Suicide and the Serial Killer

Photo by K. Ramsland

Recently, “Bike Path Killer” Altemio Sanchez ended his life in his prison cell. He was 65. A married father of two and a machinist and youth baseball coach, he’d confessed in 2007 to stalking women on hiking or bike trails and killing three in Erie County, New York. In his cell, he’d cut his arm, bled out, and was found unresponsive. At his sentencing, he’d said he “should pay for these crimes." Later, Sanchez admitted to numerous rapes over three decades. He left no note.

On June 10, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski also killed himself. A once brilliant mathematician, he suffered from paranoid delusions. Kaczynski became a survivalist and authored a lengthy manifesto about the evils of industrialization. Between 1978 and 1995, he used mail bombs to kill three individuals and injure two dozen others. Arrested in 1996, he pleaded guilty and received eight life sentences. Possibly, his cancer treatments contributed to his decision to self-terminate.

Few researchers have done a deep dive into the reasons these extreme offenders opt out. Many people think the burden of guilt drove them to it, but aside from the occasional reference in a suicide note, no data supports this. One of the few suicides linked to remorse involved Mack Ray Edwards. In 1970, he turned himself in to the LAPD for child abduction. Edwards also confessed to killing other children. Before his trial he attempted to kill himself twice. He told the jury he wanted to be executed. He got his wish, but the appeals process was slow, so he hanged himself with an electrical cord.

Lester (2010) found that suicides among serial killers (6.2%) was far less common than among mass murderers (34.7%), but he was curious about whether suicidal serial killers differed as a group from their nonsuicidal peers. Lester and White (2012) examined a sample of 483 serial killers and found that 30 had committed suicide. They noted a database from author Michael Newton that showed a 4.4% suicide rate for nearly 600 serial killers. Newton claimed that the suicidal group tended to kill as part of a criminal enterprise rather than being compelled by personal cause or sexual fantasies. Otherwise, they weren't much different from one another. However, Lester and White found some differences in the backgrounds of self-terminated serial killers, notably that they’d come from dysfunctional homes, with psychiatric disturbances in the parents. Often the sexual acts they’d performed during the murders were more deviant than the non-suicide group.

Yet differences in timing and method seem like relevant factors for analysis. Some kill themselves quickly upon arrest, the threat of arrest, or conviction. Some do it after a brief prison stint, and some spend decades in prison before ending their lives. A few leave notes that assist with motivation, but no study has compared these cases for data about the relationship of timing to motivation. Such an analysis might be instructive.

Leonard Lake and Herb Baumeister both ended their lives once they felt cornered, and Fred West killed himself after arrest. When David Meirhofer was finally apprehended for a child abduction and murder in 1974, he admitted to four murders, then quickly hanged himself in his cell. That’s different from British physician Harold “Fred” Shipman, who waited four years post-conviction to end his life, reportedly so his wife could receive his pension payments. Richard Trenton Chase went through a trial before overdosing not long later on his medication for a mental illness.

Israel Keyes used his suicide to win his cat-and-mouse game with police. He'd admitted to three victims and offered details on eight more, but when he got fed up with how cops were handling him, he decided his own fate. Just after 10 p.m. on Dec. 1, 2012, a guard saw Keyes writing on a legal pad. He didn’t realize Keyes was composing his suicide note. He placed it on the bed, arranged some drawings of skulls, and tied his coiled sheet around his neck and ankle. He sliced his wrist with a razor and bled out, letting the sheet pull tight to strangle him.

In one case, a suicide revealed a killer. When retired French police officer Francois Vérove killed himself with a barbiturate overdose at the age of 59, his postmortem DNA closed a series of cold cases from the 1980s and 1990s. His suicide note confessed to experiencing "previous impulses" but added that he’d straighten himself out after getting a family. He’s believed to be responsible for at least six rapes and four murders.

Hanging and shooting, it turns out, are the typical methods. When Joe Ball saw law enforcement coming for him, he rang up “No Sale” at his cash register and shot himself in the head. Paul John Knowles committed suicide-by-cop when he grabbed for a cop’s gun while being transported in a police car. Child strangler Jeanne Weber died from injuries when she tried strangling herself. Austrian killer Jack Unterweger used the complicated knot that had linked him to several of his eleven victims to hang himself.

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One suicide seemed part of an elaborate payback scheme. When Pakistani police dismissed a criminal complaint filed by Javed Iqbal against two boys who'd beaten him, he proposed to kill 100 street kids. In 1999, over a period of six months, Iqbal lured boys to his apartment, asphyxiated them, and dissolved the bodies in acid. Then, he turned himself in. Sentenced to be strangled and cut into 100 pieces, Iqbal poisoned himself in his cell.

Although families of victims can feel relief when serial killers end their lives, some might also be angry over unresolved cases to which they’re linked. In addition, prison systems come under fire for their failure to spot red-flag behaviors. Research on timing and motivation might assist officials to watch for these signs. In some cases, hindering suicide might give waiting families hope for resolution.