Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (12 page)

The entire episode was so embarrassing to Hungary’s aristocracy that the matter was hushed up and kept secret until the 1720s, when a Jesuit scholar uncovered the transcripts of the official investigation.

Serial Sexual Crimes in Premodern History

Aside from the cases of Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Báthory, there are few accounts in history of any pathological serial murder prior to the nineteenth century. In Scotland, in the Galloway region somewhere between 1560 and 1610, Sawney Beane and his family of cave-dwelling cannibals are said to have killed and eaten thousands of travelers over a forty-five-year period. His family, the product of incest consisting of eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons, and fourteen granddaughters, fed on human flesh that was found by soldiers and pickled and smoked in the caves. They were all put to death in Leith without standing trial. The historic authenticity of this episode, however, has not been resolved with any finality, as no contemporary documentation for the event has been identified.
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In 1577 Nuremberg, German hangman Hans Schmidt wrote in his autobiography that he put Nicklaus Stüller to death because “First he shot a horse-soldier; secondly he cut open a pregnant woman alive in which was a dead child; thirdly he again cut open a pregnant woman in whom was a female child; fourthly he once more cut open a pregnant woman in whom were two male children.”

During the same period in Cologne in 1589, Peter Stubbe (Stumpf) stood charged with the rape, murder, and cannibalization of fifteen women and children near the village of Bedburg over five years. Their remains were found scattered around the village fields. Some of his victims were pregnant women from whose wombs he tore out the fetus and ate it. One of his victims was his own infant child, the result of incest with his daughter, whom he killed and ate. Stubbe, it was charged, had made a pact with the devil to turn into a werewolf, in which form he would attack his victims. He was executed in Cologne on October 8, 1589.

Another case of “werewolf” serial homicides is recorded in France in 1603, when a fourteen-year-old boy, Jean Grenier, was arrested after being beaten back by a girl he had attacked. Grenier confessed that he would take the form of a werewolf while mutilating and eating young children and pretty girls. The judge of Chastellanie and Barony of La Roche Calais questioned the boy, paying particular attention to the issue of werewolves. According to the surviving transcripts:

Asked what children he had killed and eaten while thus transformed into a wolf: said that once, as he was going from Coutras to Saint Anlaye he entered a house where he saw no one but found a one-year-old child in a cradle and took it by its throat between his teeth, carried it behind a garden fence, ate as much of it as he wanted.

That near the parish of Saint Antoine de Pizon, he hurled himself upon a young girl wearing a black dress and watching over lambs, killed her and ate as much of her as he wanted. But here is something remarkable: he said that it was he who had pulled her dress down without tearing it. It has been observed that real wolves tear with their claws, and werewolves tear with their teeth, whereas men know how to despoil girls they wish to eat of their dresses without tearing them.
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That the girl’s dress was not torn took on crucial forensic significance in this case. Physicians were called to examine the boy and concluded that he did not really turn into a werewolf, but only imagined he did, as a result of “demonic possession.” In other words, he was insane. As a result, Jean Grenier was not put to death, but instead confined for life in a monastery.

The remaining few cases that are noted in history are either series of assassinations for political motives or murders by bandits, highwaymen, and pirates systematically killing off witnesses to their crimes. There were frequent accounts of serial killing for profit, including several of female killers poisoning their victims. Serial killers preying on victims for pathological need or pleasure were rarely if ever heard of, but we cannot rule out the possibility that legendary accounts of vampires and werewolves are actually factual descriptions of human serial killers.

The earliest recorded episode of a fetish-driven serial sex crime crops up in April 1790 in London. A “Monster” is reported by contemporary description, having committed a series of “nameless crimes, the possibility of whose existence no legislator has ever dreamed of.” The Monster stalked well-dressed women in the streets, abused them with indecent language, and then slashed at their clothing. In some cases, he wore some kind of knife apparatus on his knees, allowing him to approach women in a crowd and slash at their clothing discreetly from below. More than fifty women were attacked this way between 1788 and 1790. Occasionally the assailant would cut too deeply and wound his victims, but many avoided being injured by the fashion of the day, consisting of multiple thick petticoats and bloomer-type underwear.

London was as shocked and alarmed by these extraordinary and inexplicable attacks as they would be by Jack the Ripper a hundred years later. Rewards were offered for the capture of the Monster and descriptions of his activities were posted everywhere, but they varied. The attacks appeared to escalate when some women on the street were approached by a man holding a small bouquet of artificial flowers who would ask them to smell it. Those who bent over to do so would be slashed on the face with something sharp hidden in the bouquet.

In June 1790, one of the victims thought she recognized her assailant, and he was arrested. He turned out to be an artificial-flower maker named Renwick Williams. Not all the victims identified him, and his trial was very complex because nobody knew what to charge him with. The prosecution spoke of “a crime that is so new in the annals of mankind, an act so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible.” Due to the peculiarities of the criminal code at that time, attempted murder was merely a misdemeanor, and the authorities were hard pressed to find an appropriate felony with which to charge Renwick Williams. At first they considered the Coventry Act, which made it a felony to lie in wait with the purpose of maiming or disfiguring a person. But there was no evidence that the Monster ambushed his victims. The Black Act made it a felony to go about armed while in disguise, but Williams was not obviously disguised. Finally the magistrates discovered a 1721 act that was passed when English weavers, in protest against cloth being imported from India, slashed the clothes of those they saw wearing it. The act made it a felony punishable by transportation (usually to Australia) for seven years, to “assault any person in the public streets, with intent to tear, spoil, cut, burn, or deface the garment or clothes of such person, provided the act be done in pursuance of such intention.”
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Williams was convicted of the charge, but a superior court decided that it did not apply to his case. He was tried again on the misdemeanor of attempted murder and sentenced to six years in prison. He denied being the Monster to the end. Upon his release, Williams married, fathered a child, and vanished from history.

In the decades that followed, several similar cases are on record in France and Germany. In Paris in 1819, women on the street were attacked and cut about the thighs and buttocks by
piqueurs.
The term
picquerism
is still used today to describe stabbing or slashing committed as a substitute for sex. At the same time in Augsburg, Germany, a
Mädchenschneider—
“girl cutter”—began to cut and slash young women in the buttocks, arms, and legs. His reign of terror lasted eighteen years, claiming some fifty victims, until the arrest of a wealthy thirty-five-year-old wine merchant named Carl Bartle. In his home, authorities discovered an extensive collection of edged weapons. Bartle confessed an aversion and disgust for women and stated that since age nineteen he would have an orgasm at the sight of blood. Like Williams, he was sentenced to six years in prison.

In the area of Bozen and Innsbruck, several women were stabbed with a small penknife in 1828 and 1829. The perpetrator, when arrested, also confessed to a sexual compulsion to stab women, which was enhanced by the sight of dripping blood. In Leipzig, similar attacks took place in the 1860s. In Bremen in 1880, a twenty-nine-year-old hairdresser, Theophil Mary, was charged with slashing the breasts of thirty-five women he had confronted on the streets. Previously he had committed a series of attacks in Strasbourg, but moved when the authorities intensified their search for the offender.

All of these offenses seemed a rehearsal for the attacks committed by Jack the Ripper in London in 1888. For some reason, all these perpetrators never crossed the line to killing their victims. Their attacks ranged from hesitant slashing of clothing to violent stabs to the women’s bodies, but while they persisted for years, they never escalated to homicide.

Slouching Toward Whitechapel: The Rise of Sexual Murder

It was not until the nineteenth century, with the advent of leisure time for all classes, that the middle and lower classes began to indulge to any extent in sex crime and serial homicide. Sex crime was no longer the prerogative of only aristocrats or demented vagrants.

In 1808, police in Regensdorf in Bavaria arrested fortune-teller Andrew Bichel for murdering women who came to his premises seeking employment as servants. Two bodies were found buried beneath the woodshed, and chests of women’s clothing were discovered in Bichel’s house. It was determined that Bichel had a fetish for female clothing and killed his victims for it. Bichel would request that the girls being interviewed bring their wardrobes with them. He persuaded some of the girls to have their eyes covered and their hands tied behind their backs in order to show them their future in a magic mirror. He then stabbed them in the neck.

One of the earliest documented sex murders was committed in the small town of Alton in England in July 1867. The perpetrator represented a new class with earned leisure time on its hands—the middle class. A young solicitor’s clerk named Frederick Baker approached an eight-year-old girl he knew and persuaded her to go for a walk. Several hours later when the girl had failed to return home and her friends informed her mother that she had gone off with Baker, the mother set out to look for her daughter. She encountered Baker returning to the town. He told her in a very calm and self-possessed manner that her daughter had gone to buy candies. The child’s body was found in a field several hours later, beheaded and cut up into many pieces. Her genitals were missing and were never found. Baker was immediately arrested but claimed to be innocent. In his office diary, however, police found an entry reading: “Killed a young girl today. It was fine and hot.” Baker was tried and executed. (During his trial, he stated that he meant to write: “Killed, a young girl, today. [The weather] was fine and hot.”)

Had Baker lived in a larger urban community where he was not known, he might have gone on to continue killing. When he encountered the girl’s mother, he was calm and collected, and his clothes were clean despite the fact that he had just dismembered a body. That suggested that Baker must have stripped off his clothes in a lucid and premeditated manner prior to butchering his victim. His behavior, when questioned by the police, was cool and calm, and he persistently denied committing the crime.

It is in Europe in the 1860s that the first modern pathological serial sexual killings begin to crop up in history. In France, Joseph Philippe murdered six prostitutes, while in Vittoria, Spain, a man named Gruyo strangled six prostitutes over a period of ten years. In Italy in December 1870, a fourteen-year-old girl, Johanna Motta, set out to a neighboring village but failed to return. She was discovered lying by a path in the fields, with her abdomen cut open and her torn-out intestines and genitals near by. She had been suffocated by dirt forced into her mouth and appeared to be strangled. Nearby, under a pile of straw, were found remnants of her clothing and a piece of flesh cut from her calf.

In August 1871, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, Fregeni, was found by her husband in a field when she failed to return home. She had been strangled and her intestines were hanging out through a deep wound in her abdomen.

The next day, nineteen-year-old Maria Previtali reported that her cousin, twenty-two-year-old Vincenzo Verzeni, had dragged her out into a field of grain and attempted to strangle her. When he stood up to see if anyone was coming, she managed to talk her cousin into letting her go. Verzeni was arrested and he confessed:

I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure. It was even a pleasure only to smell female clothing. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating. I took great delight in drinking Motta’s blood. It also gave me the greatest pleasure to pull the hairpins out of the hair of my victims.

I took the clothing and intestines, because of the pleasure it gave me to smell and touch them. At last my mother came to suspect me, because she noticed spots of semen on my shirt after each murder or attempt at one. I am not crazy, but in the moment of strangling my victims I saw nothing else. After the commission of the deeds I was satisfied and felt well. It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals and such things. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood. To this very day I am ignorant of how a woman is formed. During the strangling and after it, I pressed myself on the entire body without thinking of one part more than another.
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