September 24th, 1997 to September 30th, 1997

The Killing Fields

Gay & Lesbian Murderers from 1920s to Present

Part Two by Lori Weiner

Gays and lesbians are not only the victims of violent crime-they are, occasionally, the perpetrators. The Andrew Cunanan case is only the latest case of a gay person possibly turning intense self-hatred into outward rage.

Some of the most notorious gay killers, starting in the early part of this century, are profiled below, in this second part of Outlines' four-part series on murder and the gay community.

The majority of information regarding the serial killers profiled below was obtained from the book, Answer Me! The First Three, from Goad To Hell Enterprises and published October 1994 by AK Press, San Francisco.

The Butcher of Hanover
Perhaps the earliest known gay serial killer lived in post-World War I Germany. Fritz Haarmann, also known as "The Butcher Of Hanover," picked up transient youth from that city's train station. Haarmann, who was epileptic and liked to impersonate police officers, was often assisted by his lover Hans Grans in luring a boy to their apartment. After sexually assaulting and murdering their guest, Haarmann and Grans hacked him to pieces and sold the butchered carcass as food on the black market. Haarmann and Grans were discovered in 1924, when a police search of their apartment uncovered stolen goods. Acting on a hunch, authorities dove into a nearby river, where they discovered the remains of 23 young men. Eventually Haarmann, described as "fat with a high pitched voice," was indicted in 27 murders, though Haarmann himself claimed to have killed "closer to 40" young boys. Lover Hans Grans was sentenced to 12 years in prison; Haarmann himself was beheaded.

The Matamoros Cult Killer
Between Larry Eyler in the early '80s and Jeffrey Dahmer in the early '90s lurked Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, also known as "The Matamoros Cult Killer." Constanzo was a "gay voodoo cult leader" and male model who dabbled in drug running in Matamoros, which is a city near the mouth of the Rio Grande inNortheast Mexico. He applied a Pan African religion, Palo Mayombe, to his own self-styled blood cult. Constanzo preached that human sacrifice protected his disciples from the police. Both humans and animals were ritually sacrificed (and usually eaten) by Constanzo and his followers. Constanzo, his male lover, and many of his cult members removed victims' spines and wore them as good-luck necklaces.

The jig was up on the Matamoros Cult Killer in April 1989, when one of the cultists drove through a police barricade. Apparently believing themselves thoroughly "protected" from the cops, the group cheerfully led authorities to corpse after corpse. Thirteen bodies, including that of a student who had been abducted while celebrating Spring Break in Matamoros were recovered from the scene. The cultists were promptly arrested for murder. As for Constanzo and others in the cult hierarchy, they had already taken off for Mexico City when his underlings were apprehended. In the midst of a shootout with police, Constanzo ordered one of his associates to shoot both him and his lover, which the associate did. All told, Constanzo and his band of killers are believed to be responsible for as many as 21 deaths.

From Candy Store to Killer
Before John Wayne Gacy broke his "record," Dean Corll sliced and hacked his way to gory infamy by murdering 27 young men and boys, at the time the largest body count attributed to a single killer. Corll was also a native Midwesterner, born in Ft. Wayne, Ind., in 1939. As a youth Corll was sickly and subjected to merciless teasing from his classmates. One of his few friends snidely remarked that Corll "turned into a fag" while in the Army, returning home after his tour of duty to work in his mother's candy store.

It was after the candy store closed shop for good in the late '60s that Corll became a killer.

It started when Corll began hosting glue-sniffing parties for young boys in his Houston home. Working with him were Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, two adolescents paid to lure boys back to Corll's house. Corll would then handcuff the doomed youth to a board before sodomizing and killing him.

Like Gacy and Eyler, Corll preferred young men and boys-the oldest victim was a college student and the youngest, a boy of just nine.

Corll's undoing came at the hands of Elmer Wayne Henley. One night in August 1973, Corll became furious when Henley returned to the house with a young girl. A wild party ensued, and Henley passed out. When he awoke, he was chained to Corll's torture board. He persuaded Corll to free him, then snatched the murderer's gun and pumped six rounds into his chest. When police arrived, they discovered the corpses of 17 boys. A report at the time described the scene as "wall to wall bodies." A bag containing several sets of male genitalia was also found on the premises. Two other hiding places contained an additional 10 bodies.

David Owen Brooks was sentenced to life imprisonment; Henley received 594 years of hard time.

The Hernandez Brothers
In 1963, brothers Cayetano and Santos Hernandez told the villagers of Yerba Buena, Mexico that the gods would shower them with fortune if the proper sacrifices were made. Sacrifices, in this case, meant sexual favors. Cayetano got the males, and Santos the females.

Eventually the Hernandez brothers left Yerba Buena for Monterey and found a bizarre brother-sister team.

Eleazor Solis was a gay male pimp, and his sister Magdalena a blonde lesbian prostitute. The Hernandez brothers told the villagers of Monterey that the siblings were "mountain gods" and sex with them guaranteed prosperity.

When little prosperity actually ensued, the Hernandez brothers and the villagers of Monterey held a human sacrifice. Two infidels were pummeled to death and all the participants drank the victims' blood from bowls. Six others were also killed, including a 16-year-old girl who had been sleeping with Magdelena but switched allegiances to Santos. Allegedly, Magdelena tied the girl to a cross, knocked her out, and commanded the townspeople to beat her to death, which they promptly did. The girl was then burnt at the cross.

Several townspeople attempted to alert the police. All were later found dead. The cult retreated to a cave, where Santos died in a gun battle with police and Cayetano was murdered by a rival. The surviving cult members were apprehended and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Patrick Kearney
Patrick Kearney was a respectable man, living quietly with his lover David D. Hill in Redondo Beach, Calif. He is remembered as "quiet and clean." From 1968 to 1977, the former military man murdered young boys and men he found in the gay cruising areas of Hollywood. After killing them, he chopped them to pieces and neatly bagged their remains. It is unknown whether Hill was an active accomplice in the killings, but he accompanied Kearny when heat from the police forced him to relocate to El Paso, Texas.

Eventually the two turned themselves in at the El Paso post office, pointing to a "Wanted" poster of the lovers and exclaiming, "That's us." Hill was freed on the basis of insufficient evidence, but Kearney confessed to 28 specific killings, hinting that he could have killed as many as 40. He later told an investigator he preferred jail to the military and kept "a neat and tidy cell." At his trial, Kearny said that "murder excites me and gives me a feeling of dominance."

The Score Card Killer
Coinciding with Patrick Kearney's reign of terror in southern California was Randy Steven Kraft, dubbed "The Score Card Killer." Described as a 'computer genius,' Kraft kept a "handwritten death list" with coded references to each of his victims from 1971 to 1983.

Like Larry Eyler, Kraft picked up hitchhikers, rendered them insensate with alcohol or drugs, then murdered them. One victim was found wrapped around a tree, butane lighter burns on his body, mouth stuffed with dirt, and genitals gone. Many of Kraft's victims were Marines, and all were in their late teens to early 20s.

In May 1983, police stopped Kraft for a traffic violation and found a strangled Marine sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

Kraft was accused of 45 killings, but he claimed to have actually murdered closer to 65 men, since he frequently traveled on business to Oregon and Michigan. He was eventually convicted of 16 slayings.

The Freeway Killer
Vietnam veteran William Bonin had a girlfriend, but tended to kill young boys on the weekend. During a one-year stretch between 1979 and 1980, Bonin cruised the roads of Orange County, Calif., looking for teenage males. He offered them a ride, and when they accepted he strangled or stabbed them, then dumped their naked bodies on the highway shoulder, earning him the media tag "The Freeway Killer." Bonin was unusually sadistic, forcing one victim to drink chlorohydrate acid and then ramming an ice pick into the boy's ear.

After bragging to friends that he was the "Freeway Killer," Bonin and his sometime accomplice, Vernon Butts, were apprehended. Butts hung himself while in jail. Bonin was sentenced to death by Judge William Keene, who later gained fame in his own right as "The Judge" on the eponymous daytime TV show.

Portrait of a Serial Killer:

Henry Lee Lucas
Henry Lee Lucas was immortalized in the cult film Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. Lucas, a bisexual, claimed his first victim in his early 20s -his violently abusive mother. He received a 40-year sentence for the matricide and attempted suicide while in jail, telling authorities that "(his mother's) voice is commanding me to kill." When he was paroled in 1970 he begged to remain in jail. But Henry was freed.

Lucas drifted through the South, killing female hitch-hikers along Interstate 35 in Texas. Then in 1976, he met Ottis Elwood Toole in a Florida soup kitchen. It was love at first sight for the one-eyed Lucas and Toole, a male prostitute with a tested IQ of 75. Like Lucas, Toole was a nomadic murderer, slaying randomly while cruising the West Coast in a pickup truck during the mid-'70s.

Toole was also a cannibal and Satanist who had been dubbed "the devil's child" by his grandmother. The duo became a rampaging couple over the next six and a half years, with Toole allegedly slaughtering gay men when angry with Lucas.

Lucas eventually married Becky Powell, Toole's young niece. More than 30 years her senior, he adopted the girl and became her common-law husband. Powell and Lucas wandered into a Texas Christian commune, where they remained until 1982. On the road again and roughing it in the desert, Powell and Lucas argued. She slapped him, and he stabbed her to death, dismembered her body, and left her carcass in a field. Lucas was deeply remorseful for the murder and often returned to the death scene to speak to his sweetheart. He also visited the Texas Christian commune one last time, murdering an octogenarian named Granny Rich. It was Rich's killing that finally led authorities to Lucas. While confessing to her killing, Lucas casually remarked that "(he) had at least a hundred more out there."

During his trial he claimed responsibility for more than 600 murders worldwide, even claiming to have given the Reverend Jim Jones the "killer cyanide" he used to wipe out his People's Church in Guyana.

Ottis Toole, himself on Death Row in Florida, corroborated many of Lucas' statements.

Eventually police would close the books on more than 200 murders based on the testimony, though much of it was contradictory. Later, Lucas would recant and claim he only killed one person: his mother. Still, authorities remain convinced that Toole and Lucas collectively were responsible for at least a dozen slayings.

Britain's Dahmer
Dennis Nilsen was Britain's own Jeffrey Dahmer. Described as "an alcoholic homosexual necrophile ... who couldn't confront his homosexuality," Nilsen picked up strangers in bars, drugged them, and slaughtered them. A Scotsman, Nilsen's mother prevented him from looking at his naked body. After a traumatic incident where he nearly drowned, the eight-year-old boy was molested by the person who pulled him out of the water.

When a roommate of three years left him in 1978, Nilsen lost it. When a visitor refused Nilsen's offer to stay overnight, the spurned host choked him to death with a tie. A second guest who preferred listening to a Walkman over Nilsen's conversation was strangled with the headphone cord. Nilsen would describe his compulsion to kill as "misplaced love out of its time and out of its mind."

Nilsen methodically cleaned his victims' bodies, lay the corpse next to him in bed, and masturbated. Occasionally he would bring up a corpse from beneath his floorboards, lay it beside him, and watch television alongside it.

When the odor of death overcame even Nilsen, he burned the corpse in his backyard, adding rubber to the putrid mixture to ward off suspicion.

In February 1983, a complaint of "drainage pipes backing up" led to the discovery of Nilsen's grisly abode. Nilsen "seemed relieved to have finally been captured," according to reports. During his trial he described his emotional isolation: "Loneliness is a long, unbearable pain ... there was never a place for me in the scheme of things. ... I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark, endless dirges. ... I made another world, and real men would enter it, and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid, unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime."

The unusually well-spoken killer is the subject of a book titled Killing For Company. He is currently imprisoned on the Isle of Wight.

Aileen Wuornos:

1st know Lesbian Serial Killer
Aileen Wuornos is distinctive as the only known lesbian serial killer. Acting with her lover Tyria Moore, whom Wuornos supported with money she earned prostituting herself, "Lee" Wuornos murdered at least seven white male "johns" in 1989-90.

Moore and Wuornos lived in the Fairview Motel south of Daytona, Fla., until Wuornos was apprehended by authorities; their room sported a 3-D replica of "The Last Supper" on the wall. Thirty-four years of age at the time of the killings, Wuornos allegedly told Moore that she only killed her clients when "they got rough or wouldn't pay."

Herself the subject of an unintentionally hilarious cult film, Wuornos was adopted by Arlene Pralle, a born-again Christian horse breeder, who ultimately sold Wuornos out for the bright lights of 60 Minutes and 20/20. As for Moore, she finked to the feds and turned states' evidence upon her lover's apprehension. Wuornos continues to sit on Death Row, awaiting the clemency she feels convinced will come: "They're gonna electrocute me, give me life in prison, and I don't deserve it. It was just self-defense."

Part Three of "The Killing Fields," in the Oct. 1 issue of Outlines, looks at "The Chicago Killers"-Gacy, Eyler, and Dahmer.

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