Dances with Werewolves

By Anastasia Toufexis

America has a pantheon of ghouls, where the bloodiest of villainies earns an assurance of immortality. And now there are two more candidates for this hellish hall of fame.

Henry Louis Wallace was smooth -- very, very smooth. Listeners tuning into WBAW-FM in Barnwell, South Carolina, during the late evening hours four years ago responded positively to Wallace, a.k.a. "Night Rider," a silky-voiced disk jockey who favored urban contemporary music. Women, taken with his sweet smile, solicitous attitude and pleasant looks, trusted him all along. They invited him to their homes for dinner, watched while he cradled their babies in his arms, accepted his invitations to date.

Today Wallace, 28, sits in a jail cell in Charlotte, North Carolina, charged with the worst killing spree in the area's history. According to police, Wallace murdered at least 10 women over the past two years in North Carolina. His last alleged victim was a 35-year-old supermarket clerk who was found strangled in her apartment two weeks ago. Her tragically apt name: Debra Ann Slaughter.

Like Wallace, Frank Potts was a good neighbor to the 300 residents of Estillfork, Alabama. He helped widows cut wood and brought friends oranges from Florida, where he worked each year as a fruit picker. To some, he could sound like a preacher in full sermon. "I found Frank Potts to be the kind of person you could trust," says James Robert Henshaw, who once hired Potts to cut trees and haul wood. "I found Frank Potts to be just like us."

Well, maybe not. Up on remote Garrett Mountain, the local police, FBI and ! National Guard have been searching the grounds around Potts' cabin for the past three weeks, ever since the body of 19-year-old Robert Earl Jines, his head bashed in, was discovered in a shallow grave 75 yds. away. Potts, 50, a wiry, intense man, is the prime suspect in Jines' murder, as well as the death of up to 14 others. The murders stretch back 15 years and all the way to New York, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia and Florida. Potts denies involvement in all these murders, but a law-enforcement spokesman noted, "It seems wherever Mr. Potts is, people disappear and die."

Already, trucks and cars filled with smiling adults, and sometimes young children, are streaming into Estillfork. Roy Taylor and his wife Emogene drove 40 miles from Tennessee to catch a glimpse of Potts' cabin. "We've been seeing this on TV so much . . . so we thought we'd come out here," explains Emogene. "I guess this'll make history," says local resident Jeanette Gifford, as the cars cruise by. "There'll probably be a movie about it."

That's a good bet. Public fascination with serial killers is at an all-time high. Spectators sat in a courtroom in Gainesville, Florida, last week to get a look at Danny Rolling, who terrorized the city with his slaying of college students 3 1/2 years ago, as jurors were deciding to recommend that he be put to death. Meanwhile, television viewers are tuning into interviews with Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee cannibal who dismembered 17 young men, and with David ("Son of Sam") Berkowitz, the lovers' lane stalker who shot and killed six men and women in New York City. The curious can call 1-900-622-GACY to listen, for $1.99 a minute, to John Wayne Gacy argue against his death sentence, which is due to be carried out in May. The Chicago contractor, who killed 33 young men and buried many under his house, explains that he "really is the 34th victim."

Bookstores are swamped with books on killers, from encyclopedias and scholarly treatises to true-crime accounts and the just published A Father's Story by Jeffrey's dad Lionel Dahmer. A documentary featuring hitchhiker Aileen Wuornos, who has been billed catchily if incorrectly as America's first female serial killer for her murder of seven men, is playing theaters. There is also an unsavory but frenetic market in serial-killer collectibles. Fans are swapping trading cards of their favorite murderers. Dahmer T shirts are big sellers at heavy-metal concerts, and a comic book celebrating his exploits ( has all but sold out to buyers. Most bizarre, collectors are paying up to $20,000 in posh galleries around the U.S. for Gacy's paintings of eerie clowns; the killer used to dress up as "Pogo the Clown" to entertain neighborhood kids between his bouts of murder.

For many Americans, these modern-day ogres offer a perverse thrill. "Serial killers are the werewolves of the modern age," declares Hart Fisher of Champaign, Illinois, who published the Dahmer comic. "By day they walk around unassuming, then boom! By night they turn into monsters. People want to know why." The most fascinated seem to be the most nonviolent people of all, "the kind who would find a spider in the bathroom and take it outside with a tissue," says crime writer Ann Rule, who turned her experience on a suicide- prevention hotline alongside fellow volunteer -- and serial killer -- Ted Bundy into the best-selling The Stranger Beside Me. "The more we learn about things that frighten us, the more we can ease our fears."

However, others invest more than curiosity in the subject. "It's like touching evil, getting close to it," says Thomas Jackson, 34, of Port Huron, Michigan. Like thousands of people around the world, he eagerly corresponds with murderers like Gacy and Charles Manson. Some are drawn by the temptation to redeem lost souls. Dahmer, imprisoned for life in Wisconsin, has been showered by fans with Bibles and $12,000. Richard Ramirez, California's vicious "Night Stalker" who killed 13 people and is now at San Quentin, has a devoted following of women who write and visit.

The more grotesque the deed, the greater the killer's appeal. In the panoply of murderers, Long Island landscaper Joel Rifkin, who goes on trial this month for the death of 17 young women, is just a garden-variety killer. The man- eating Dahmer is the pick of the crop. "People are getting very morbidly involved in violence, especially violent sexual behavior," says criminologist Robert Ressler, who says he first coined the term serial killer 20 years ago when he worked in the FBI's behavioral-research branch. Americans now wallow in the horror and gore and take a guilty delight in killers' eluding capture. (Indeed, it is a chilling emulation of Gacy's reaction to the film Silence of the Lambs: "When I see a movie like that, I'm rooting for the killer," he told his Chicago lawyer Greg Adamski.) "Our society is actively breeding serial killers," says William Birnes, co-author with Joel Norris of the book Serial Killers, "and society's fascination with them is only adding to that."

Some experts believe the number of serial killers is rising. "Going back to 1960, you had about 10,000 homicides a year in the U.S., and most of these were solved and very few of them represented multiple or serial killers," notes Ressler, now a forensic consultant in Spotsylvania, Virginia. "Today we're running 25,000 homicides a year, and a significant number of those homicides are going unsolved. We're seeing a great increase in stranger killing and in many of these cases, the victims are falling to serial and multiple killers." Still, the notoriety these killers enjoy is out of proportion to their numbers. The FBI estimates there may only be dozens of serial killers operating in the U.S. Yet serial murder remains a peculiarly American phenomenon: 75% of the 160 or so repeat killers captured or identified in the past 20 years were in the U.S.

Birnes and Norris have divided the serial-killer life into seven phases of activity, a repeating cycle that begins with desire and ends with morose feelings -- aura, trolling, wooing, capture, murder, totem and depression. They kill to satisfy some inner psychological and sexual pressure, and they favor such killing methods as hanging, strangling or stabbing, which put them in intimate contact with their victim. "The only time serial murderers have control is when they kill," says Birnes. "That's why they keep totems." For instance: the body parts Dahmer put in his refrigerator, the victims' jewelry that Rifkin kept or the bodies buried in basements and yards. These mementos allow them to hang on to the highlights and relive them.

"Serial killing is an addiction," says crime author Ron Holmes of Louisville, Kentucky. The murderers "get caught because they stop paying attention to detail." Holmes recalls Bundy's words: "You learn what you need to know to kill and take care of the details, like changing a tire. The first time you're careful; the 30th time you can't remember where you put the lug wrench."

And what creates serial killers? While they tend to be cunning and intelligent sociopaths who use charm, guile, ruses and devices to gain the trust of victims, they are "failures at life," observes Birnes, "at every single level of their life." Experts blame the creation of serial killers on the breakdown of the family and physically and sexually abusive childhoods. Of the 36 serial killers he has studied, says Ressler, "most of them had single- parent homes, and those who didn't had dysfunctional families, cold and distant fathers, inadequate mothers. We are creating a poor environment for raising normal, adjusted young males."

But not all kids of lousy parents grow up to be killers. Thus some researchers suspect that biology plays a strong role. Psychologist Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia has completed a study in which he and an associate monitored the brain waves of psychopaths as they responded to emotion-laden words, such as rape, cancer, death, and neutral words like table and chair. The team found that normal people responded quickly to emotional words; the psychopaths showed no such activity -- all words were neutral.

As for the public fascination with serial killers, it may not create the monsters but it can drive them on. Berkowitz, notes Ressler, admitted that the biggest thrill of his life was seeing his letters printed in the papers during his murderous spree. "That actually encouraged him," says Ressler. Rolling admitted in a Gainesville court that one reason he committed the slayings was that he wanted to be a "superstar in crime." Says Florida prosecutor Rod Smith: "It's frightening if someone who craves attention can get so much by doing something so horrible. How many others out there with meaningless lives are looking to get their 15 minutes of fame?"

Once apprehended, killers sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to retain their status. Donald Leroy Evans, a Mississippi murderer who is facing trial for strangling a prostitute in Florida, claims a toll of more than 70 victims. But few believe he's killed nearly that number. In fact, Evans wrote to another serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas, who is imprisoned in Texas, asking for details of some of his crimes so that Evans could take credit for them. Evans' deeds have earned him his own trading card. Notes his lawyer: "He has a card. He's real proud of that."

Lucas himself spun a wildly inflated tale of murder for police. He once claimed to have killed some 600 people in 20 states but has since recanted, claiming he had been trying to commit "legal suicide" and to get back at police. Lucas, convicted in the death of 12 and facing another murder trial later this month, readily admits he phonied confessions partly to achieve star status. "I got to really liking it," he told TIME last week. "Manson was nothing compared to me. People built me into something. I became a monument." He adds, "I got fan mail, friends . . . people that would die for me."

With reporting by Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh and Richard Woodbury/Huntsville, with other bureaus