Mundane Motives:
Killers in the medical profession
seem especially heinous because while they take an oath to do everything in
their power to keep someone alive, they tend to see their patients as guinea
pigs. Their motive for becoming doctors seems to be more about power, control,
and gain than about healing and helping. Victims are readily available and it's
not that difficult to cover up certain types of murders in a major hospital,
especially if the patients are elderly or have a serious illness. What's one
more injection? While nurses tend to be
mercy killers, that's been true of few doctors.
Dr. Marcel Petiot
Misplaced compassion: Dr. John
Bodkins Adams was charged with 21 counts of murder in 1957 when it was found
that some forty of his elderly female patients had died under mysterious
circumstances. While Adams was acquitted, it was clear that he had built up
severe dependency in his patients of morphine or barbiturates as a way to
"ease" the passage. He did not consider this to be murder. To cover
up another crime: While it hasn't been proved that he actually molested them,
oral surgeon Tony Protopappas fatally overdosed three young female patients,
and all of them were attractive. Dr. Marcel Petiot, who was executed for
murdering twenty-four people (though he claimed it was sixty-three), apparently
did away with a girl in his employ who got pregnant. He also murdered wealthy
Jewish patients in the 1940s with strychnine to get away with stealing their
worldly goods.
Dr. William Burke & Dr.
William Hare
Murder by tacit consent: During
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the medical establishment needed
corpses to train students. It became a practice to rob fresh graves, and
eventually when that activity became difficult, some people supplied the
freshest of bodies by simply killing them. One such person was William Burke.
Together with his partner William Hare, he would get his victims drunk and then
either grab them from behind in an arm lock around the throat or sit on their
chests while holding their nose and mouth closed. In nine months, these two
managed to kill 16 people and then sold them one after another to the medical
school in Edinburgh, Scotland, for an average of ten pounds. While physician
Robert Knox noticed how fresh the corpses were and that they obviously had not
been buried, he didn't ask questions. He just paid for the bodies. By doing so,
he participated in murder---and got away with it.
Dr. Harvey Hawley Crippen:
Who killed his wife in England in
1910, in part to escape her domineering ways and in part because he was in love
with his young secretary. One night he poisoned Belle, shot her in the head,
dismembered her, and buried her parts in his cellar (or tossed some into the
canal.) He told her friends that she had left him to join a lover in America,
but a Scotland Yard inspector didn't buy it. He questioned the dentist, who
subsequently fled, leaving his house available to the detective's search.
Bell's parts were found and Crippen was caught, tried, and hanged.
Dr. Sam Sheppard
Another case of domestic motives
was Dr. Sam Sheppard, which dominated the news at various times from the
1950's, when the murder of his wife Marilyn occurred in the Cleveland area, to
a couple of years ago. Handsome, athletic, and philandering Dr. Sheppard
claimed that a bushy-haired intruder broke into his home, bludgeoned his
pregnant wife to death and knocked him unconscious in two separate incidences,
all without waking his young son and the family dog in a nearby bedroom.
Police, judge and jury did not believe his incredible story and Sheppard went
to prison. Given the prejudicial newspaper coverage at his trial, super lawyer
F. Lee Bailey won Sheppard a second trial after which the doctor was acquitted.
A sympathetic television series and movie called The Fugitive gave Dr.
Sheppard an additional publicity boost. In the late 1990's, his son attempted
to have the State of Ohio declare his late father innocent using the latest DNA
techniques, but was unsuccessful. Many of the people involved in the original
murder investigation, as well as many people in the Cleveland area where the
murder occurred, believe that Sheppard was very guilty of murdering his wife so
that he could then marry his girlfriend.
Even more disturbing are motives
that involve real pleasure in the killing:
Pleasure Motives:
Certain doctors actually exploit
their position for the express purpose of murder, such as those who kill for
the following reasons:
Bloodlust:
For some, committing a violent
death is as exciting as a sexual encounter. They want the heightened feeling
that comes from the excitement that results from killing or watching others
react to a death. Michael Swango, for example, described a major fatal accident
as an ultimate fantasy and also admitted how much he loved coming out of the ER
with an erection, knowing he was about to tell parents that their child is
dead.
Experimentation:
People become doctors because
they're innately curious about the human body and the only way to experiment
with it without being discovered is to kill the victims. H. H. Holmes is a good
example, and if Jack the Ripper was a physician, as some suspect, this may have
motivated him, too. Obviously, Joseph Mengele had this motive, although he did
not have to find ways to cover it up. He was free to experiment all he wanted
on creatures that were considered less than human.
Financial profit:
Some doctors participate in
schemes to defraud insurance companies by killing people and sharing in the
death benefits. Dr. Morris Bolber organized a partnership for this type of
crime in Philadelphia in the 1930s. It is estimated that he and his partners
killed around fifty people before they were stopped.
Dr. Frank Sweeney
Was the prime suspect and man who
super cop Eliot Ness believed was guilty in a series of thirteen Depression-era
murders in Cleveland. Still officially unsolved, the killer was believed to
have medical knowledge and, almost uniquely in serial killer history, killed
men and women equally by expert decapitation. Sweeney, a brilliant but twisted
surgeon, taunted Ness for years about not having sufficient evidence to convict
him.
Visionary purposes: Mengele
believed that his experiments with people were a way to put science into the
service of the Nazi goal of evolving a superior human race. He had a mission to
kill.
Punishment and power: Dr. Thomas
Neill Cream poisoned four women in part for sadistic pleasure and in part to be
their judge and executioner for their immoral behavior. Going to medical school
in Canada, he was forced to marry a woman he'd aborted, so he left for England.
Then he returned to Canada and that's where he killed a chambermaid who came to
him for an abortion. He moved to Chicago where another woman fell victim to his
abortion methods. He then killed a man while "treating" his epilepsy
because he coveted the man's wife. For that he went to prison for ten years.
(Although he claimed, years later that he was Jack the Ripper; he was behind
bars in 1888.) Going to London in 1891, he poisoned four prostitutes with
strychnine. Identified and arrested, he was hanged in 1892.
Dr. Harold Shipman
Relief for inner conflicts: Dr.
Harold Shipman was convicted in England of 15 counts of murder in 2001. In
court, he displayed indifference to the suffering he'd caused many families and
contempt for the prosecution, which is indicative of sociopathy. However,
according to Dr. Chris Missen, head of forensic psychology at Anglia
Polytechnic University, Shipman actually had a secret self that was awash in
monumental self-pity. He had watched his mother die when he was seventeen,
which he may have interpreted as rejection and abandonment. He wanted the jury
to believe that he had an impulse control problem, but in truth, he had been
highly organized in the way he altered medical records and adopted the pretense
of making proper arrangements. He'd even typed up a will for his last victim
and forged her signature. "What might have been perceived as a deep inner
hypersensitivity," says Missen, "may have been no more than a swollen
ego, in danger of imploding at the least pinprick." Shipman could not
handle potential rejection from women the age his mother would have been had
she lived, so his older female patients brought out his inner conflicts. That
means that what may have become suicidal despair in others turned into a
homicidal rage in Shipman. He killed patients to keep from killing himself. If
the estimates that his victims number nearly 300 are correct, then he killed an
average of one patient a month since his medical career began. The question can
be asked whether it's the position of power that shapes them into killers or
whether they're just sociopaths who managed to become doctors. A close look at
one of the most flagrant offenders in American history offers some clues.
America's Arch Fiend
In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson
published a gothic tale called The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Less than a decade later, the public would discover just how frighteningly real
such a case could be.
Dr. Holmes
Liked to swindle insurance
companies. Murder for profit was his game, but he also grew to relish his
little hobby so much that he began to include torture and other types of
experiments prior to death. His real name was Herman Webster Mudgett, born in
New Hampshire in 1860, and he got into the murder business around the same time
as Jack the Ripper. While he confessed in 1896, it's not clear how many people
he actually killed or whether he told the truth about anything. What is clear
is that he did kill men, women, and children, and gave little thought to what
he was doing. Had he not been caught, he'd likely have continued to con and
kill for the rest of his life.
Even as an adolescent, surgery
fascinated him. He'd catch animals and perform anatomical experiments on them.
When he was 18, he went to medical school at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, graduating at the age of 24. While there, he stole corpses to practice
more interesting experiments than the animals had afforded him. He also learned
how to use the corpses to defraud life insurance companies, by using acid to
obliterate their features and then giving them the fictitious names on the
insurance policies that he'd already taken out. He was banned from the place
after getting caught with a female corpse, so he moved on to Englewood,
Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. There he abandoned his first wife and took on
the alias by which he would become renowned: Henry Howard Holmes. He secured a
position as a druggist, and it wasn't long before the owner of the business, a
widow, disappeared. Holmes used the business to sell fake cures and soon became
wealthy. Though not divorced, he married again, although this wife left him
after only a year.
To be continued….
