A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

case as a result of his polygraph answers.
    As far as a prison term was concerned, the Murphy conviction would matter little. But, for her parents, it was essential to learn the truth. It was January 1973 when Pierce faced polygrapher Dewey Gillespie for the second time.
    Gillespie found strong evidence of deception on Pierce’s part when he asked the vital questions about Georgia. In the interview that followed, Bernie Pierce finally admitted his involvement in her death.
    Pierce told Don Cameron and Ted Fonis that he and Georgia Murphy had gotten into a fight late on the night of November 4, 1969. He said he had pulled Georgia out of his car and she’d hit her head on some concrete. She had lost consciousness.
    And then, with the flat, remorseless voice that detectives had come to expect from Pierce, he told them how he had simply rolled her into the Duwamish River. He didn’t know whether she was dead or not, nor, apparently, did he care. Asked about the clothes she wore that night in early November, he said he had probably dumped them somewhere along the Pacific Highway.
    Bernie Pierce was clearly a man full of rage, a rage that was exacerbated by alcohol. Beyond the two murders he had confessed to, and the sexual assaults detectives already knew about, Pierce admitting choking a prostitute into unconsciousness in Taiwan in 1967 while he was in the Navy. There was no way of checking to see if that woman had survived.
    Opinions from psychiatrists that were included in Bernard Pierce’s sentencing report stated that he was a sexual psychopath, and that his sociopathy was complicated by alcoholism. As friendly as he might seem when he was sober, he was terribly dangerous to women when he was intoxicated and aroused. No one will ever know how many women had been terrorized by Bernie Pierce. There may have been others who, like the girl who was almost strangled in her own apartment, chose not to report his attacks.
    For detectives from both the Seattle and King County Police Departments, Pierce’s conviction came at the end of years of dedicated investigative work which brought, finally, answers to tragic questions in the deaths of two trusting young women. Judge Dore sentenced the man who had so brutally violated that young trust to life in prison on February 21, 1973.
    At this writing, Bernie Pierce is fifty years old and still behind bars at Washington State’s Twin Rivers Prison. His first possible release date is March 13, 2001.

Profile of a Spree Killer
    We have become so familiar with the term “serial killer” that most of us don’t remember that this appellation is relatively new to the jargon of forensic psychologists and detectives. Before 1982,
all
multiple killers were called “mass murderers.” Indeed, when I published my book about Ted Bundy,
The Stranger Beside Me,
in 1980, even he was called a mass murderer on the cover copy—and no one questioned that. It wasn’t until my dear friend, Pierce Brooks, retired Captain of the Los Angeles Police Homicide Unit, invited me to present the Bundy case to the VI-CAP (Violent Criminals Apprehension Program) Task Force in Huntsville, Texas, that I first heard the term “serial killer.”
    Serial killers kill one or two victims at a time over a long period of time. They are addicted to murder—just as some people are addicted to drugs, alcohol, or gambling—and they do not stop until they are dead or arrested. At first they kill out of curiosity and a deeply imbedded rage, and it gives them a chilling kind of “high.” They may not try it again for a few years. Gradually, their killing games grow closer together until they
must
kill just to feel what they term “normal.” The “substance” they abuse is, of course, not drugs or alcohol; it is the power of controlling the life and death of another human being.
    A mass murderer, unlike a serial killer, who is considered “sane” by current medical and legal standards, is almost always psychotic. The mass murderer makes headlines for just one day’s activities, when his paranoia sends him into a business, a restaurant, or, too many times, a post office, where he attacks every human being he encounters. The mass murderer’s toll is high, but rarely as high as the overall body count run up by a serial killer. The serial killer takes infinite pains to keep his identity secret and to escape detection. The mass murderer is often bent on suicide. He either kills himself or places himself