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referred to itself as a group in the letters, was a Devil-worshipping cult, holding meetings in a cave in a park north of the city, a club of death, in which the same .44 was passed around so that every satanic member had an opportunity to kill with it. The killing only stopped when one of them was caught, and he took the rap for everybody.
    A writer searched Westchester County in search of this cult and found evidence that it existed—in a park, in a cave decorated with satanic symbolism.
    The theories grew wackier. One suggested that the Sam kills were filmed from a van always in the vicinity, those snuff films going for top dollar to the pervs who paid for that junk.
    How good could those films be? Stanko wondered—if they did exist. They were shooting at night from a distance. To get any kicks out of the kills, you’d need a camera getting close-ups inside the cars where the carnage was.
    At first, Berkowitz confessed to all thirteen shootings. He had a loony tunes tale to tell: Sam was a cranky neighbor who worshipped the Devil, drank blood, and sent messages to Berkowitz via the incessant barking of his dog, Harvey. Berkowitz said he acted alone, and cops, eager to wrap up the nightmare, were eager to believe him.
    Later, Berkowitz said he’d only done a couple of the shootings, that others had pulled the .44’s trigger as well. Then he had his throat slashed in prison and claimed to have “found God.”

    Stephen Stanko discovered Ted Bundy–land, a vast continent of research on the crown prince of serial killers. There were people who thought Bundy was the most fascinating serial killer of all time. He combined the looks and charm of a swinging bachelor with an unquenchable thirst to kill as many pretty young girls as he could.
    Now here was a guy that Stanko could identify with. A chick magnet/snuff artist. Bundy helped launch the career of the legendary true-crime writer Ann Rule, who worked beside him and never sensed the evil.
    Bundy was a 1970s serial killer, and the fun part here was the way Bundy continued to lie about and cover up his murders, even as the evidence mounted against him, and his charm and powers of persuasion were such that he always had allies right up until the end.
    Although most experts believed Bundy killed at least thirty-five people, when Bundy finally confessed, he admitted to only thirty. He was a rapist, a necrophiliac, and a postmortem surgeon.
    After seducing his always lovely victims into a private moment, he took them by surprise—either coming up from behind or sometimes accosting them as they slept—and rapidly bludgeoned them into unconsciousness.
    On some occasions, the bludgeoning itself turned out to be fatal; but in some other cases, after they were knocked out, he would become intimate and manually strangle them.
    Bundy did not give up his freedom easily. After one of his arrests, he escaped by jumping out a second-story courthouse window. Hurting his ankle in the fall, he limped around free for a short while.
    He was a nomadic killer. He killed in the American Northwest, on the salt flats, and in the Rocky Mountains. He killed in Florida, and it was there that he was caught the last time and eventually was pushed into the electric chair. Predictably, he had gone to his execution kicking and screaming.
    Stanko thought Bundy’s modus operandi was worthy of extra thought. Hit ’em over the head, knock them out or make them groggy, and then get intimate. There would be a lot less potentially harmful rasslin’ that way.

    One of the newest serial killers who was Hall of Fame worthy was “BTK,” another writer of taunting letters. BTK was an acronym for bind, torture, and kill. He did his thing in Wichita, Kansas.
    BTK was different, because although FBI profilers would have called it impossible, he ran off a string of murders that terrified Kansas, stopped, and then came back a generation later to create a second nightmare for that city.
    The BTK case had some