Traumatized from Saw and Saw II, I looked on the internet for assurance that the acts in the movie are only possible in Hollywood fiction. Below is the sad proof that it is, in fact, reality.
Jeffrey Dahmer (1960-1994)
Dahmer was born to a Christian fundamentalist father in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At age eight, his family moved to Bath, Ohio, near Akron. From his earliest youth he was extremely shy and, according to his father, was molested by a neighbor. He collected dead animals and showed signs of necrophilia, but this was revealed only at his trial. He was also a closeted alcoholic and homosexual and suffered from extremely low self-esteem. His parents divorced when he was in his teens. He committed his first murder at the age of 18, killing a young man, Steven Hicks, he had invited to his house because Dahmer "didn't want him to leave."
He later attended college but performed poorly. His father convinced him to join the military, and he appeared to recover some vitality as he became an army medic. In 1988, however, he was arrested for sexually fondling a 13-year-old boy, for which he served one year in a work release camp and was required to register as a sex offender. Shortly afterward, he began the string of murders that ended with his arrest in 1991.
Most of his victims were African American men whom he subjected to sexual assaults. His main goal was for a completely compliant sexual partner, essentially making necrophilia his motivation for killing. He achieved notoriety after his arrest following the discovery of several decaying bodies in acid vats in his apartment. Severed heads were found in his refrigerator and an altar of candles and human skulls were found in his closet. Accusations soon surfaced that Dahmer had practiced necrophilia and cannibalism. Dahmer admitted to eating the biceps of his eighth victim, Ernest Miller, whose skeleton he also kept, noting that human flesh "tasted like beef" to him.
Dahmer reportedly had a history of abandonment and feared loss and rejection. After a bitter divorce, his mother left with his brother, David, leaving Dahmer behind on the assumption that his father would care for him. However, his father had previously left as well, refusing to speak with his wife, with each not knowing the other's whereabouts. Dahmer, at 17 having just graduated high school and without money, was left alone in a home with no food and a broken refrigerator. It is thought that these feelings of abandonment, filtered through his mental illness, created the internal logic that allowed him to justify his actions to himself.
On July 22, 1991, with handcuffs still attached to one wrist, another man, Tracy Edwards, was able to successfully escape from Dahmer's apartment and flag down a police squad car. Police were led back to Dahmer's apartment where the remains of eleven victims were found. Dahmer reportedly scuffled with police trying to arrest him as the remains were being discovered. After being charged with fifteen counts of murder, he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. On February 17, 1992, a court rejected his plea of insanity and sentenced Dahmer to fifteen consecutive life sentences, which required a minimum of 936 years' imprisonment.
Dennis Nilsen (1944-)
Nilsen was born in Strichen, Aberdeenshire to a Scottish mother and a Norwegian father. His father was an alcoholic and his parents divorced when he was four years old. His mother remarried and sent her son to his grandparents, but after a couple of years, he was sent back to his mother again.
Nilsen claimed the first traumatic event to shape his life came about when he was a small child, when his beloved grandfather died. His strict Catholic mother insisted that he view the body before burial. Whether this incident, or his mother and stepfather's lectures on the "impurities of the flesh" helped shape him into what he was to become, no one really knows.
In 1961, Nilsen enlisted in the British Army and became a cook in Aden, Cyprus and Berlin. He left the army in 1972 and served briefly as a police officer. From the mid 1970s, Nilsen worked as a civil servant in a jobcentre.
He had a series of superficial, transient relationships with men, but they did not help to placate his profound isolation and loneliness. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, he sought somebody "who wouldn't leave." He wanted a corpse.
All his victims were students or homeless men whom he picked up in bars and brought to his house either for sex or just for company. Nilsen strangled and drowned his victims during the night, waking up with little memory of what he had done. He used his butchering skills, learnt in the army, to help him dispose of the bodies. Nilsen had access to a large garden and was able to burn many of the remains in a bonfire. In 1981, however, Nilsen moved to an upstairs flat. As his murders continued, he found it difficult to dispose of the remains and had suitcases full of human organs stored in his wardrobe, and plastic bags with human remains under the floorboards. Neighbours had begun to notice the smell. When he tried to dispose of the bodies by flushing them down the toilet, he blocked the sewerage of his house in Muswell Hill (23 Cranley Gardens), north London. Dennis Nilsen was arrested in 1983 on suspicion of multiple murder. He apologized to the police for not being able to tell them the exact number of people he had killed. When his house was searched, they found three heads in a cupboard, and they found thirteen more bodies in Nilsen's former place of residence at Cricklewood at 195 Melrose Avenue. During the trial at Old Bailey, Nilsen was cold and distant, and seemed utterly unaffected by the fact that he had murdered fifteen people. He was sentenced to life in prison. Nilsen's minimum term was set at 25 years by the trial judge, but the Home Secretary later imposed a whole life tariff, which meant he would never be released. But after the Home Secretary was stripped of his powers to set minimum terms in November 2002, Nilsen could be freed on life licence in 2008 because of his original 25-year minimum sentence.
John Wayne Gacy (1942-1994)
Gacy was born and raised a Catholic in Chicago, Illinois. He had a very troubled and distant relationship with his stern, abusive father. He worked briefly in Las Vegas, Nevada, before returning to Illinois. He attended a business college and began a moderately successful career as a shoe salesman in Springfield, Illinois, where he became a prominent member of the Jaycees. In 1964 he married and moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he managed a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant belonging to his wife's family.
However, Gacy's first marriage fell apart after he was convicted of child molestation. He was sent to prison for this crime; after he was released, he moved back to Illinois. He successfully hid this criminal record until police began investigating him for his later murders.
In 1975, he bought a house in an unincorporated area surrounded by the Chicago neighborhood of Norwood Park, living there with his widowed mother, and established his own construction business, PDM Contracting. He married a woman he had known since high school, and his and her two daughters moved in with him and his mother moved out. He became a prominent and respected member of the community. In addition to his clown act, he became a committee member for the Democratic Party. In this capacity, he was even able to meet and be photographed with then-First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
It was also during this time that he claimed his first known victim, a teenage boy he picked up at a bus depot. His marriage fell apart and his wife divorced him in mid-1976. Gacy began a double life: respected member of the community by day, sexual predator and murderer by night.
No suspicion fell on him until late 1978, when he was investigated following the disappearance of a teenage boy, Robert Piest, who was last seen with Gacy. A search of his house, by Des Plaines detective Joseph Kozenczak, revealed a number of incriminating items related to other disappearances. In December 1978 Gacy went to the police and confessed. He claimed he had first killed in January 1972. He confessed to 33 murders, indicating where the bodies were in 28 of the cases—buried under his house. The other five he said were thrown into the Des Plaines River. Most of the victims were young male prostitutes. Some victims were also teenage boys whom Gacy had hired through his contracting firm. Bodies were uncovered from December 1978 to April 1979, when the last known victim was found downstream in the Illinois River.
On May 10, 1994, Gacy was executed in Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois, by lethal injection. According to reports, Gacy did not express remorse. His last words were to the effect that killing him would not bring anyone back, and he is reported to have said "You can kiss my ass," to a guard while he was being sent to the execution chamber.
Some have pointed to his poor relationship with his abusive, alcoholic father, his head trauma and subsequent blackouts in his teenage years as some basis for his acts. During his time on Death Row, Gacy took up oil painting, and his favorite subject was painting portraits of clowns. He claimed to have used his clown act as an alter ego, once sardonically saying that "A clown can get away with murder." After his execution, his paintings were sold at auction. Reportedly, the main buyer destroyed the paintings after winning the bids.
Aileen Wuornos (1956-2002)
Born in Rochester, Michigan, Wuornos had what was by most accounts a traumatic childhood. Her father, a psychopathic child molester left her mother before Aileen was born, and later committed suicide in prison when she was 13 (1969). Her mother abandoned her and her brother, Keith, in 1960, leaving them in the care of their grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos.
Wuornos later said that Lauri physically and sexually abused her as a child, that Britta was an abusive alcoholic, and that they both claimed to be her actual parents until she was twelve, when she found out the truth. She also claimed to have had sex with multiple partners, including her brother, at a young age.
A storeowner in Palm Harbor, Florida, named Richard Mallory took a ride with Wuornos on November 30, 1989, and became her first victim. Over the next two years, five subsequent victims were found; one other is still missing. Wuornos was eventually identified when she and her girlfriend Tyria Moore had an accident while driving a victim's car. She was apprehended a few months later.
Wuornos cited self-defense for Mallory's murder, maintaining that he had attempted to rape her. She was convicted for this first murder in January 1992 with help from Moore's testimony. fter her first death sentence, Wuornos often said she wanted it all to be over. In 2001 she began fighting to be executed as soon as possible. She petitioned the Florida Supreme Court for the right to fire her legal counsel and stop all appeals, wording her request so as to forestall any objection: "I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again." Due to her mental instability, some have argued that she was in no state for them to honor such a request.
Wuornos was executed by lethal injection (which she requested instead of the electric chair) at 9:47 a.m., Wednesday, 9 October 2002. Her last words:
"I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the Rock and I'll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I'll be back."
After her execution she was cremated, and her ashes were taken to her native Michigan and spread around a tree.
She had requested that Natalie Merchant's (from the group 10,000 Maniacs) song "Carnival" be played at her funeral. Natalie Merchant commented on this when asked why her song was run during the credits of the documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.
"When director Nick Broomfield sent a working edit of the film, I was so disturbed by the subject matter that I couldn't even watch it. Aileen Wuornos led a tortured, torturing life that is beyond my worst nightmares. It wasn't until I was told that Aileen spent many hours listening to my album Tigerlily while on death row and requested 'Carnival' be played at her funeral that I gave permission for the use of the song. It's very odd to think of the places my music can go once it leaves my hands. If it gave her some solace, I have to be grateful."
Ted Bundy (1946-1989)
Bundy was born in 1946, in Burlington, Vermont. His mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell, was a young department store clerk. His father's identity has never been authoritatively established. For the first few years of his life, Bundy and his mother lived with his mentally unstable grandfather in Philadelphia. At age four, he appeared at his aunt's bed one morning, smiling as he brandished several knives and put them beside her in bed. Bundy and his mother soon thereafter moved to Tacoma, Washington, where her uncle Jack taught music at the College of Puget Sound.
Friends generally recalled Bundy as a happy, normal child. He was a good, if not spectacular, student at Woodrow Wilson High School, and was active in the Methodist Church and the Boy Scouts. However, as he told Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, authors of Bundy's definitive biography The Only Living Witness, he had no natural sense of how to get along with other people. "I didn't know what made people want to be friends," he told the authors. "I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions."
The extroverted Bundy worked and campaigned for the Republican Party as an adult. He also worked as a volunteer at a Seattle rape crisis center. Bundy had one serious relationship with a college freshman only known to the public as "Stephanie Brooks." At one point she ended the relationship due to a lack of ambitiousness on Bundy's part, and they separated for a period of roughly two years. He eventually courted her again and then proposed. She agreed to marry him. Two days later, he unceremoniously dumped her by ceasing to return her phone calls. It was shortly after this final breakup that Bundy began a homicidal rampage lasting three years.
While some believe Bundy may have started killing in his early to mid-teens — a twelve-year-old neighbor vanished from her house when Bundy was fourteen — the earliest verified murders began in 1974, when he was 27.
Shortly after midnight on 4 January 1974, Bundy entered the house of Joni Lenz, an 18-year-old student at the University of Washington, and bludgeoned her with a crowbar while she slept. Bundy also removed a bed rod from Lenz's bed and used it to sexually assault her. She was found the next morning, in a coma, lying in a pool of blood. Lenz survived the attack, but suffered permanent brain damage.
Bundy's next victim was Lynda Ann Healy, a senior at the University of Washington. On 31 January 1974, Bundy broke into her room, knocked her unconscious, meticulously removed her clothes and dressed her in jeans and a shirt, wrapped her in bedsheet, and carried her outside. A single hair would be found at the crime scene which did not belong to the victim. A year would pass before her decapitated, dismembered remains were found.
From that January to June he stalked and killed more than one young woman a month, a spree that culminated in July with the double daytime abduction and murder of two females at a lakeside park near Seattle. He murdered approximately ten victims in Oregon, Utah and Washington. Bundy had a remarkable advantage as his facial features were charming, yet not especially memorable. He would be later described as a chameleon, able to look totally different by making only minor adjustments to his appearance, e.g., changing his hairstyle.
That autumn, Bundy moved on to Utah, where he raped, sodomized and strangled a 17-year old girl. Her body was found nine days later.
Next was Laura Aime, also 17, who disappeared on Halloween. Her remains were found nearly a month later.
In Murray, Utah, on November 8, 1974, dressed as a cop, Bundy lured Carol DaRonch into his car where he then attempted to slap a pair of handcuffs on her. Fortunately for DaRonch, he only got one wrist. She wrenched her door open with the other hand and escaped. Bundy was later captured and convicted of DaRonch's kidnapping on June 30, 1976. He was sentenced to one to 15 years in Utah State Prison. Colorado authorities, in the meantime, were pursuing their murder cases.
On June 7, 1977, in preparation for a hearing in his murder trial, Bundy was transported to the Pitkin County, Colorado, courthouse. During a court recess, he was allowed to visit the courthouse's law library. Bundy jumped from a second-story window and escaped, injuring his ankle, which caused him to remain in the area. He was recaptured a week later. In jail, he somehow acquired a hacksaw and managed to saw a hole in the ceiling. On the night of December 30, 1977, Bundy climbed out of the hole, and was able to walk right out the jail's front door. He stole a car in the parking lot.
He flew from Denver to Chicago, caught an Amtrak train to Ann Arbor, Michigan, then stole a car which he ditched in Atlanta before boarding a bus for Tallahassee. There, in the early hours of Super Bowl Sunday 1978, he bludgeoned two sleeping women to death and seriously wounded two others inside their Chi Omega sorority house.
On February 9, 1978, Bundy traveled to Lake City, Florida. While there, he abducted and murdered 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. Bundy was later stopped by a police officer in Pensacola. When the officer called in a check of Bundy's license plate, the orange VW he was driving came up as stolen. Before long, Bundy was identified and taken to Miami to stand trial for the Chi Omega murders. After being convicted, Bundy was sentenced to death. During the trial, he married Carole Ann Boone, a former coworker and admirer. During his incarceration, Bundy received hundreds of fan letters from female admirers. In October 1982, Boone gave birth to a girl, whom Bundy adored. Eventually, however, Boone moved away, divorced him, and changed her and her daughter's last name.
The night before Bundy was executed, he gave a television interview to Dr. James Dobson, head of the Christian organization Focus on the Family. Bundy claimed that consumption of violent pornography helped "shape and mold" his violence into "behavior too terrible to describe." Bundy said that he felt that violence in the media, "particularly sexualized violence," sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys." It is noteworthy that Bundy had never blamed pornography until this interview and no pornographic materials were found at his home when it was searched.
According to Hagmaier, Bundy also contemplated suicide in the days leading up to his execution, but eventually decided against it.
In 1989, 42-year-old Bundy was electrocuted in Florida. His last words were, "I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends."