First Discovery
A call came in to the police dispatcher in Kansas City, Missouri, on a Saturday morning on Easter weekend in 1988. It was just after April Fool’s Day, a day for pranks, but this one sounded real enough: a naked man running around a neighborhood. Prank or not, it was easy for the patrol unit in the area to check out.
And not only was it no joke, it was the start of a long investigation that was to become increasingly disturbing and bizarre.
The cops were already familiar with certain crimes involving people engaged in sexual bondage, who ended up going too far. In such cases, one person might want something that the other person did not, and the only way to avoid it was to escape. It appeared that this naked man had done just that. In fact, something appeared to be tied around his neck. As the cops drew closer, they saw he was wearing a dog collar with a red leash attached.
Two patrol cars converged on the man. Given their experience, they were already forming ideas of what they faced and how to deal with it.
The nude man could barely talk and his foot appeared to be injured. His eyes were swollen and red, and he seemed to have trouble seeing in the daylight. When the officers asked him what had happened, it was clear that he was in terrible distress and still shaken from some as-yet-unknown ordeal.
A parking meter man told police he had seen the man actually jump out of a second-floor window from a home directly across the street. The address was 4315 Charlotte Street. It was the meter man who had asked a neighbor to call the police.
On closer inspection, according to Jackman and Cole in Rites of Burial, the definitive account of the case, the dazed man bore scars around his eyes and mouth and on his wrists. The officers covered him with a blanket. When he was able, he told them his name, Chris Bryson, and then went into some detail about the place from which he had just escaped. For some reason, he lied and said that he had been picked up by a man and a woman, but he later said that it had just been one person.
The 22-year-old admitted that he’d been invited to a “party” by a man in a brown Toyota and was taken to this house. Because he did not want police to view him as a male prostitute, he did not tell them the area where he had been picked up—which was indeed where male hookers plied their trade. Bryson’s encounter with the man occurred several days earlier, at around midnight on March 29. Since that time, he had been subjected to one form of brutality after another. With a show of emotion, Bryson said that he was certain he would have been killed if he hadn’t escaped.
The driver, an older man, had said his name was Bob, and started drinking beers in the car. As they came to the house, Bryson saw that it was a three-story affair with the number clearly visible. He didn’t expect to have any trouble with the man. At 5-foot-10, if they got into a scrap, he believed he could handle himself. Bob was taller than him but paunchy and out of shape.
Inside, the place was a mess. Junk was piled up in several rooms, and it smelled strongly of dogs and feces. Bob showed him around, saying he’d been an art student and he liked to collect things. He invited Bryson to go upstairs, using some excuse about getting away from his dogs. Bryson acquiesced and went up the steps first.
As he reached the top landing, he came in for a harsh surprise. A strong blow to the back of his head sent him falling forward. Dazed, he tried to turn and defend himself, but his host was fast. He felt the prick of a needle in his neck and knew that Bob was injecting him with something. But he couldn’t fight. He couldn’t move. In short order, he blacked out.
Bryson woke up and found himself on a bed, tied spread-eagle to the bed posts. He had no clothes on and he had no idea how much time had passed. As he fell back into blackness, he was unaware that Bob was placing the dog collar around his neck and tying him quite firmly into place with a sash-like material. He also did not know until later that Bob had taken his picture in various positions, had poked and prodded him, and had described the entire incident in shorthand in a journal.
Bob began to play with his unconscious sex slave. He touched him in intimate places and used his restrained body for sexual gratification. Then he gave him another shot to keep him unconscious and bound his head in a pillowcase. He made a careful record of everything he did.
By the time Bryson revived once more, he had been in Bob’s home for about seven hours. The sun was peeking into the room, so he knew he’d been there far longer than he’d ever intended and he wondered what his wife must be thinking. He felt the cloth stuffed into his mouth that served as a gag and wondered what was going to happen to him. He struggled and felt the restraints tighten quite firmly. He realized with a growing sense of dread that he was not going to be able to free himself. But his movement brought Bob into the room.
Bryson hoped for an explanation or some sign that this was just a game that would soon end, but he was disappointed.
Bob loosened the pillow case to expose Bryson’s face and he realized from his blurred vision that he’d been heavily drugged. He tried to make a pleading sound to appeal to Bob’s sense of mercy, but it did no good. In fact, it was probably what he should not have done, for it drew a terrible response: Bob began to jab Bryson in the eyes with his finger. Then he got some substance that had a strong odor and used a Q-tip to dab it into Bryson’s eyes. It stung badly. No matter how Bryson tried, he was unable to block his tormenter from experimenting on him. He had no choice but to endure whatever the man dreamed up. He suffered the pain while trying desperately to think of a way to escape.
But the eye treatment was nothing compared to what came next.
When a sexual sadist goes looking for a partner, says former FBI profiler Robert R. Hazelwood, he generally has a certain type of person in mind. In Dark Dreams, a book devoted to the violent fantasies that drive rapists and killers, Hazelwood discusses the notion of a sexual slave. While he mostly discusses women as the victims, the same idea applies to men looking for men.
Sadists seek traits that make a person appear vulnerable—youth, low self-esteem, inexperience, ambivalence, recent trauma, or naiveté. Once they have zeroed in on a target, they begin the seduction. They’ll be friendly, and will perhaps offer gifts or a place to stay. They’ll seem harmless, genial, and even attractive. Some sadists draw out the courtship, but others take quick advantage and go right to the punishment stage.
Bob sat on Bryson, as Jackman and Cole depict, and used an iron bar to smack at Bryson’s bound hands. Then he got off and started doing something that Bryson could not see down near his groin. Soon his intention was clear: He had attached an electrical device to Bryson’s testicles and thigh. Bryson waited in horror, unable even to shout through the gag, and then felt a sudden strong jolt of electricity going through his lower torso. The pain in his hands from the beating he’d sustained snapped through his body to his thighs and he gave a muffled scream of agony.
As he reacted, he saw a flash of light and heard a whirring sound, the noise of a Polaroid camera. Bob was taking pictures of him in these humiliating, involuntary poses. Now Bryson was certain that he’d come into the hands of someone he’d only heard about in strange and scary tales—a sexual sadist who was unlikely to ever let him go. Bryson had no idea how to react; he could not believe he’d been so easily tricked into this position.
Once Bob’s fun was over, he gave his victim two more shots, one of which hurt badly. He warned Bryson that if he shouted or made any other noise, the next shot would go into his vocal chords. Bryson seemed to have no choice other than to obey as he passed out once again.
The next thing he knew, he had a fever and Bob had returned. He instructed Bryson that he was now a sex toy and was never going anywhere again. His punishments had been administered to make sure he understood his place. They were always ready and they could get worse. If he resisted too much, he could “end up in the trash” like the “others.”
And there were more instructions, all intended to make Bryson utterly subservient to Bob. He could choose to cooperate and receive some comfort or he could remain tied to the bed and be used as Bob desired—and also abused.
Bryson tried to play along, but he watched for any opportunity to get out.
For the next four days, he remained at Bob’s house, alternately being drugged, bound, tortured with shocks, and sexually assaulted. He was always tied to the bed with the dog collar and leash, even when a hand or foot was freed. Bob sometimes injected his throat with drain cleaner and sometimes hit him with the iron bar. He also warned Bryson that others before him had died for misbehavior. To prove this, he showed Bryson photographs of men who looked deceased. They might have been just sleeping, but Bryson could not tell.
But one day Bob made a mistake. He allowed Bryson to have his hands tied in front of him rather than to the iron bars on the bed, and once he was gone from the house, Bryson managed to get free and escape.
Now he was safe, with the police. Bob could no longer reach him. He did not yet know that the nightmares would remain with him for a long time to come.
The next step for investigators was questioning the man who owned the house on Charlotte Street, whom they soon learned was Robert Berdella. They had Chris Bryson’s side of the story, and it was quite a story, but just because he had reported it did not make it true. They would withhold judgment until they had more information. They had to consider their approach to the person who was being accused of some atrocious crimes.
Berdella was away, so the uniformed officers assigned to the job waited for him to return. When he did, walking up to their car dressed in a black shirt, they immediately arrested him on the suspicion of sexual assault and asked if he would sign a consent form to allow them to search his home.
Berdella asked for more information about why they were bothering him and when they informed him that they did not have to explain anything, he refused to allow them into the house. They did tell him that a man named Christopher had reported the incident, and he seemed incredulous. They warned Berdella that he did not have to talk and had a right to have an attorney present. At the station, Berdella contacted one.
For the moment, the police were working under the impression that this “crime” might be no more than a lovers’ quarrel, with one person turning against the other and dragging the police into it. Such motives were not uncommon and Berdella’s reaction had been consistent within that context. But police assigned to the case were careful to do the investigation by the book, in the event the incident turned into something unexpected. If Berdella really had held Bryson in his home for several days against his will, torturing him in unspeakable ways and warning him that he might die, they wanted answers to some key questions: What had been his intention and would they discover more victims?
To get into Berdella’s house without getting attacked by his dogs, they requested the services of animal control officers. Then a squad of detectives and uniformed officers kicked in the door. Three Chow Chow dogs were found and taken out of the trash-littered home. Detectives then got to work.
Nothing stood out on the first floor, so they climbed to the second floor to start going through the bedrooms, with the awareness that Bryson had reported being tortured in an area upstairs.
Just as Bryson had described, they found a closed room with a bed and a television. On the bed were some burned ropes, which Bryson said he had lighted with discarded matches to free himself, and some bindings tied to the bars on the headboard. Upon closer examination, it was clear that those bars had been well worn by something like a great deal of rubbing by these bindings. Jackman and Cole use this detail to foreshadow what was to come by hinting that Bryson’s treatment had been done there before, perhaps many times.
Near the bed was some sort of electrical device, plugged in, with wires that led to the bed. The police also found syringes on a tray on a table, prepared and ready. A bottle of eye drops and a bottle of what appeared to be a liquid drug sat with them. Pornographic magazines lay on the floor.
It was all pretty much as Bryson had told them—his captor had been injecting him as he was tied to the bed. Corroborating another part of his story, the window was damaged as well. But that did not yet mean that this scenario could not be evidence of some perverse game between lovers.
In the adjoining room, the searchers found a box full of Polaroid snapshots of Bryson, who appeared to be frightened and suffering. They catalogued everything methodically, still believing that there would be a mundane motive behind it all.
But then things shifted. Inside another room, which appeared to be Berdella’s bedroom, detectives discovered two human skulls and two envelopes full of teeth. That was jarring. Then back in the torture room, they found a collection of audiotapes, what appeared to be a log or notebook full of scribbled notes that looked like code, and more photographs.
But these were not of Bryson. They depicted other males, also bound and assaulted. One of them looked dead.
An examination of the log, as detailed in Giannangelo’s analysis of serial crimes, revealed a meticulous mind with a clear need for control. The scribbler had made notes about what he had done to a victim and whether or not there was a reaction. If the reaction was verbal, he recorded the exact words the person had said. If he made an injection, he noted what it was and how much he had given. The sexual assaults were easy to decipher, and each one was accompanied by a notion regarding the victim’s response. In peculiar shorthand, he jotted the times, the victim’s slightest movement, whether the victim was aware of things being done to him, and sometimes an ominous notation, “DD” or “86.” After that, for each person, there was nothing more, aside form the date and time of this unexplained event.
To find out where they stood, police called in additional personnel, including forensic anthropologist Dr. Michael Finnegan from Kansas State University. The crime scene unit had already arrived and they were busy dusting for fingerprints. They collected bed sheets from the suspect bed, the pillowcase that Bryson had described having over his head, and items that appeared to be bloodstained.
When Dr. Finnegan arrived that evening, he examined the skulls and said that one was old and was probably a fake curio purchased from somewhere, but the other one was recent and human. The teeth appeared to be associated with that skull and he estimated it to be from a young male.
Another search warrant was sought, but this time for suspected murder.
More photographs turned up, along with more written records, and a wallet with a man’s name in it that was not Berdella’s turned out to be a missing person. Then newspaper articles about another missing man were discovered on a table. Even worse, a fresh area of cement had been poured in the basement’s concrete floor.
This case was no lovers’ quarrel or even just a case of sexual assault. Something much larger was happening. Now, on the suspicion of murder, they could look through the entire house. The crime scene personnel suited up to protect themselves from bacteriological contamination, should they turn up a body. No one knew what to think and it was better for them that they not form any hypotheses just yet.
In another closet, the officers found a bag full of human vertebrae. These were sent to the lab for analysis. All around the house, they found pieces of paper on which the names of men were written, and a man’s passport. They traded theories about how to interpret what they were finding, alternating between murder and extreme sexual practices, but they worked for hours without finding something that resolved this issue.
Weird masks and books on occultic practices gave an ominous cast to it all. That brought in a police officer who knew a lot about satanic crimes. She made notes about suspicious items and prepared to track down what they might mean in sexual or death rituals.
Another team got a warrant to search through Berdella’s pseudo-Goth hippie shop in another part of town, Bob’s Bazaar Bizarre. There he sold folk art and weird artifacts, from lava lamps to roach clips. The place turned up nothing. His car, too, offered no clues.
Officers questioned neighbors about suspicious events, says Harold Schechter in The Serial Killer Files, and they received the answers typical of those who have seen no evidence of a depraved mind. Neighbors thought of Bob Berdella as a friendly, quiet man who had assisted in programs like “Crime Watch.” He had told people that he invited troubled young men to his home to help them when they had nowhere else to go. One neighbor did think it was odd that Berdella worked in his backyard garden after dark, and in Mortal Evidence Cyril Wecht writes that some acquaintances were concerned about how junky things were getting around the Berdella house.
It turned out that Berdella had actually been investigated in 1985, three years earlier, over the disappearance of two young men, Jerry Howell, 19, who went missing in July 1984, and James Ferris, 25, who vanished in September 1985. A man named Todd Stoops had informed police that he had seen both men with Bob Berdella. Police had advised Stoops, who had stayed in Berdella’s home on several occasions, never to go back. Eventually he, too, disappeared.
During the investigation for Ferris and Howell, Berdella admitted knowing them but denied any wrongdoing. Police kept him under surveillance for a while but eventually dropped the investigation for lack of leads or evidence against Berdella.
To detain Berdella while they continued to search, the police charged him with nine felony counts and the judge ordered him held without bond. On April 4, 1988, Berdella was arraigned on seven counts of sodomy, one count of felonious restraint, and one count of first degree assault.
Attention was focused on Berdella’s backyard, especially when it appeared that one area had recently been worked on. That area looked too small to contain a body, but a team brought in a backhoe and started to excavate. They set out to work carefully to avoid damaging evidence that might be buried there. But the second time the shovel went into the ground, it pulled out what they were looking for: the clear stench of death and another human skull. Or rather, a head. It had some tissue and hair still clinging to it, as well as a vertebra.
Detectives wondered if they were faced with a case like that of John Wayne Gacy in Chicago in 1978, where bodies were found in the crawlspace beneath his house and in areas around his yard. They continued to search for bodies.
It became an urgent matter now to ascertain whether these skulls had belonged to any of the men whose names and possessions had been found in the house—men who had been reported missing.
Even as detectives were working on identifications, the skulls were submitted to chemical dating tests at the University of Kansas. Under Dr. Finnegan’s guidance, the team there estimated that the skull was that of a male between 25 and 36 when he had died. He might have been dead anywhere from six weeks to 10 months. The vertebra showed evidence of cutting with some implement, such as a knife or saw.
The skull from the closet was estimated to have been that of a man between the age of 21 and 32, and he had likely been dead for about a year and a half.
In neither case could anyone determine a cause of death. They would need the bodies for that—and even then, unless there had been clear damage to the bone, they might not be able to give a definitive statement on that matter.
A chainsaw seized from the home was taken to the crime lab for analysis. The analysts found traces of human blood, hair, and flesh. All of this was carefully preserved.
Berdella’s background was excavated as well. Born in Ohio on January 31, 1949, he had been raised a Catholic. His father worked in a factory and his mother had been an ordinary homemaker. He had been a good student, especially in art. When he was 16, his father had died, devastating Bobby and souring him on his religion. He became a loner, aware at a young age that he was gay. He moved to Kansas City in 1967 to attend the art institute. He hoped to become a professor but instead became a chef. He also took on small-time drug peddling and for that and drug possession he was twice arrested, but he served no time. He purchased the house on Charlotte Street and began collecting artifacts and oddities. Ending his career as a chef, he devoted himself to his store.
Investigators continued to dig in the backyard to find bodies. The original hole, where the head was found, yielded a few more vertebrae but no other bones. They had divided the area into grids, working them with a group of police academy recruits one plot at a time. They were certain the place was filled with deceased victims, but further efforts proved unproductive. They found a few animal bones, writes Wecht, and some glass jars filled with bird feathers (which Berdella later claimed he had no knowledge of).
In the basement, crime scene technicians prepared to have a proper look for evidence there. They had seen what appeared to be items spotted with blood that had dripped from the ceiling, so they made some decisions about what they had to do.
Aside from drops of blood on items sitting in the cellar, detectives found a large area on the floor in one corner that glowed blue when sprayed with the fluorescing chemical. It appeared the blood that had been there probably settled into the cement. That was good indication that someone had bled a lot. They took photographs. Then they brought a bucket and some other containers down from a gardening shed. These they also sprayed with Luminol, which only fluoresces in a darkened area, and found the clear indication that they had contained blood.
They broke up the cement where it appeared that someone had repaired a spot, fully expecting to find a body buried beneath.
Once they had torn up the backyard and found nothing, they turned their attention to the front. Digging carefully, they looked for even the tiniest bone fragments or teeth, anything that could tell them if Berdella had used the yard to hide evidence. As they worked, they knew there had been speculation that Berdella had fed human remains to his dogs. Finding meat in his freezer that bore no labels, they sent it out for testing. The results indicated that it was beef.
While neighbors knew very little about Berdella’s secret life, it seemed clear to detectives that one population in the city would likely know much more: the available men who hung out in areas where they could be picked up by other men for “dates.” Getting them to talk was dicey, since their trade was illegal and some even had families and did not want their business exposed. Many were addicted to drugs.
Several did talk, nonetheless, and it was clear to police that Berdella’s Toyota Tercel was well-known in the area. He often drove through looking for men. Even more interesting was his reputation among these men. They considered him dangerous. Yet no one offered something that the police could use as proof of deeds more nefarious than picking up men.
Still, some names turned up. Todd Stoops, Robert Sheldon, Larry Pearson, and Mike Wallace had all disappeared. Using computerized databases at the FBI, investigators found relatives of the missing men and managed to acquire medical records and dental charts. They also got photographs to compare against the disgusting Polaroids found in Berdella’s home.
They estimated that there were about 20 different men in the more than 300 photographs, and some of them had been identified as different men by different people. The detectives realized that they might not be able to identify them all, and even that some may be alive and well. Certainly, they had found men who had lived in Berdella’s home who had come to no harm. Some had never even been approached for sexual favors, and some who had may have enjoyed the activities. So Berdella had picked only some men as potential slaves, to be held against their will, and of those men, he may have killed only a few. It was difficult to tell.
Both skulls, according to Jackman and Cole, were identified as belonging to specific men whose presence in Berdella’s house could be proven by other means—items that belonged to them, logs of what Berdella had done to them on which he had sometimes written names, and photographs. The skull in the closet, found first, belonged to a young man named Robert Sheldon. The one in the ground was identified as Larry Pearson’s. (Wecht has this order reversed in his book.)
Since Pearson’s identification occurred first, prosecutors charged Berdella with his murder and prepared to seize his home under state forfeiture laws. In evidence, they had photographs, a 58-page diary about the encounter, capture, torture, and apparent deaths of several young men, and the teeth and skulls. Yet they were still preparing and hoping for more evidence, and they fully expected to go to trial. They were in for a surprise.
At his arraignment, in a preemptive move to exploit a legal technicality and take the death penalty off the table, Berdella pleaded guilty to killing Larry Pearson. Prosecutors were caught off guard, says Wecht, but they decided to accept it. They still had another skull that was in the process of being identified, so they could file more charges later.
Berdella admitted to the judge that he had killed Larry Pearson by asphyxiation. He had placed a plastic bag over Pearson’s head, secured it with a rope, and let him die. He acknowledged that he was aware of what he was doing and that it was wrong.
Then Robert Sheldon was identified with dental records. This time, prosecutors notified the court in advance that they were seeking the death penalty, which was their own preemptive strike against Berdella. He pleaded not guilty and the expected trial was now set.
But Berdella’s attorneys offered a deal: Berdella would make a full confession, giving detectives the details about his sadistic assaults and naming names, in exchange for life in prison and for the police dropping their efforts to seize his house.
While the possibility hung over their heads that Berdella might be sitting on a substantial number of unspeakable crimes, prosecutors mulled it over. They wanted to know how many deaths were involved, and the defense attorneys offered only the information that the final toll was no more than a half dozen.
Prosecutors decided to accept the deal and preparations were made to record everything that Berdella revealed. In a small conference room in the basement of the Kansas City jail, under oath, he described what he had done, and the final report, says Wecht (who read it), came to 717 pages.
It was December 13. Two prosecutors, two detectives, two defense attorneys, a court stenographer, and Berdella were seated around a table on folding chairs. It took three long, weary days, but Berdella finally told all.
The crime spree began four years earlier in 1984. All of the victims had been abused and all had died inside the Charlotte Street house.
The first one was Jerry Howell (Wecht spells it as Holwell), with whom Berdella had a prior acquaintance. They had engaged in a sexual relationship for a couple of months. Berdella said that he had assisted Howell in paying for a lawyer and Howell had refused to pay him back. Berdella picked him up on the evening of July 4 and took him home, where he fed the young man a variety of tranquilizers. When Howell passed out, Berdella had sodomized him repeatedly. He used a carrot or cucumber to continue to assault him, and then bound him to keep him at the house. Berdella went to work and returned that evening to repeat the assault. He injected Howell with several substances to keep him subdued, and beat him with a metal rod. At about 10 p.m., Howell died. Berdella claimed that it had surprised him. He had not expected this turn of events and he figured that Howell must have accidentally aspirated his own vomit, triggered by the drugs.
To drain out the blood in preparation for dismemberment, Berdella hung the body upside down by the feet. Because this excited him, he took a lot of photographs. Then he took the body down and used kitchen knives to cut it into manageable pieces. For some parts, he used his chainsaw.
To dispose of Howell, Berdella placed the pieces into bags. He then set them out on the curb, wrapped in several layers of paper and plastic, to be picked up on Monday with the trash. He also bagged and set out Howell’s clothing and the instruments he had used, to get rid of evidence. A week or two passed before he actually sat down and made notes about the incident.
The next victim, Robert Sheldon, had stayed at Berdella’s house several times, and showed up for the last time on April 10, 1985. On that day, he became a captive. Berdella did the same things to Sheldon as he had done to Howell, but this time he added something: an injection of Drano into the left eye. The idea was to permanently blind him to make him a better long-term captive. He also did more damage to Sheldon’s hands with various implements. When it seemed that Sheldon might be discovered by another visitor, Berdella put a bag over his head and suffocated him. That was on April 14, so he had been captive and subjected to these vile treatments for four long days. While Berdella cut him up in the bathtub and put the pieces out with the trash, he kept the head in a freezer for a few days and then buried it in his backyard.
Only a couple of months went by before the next victim, Mark Wallace, stumbled into the viper’s nest. Berdella killed Wallace quickly, after some experimentation with electric shock.
Under questioning about this crime, Berdella considered the influences that might have been a factor. He said that he had seen a film as a teenager called The Collector that had planted a dark fantasy in his mind (he was 16 and it was 1965). The man in the film, based on a novel by John Fowles, is driven by the need to capture a woman and keep her imprisoned while he develops a relationship with her. Eventually she dies and he decides that it was her fault. He ponders what he needs to do with the next captive to make it a better experience for him and then goes in pursuit of her. Berdella said that this movie gave him a framework for feelings he was already having.
That September, when Walter Ferris asked if he could stay at Berdella’s house for a while, he found more than he was looking for. While Berdella was injecting and torturing him, Ferris died from either an overdose or from the wrong combination of drugs. He, too, was cut up and placed on the curb.
Todd Stoops had stayed with Berdella prior to his eventual captivity, but in June 1986, he came into Berdella’s lair for the last time. Berdella injected him and subjected him to sexual assault, including shoving his entire fist into Stoops’ rectum. Eventually, Stoops began to bleed heavily, which was indicative of a rupture. Stoops developed a fever, so Berdella administered several different types of animal antibiotics. He also injected Drano into Stoop’s eyes and voice box, and continued to assault him. Stoops never got better, and on July 1, he died. Berdella cut him up and placed the wrapped body parts in the basement for nearly a week.
The last one to die, Larry Pearson, had been a male prostitute, whom Berdella said he had met in the spring of 1987. He made Pearson a captive near the end of June. Pearson was more cooperative than the other men, so Berdella did not have to use as much “discipline” on him. He said that he kept Pearson around as a sex slave for about six weeks. He even thought of putting the dog collar on him first, before he had used it on Bryson. But finally Pearson had apparently decided that enough was enough and had tried fighting back. Berdella knocked him out to subdue him and he died. This head he also kept and put into the freezer.
Inexplicably, according to Wecht’s report, he had dug up Sheldon’s head and replaced it in the ground with Pearson’s. Taking the skull inside, he had removed the teeth and placed the skull in the closet.
Despite rumors, Berdella insisted to police and later in a media interview that he had not been involved in devil worship and had fed no human flesh or bones to his dogs. (Hickey notes in Serial Killers and Their Victims that there was evidence otherwise regarding the satanic activity.)
On December 19, Berdella returned to court to officially plead guilty to five more murders. To four of them, he pleaded to second-degree murder, but for Robert Sheldon he accepted the charge of first-degree murder. It was not made clear why prosecutors had made this distinction.
But ensconcing Berdella in prison was not the end of the story. The media kept tabs on him and when he complained that roaches invaded his prison cell, one local disc jockey urged listeners to mail more roaches to him. Berdella insisted that reporters had him all wrong; he was human, a good person, despite his terrible acts. To show this, he set up a fund for the families of his victims worth about $50,000 from the sale of his assets, but for one family, that wasn’t good enough. If he wasn’t going to get the death penalty, he was going to be punished in civil court.
Coroner and forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht entered the case in 1992 as part of the civil litigation in a wrongful death suit. He writes about it in Mortal Evidence. The attorneys who hired him represented the family of Todd Stoops and they were suing for a substantial payment.
Todd Stoops was 23 at the time of his death on July 1, 1986. Berdella had used tranquilizer drugs to immobilize his victims and the legal question posed was about his actual intent: Had Berdella wanted merely to torture his victims, with death the unfortunate and unintended result, or had he known all along that the final act would be murder? None of the victims’ bodies had been found, so all of the details had been gleaned from Berdella’s confessions and diaries.
“Obviously,” says Wecht, “this was a very frustrating situation for a scientist.”
The family sued both Berdella and the insurance company, Economy Fire and Casualty, which held the homeowner’s policy on Berdella’s house, for the sum of $1 billion. Clearly, Berdella had killed the young man there, and they felt entitled to payment from his estate. In the end, the jury decided not on $1 billion but $5 billion. The figure was stunning. It was the largest jury award ever handed down in a wrongful death suit.
Berdella did not have that kind of money, so the clear target had been the insurance company. However, their policy covered accidental deaths, not intentional murder. Thus, Wecht was to review the evidence that Berdella had never intended outright murder.
****
This ends the quiz. What follows are the case’s closure and an analysis of sexual sadism.
Dr. Wecht reviewed everything sent to him and offered the Stoops family attorneys his medico-legal opinion. Having degrees in both law and medicine, and having practiced in Pittsburgh as both coroner and forensic pathologist for many years, he brought his entire experience to bear on giving a proper reading of the covert details of physical trauma behind the overt details offered in Berdella’s confession. He also noted that Dr. Shelly Tepper, a board-certified forensic pathologist, had testified at the trial that Stoops had died as the result of a tear and subsequent infection in the anal wall. That’s why he had gotten the fever and had become dehydrated. He had likely died from septic shock. This opinion, too, had been based on Berdella’s description of events and on photographs of Stoops during the course of his deteriorating condition.
While it was impossible to determine the extent of the rectal injury without an actual examination of the remains, the symptoms matched what was known of such a condition. Wecht evaluated whether Berdella had realized that the act of torture could or would be fatal, and decided that with the administration of the antibiotics, Berdella’s desire was to heal Stoops and keep him alive as a sex slave. The administration of Drano, too, indicated intent to keep him alive, because his stated reason for this gesture was for long-term captivity. Since Berdella had no medical background, he was just using what he thought might work, but he was wrong.
Dr. Wecht stated that, in his opinion, Berdella had not intended to kill Todd Stoops. The rupture of the rectal wall was unexpected, as was the subsequent fatal infection. “By definition,” Wecht writes, “that is negligence.”
On October 8, 1992, Berdella died in prison of a heart attack. For his four years of crimes against other men, he had served just four years in prison. On a Web Site, thoughtpeach.com, an article written by someone who lived two blocks from Berdella’s former torture house, it was suggested that recent evidence indicated that he had been poisoned. That evidence was not forthcoming, so the official manner of death remains “natural.” Berdella was buried in the same gravesite with his father in Cuyahoga, Ohio, as detailed on the Find-a-grave Web site.
In 1993, Economy Fire and Casualty Insurance Company settled with the Stoops relatives for $2.5 million. (Another source says $18 million).
Dr. Robert Hare, internationally noted researcher on psychopathy, believes it is unlikely that we will ever have a unified theory about the causes of violence in general, but he does claim that we are moving toward greater understanding of certain predatory types of violence that we can attribute to psychopaths. The answers lie not within sociological or environmental factors but within the individual.
As Berdella demonstrated, psychopaths are arrogant, narcissistic, shallow, manipulative, and grandiose. They have no regard for the suffering they may cause and they generally form no strong emotional attachments to others. The disorder appears in every culture and manifests early with conduct disorders, callous disregard, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders. While not all psychopaths break the law, many do commit antisocial acts such as lying, emotional manipulation, aggression, and cruelty. What drives their actions is the need for power and control. They view the world in terms of givers and takers and feel justified being the takers. Their violence, as serial killer Arthur Shawcross once said, is just “business as usual.” In other words, their aggression is instrumental, not reactive, and is intended for some dark gain.
In terms of treatment, Hare notes that sexual offenders who are psychopathic present special problems.
“The offenses of psychopathic sex offenders,” he says, citing the literature, “are likely to be more violent or sadistic than are those of other sex offenders.”
They also recidivate more, diversify their crimes, and fail to learn from punishment. “Psychopaths appear to suffer little personal distress, see little wrong with their attitudes and behavior, and seek treatment only when it is in their best interests to do so.”
They apparently fail to process emotion the way ordinary people do, and that means they have no empathy. Thus, the typical socialized emotional inhibitions on aggression are weak.
When Berdella was asked about his intent after the second murder, he said that he didn’t really have one, at least not consciously. It was more a matter of not being caught the first time, so what difference did it really make if he killed again?
Adriane Raine, from the University of Southern California and long interested in the neurological correlates of psychopathic behavior, has found brain deficits in several areas that appear to contribute to violence—specifically the limbic system (the emotional center) and the prefrontal cortex. These deficits may make psychopaths impulsive, fearless, less responsive to aversive stimulation, and less able to make appropriate decisions about aggression toward others. They may also seek out sensation-stimulating activities. Predatory murderers are lacking in affect and are much more likely to attack a stranger than those whose violence is more reactive or emotional.
In evaluating the emotional processes in the true psychopath, Patrick Christopher echoes both Raine and Hare when he says that the predatory behavior of the psychopath is related to weakness in the brain’s defensive system. Emotions are thought to activate one of two basic processes in the brain, aversive and appetitive, or avoidance and approach. “In psychopaths,” he says, “unpleasant stimuli have to be highly intense for defensive action to activate and interrupt goal-seeking behavior.” In other words, it’s not long-term ideas about imprisonment that will deter, nor their victim’s pain or distress, but rather immediate personal punishment to themselves. They have a goal in mind and they will use force and violence to achieve it—unless it may harm them somehow, such as stabbing someone much larger who might fight back and win.
But even more profound, serial killers use the string of murders as a way to give meaning and purpose to their lives. Candice Skrapec, from California State University at Fresno, tries to learn what it is that drives them and she finds basic human needs, albeit exaggerated. From interviews, she discovered that male serial killers of the predatory type feel like victims and strike back in anger to make others pay. In short, they feel both exempt from even their own moral codes and entitled to do whatever they are doing. They fuel their momentum with dark fantasies that make them feel larger than what they actually are and seem to complete them. Enacting the fantasy protects them by challenging their self-image of powerlessness and making them feel special—they are doing something that few people can do.
The killing thus increases their sense of vitality, which produces euphoria that is followed by a sense of calm or relief from pressure. When their murders are covered in the media, it affirms their sense of power. It isn’t difficult to sexualize the aggression, even if sexual predation is not the original motive. They express the sense that killing involves something larger than mere death—the urge to fully destroy. Given their limited range of evaluation—everything is black or white with no in between—their acts must be all or nothing.
The killings “reconstitute” a fragmented sense of self into an integrated whole. “In the end,” says Skrapec, “what appears outwardly to be offensive behavior is essentially defensive.” Serial killers experience anger as emptiness and so they act out to feel better, even to devise a sense of meaning within their lived experience.
Regardless of just how Berdella’s brutality might be explained, he ranks with John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Nilsen, and others who believe they need to dominate a vulnerable person and make him do their bidding—even unto death.
Giannangelo, Stephen J. The Psychopathology of Murder. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.
Hare, Robert. “Psychopaths and their Nature,” in Violence and Psychopathy. Adrian Raine and José Sanmartín, eds. New York: Kluwer, 2001.
Hazelwood, Robert R. and Stephen G. Michaud. Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide, and the Criminal Mind. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Hickey, Eric. Serial Murderers and Their Victims, 3rd edition. Belmont, C: Wadsworth, 2002.
Jackman, Tom and Troy Cole. Rites of Burial: The Shocking True Crime Account of Robert Berdella, the Butcher of Kansas City, Missouri. New York: Pinnacle, 1992.
Lane, Brian and Wilfred Gregg. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. New York: Berkley, 1995.
Patrick, Christopher. “Emotional Processes in Psychopathy,” in Violence and Psychopathy. Adrian Raine and José Sanmartín, eds. New York: Kluwer, 2001.
Raine, Adrian. “Psychopathy, Violence and Brain Imaging,” in Violence and Psychopathy. Adrian Raine and José Sanmartín, eds. New York: Kluwer, 2001.
Richardson, Tim. “Anthropologist Fills in History’s Blanks,” Kansas News, June 25, 2000.
Schechter, Harold. The Serial Killer Files. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Skrapec, Candice. “Motives of the Serial killer,” in Violence and Psychopathy. Adrian Raine and José Sanmartín, eds. New York: Kluwer, 2001.
Wecht, Cyril and Greg Saitz with Mark Curriden. Mortal Evidence: The Forensics behind Nine Shocking Cases, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2003.
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