The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman

child’s body was not found for a month) – but for firing on a traffic policeman who gave chase while Bundy was driving a stolen car. Bundy, who was using an assumed name, was identified in custody (the FBI had profiled him) and later charged with the three Florida murders only. He was tried and found guilty, and – after a decade of highly-publicised and largely self-conducted appeals – Ted Bundy was executed in 1989.
    Negro drug pusher, burglar, rapist and heterosexual serial killer Carlton Gary, alias ‘The Stocking Strangler’ of Columbus, Georgia, assaulted, raped and strangled five elderly white women in Columbus in the late 1970s. His victims were all complete strangers who lived alone, and whose homes Gary broke into in the exclusively white Wynnton district of the city. A sixth white woman of seventy-eight, whom Gary raped when he broke into her Wynnton home immediately preceding the fifth murder, escaped death only because she fought him off long enough to sound a burglar alarm and summon the police. Gary escaped, and the murders ceased abruptly in February 1978. Although a native of Columbus, Gary had moved east in the mid-1970s. After escaping from a New York state prison in 1977, he returned to Columbus and committed the Wynnton murders. At that time he was not a suspect; then in 1979 – a year after the Wynnton murders had ceased – he was arrested elsewhere in Georgia on unrelated charges. After interrogation he was charged with three of the Wynnton stranglings, together with associated counts of rape and burglary. In 1986 he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. Gary, now thirty-seven, is on Death Row awaiting the outcome of appeals which may not be decided until the early 1990s.
    One racial criminal behaviour characteristic links the Carlton Gary homicides in Columbus, Georgia, with nine serial murders committed in New York City in 1974 by Calvin Jackson – another heterosexual negro ex-convict – and a series of at least seven murders, committed a decade later and more than four thousand miles away in Stockwell, South London, by the bisexual British serial killer Kenneth Erskine.
    By early summer in New York in 1974, five women – mostly elderly – had been found dead in their rooms over a period of two years in the run-down Park Plaza Hotel at 50 West 77th Street. Foul play was not suspected. All were thought to have died either from acute alcoholism or (in one case) asphyxia, that might have been self-induced. Then Yetta Vishnefsky, who was seventy-nine, was found dead in Room 605. This time no pathologist was needed to establish the cause of death. She had been bound with her own stockings, and knifed in the back: the post-mortem examination revealed that she had been raped. Shortly afterwards Kate Lewinsohn, who was sixty-five, was found dead in Room 221 with a fractured skull. She, too, had been raped. And on 8 June Winifred Miller was found burned to death in her bed in Room 406.
    While the police investigation into those three murders was continuing, a ninth victim – sixty-nine-year-old Mrs Pauline Spanierman – was found by a maid, battered to death in her room in the adjacent twelve-storey apartment house at 40 West 77th Street. On this occasion there was a suspect; a black man, weighing about one hundred and forty pounds (ten stone) and five feet seven inches tall, who had been seen making his way down the fire escape at the Park Plaza at half-past three that morning, approximately the time that Mrs Spanierman was murdered. The precise description led the police to Calvin Jackson, an ex-convict and former drug addict, who worked at the Park Plaza as a porter – and shared a room there with a woman named Bernice Myers.
    Jackson (who, it transpired, was also wanted for questioning in connection with a series of murders in Buffalo, New York State) confessed to the nine Park Plaza killings and stood trial in 1976. Psychiatrist Dr Emilia Salanga, one of a