Psychiatric News December 3, 2004
Volume 39 Number 23
© 2004 American Psychiatric Association
p. 13
`Special Chemistry' Forges Bond Between Killing Teams
Eve Bender
When people kill in pairs, it is not unusual for one of the killers to
play a dominant role in the relationship, according to an expert on serial
murder.
Behind the monikers—the D.C. Snipers, the Hillside Stranglers, the
Sunset Strip Killers—are two people who meet and develop a
"special chemistry" that moves them to rape, torture, or kill
together.
This chemistry "seems to ignite the team's willingness to engage in
the most despicable behavior, which they might never have engaged in
separately before they met and established a bond of loyalty," noted
Jack Levin, Ph.D., who is the Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor of Sociology
and Criminology and director of the Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence
at Northeastern University in Boston.
Levin, who is also an expert on serial killers, spoke at the annual meeting
of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in Scottsdale, Ariz., in
October about the dynamics between two people who kill.
As it was with John Muhammad and Lee Malvo (see story above), there is
usually a dominant partner who persuades the other person to kill and who is
somewhat older then the other person.
This was also the case with Angelo Buono, who was in his 40s when his
younger cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, came to Los Angeles from Rochester, N.Y., to
live with him in 1975.
Buono convinced his 27-year-old cousin they should get teenage girls to
prostitute for them, which they did. Their first victim was Yolanda
Washington, one of these prostitutes.
Ultimately, the cousins would go on to torture, rape, and kill 14 girls in
the Los Angeles area.
Levin noted that with each victim, the level of sadism increased to the
point where the cousins electrocuted their victims or injected them with
cleaning fluid. "They got high on sadism and needed larger and larger
doses to keep that high," he said.
Doug Clark and Carol Bundy met and fell in love in Los Angeles in 1979, and
Clark convinced Bundy to lure an 11-year-old neighbor to Clark's apartment so
he could photograph her nude. Bundy said later that the child was her
"gift" to Clark. Together, the pair killed and mutilated at least
seven women along the Sunset Strip.
In a later case, 23-year-old Paul Bernardo convinced his 17-year-old
girlfriend, Karla Homolka, to help him rape, torture, and kill three young
girls—one of them being Homolka's younger sister—in Toronto in the
late 1980s.
"I would argue that the insanity in these cases lies in these
relationships more so than it does in the killers' individual minds,"
Levin said. 
Related Article:
-
Expert Witness Describes Making of a Serial Killer
- Eve Bender
Psychiatr News 2004 39: 13-44.
[Full Text]
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