published on the Internet by foes of HAARP - Texas physicist Bernard J. Eastlund describes a fantastic offensive and defensive weapon that would do any megolomaniacal James Bond supervillain proud. According to the patent, Eastlund's invention would heat plumes of charged particles in the ionosphere, making it possible to, for starters, selectively "disrupt microwave transmissions of satellites" and "cause interference with of even total disruption of communications over a large portion of the earth." But like his hopped-up ions, Eastlund was just warming up. Per the patent text, the physicist's "method and apparatus for altering a region in the earth's atmosphere" would also:
"Cause confusion of or interference with or even complete disruption of guidance systems employed by even the most sophisticated of airplanes and missiles";
"Not only . . . interfere with third-party communications, but [also] take advantage
of one or more such beams to carry out a communications network at the same
time. Put another way, what is used to disrupt another's communications can be
employed by one knowledgeable of this invention as a communications network
at the same time";
"Pick up communication signals of others for intelligence purposes";
Facilitate "missile or aircraft destruction, deflection, or confusion" by lifting large
regions of the atmosphere "to an unexpectedly high altitude so that missiles
encounter unexpected and unplanned drag forces with resultant destruction or
deflection of same."
If Eastlund's brainchild sounds like a recipe for that onetime cold war panacea, the Strategic Defense Initiative (AKA Star Wars), it's probably no coincidence. The APTI/Eastlund patent was filed during the final days of the Reagan administration, when plans for high-tech missile defense systems were still all the rage. But Eastlund's blue-sky vision went far beyond the usual Star Wars prescriptions of the day and suggested even more unusual uses for his patented ionospheric heater.
"Weather modification," the patent states, "is possible by . . . altering upper atmospheric wind patterns or altering solar absorption patterns by constructing one of more plumes of particles which will act as a lens or focusing device." As a result, an artificially heated ionosphere could focus a "vast amount of sunlight on selected portions of the earth."
HAARP officials deny any link to Eastlund's patents or plans. But several key details suggest otherwise. For starters, APTI, holder of the Eastlund patents, continued to manage the HAARP project. During the summer of 1994, ARCO sold APTI to E-Systems, a defense contractor known for counter-surveillance projects. E-Systems, in turn, is currently owned by Raytheon, one of the world's largest defense contractors and maker of the SCUD-busting Patriot missile. All of which suggests that more than just simple atmospheric science is going on in the HAARP compound.
What's more, one of the APTI/Eastlund patents singles out Alaska as the ideal site for a high-frequency ionospheric heater because "magnetic field lines. . . which extend to desirable altitudes for the invention, intersect the earth in Alaska." APTI also rates Alaska as an ideal location given its close proximity to an ample source of fuel to power the project: the vast reserves of natural gas in the North Slope region - reserves owned by APTI parent company ARCO.
Eastlund also contradicts the official military line. He told National Public Radio that a secret military project to develop his work was launched during the late 1980s. and in the May/June 1994 issue of Microwave News, Eastlund suggested that "The HAARP project obviously looks a lot like the first step" toward the designs outlined in his patents.
Is HAARP capable of anything on Eastlund's wish list? The military says no, pointing out that the power levels used in the Alaskan transmitter are too low to achieve Eastlund's goals. That may well be true - Eastlund's designs call for more powerful bursts of high-frequency radio waves than the HAARP prototype will be able to muster. However, the project's own environmental impact reports warn that the HAARP transmissions could pose a danger to airplanes up to four miles away. And according to Far Smith, editor of the environmental magazine, Earth Watch Journal, the energy that drives HAARP could be a thousand times more powerful than the military's most powerful PAVE PAWS over-the-horizon radars, which emit "incidental" sidelobe radiation that can disrupt cardiac pacemakers up to seven miles away and cause the "inadvertent detonation" of bombs and flares in passing aircraft. The official HAARP "fact sheet" reassures jittery paranoiacs that the effects of ionospheric heating will always dissipate in a matter of minutes. Yet good soldier Eastlund boasts in his patent that the radiation "can also be prolonged for substantial time periods so that it would not be a mere transient effect that could be waited out by an opposing force.
"Thus," he continues, "this invention provides the ability to put unprecedented amounts of power in the earth's atmosphere at strategic locations and to maintain the power injection level. . . in a manner more precise and better controlled than heretofore accomplished by the prior art. . . the detonation of nuclear devices of various yields at various altitudes."
Eastlund's patent really trips into conspiratorial territory in its References Cited section. Two of the sources documented by Eastlund are New York Times articles from 1915 and 1940 profiling none other than Nikola Tesla, a giant in the annals of conspiratorial history. Tesla, a brilliant inventor and contemporary of Edison, developed hundreds of patents during his lifetime and is often credited with inventing radio before Marconi, among a host of other firsts. Of course, mainstream science has never fully acknowledged Tesla's contributions, and his later pronouncements (he vowed that he had developed a technology that could split the earth asunder) have left him straddling that familiar historical territory where genius meets crackpot. Not surprisingly, fringe science and conspiracy theory have made Tesla something of a patron saint. Whenever talk radio buzz or Internet discussion turns to alleged government experiments to cause earthquakes or modify weather, references to government-suppressed "Tesla Technology" are sure to follow.
Judging from the APTI patent, Tesla was a major inspiration for the Eastlund ionospheric heater. The first New York Times article, dated September 22, 1940, reports that Tesla, then eighty-four years old, "stands ready to divulge to the United States Government the secret of his 'teleforce,' with which, he said, airplane motors would be melted at a distance of 250 miles, so that an invisible Chinese Wall of Defense would be built around the country." Quoting Tesla, the Times story continues: "'This new type of force,'" Mr. Tesla said, "'would operate through a beam one hundred-millionth of a square centimeter in diameter, and could be generated from a special plant that would cost no more than $2,000,000 and would take only about three months to construct.'" The second New York Times story, dated December 8, 1915, describes one of Tesla's ideas to Eastlund's invention are remarkable, and by extension the overlap between Tesla and HAARP technology is downright intriguing.
Apparently, APTI and the Pentagon are taking Eastlund's - and by extension, Tesla's - ideas seriously. As authors Nicholas J. Begich and Jeane Manning point out in the 1996 book, Angels Don't Play This HAARP, another of the Eastlund/APTI patents outlines a technology for transmitting electrical energy a la Tesla's war-and-peace project.
On the conspiracy circuit, any nexus between Tesla and Tesla-like military plans is likely to be as explosive as a warhead passing through one of Eastlund's ion plumes. From here their speculation about HAARP tends to rocket into somewhat thinner air. In Angels Don't Play This HAARP, which is subtitled, "Advances in Tesla Technology," authors Begich and Manning suggest that in addition to modifying the weather, the military's Tesla-HAARP technology might be used as a form of mass mind-control.
"The impact of RF [radio-frequency transmissions] on human physiology," they write, "is well known to the air force and has been described in publications dating back to 1986." If Begich and Manning don't conclusively prove a connection between HAARP and government schemes to "disrupt mental processes" via pulsed radio-frequency transmissions, they do dig up a motherlode of elitist pontification by cold warriors obsessed with controlling the American hoi polloi. Zbigniew Brzezinski - former National Security Advisor to President Carter - puffed in 1970 that a "more controlled and directed society" would evolve, one in which the "elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control." Infuriating and outrageous, yes. But it doesn't actually prove anything about the goals of HAARP.
Even more interesting, but still not the smoking gun that some HAARP critics believe it to be, are the forecasts of geophysicist Gordon J. F. McDonald, a vintage cold war strategist who comes off sounding like Dr. Strangelove on speed. Begich and Manning quote a McDonald precis calling for electronic pulses aimed at broad geographic regions. "In this way," McDonald explains, "one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of a very large populations in selected regions over an extended period . . . . No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades." (Never a lover of subtlety, McDonald titled a chapter on weather modification in one of his books, "How to Wreck the Environment." Clearly, mind control has been the Holy Grail of anal-retentive national security obsessors since the days of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. And it certainly wouldn't be surprising to find the Pentagon toying with that notion in Alaska, although the evidence for it hasn't surfaced (yet).
On the farthest fringes of speculation, HAARP has attained that ultimate status of conspiracy theory template, onto which any ideology, philosophy, or pathology can attach its own interpretation and customized "facts." It comes as no shock to find UFOs circling these outer limits of HAARPology: the HAARP frequencies are the radio frequencies associated with UFO appearances and abductions, say some theorists, suggesting either than alien UFOs use a similar technology or that UFOs are a government hoax implemented with HAARP-like hardware, or both. Beyond UFOs, other theorists claim that HAARP is a "death ray" with northern exposure, is responsible for various recent earthquakes and power outages in the Western United States, is a plot to implement a "genetic reprogramming" of the human race, or ultimately represents a battle between earthly villains and New Age "ascended masters" from dimensions beyond.
Back on earth, the fact remains that HAARP certainly isn't the simple science fair project described by its Pentagon handlers. To quote HAARP's godfather, Bernard Eastlund, "HAARP is the perfect first step toward a plan like mine. . . . The government will say it isn't so, but if it quacks like a duck and it looks like a duck, there's a good chance it is a duck."
Judgement Day Theories
The end may be near, but exactly how near is the sticky question. As millennium fever swept the globe, party planners and doomsdayers alike were fixated on the year 2000. Meanwhile, Judgment Day sticklers have been obsessing over the fact that there never was a "year zero," and therefore A.D. 1 plus two millennia equals 2001. But pinpointing Armageddon isn't quite that simple. When it comes to end times, there are as many proposed dates as there are fates (Rapture or Tribulation? Fire or Flood? Demons or Pleiadeans?).
However, in the wake of past doomsday embarrassments (the world didn't end in the year 1000, and the hoopla over the 1987 Harmonic Convergence turned out to be the spiritual equivalent of 8-track tape), few latter-day prophets are willing to stick their necks out and name a drop deadline. "What the prophets try to do is make predictions and leave the fulfillment vague," explains Stephen D. O'Leary, a millennial scholar at the University of Southern California. The most successful millennial prophets remain "strategically ambiguous," he says. He prophets who do get specific tend to be the more marginal ones."
It's no surprise that the Internet, a haven for marginal oracles of all strips, is home to millenarians who are bold enough to set a date. In fact, the Internet has assumed an important role on the end-times stage. "The Internet will be to the twenty-first century what the printing press was to the sixteenth," says medieval historian Richard Landes of Boston University, who, with O'Leary, cofounded the Center for Millennial Studies. Just as the printing press made apocalyptic tracts available to the public five hundred years ago, the Internet disgorges a vast literature of alternative doomsday scenarios.
"The Internet has increased the amount and the kind of information people have at their disposal to construct millenial scenarios," says O'Leary. "It also gives people a chance to try out different interpretations and prophecies in electronic discussion groups." In effect, he says, "the Internet provides a kind of social reinforcement," a public-address system for "people who might otherwise be relegated to the fringes as crackpots."
Well, in the lottery of multiple Armageddons, today's crackpot may turn out to be tomorrow's messianic seer. So how can the rest of us plan for the ultimate end and/or final beginning? The handy guide to doomsday chronologies is a good place to start, and a good place to determine if any of these are in fact true:
July 1999 (Nostradamus): This end date arrives in the summer of 1999 (just in time for that Prince song). Everybody's favorite sixteenth-century doomsayer was uncharacteristically specific when he prophesied that "in the year of 1999 and seven months will come a great king of terror from the skies…." Rather than interpreting that to mean Stephen King skydiving, latter-day pessimists are thinking nuclear missile strike. And the pessimists' tent is big enough for everyone: Everyone banking on the end of the world wants a piece of nuclear Nostradamus - New Agers, psychics, fundamentalist Christians, and Tom Clancy fans alike.
August 18, 1999 (Criswell): Ed Wood's favorite phony TV psychic was brazen enough to narrow down Armageddon to the precise day: "If you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 18, 1999, and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak, and no words will come out, for we have no future…. You and I will suddenly run out of time!" Of course, Criswell never explained exactly how the world would end, only that future generations will wonder "what on earth was meant by the words 'Henry Ford' or 'Hollywood.'" But how accurate was Criswell? Well, his record speaks for itself: "Meteor destroys London [in] 1988"; "I predict embalming by radar, where the body is turned to indestructable stone"; "I predict that by 1980 you will be able to lift your own face in your own home for only $5.00."
1999 (Edgar Cayce): The "sleeping prophet" pinpointed 1999 as the year of the Armageddon, to be followed by the New Age and the Second Coming of Christ. In between, we can expect a number of Hollywood comet/meteor movie-style special effects: A shift in the earth's axis leading to melting polar caps and the sinking of England and Japan. Also, the destruction of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York by earthquakes and floods, making it difficult for big-city swells to continue to sneer at small-town America; on the plus side, Atlantis will rise up from the depths of the ocean, opening an entirely new real estate market; and as if that weren't enough, Christ will initiate a "New Age of Peace." Of course, Cayce's loose time line will allow Armageddon to slip until 2001 or 2002, if absolutely necessary.
2000ish (Jack Van Impe): The perpetually grinning televangelist is, well, impish when it comes to naming dates: He won't do it. He does, however, offer an "Overview of Major Future Events" somewhat more convoluted than a Thomas Pynchon novel: The Antichrist takes center stage during the seven-year tribulation, followed by sundry judgments, "War in Heaven," and the "battle of Armageddon" (neatly illustrated on Van Impe's Internet web site as a horde of marauding Huns), the Second Coming, more judgments, and a thousand years of peace with "Satan Bound," a period that closes with "Satan Loosed," again, kind of like the surprise return of Freddy Kruger at the very end of those slasher movies, after you think he's already been killed. It's all very confusing (did I enter the millennium in a mortal body, or do I need to trade up for resurrection?) which undoubtedly helps Van Impe sell those twenty dollar explanatory videos.
May 5, 2000 (Richard W. Noone): The author of the book 5/5/2000: Ice - The Ultimate Disaster, is refreshingly specific: "On May 5 of the year 2000, Mercury, Venus, Mars Jupiter and Saturn will be aligned with the earth for the first time in 6,000 years. On that day the ice buildup at the South Pole will upset the earth's axis, sending trillions of tons of ice in the water sweeping over the surface of our planet." Though the book jacket claims that "astonishing evidence points to worldwide disaster in our lifetime," said evidence turns out to be culled mostly from the works of fringe scientists such as Emanuel Velikofsky, making It likely that 5/5/2000's major event will be El Torrito's Cinco de Mayo happy hour.
2000 or 2007 or 2048 (Hal Lindsey): The bestselling author of our day (more sales than Stephen King) is bearish when it comes to setting the big date. In his earlier books (including The Late, Great Planet Earth), however, the modern bard of Christian Apocalypse did let a few numbers loose: Armageddon in the year 2000 and the Second Coming of Christ in 2007 (forty years after the reunification of Jerusalem). However, Lindsey has also cited 2048 (see Bede below) as a possible drop deadline.
2001 (Uranus Society): Per interstellar thought messages received by Southern California UFO disciples, a "Pleiadean starship will land on a rising portion of Atlantis in the area of the Bermuda Triangle…in the year 2001!" At that point, Earth will become the final world to join "an alignment of 33 planets," forming an "Interplanetary Confederation for the Spiritual Renaissance of Humankind on Earth!" Though our Pleiadean "Space Brothers" are wise to tie their arrival to the classic Stanley Kubrick film, the previous E.T.A. for ET of 1985 (when neither starships nor star children showed up) proved that Unarians aren't averse to issuing a cosmic raincheck.
2003 (Kalki Avatar): According to the Hindu calendar, the Sree Vishiva Karma Veera Narayana Murthy, avatar of Krishna, will arrive in 2003 to establish the reihn of dharma (Righteousness). "He will rule over the universe for a period of 108 years, and return to His abode, Vaikunta. Preceding that, the world will be full of calamities and situations will be changing every instant." For example, from 1999 to 2003, we can expect a "rain of blood in towns, villages and forests. Poor quality coins will be used as currencies. The males of goat and ox will sport mammary organs, and will be milked. Blood will flow from the limbs of elephants and horses….Many incurable diseases will be present. A man will have ten women after him, which will result in extreme behaviour in human beings."
December 21, 2012 (Mayan Calendar): Turns out the "Harmonic Convergence" of 1987 wasn't a bust, after all; it opened a transitional period of cosmic change that will culminate on the day of the winter solstice in the year 2012. So forecasts Jose Arguelles, the New Age visionary who organized the harmonic festivities of a decade ago. Arguelles is not alone in pinpointing 2012 as the date of the looming end-time. A convergence of New Age thinkers has arrived at the same fateful date, based on the Mayan "Long Count" calendar, a kind of mystical Daytimer which measures a "Great Cycle" of 5,125 years and which runs out of refill pages on - mark your calendar - December 21, 2012. Most Mayan calendar counters expect major "earth changes" of the cataclysmic, rising-Atlantis, sinking - Los Angeles variety. Because the Mayans synchronized their calendar to the skies, spectacular astrological alignments are expected in 2012. Per Arguelles, the year 2012 will transport humankind from the "third dimension" to the "fourth dimension," a new galactic state of consciousness. Other Mayan calendar countdowns peg the New Age apocalypse to December 22, 2012.
2058 (Bede the Venerable): The eighth-century theologian calculated that Jesus was born 3,942 years after the creation of the world, which means that the six thousand-year millennial week will end in 2058. So far no one has decided to champion Bede. Alas, latter-day millenarians seem uninterested in his old-school dating.
2076 (Year of the Haj): 2076 is the year 1500, according to the Muslim calendar, which has led several Sufi sects to declare 2076 as the end day. My prediction: American Tricentennial hype will probably overshadow the Muslim eschaton.
2240 (Jewish Calendar): The year 2240 is the year 6000, according to the Jews. If by then the other doomsday scenarios haven't swept us into either the dustbin of history of a state of cosmological harmony, nothing is going to knock us off our self-satisfied perch. Except maybe the Klingons.
However, in the wake of past doomsday embarrassments (the world didn't end in the year 1000, and the hoopla over the 1987 Harmonic Convergence turned out to be the spiritual equivalent of 8-track tape), few latter-day prophets are willing to stick their necks out and name a drop deadline. "What the prophets try to do is make predictions and leave the fulfillment vague," explains Stephen D. O'Leary, a millennial scholar at the University of Southern California. The most successful millennial prophets remain "strategically ambiguous," he says. He prophets who do get specific tend to be the more marginal ones."
It's no surprise that the Internet, a haven for marginal oracles of all strips, is home to millenarians who are bold enough to set a date. In fact, the Internet has assumed an important role on the end-times stage. "The Internet will be to the twenty-first century what the printing press was to the sixteenth," says medieval historian Richard Landes of Boston University, who, with O'Leary, cofounded the Center for Millennial Studies. Just as the printing press made apocalyptic tracts available to the public five hundred years ago, the Internet disgorges a vast literature of alternative doomsday scenarios.
"The Internet has increased the amount and the kind of information people have at their disposal to construct millenial scenarios," says O'Leary. "It also gives people a chance to try out different interpretations and prophecies in electronic discussion groups." In effect, he says, "the Internet provides a kind of social reinforcement," a public-address system for "people who might otherwise be relegated to the fringes as crackpots."
Well, in the lottery of multiple Armageddons, today's crackpot may turn out to be tomorrow's messianic seer. So how can the rest of us plan for the ultimate end and/or final beginning? The handy guide to doomsday chronologies is a good place to start, and a good place to determine if any of these are in fact true:
July 1999 (Nostradamus): This end date arrives in the summer of 1999 (just in time for that Prince song). Everybody's favorite sixteenth-century doomsayer was uncharacteristically specific when he prophesied that "in the year of 1999 and seven months will come a great king of terror from the skies…." Rather than interpreting that to mean Stephen King skydiving, latter-day pessimists are thinking nuclear missile strike. And the pessimists' tent is big enough for everyone: Everyone banking on the end of the world wants a piece of nuclear Nostradamus - New Agers, psychics, fundamentalist Christians, and Tom Clancy fans alike.
August 18, 1999 (Criswell): Ed Wood's favorite phony TV psychic was brazen enough to narrow down Armageddon to the precise day: "If you and I meet each other on the street that fateful day, August 18, 1999, and we chat about what we will do on the morrow, we will open our mouths to speak, and no words will come out, for we have no future…. You and I will suddenly run out of time!" Of course, Criswell never explained exactly how the world would end, only that future generations will wonder "what on earth was meant by the words 'Henry Ford' or 'Hollywood.'" But how accurate was Criswell? Well, his record speaks for itself: "Meteor destroys London [in] 1988"; "I predict embalming by radar, where the body is turned to indestructable stone"; "I predict that by 1980 you will be able to lift your own face in your own home for only $5.00."
1999 (Edgar Cayce): The "sleeping prophet" pinpointed 1999 as the year of the Armageddon, to be followed by the New Age and the Second Coming of Christ. In between, we can expect a number of Hollywood comet/meteor movie-style special effects: A shift in the earth's axis leading to melting polar caps and the sinking of England and Japan. Also, the destruction of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York by earthquakes and floods, making it difficult for big-city swells to continue to sneer at small-town America; on the plus side, Atlantis will rise up from the depths of the ocean, opening an entirely new real estate market; and as if that weren't enough, Christ will initiate a "New Age of Peace." Of course, Cayce's loose time line will allow Armageddon to slip until 2001 or 2002, if absolutely necessary.
2000ish (Jack Van Impe): The perpetually grinning televangelist is, well, impish when it comes to naming dates: He won't do it. He does, however, offer an "Overview of Major Future Events" somewhat more convoluted than a Thomas Pynchon novel: The Antichrist takes center stage during the seven-year tribulation, followed by sundry judgments, "War in Heaven," and the "battle of Armageddon" (neatly illustrated on Van Impe's Internet web site as a horde of marauding Huns), the Second Coming, more judgments, and a thousand years of peace with "Satan Bound," a period that closes with "Satan Loosed," again, kind of like the surprise return of Freddy Kruger at the very end of those slasher movies, after you think he's already been killed. It's all very confusing (did I enter the millennium in a mortal body, or do I need to trade up for resurrection?) which undoubtedly helps Van Impe sell those twenty dollar explanatory videos.
May 5, 2000 (Richard W. Noone): The author of the book 5/5/2000: Ice - The Ultimate Disaster, is refreshingly specific: "On May 5 of the year 2000, Mercury, Venus, Mars Jupiter and Saturn will be aligned with the earth for the first time in 6,000 years. On that day the ice buildup at the South Pole will upset the earth's axis, sending trillions of tons of ice in the water sweeping over the surface of our planet." Though the book jacket claims that "astonishing evidence points to worldwide disaster in our lifetime," said evidence turns out to be culled mostly from the works of fringe scientists such as Emanuel Velikofsky, making It likely that 5/5/2000's major event will be El Torrito's Cinco de Mayo happy hour.
2000 or 2007 or 2048 (Hal Lindsey): The bestselling author of our day (more sales than Stephen King) is bearish when it comes to setting the big date. In his earlier books (including The Late, Great Planet Earth), however, the modern bard of Christian Apocalypse did let a few numbers loose: Armageddon in the year 2000 and the Second Coming of Christ in 2007 (forty years after the reunification of Jerusalem). However, Lindsey has also cited 2048 (see Bede below) as a possible drop deadline.
2001 (Uranus Society): Per interstellar thought messages received by Southern California UFO disciples, a "Pleiadean starship will land on a rising portion of Atlantis in the area of the Bermuda Triangle…in the year 2001!" At that point, Earth will become the final world to join "an alignment of 33 planets," forming an "Interplanetary Confederation for the Spiritual Renaissance of Humankind on Earth!" Though our Pleiadean "Space Brothers" are wise to tie their arrival to the classic Stanley Kubrick film, the previous E.T.A. for ET of 1985 (when neither starships nor star children showed up) proved that Unarians aren't averse to issuing a cosmic raincheck.
2003 (Kalki Avatar): According to the Hindu calendar, the Sree Vishiva Karma Veera Narayana Murthy, avatar of Krishna, will arrive in 2003 to establish the reihn of dharma (Righteousness). "He will rule over the universe for a period of 108 years, and return to His abode, Vaikunta. Preceding that, the world will be full of calamities and situations will be changing every instant." For example, from 1999 to 2003, we can expect a "rain of blood in towns, villages and forests. Poor quality coins will be used as currencies. The males of goat and ox will sport mammary organs, and will be milked. Blood will flow from the limbs of elephants and horses….Many incurable diseases will be present. A man will have ten women after him, which will result in extreme behaviour in human beings."
December 21, 2012 (Mayan Calendar): Turns out the "Harmonic Convergence" of 1987 wasn't a bust, after all; it opened a transitional period of cosmic change that will culminate on the day of the winter solstice in the year 2012. So forecasts Jose Arguelles, the New Age visionary who organized the harmonic festivities of a decade ago. Arguelles is not alone in pinpointing 2012 as the date of the looming end-time. A convergence of New Age thinkers has arrived at the same fateful date, based on the Mayan "Long Count" calendar, a kind of mystical Daytimer which measures a "Great Cycle" of 5,125 years and which runs out of refill pages on - mark your calendar - December 21, 2012. Most Mayan calendar counters expect major "earth changes" of the cataclysmic, rising-Atlantis, sinking - Los Angeles variety. Because the Mayans synchronized their calendar to the skies, spectacular astrological alignments are expected in 2012. Per Arguelles, the year 2012 will transport humankind from the "third dimension" to the "fourth dimension," a new galactic state of consciousness. Other Mayan calendar countdowns peg the New Age apocalypse to December 22, 2012.
2058 (Bede the Venerable): The eighth-century theologian calculated that Jesus was born 3,942 years after the creation of the world, which means that the six thousand-year millennial week will end in 2058. So far no one has decided to champion Bede. Alas, latter-day millenarians seem uninterested in his old-school dating.
2076 (Year of the Haj): 2076 is the year 1500, according to the Muslim calendar, which has led several Sufi sects to declare 2076 as the end day. My prediction: American Tricentennial hype will probably overshadow the Muslim eschaton.
2240 (Jewish Calendar): The year 2240 is the year 6000, according to the Jews. If by then the other doomsday scenarios haven't swept us into either the dustbin of history of a state of cosmological harmony, nothing is going to knock us off our self-satisfied perch. Except maybe the Klingons.
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