Serial Killers and Their Secret Lives

Art by K. Ramsland

I’ve been asked a lot lately about serial killers who’ve successfully led double lives. The recent arrest of Rex Heuermann, charged with three of the four Gilgo Beach murders, has raised a lot of questions. What signs did people miss about his covert proclivities? Did his wife and children suspect anything? Did neighbors see any disturbing behavior? What can we do to protect ourselves from someone like this?

Heuermann, 59, seemed like an ordinary businessman. He commuted daily from the house in Massapequa Park on Long Island, where he grew up, to his office in Manhattan. He had a wife and two kids. He lived in a nice neighborhood. He wasn’t quite neighborly, it seems, but he caused no overt trouble. He’d been to college; he was an architect. Some clients report that he did good work. But he also had a secret life. He used burner phones to make dates on the sly with sex workers. In at least three, possibly four, cases, he allegedly strangled the women.

Police are working to sort through Heuermann’s massive cache of guns (over 200), his hunting gear, his computers, and other items from his home. They’re questioning those who knew him and searching his other properties. If he turns out to be a serial killer, Heuermann was fairly good at sheltering his dark side for at least 15 years. His wife was traveling each time a murder occurred, starting in July 2007. The victims, found in December 2010, were wrapped and dumped, undiscovered for months to years. Twelve years later, Heuermann was identified as a suspect. He’d used several different burner phones (although keeping them helped get him caught). As the case unfolds, there are likely to be more revelations and possibly more victims.

What we’re seeing now, we’ve seen before. Purposeful predatory serial killers like Gary Ridgway, John Wayne Gacy, Robert Hansen, Richard Cottingham, and Dennis Rader learned early to shield their darkest urges and acts. All had families and regular jobs. They developed deceptive façades of normalcy in order to live in their communities.

Psychologists refer to this behavior as compartmentalizing. Utah-based prison psychologist Al Carlisle, who’d spent a lot of time with Ted Bundy, proposed that the ability to repeatedly kill while functioning as a normal person develops through three distinct processes: fantasizing salacious scenarios, dissociating from unpleasant feelings, and developing a knack for chameleon-like adaptation.

They have a fluidity of ego, often facilitated by narcissistic needs. The person has no investment in integrity and no commitment to a given persona. They can flip in and out of whichever one they need for a given circumstance. “It’s like an actor,” Carlisle wrote. “The actor creates within his mind the world of his character, and he can move around within the sphere of the character he is playing without losing the essence of the part.”

In other words, these covert killers can access the voice, mannerisms, behavior, and emotions of ordinary people as needed. “The killer shifts from the pathological compartment in his mind back into the socially acceptable compartment, but he never completely leaves the theater in his mind.”

When I was writing Confession of a Serial Killer with Dennis “BTK” Rader, he used a different word: cubing. By this, he meant that he’d developed a variety of “life frames.” Each side of the cube was an identity he could use: family man, husband, Boy Scout volunteer, church leader, burglar, or serial killer. Each role was part of him, but only one face of the cube was visible at any given time. He could shift easily from one to another.

“As I grew up, the mental cubing was [an] escape from a boring class or job… When I felt alone, my cubing made me feel better. It was easy to cube into [the] Dark Side as my secret. I wasn’t hurting anyone, only in my mind.”

By adulthood, cubing was a natural outlet. “I started work at the Coleman plant, doing assembly work… I passed the time by cubing into daydreams about being a hitman and a spy.”

His fantasies eventually inspired action. As a “spy,” he followed women and became a voyeur, using his imagined mission to justify peering into people’s homes, then breaking in. This evolved into murder. Yet, he went home to his wife, kids, and responsibilities as if he’d done nothing. He still went to his job. “Yes, I was a serial killer,” Rader said, “but still a loving husband and father.”

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Some predators can succeed at these revolving personas for years, but from time to time, they do show their hand. There’s no firm list of traits and behaviors that will guarantee our safety from them, but some behavioral patterns provide signals.

Among the best guides to predatory maneuvers are Robert Hare’s Without Conscience, David Givens’ Crime Signals, and Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. Givens says these predators and con artists might be overly friendly and rehearsed, deflecting their target from what they’re about to do. Their eyes might lack the emotion they’re expressing. There may be subtle self-stimulation with hands and fingers (especially touching the mouth) or touching of the potential victim during a request. In addition, their rhythmic repetition of gestures adds a hypnotic quality.

More to the point, relatives of killers who’ve been caught have also reported suggestive behaviors: inconsistencies in their narratives, outright lies, tension or agitation with no context, unexplained absences, unexplained cuts or bruises, and items turning up that belong to no one in the family. Some killers have also kept private areas, like locked drawers or rooms, briefcases, vaults, or safety deposit boxes, allowing no one near them. Such behaviors don’t necessarily signal a covert serial killer, but they appear often enough in the backgrounds of identified killers that they should inspire greater vigilance. It’s the patterns of deception that should concern us.

We tend to operate in an atmosphere of social trust, so we don’t expect people we know to wear masks of deception. However, learning these signals and being observant might provide some protection.