Is there Karma for Serial Killers?

Sometimes what goes around comes back around with a vengeance.

Posted Mar 17, 2021

K. Ramsland
Source: K. Ramsland

A couple of recent news items made me think about times when serial killers got a taste of their own medicine. We like to believe that actions have consequences and that bad actions will be punished in particularly exquisite ways. It’s rare, but when it happens, it’s satisfying. Social media memes of “instant karma” often go viral, with numerous comments along the lines of “got what they deserved.”

Roger Kibbe, the “I-5 Strangler,” murdered at least seven women in California during the 1970s and 80s. He had an odd ritual: he liked to cut their clothing in nonfunctional ways with scissors. To find them, he’d drive to a remote stretch of the highway, look for a woman driving alone, and pull over, pretending to need help. Or, he’d look for disabled cars. Charmaine Sabrah, 26, and her mother, Carmen Anselmi, had broken down on I-5. Kibbe offered a ride, but he had a two-seater sports car, so he could take only one at a time. Carmen sent Charmaine with him, hoping he was the good man he seemed. But he never returned. Charmaine’s strangled body was found fifty miles away. Kibbe was finally caught and sent to the Mule Creek State Prison. Last week, his cellmate allegedly strangled him. A victim's relative expressed hope that Kibbe had thought about each of his victims as he painfully expired in the same way.

I also noticed some karma when I watched the recent Netflix documentary, Murder among the Mormons. It featured Mark Hofmann, the talented forger who got into a financial corner and used homemade bombs to blow his way out. He killed two people. I describe this case here. His third bomb injured him and eventually sent him to prison. There, after his wife divorced him, he attempted suicide by overdose. His awkward position while unconscious cut off circulation to his right arm. Thus, the forger’s hand that had facilitated his fraud was rendered permanently useless.

A boomerang effect seems to have come for Joseph Duncan III, who used predatory cunning to kidnap, molest and kill children. That calculating brain is now riddled with terminal cancer. In 2005, Duncan had murdered Brenda Groene, her boyfriend and her thirteen-year-old son before abducting Dylan and Shasta Groene from their home near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He killed Dylan. Caught with Shasta, he was convicted on multiple charges. DNA also linked Duncan to the murder of a 10-year old boy in California. In addition, he’d admitted to killing two young girls in Seattle, but since he was on federal death row he wasn’t charged. Last November, he was given 6-12 months to live. The organ that once facilitated unthinkable crimes is now his death chamber.

Perhaps the ultimate form of cosmic reciprocity for a serial killer happened to Jeffrey Dahmer. He’d killed seventeen men before he was arrested in Wisconsin 1991. An intended victim had escaped his personal killing field and returned with the police. Inside Dahmer’s apartment they found human heads, intestines, hearts, defleshed skulls, and dismembered torsos. Dahmer was killing men and preserving or dissolving their parts. Convicted, he went to prison. On November 28, 1994, Christopher Scarver murdered Dahmer and another inmate as they mopped the shower and toilet area. Scarver used a 20-inch steel bar from the weight room to bash in Dahmer’s skull – similar to the weapon Dahmer had used on his first victim, Steven Hicks. He’d hit him with a dumbbell and strangled him with the bar. Dahmer died on the way to the hospital.

Jack Unterweger was convicted in an Austrian court of killing nine women in three countries, including the U.S. Despite his vehement claims of innocence, the murders were behaviorally linked by his complicated ligature knots. He’d sworn he’d never spend another day in prison, so after his conviction, he used a wire and the drawstring from his prison jumpsuit to hang himself – tying that same complicated knot.

Slightly less karmic, but still in the realm of reaping-what-you-sow, self-admitted “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison. Maybe he should have been strangled with one of the “choker” necklaces he gleefully made to sell. Similarly, Charles Schmid, the “Pied Piper of Tucson” who’d murdered three teenage girls in 1964, was stabbed 47 times during a prison brawl.

Such tales bring a little closure to the sense of injustice some feel when a particularly wicked killer gets only a life sentence. We realize an eye-for-an-eye is not quite civilized, but when it happens it can feel like a higher force with a poetic sense of justice has made the move.