Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (58 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
[
Sources: Richard Logan and Tere Duperrault Fassbender, Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean (Green Bay, WI: Title Town Publishing, 2010); “The ‘
Bluebelle
’ Mystery,” Life, December 1, 1961; Erle Stanley Gardner, “The Case of the
Bluebelle
’s Last Voyage,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, March 25, 1962; Stuart B. McGiver, Murder in the Tropics: The Florida Chronicles, vol., 2 (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 1995).
]
I
’
M AN INVETERATE COLLECTOR OF QUOTES
. F
OR YEARS
, I’
VE FILLED A SERIES OF
old-fashioned composition books with hundreds of thought-provoking lines, phrases, and entire passages garnered from newspapers, magazines, and books of every category: criminology, psychology, history, biography, poetry, fiction, and so on.
The quotes that grab my interest tend to be of two varieties: those that do a particularly good job of articulating insights I share—of putting my own thoughts into better words than I myself have managed to come up with—and those that light up my brain with new ideas.
Not all (or even most) of the quotes in my notebooks relate to murder, madness, and our deep-rooted attraction to the violent and horrible. But by validating my perceptions, crystallizing my thoughts, and giving me new ways to think about things, the ones that do deal with those subjects have had a big impact on my work in the field of true crime.
Here, then, culled from my collection, are a baker’s dozen of quotes that, I hope, readers will find as meaningful and stimulating as I have.
“The virtuous man is content to dream what the wicked man really does.”
—P
LATO
(360 B.C.E.)
“What, unknown or neglected by man, walks in the night through the labyrinth of the heart?”
—J
OHANN
W
OLFGANG VON
G
OETHE
(1789)
“It is a general phenomenon of our nature that that which is sad, terrible, and even horrendous holds an irresistible attraction for us.”
—F
RIEDRICH
S
CHILLER
, “On the Tragic in Art” (1792)
“Mr. Walker preached today on the government of the thoughts. Thought I, what thunders mutter in these commonplaces. Suppose he had rolled back the cloud of ceremony and decency and showed us how bad the smooth plausible people we meet everyday in society would be if they durst, nay how we should behave if we acted out our thoughts—not how devils would do, but how good people that hoped to be saved would do if they dared—I think it would shake us. These are the real terrors.”
—R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
MERSON
(1832)
“Men who have killed their wives, and committed other such everyday matters, have been condemned, executed, and are forgotten—but it takes a deed that has some of the sublime of horror about it to attract attention and set people crazy.”
—J
AMES
G
ORDON
B
ENNETT
(1841)
“Madame Tussaud made the discovery that the effigies of a dead criminal would bring in thousands of shillings, while no one would expend a solitary sixpence to look upon the living image of Innocence herself.”
—J
AMES
R
USSELL
L
OWELL
(1850)
“Ourself behind ourself concealed—
Should startle most—
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least.”
—E
MILY
D
ICKINSON
(1863)
“The average church-going Civilizee realizes, one may say, absolutely nothing of the deeper currents of human nature, or of the aboriginal capacity for murderous excitement
which lies sleeping in his own bosom. Religion, custom, law and education have been piling their pressure upon him for centuries mainly with the one intent that his homicidal potentialities should be kept under. The result, achieved with infinite difficulty, is the public peace which until recently we have enjoyed, a regimen in which the usual man forgets that in the practical sense there is any bloodthirstiness about him, and deems it an exceptional passion, only to be read in newspapers and romances.… But the water-tight compartment in which the carnivore within us is confined is artificial and not organic. It will never be organic. The slightest diminution of external pressure, the slightest loophole of licensed exception, will make the whole system leaky, and murder will again grow rampant.”
—W
ILLIAM
J
AMES
(1903)
“I and the public know,
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
—W. H. Auden (1939)
“The crime and punishment ritual is part of our lives … We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to envy secretly, and to punish stoutly. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do and, like scapegoats of old, they bear the burdens of our displaced guilt and punishment.”
—K
ARL
M
ENNINGER
(1968)