Many of us know the thrill of dressing up for Halloween.
It's the one night of the year where it's okay to pretend to be someone you're not,
and to allow yourself to indulge in dark fantasies.
Horror movies are full of killers who wear masks in order to scare their victims.
The masks are scary not just because of what they show, but also because of what they hide.
They conceal the killer's true identity and intentions.
The masks remove their humanity.
But masked killers aren't just the stuff of fantasy and Hollywood movies.
History is full of examples of real criminals who disguise their faces, sometimes to commit
their crimes, and sometimes to relive them.
In 1960, on the small island of Jersey, a small boy wakes up in the middle of the night
to see a dark figure standing over the edge his bed.
He can barely make out the man's face in the monlight, and he's horrified by what she sees.
The man appears disfigured, his hair is unkempt. and his eyes are hollow.
The man is Edward Paisnel.
He's wearing a disguise that consists of an old, tattered rubber mask and a woman's wig.
Paisnel brutally sexually assaults the boy.
The child tries to fight back, but Paisnel is also wearing nail studded bracelets and
shoulder pads that pierce him as she struggles.
This scenario repeats itself for ten years, as Paisnel assaults young boys and women by
breaking into their homes while dressed as what the locals nickname, “The Beast of
Jersey.”
He's caught in 1971, when he's stopped by police after he speeds through a roadblock
in a stolen car.
Police discover the mask on the inner lining of his coat.
At his barn they find a Satanic altar where Paisnel would sacrifice animals and perform
rituals.
He had modeled himself after the notorious child killer Gilles de Rais, who was thought
to have killed up to 200 kids in the 15th century.
Paisnel is charged with 13 counts of rape and sodomy and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Although he was never charged with any murder, he has been linked to unsolved missing children's
cases as well as the murder of a woman in 1966.
At around midnight on February 22nd, 1946.
Jimmy Hollis and his girlfriend Mary Jeanne Larey are parked on a lonely road often frequented
by teenagers in search of privacy when tall man wearing a white mask over his head with
holes cut out for his eyes approaches the driver's side of the vehicle.
The man points a gun at Hollis and orders the couple to get out of the car.
He tells Jimmy Hollis to take off his pants and then strikes him twice in the head with
a blunt object, knocking him unconscious.
The man asks Mary to give him her purse but she tells him she doesn't have one, at which
point he also strikes her and proceeds to sexually assault her.
He penetrates her with the barrel of his gun.
Mary manages to get up and runaway.
She eventually reaches a house and is able to contact the police.
Both Mary and Jimmy survive the attack, but subsequent victims of The Phantom Killer are
not so lucky.
Over the course of ten weeks, the phantom kills 5 people and wounds 3 others.
The murders send the town of Texarkana into a state of panic, many of the residents even
going as far as packing their belongings and moving away.
Although suspicion falls on the son of a minister named Youll Swinney, the killer is never caught
and the case remains unsolved.
The Texarkana Moonlight Murders as they came to be called were the inspiration for the
1976 film The Town that Dreaded Sundown, which in itself inspired many horror movies.
It's influence can clearly be seen in Friday the 13th Part 2, in which Jason Vorhees wears
a sack over his head reminiscent of the Phantom Killer.
On September 27, 1969, Bryant Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard are having a picnic at Lake
Berryessa, in Napa County, CA.
The young students are lying on the ground along the shoreline when Shepard notices a
man lingering in the distance.
She turns away and tries to ignore him, but when she turns back to look again she sees
that the man has walked even closer.
When he gets within around 100ft.
Of the couple, he steps behind a tree.
When he emerges again he's wearing a bizarre black costume, which consists of a black executioner's
hood and a waistline bib decorated with a crossed circle symbol.
He walks toward the couple pointing a gun, at which point Shepard screams and tells Hartnell
to run.
By the time they get up the man is already within shooting range.
He tells them that he's an escaped convict who killed a guard and needs money in order
to flee to Mexico.
In reality, the hooded man is the notorious Zodiac killer, who has been terrorizing northern
California with seemingly random killings and taunting police with letters and cryptic
ciphers.
The Zodiac forces Shepard to tie Hartnell up using plastic clothesline.
She does as she's told, and then the killer ties her too.
Believing that they are being robbed, Hartnell tries to reason with the Zodiac and asks him
if his gun is really loaded.
The Zodiac takes out the gun's clip to show Hartnell that it is and then proceeds to stab
the couple.
He stabs Hartnell six times and Shepard ten times before fleeing.
Using a black marker, the Zodiac leaves behind a message on Hartnell's car door that reads:
Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27–69–6:30/by knife
He then heads to a phone booth 27 miles away in downtown Napa and calls police.
“I want to report a murder, no, a double murder.
They are two miles north of Park Headquarters.
They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.”
“I'm the one who did it.”
The couple is still alive by the time that they are ushered away by an ambulance, but
Cecelia Shepard dies two days later in the hospital.
Interestingly, it seems as though the attack at Lake Berryessa is the only time that the
Zodiac wears the costume.
The Beast of Jersey, The Phantom Killer and the Zodiac are examples of criminals who used
masks either to hide their identity or to terrify their victims, but masks have also
been used by killers for other means.
A teenager from Plainfield, Wisconsin is visiting the home of his neighbor Edward Gein when
he notices what look like human heads on a counter.
Gein claims they're shrunken head relics from the South Seas that were sent to him by a
cousin who had served in World War II.
The teen tells the townspeople about what he saw but they have a hard time believing
his story until two other men visit Gein's house and see the heads for themselves.
Still, they dismiss them as Halloween decorations and no one contacts the authorities.
Kids in the neighborhood begin to refer to Gein's home as a haunted house, and sometimes
they dare each other to peer into the window to catch a glimpse of the shrunken heads.
In actuality the heads are human facial skins that Gein peels off of female corpses in order
to wear as masks as part of a strange cross dressing ritual.
When his house is searched as part of a murder investigation, authorities even find a shirt
made of human skin, complete with human breasts, and Gein would later confess to wearing the
shirt around his house and also to draping female genitalia over his naked groin.
Police learn he's obsessed with the idea of becoming a woman, in large part due to an
unhealthy obsession with his dead mother.
Gein is known to have robbed 9 graves and committed 2 murders.
He is part of the inspiration for the character of Norman Bates in Psycho and Leatherface
in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
40 year old Dennis Rader is spending time in his parents' basement taking photos.
He's a father of two, a Cub Scout leader and the president of the local church congregation.
To most people in his neighborhood, he seems like an upstanding citizen.
But Rader is also a deeply sadistic killer known to the police as BTK.
By 1985, he has already killed 8 people, most of them by suffocation or strangulation.
While alone in his parents' basement, he relives his murders by posing for photos while dressed
up in his victims' clothing and wearing a plastic mask of a woman's face.
Most of his killings involved brutal acts of bondage and it seems like the photographs
are an attempt to recreate the sexual arousal he felt while committing them.
Sometimes he travels to motels for the photo shoots, other times he does them out in the woods.
He kills two more people and continually mocks police until he's finally caught in 2005 and
sentenced to life in prison.
Although all these killers used masks for different reasons, they terrify us because
they call to mind our fear of anonymous death, or they remind us that our identities are
fragile.
You may think you know your neighbors, but the masks we all wear can be deceiving.
Now I want to know what you think, who is the scariest masked killer and why?
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