Close Encounters with Serial Killers Inspire Book

"Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" a history book by Peter Vronsky recently published by Penguin Berkley Books, was inspired by the author’s two brief encounters with serial killers before they were captured.

(PRWEB) February 22, 2005

"Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" a book by Peter Vronsky recently published by Penguin Berkley Books, was inspired by the author’s two brief coincidental encounters with serial killers before they were identified and captured. (See: http://www.petervronsky.com)

In 1979, on a visit to New York, while checking into a Times Square area hotel, Vronsky encountered serial killer Richard Cottingham in the hotel elevator. Minutes after the encounter, hotel staff called the fire department to report heavy smoke coming from one of the rooms. The arriving firefighters discovered the burning torsos of two Times Square street prostitutes, their heads and hands missing.

Vronsky writes how he entirely forgot his encounter in the elevator until months later he saw the photograph of the killer in the press after he was identified and charged with a series of murders, including the ones in the hotel. Vronsky was not the only one to forget Cottingham, who was eventually convicted in the gruesome torture mutilation murders of five women. Vronsky describes how after Cottingham murdered a woman in a large New Jersey motel and stuffed her corpse under the bed to be found by housekeeping staff, Cottingham returned to check-in to the very same motel three weeks later with another victim. Not one member of the motel staff recognized him!

Cottingham was apprehended only when motel staff began to hear the muffled screams of his victim as he tortured her in his room and called the police. The victim was rescued and testified at his trial.

In his chapter entitled “My Two Serial Killers” Vronsky describes how this 1979 encounter lead him to wonder over the years about where serial killers came from and what they were, long before the term ‘serial killer’ was even introduced. Eventually he began to write a book about the history of serial homicide.

While researching, Vronsky was in for a shock. He discovered that he had actually encountered a second serial killer: Andrei Chikatilo—"Citizen-X"--the "Red Ripper"--one of the world’s most prolific killers, who murdered and cannibalized an extraordinary fifty-three victims in the Ukraine.

Vronsky was working as a documentary filmmaker in Moscow in 1990 when he was approached for an interview by Chikatilo during a demonstration. Chikatilo was visiting Moscow to protest the construction of a garage beneath his son’s apartment window in Rostov and wanted to meet Gorbachev to lodge his complaint. After conversing with Chikatilo, Vronsky decided Chikatilo’s story was uninteresting for the documentary film and brushed him off. Three weeks later Chikatilo was arrested after killing his fifty-first to fifty-third known victims near a railway station.

Again Vronsky forgot his banal encounter with Chikatilo, and this time did not even recognize him when his pictures appeared in the press after his arrest. It was only years later when he encountered the report of the odd complaint that motivated Chikatilo’s visit to Moscow to seek out Gorbachev in 1990 that Vronsky realized who it was that he had turned away. Vronsky says, “I was fascinated with their invisibility—their forgettability. Apparently they stalked and killed like evil transparent ghosts.”

Chikatilo projected such a harmless persona that shortly after committing a murder, he emerged with a victim's blood on his face on a railway station platform patrolled by police officers specifically on the look-out for the serial killer. Although the police decided to take note of his identification, they did not detain him and allowed him to go on his way to commit another murder.

Vronsky writes in his book, “While my Cottingham encounter in New York was one of those experiences that one can easily write off a coincidence, my second encounter with a serial killer made me wonder. I questioned the mathematical odds of running into two killers in that manner. One killer I could easily understand, but two made me ask, how many more might there be out there that I did not know about? I wondered what the odds were of walking by a serial killer without ever finding out about it—on the street, waiting in line for a burger, browsing for books in a true-crime section, or sitting next to one on a train or bus?”

"Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" is a definitive 430-page book covering the historical, cultural, psychological and investigative aspects of serial homicide around the globe from the Roman Empire to the Washington Beltway and the Green River murders.

Peter Vronsky is currently completing his doctorate in history at the University of Toronto and is a former international investigative documentary producer.

For more information or to contact the author: http://www.petervronsky.com

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

Peter Vronsky

New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2004.

432 Pages, Illustrated

ISBN: 0425196402

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