Ripper Read online

  According to Douglas’s Web site, serial killers will take trophies or keep some kind of memento of their crimes. Sometimes a killer will keep a victim’s jewelry—something she was wearing at the time of the crime. It could even be something like a driver’s license or other ID or even a photo the victim carried with her, Douglas explained. Some serial killers might cut off some of a victim’s hair and keep it. When a serial killer commits a murder, he feels a sense of accomplishment; he feels so good that he doesn’t want the feeling to end. Serial killers collect trophies, Douglas said, to keep up the fantasy of the crime.

  While Mailhot didn’t keep those kind of trophies, he did keep souvenirs of his kills, like the pillow he used to smother Audrey Harris, the clothes he wore when he cut up the women’s bodies and the saw he used to dismember Stacie Goulet. Mailhot also apparently put a little dot of Stacie’s blood on the July 4 entry on a calendar on his refrigerator.

  Douglas said that during the cooling-off period between murders, serial killers will “pull out their trophies and just sit back in their La-Z-Boy chairs and relive the crime over and over in their minds.” That would have been easy for Mailhot, because he actually left the pillow he used to suffocate Audrey on the chair in his living room.

  Not all killers, though, take trophies. David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” for example, didn’t take any tokens, because, unlike Mailhot, whose crimes were up close and personal, Berkowitz’s crimes were very impersonal. He shot and killed his victims from a distance.

  David Berkowitz was born on June 1, 1953. After his arrest in August 1977, he confessed to killing six people and wounding seven others in New York City, from 1976 to 1977. Berkowitz told police that a neighbor’s dog, possessed by a demon, ordered him to commit murder. However, Berkowitz later claimed he only killed three people and wounded one other. He said the other victims were murdered by members of a satanic cult to which he belonged. To this day Berkowitz is the only person ever charged with the murders, but some law enforcement authorities believe he may be telling the truth.

  Although Berkowitz didn’t keep trophies, he visited the grave sites of the victims, where he rolled in the dirt and relived the fantasy of the kill, Douglas said.

  When a serial killer commits his first murder, he views it as quite an accomplishment; it makes him feel so good about what he’s done that he doesn’t want the feeling to end, Douglas said. For killers, taking mementos keeps the fantasy alive.

  Douglas also came up with terms to describe the different types of crime scenes: organized, disorganized or mixed.

  According to Douglas, when a crime scene appears organized, it is usually premeditated and there is not much evidence found at the scene. Typically, an organized criminal has an antisocial personality. He knows right from wrong and is not insane. He is also someone who will not show any remorse for his crimes.

  In contrast, a disorganized crime scene indicates that the criminal did not plan his crime. The disorganized criminal is more likely to be caught than the organized criminal, because he often leaves evidence like fingerprints, blood and semen at the crime scene, Douglas said. A disorganized crime scene may mean that the perpetrator is young, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, mentally ill or, for some reason, has trouble controlling the victim, according to Douglas.

  There are also crime scenes that are both organized and disorganized, Douglas said. By way of example, Douglas points to the case of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, for which O.J. Simpson was tried and acquitted.

  Douglas said although the crime scene appeared to be very premeditated—the perpetrator brought the weapon, gloves and a hat to the scene—it also appeared disorganized, because even though the crime was planned out, the murderer didn’t expect to be confronted by another person. Therefore, the murderer lost control over the situation, and the appearance of the crime and crime scene shifted from organized to disorganized, Douglas said. In addition, a mixed crime scene might indicate that more than one person was involved in the crime, he said.

  Like everyone else, a killer learns from experience, Douglas said. And if you don’t catch him right away, he’ll probably get better at killing. The Woonsocket police were lucky they got the break that led them to Jeffrey Mailhot, because there’s no telling how many more women he would have murdered if he wasn’t caught. He even admitted to police that he would have kept on killing. And even if Mailhot had sought counseling to find out why he had become a murderer, he never would have gotten better.

  According to Douglas, serial killers can never be rehabilitated, because they don’t think the way the rest of us do. Because of that, their brains can’t be reprogrammed—no matter how much counseling or treatment they have. Douglas said all you can do is write them off.

  Mailhot was no different from any other serial killer in that regard.

  “Mailhot had psychological problems,” Sergeant Ed Lee said later. “We sat there and interviewed him and we tried to find those answers ourselves. He even said, ‘My parents died at a young age, but a lot of peoples’ parents die at a young age, and they don’t kill people.’ A lot of people say it’s [a serial killer’s] inability to love, because they weren’t loved as a child. Obviously, he also had some obsessive/compulsive issues and some underlying mental-health issues that we don’t know about.”

  Lee said what Mailhot described in his interview with police fit the profile of a serial killer.

  “They live out this fantasy in their minds, time and time and time again, and then when they get up enough courage to act upon it, it becomes like someone smoking crack for the first time. They’re addicted, and that’s it,” Lee said. “[Mailhot] admitted that he wasn’t going to stop. It was going to be more frequent and he said it was something that he couldn’t control.”

  Lee said what was so intriguing about Mailhot was that the people who knew him—his neighbors, his coworkers and his family—thought the police were out of their minds to think that he could murder three women.

  “It was that whole ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ thing,” Lee said. “People didn’t want to believe that someone could be so friendly to them and be such a good guy, but who was actually a monster deep down inside and was capable of doing those things.”

  One of the most notorious serial killers in history, of course, is “Jack the Ripper.” Although there have been many books written about “Jack the Ripper,” his identity still remains a mystery. Because of the way Mailhot cut up his victims, a comparison to “Jack the Ripper” was inevitable. Although the two men dismembered their victims for very different reasons, they both murdered the same type of women—prostitutes.

  For a six-week period in the late summer and early fall of 1888, “Jack the Ripper” murdered and mutilated five prostitutes. Jack was never caught—despite a massive manhunt by law enforcement. And unlike almost all other serial killers, including Jeffrey Mailhot, “Jack the Ripper” just seemed to vanish.

  Jack stalked and killed his victims on weekends. Maybe that meant he was a regular working stiff during the week. It almost defies belief that he was never caught and that he left very few clues behind.

  Like the serial killers who came after him, including Jeff Mailhot, Jack was probably a nice-looking guy, able to convince the women he ultimately murdered to go off with him.

  And like today’s investigators, police handling the murders committed by Jack developed a working theory of the killer, a psychological profile, if you will. He was thought to be a single white male, between twenty and forty years old. Because it didn’t appear that his victims struggled with him, and because they had no defensive wounds, police figured that Jack was a normal-looking, respectable guy who overpowered his victims and killed them quickly.

  The difference between Mailhot and Jack was that Jack killed his victims so he could mutilate them, while Mailhot killed to kill and dismembered his victims in order to more easily dispose of their bodies.

  In 1988, one hundred years after the
Ripper murders, the Institute of Forensic Sciences developed an FBI psychological profile of Jack. Those experts said “Jack the Ripper” was male, in his late twenties, and lived in the area where the murders occurred. They believed he was employed and didn’t have a family, because he was out late on the weekends. And they figured he was most likely a loner.

  Sounds like Mailhot. However, unlike Mailhot, London police thought Jack might have been in some minor trouble with the law. And they thought he might have been abused by his mother when he was a child. There was never any indication that Mailhot had been abused.

  London’s East End and the Whitechapel section of the city, with its run-down shops and rooming houses, where Jack picked up his victims, could be compared to the area around Arnold Street in Woonsocket, where Mailhot picked up his victims.

  Both men were drawn to those places because of the prostitutes that walked the streets. For Mailhot, Jack and many other serial killers, these working women were perfect victims. For one thing, they were used to going with strangers, and for another thing, they probably didn’t have families who would even miss them.

  Jack’s first victim was Mary Ann Nichols, born Mary Ann Walker. She was forty-three when Jack murdered her in the early-morning hours of August 31, 1888. Jack slit Mary Ann’s throat from ear to ear, mutilated her body and left her on the street, where she was found by a local police officer. Unlike Mailhot, Jack didn’t care about getting rid of his victims.

  Jack’s second victim was Annie Smith Chapman, forty-seven. Annie married John Chapman in 1869 and the couple had three children, two girls and a boy. One daughter, Emily Ruth, died of meningitis when she was just twelve years old.

  Sometime in 1884 or 1885, Annie and her husband agreed to separate. Some said it was because of her “drunken and immoral ways.” Whatever the reason, Annie found her way to a rooming house in Whitechapel and sometimes sold herself in order to pay for her bed.

  On the evening of September 7, and the early-morning hours of September 8, 1888, Annie was forced to turn to prostitution to pay for her night’s lodging. But Annie went back to her room and her body was found nearby, shortly before 6:00 A.M. on September 8. Police believed she had been choked to death because her face and tongue were swollen. She had nearly been decapitated and her insides had been cut out. Her intestines had been placed on her shoulder and her female organs had been cut out and were nowhere to be found. But the killer made no attempt to hide or remove her body.

  After Annie was killed, police and local residents believed her murder was committed by the same person who murdered Mary Ann. But then three weeks went by without another murder and residents were lulled into a false sense of security. But like most serial killers, Jack was just biding his time before he struck again.

  And strike again he did—with even more rage. Woonsocket police always believed that had Mailhot continued his murdering ways, his attacks would have also become more violent.

  Elizabeth Stride, forty-five, was Jack’s next victim. Again, much like Audrey, Christine and Stacie, she had family problems and ended up living in a rooming house in Whitechapel, around 1882. By 1888, she had been arrested for prostitution and public drunkenness. On the evening of September 29 she left her rooming house and was seen at various places during the night and in the early morning hours of September 30. But the last time anyone saw her alive was about 12:45 A.M. At the time she was with a man outside on a local street. She was found around 1:00 A.M. by a man driving his horse and cart. Her assailant had slit her throat, but he had not mutilated her body.

  Shortly after Elizabeth was found, police discovered the mutilated body of forty-six-year-old Catherine Eddowes. Like Jack’s other victims, Catherine’s throat was slit. Her killer had also sliced up her face and removed her intestines, one of her kidneys and her womb.

  Then Jack took another brief hiatus until November, when he killed again with a vengeance. It was probably because he was losing his grasp on reality and no longer had much control over his actions. His need to kill grew stronger and the killings became more frequent—something that would have happened to Mailhot, had he not been caught. His need to kill would have overpowered his life and he would have had to kill more and more women just to feel normal.

  The youngest of Jack’s official victims was Mary Jane Kelly, twenty-five, who was murdered on November 9, 1888. Family issues had caused Mary Jane to turn to prostitution to support herself. Mary Jane was found shortly before eleven that morning. She was lying on the bed in her room. Her throat had been slit and she was nearly decapitated. Her killer had slit open her stomach and removed her breasts. Her arms had been mutilated and her face hacked so severely that she was no longer recognizable. Because there were no defensive wounds, investigators believed she had been murdered while she was sleeping.

  Of course, “Jack the Ripper” was never caught and no one knows his identity. Many have speculated he was a well-known figure of the time, but who knows? Maybe he was just a regular guy, like Jeffrey Mailhot, with an insatiable appetite for murder.

  Today, when most people think of serial killers, the first name they think of is Ted Bundy. Before he was put to death in 1989, Bundy confessed to murdering dozens of young women in a number of states over four years in the 1970s.

  On the surface Bundy, like Mailhot, didn’t fit the profile of a homicidal maniac. He was intelligent, confident, politically astute and attractive. But what caused Bundy to embark on his killing spree?

  Theodore “Ted” Robert Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946. Born to an unwed mother, his grandparents raised him and tried to hide the fact that he was illegitimate by pretending his mother was his sister. Unlike Mailhot, Bundy seemed anything but normal as a child. He tortured animals, was obsessed with knives, engaged in voyeurism and became a compulsive thief. Some speculate it was the breakup with his first girlfriend that caused Bundy to begin his murderous rampage because his victims resembled her.

  Just before he was executed on January 24, 1989, Bundy granted an interview to psychologist James Dobson. During that interview Bundy talked about how he developed his compulsive behavior and also discussed how his addiction to hard-core pornography fueled his crimes.

  As with Mailhot, alcohol unleashed the murderous monster in him, Bundy said. And like Mailhot, Bundy grew up in a good home and was not abused in any way. Bundy told Dobson he didn’t want anyone to accuse his family of contributing to his criminal behavior. Bundy explained that although he took responsibility for his actions, he said his introduction to pornography contributed to his violent behavior.

  Bundy told Dobson that he was a normal person who had good friends. Bundy said he led a normal life, except for his destructive addiction to pornography—an addiction that he kept hidden from people close to him.

  Bundy said that as his addiction to porn grew, he needed more and more explicit material. Then, he explained to Dobson, that there came a point where just looking at pornography no longer satisfied him and he realized he couldn’t control his sexual fantasy any longer and he needed to find an outlet for his destructive energy.

  Some of Bundy’s comments to Dobson are remarkably similar to Mailhot’s comments to Lee and Nowak.

  Bundy said when he woke up in the morning after murdering someone and realized what he had done with a clear mind, he was absolutely horrified. He said there was no way to describe the urge to murder, and once that urge had been satisfied, how it felt to become “himself” again.

  Like Mailhot, Bundy wasn’t some bum or pervert whom people could look at and immediately determine there was something wrong with him. He said he was a normal person who had good friends and led a normal life, except for the fact that he had been influenced by pornographic violence to commit murder. Bundy told Dobson that an FBI study on serial murder indicates that the most common interest among serial killers was pornography. However, Mailhot and Bundy differed in that respect—Mailhot never mentioned that he was addicted to pornography or t
hat it played a part in his murderous behavior.

  Bundy, though, told Dobson that had he not been addicted to pornography, he and his victims and their families would have been better off. He said he was absolutely certain he would not have been driven to murder without the influence of violent pornography.

  When asked by Dobson if he felt remorse for murdering so many people, Bundy said he did. But like Mailhot, he seemed to feel more remorse for the families of his victims than for the victims themselves. When Dobson asked him to talk about the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, Bundy said it was too painful to talk about, but he said he hoped someday the families of his victims could find in their hearts to forgive him, although he didn’t expect that.

  Although Mailhot and Bundy seemed to share some similar traits, Mailhot had much more in common with another prolific serial killer known as the “Green River Killer.”

  Given Mailhot’s statement to police that he would have continued killing if he had not been caught, it’s quite possible that he could have become another Gary Leon Ridgway, also known as the “Green River Killer.”

  Gary Ridgway, born February 18, 1949, is one of the most prolific serial killers this country has ever seen. He was arrested on November 30, 2001, and initially charged with killing four women, whose murders were attributed to the “Green River Killer.” Then two years later, Ridgway pleaded guilty to murdering forty-eight women.

  Like Mailhot, Ridgway also murdered women involved in street prostitution. When Ridgway confessed to police, he told them that he had actually murdered more than the forty-eight victims he was charged with killing.

  Although police could never really figure out exactly why Ridgway killed so many women, they said that some of his admissions indicated that he was deeply psychopathic. However, they said, he didn’t suffer from any mental disease or defect that would absolve him from responsibility for the murders. According to police, there was nothing in Ridgway’s past—except for the murders—that suggested he was mentally ill. The same could be said of Jeffrey Mailhot.