Serial Killers

“ You can kill somebody pretty easy if you have the mindset for it. ” Gary Ray Bowles

Gary Ray Bowles fits the outward ideal of – “He doesn’t look like a serial killer.” With his rather unassuming ways and almost demure manner, his mild outside appearance doesn’t accurately portray the vicious serial killer lurking within.

The year was 1994 and over the course of that calendar year, Bowles would murder a known total of six men. Bowles’ modus operandi was to prostitute himself to his victims who he would later beat, strangle to death and rob. His use of their stolen credit cards helped the police and FBI track him down. Throughout his period of committing murders, Bowles didn’t exactly work hard to conceal his activities or identity. Unlike some serial killers who take great pains to hide and remain concealed, Bowles for example would carelessly use his victim’s credit cards in full view of store security cameras.

Bowles has stated he had a very abusive childhood that included beatings and later abandonment. His mother married consecutive abusive men who routinely beat Gary, his brother and mother. When the abuse didn’t stop, Gary and his brother severely beat their second stepfather. When their mother chose to stay with the abuser, Gary and his brother decided to leave home for a life on the streets. His upbringing no doubt helped create the rage that would later manifest itself in a series of killings along the I-95 highway corridor from Florida to Maryland.

The sheer brutality of the murders and smart police work early on in the investigation combined to lead investigators towards the idea of a serial killer on the loose. They were so sure that Bowles would kill again he landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and appeared on the television show America’s Most Wanted.

“I just wanted to kill as many people as possible before they caught me.”

While Bowles never admitted to being gay, he did engage in sexual activities with men for financial gain. This was to be Bowles’ main source of income for many years. Though during the height of killings he was working through a staffing agency in Jacksonville Beach, Florida via an assumed name – Timothy Whitfield.

Bowles did have relationships with women, including one relationship that ended with Bowles going to prison for six years for beating and sexually assaulting her. He would also serve another prison sentence for unarmed robbery of an elderly lady.

Gary Ray Bowles was sentenced to death after having his first case reversed by the Florida Supreme Court. He was convicted for the murders of three people and is now awaiting his fate on death row.

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Article by Roy Whyte . Visit his Google+ page for more.

Aileen Wuornos was a tragic case of American history gone wrong, a female serial killer whose troubled life spiraled out of control into multiple murders. The Florida coast experienced a streak of chilling killings through the mid to late eighties. Cold case after cold case piled up when the woman prostitute assaulted victims as she stood by the highway assessing the next murder. The thirty-something blonde woman with the harsh brown eyes and stringy blonde hair would only be arrested after seven men were found dead.

Aileen Carol Wuornos claims to have killed men out of a need to make money, but surely someone as risk taking as she was might have avoided murder if she wished. Wuornos maintained that the killings simply rounded out a robbery modus operandi, and perhaps did not acknowledge herself how damaged psychologically she was in order to do that to them. Wuornos communicated to the court and in her trial testimony in a lucid, almost transparent manner about her serial crimes.

The Wuornos case is a bellwether that proves how the image and stereotype of the serial killer can mask the real criminals in the population at large. Born in Michigan in 1956, Aileen Carol Pittman certainly received more than her share of life’s rocky twists and turns. Aileen Wuornos was far from the typical psycho killer, she was an emotionally distraught woman who viewed murder and robbery as her only pathway to day to day security. It is indicated that even from her first suicide attempt she never received adequate psychological counseling. That said, FBI profiling did help nab Wuornos before she could kill anyone else.
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One of the astonishing serial killer stories to come out of the 1960’s and 1970’s of American Criminal History was Edmund Kemper. One of the earliest serial killers, Kemper suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and murdered his own mother as the culmination of a string of intensive and fatal attacks. Often posing as a police officer, Kemper picked up women looking for a ride who were too young and inexperienced to turn him down.

Kemper’s story was a strange one, with traditional serial killer colorations of maternal domination and later serial murders. But the first killings of Edmund Kemper were his own grandparents when he was just 15. This hardly matches the later modus operandi of young female students he murdered later. The initial married couple and the intermittent coeds, then his mother and her friend, then a group of eight random victims represent the body of Kemper’s victim list.

Why did Edmund Kemper want to kill young women? Because it was the only way he felt he could connect to them and “own” them. But Kemper also had been marginalized from normal society early by his institutionalization. Possibly these were unconscious rehearsals for the killing of his mother that was his real aim all along. Once Kemper’s head cleared, perhaps he was done and was ready to meet with the consequences.

What association could he possibly have for the college age women? Unable to get into college himself, was Kemper killing genders “others” who had outpaced him academically? Kemper’s turbulent relationship with his mother underscores the link between her in his mind as a college employee and the co-ed girls he killed.
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