Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (13 page)

Verzeni admitted that he experienced sexual pleasure whenever he choked a woman. Previously he had experienced orgasms while pressing his victims’ throats without killing them, but in the case of the two murder victims his sexual satisfaction became so delayed that they died. He sucked the blood of his victims and had torn a piece from Motta’s calf to take home and roast, but hid it under a haystack for fear that his mother might suspect him. Verzeni stated that at age twelve he discovered that he derived sexual pleasure from wringing the necks of chickens. In the four years before the murders he had attempted to strangle three other women, including his former nurse while she slept sick in bed.

In the 1870s, physical features were linked to criminal character; therefore, close attention was paid to Verzeni’s physiology. (Later in this book, we will see how a hundred years later, counseling psychologist Dr. Joel Norris found frequent physical abnormalities in serial killers he observed.) The clinical assessment of Verzeni concluded:

His cranium is of more than average size, but asymmetrical. The right frontal bone is narrower and lower than the left, the right frontal prominence being less developed, and the right ear smaller than the left (by 1 centimeter in length and 3 centimeters in breadth); both ears are defective in the inferior half of the helix; the right temporal artery is somewhat atheromatous. It seems probable that Verzeni had a bad ancestry—two uncles are cretins; a third, microcephalic, beardless and one testicle wanting, the other atrophic . . .

Verzeni’s family is bigoted and low-minded. He himself has ordinary intelligence; knows how to defend himself well; seeks to prove an
alibi
and cast suspicion on others. There is nothing in his past that points to mental disease, but his character is peculiar. He is silent and inclined to be solitary. In prison he is cynical. He masturbates, and makes every effort to gain sight of women.
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The description of the first known sexual serial killer is remarkably typical of the ones of today. Verzeni was of average intelligence and showed no signs of mental disease but was “peculiar and inclined to be solitary.” Vincenzo Verzeni was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1872.

The same year in Vinuville, France, a young man named Eusebius Pieydagnelle surrendered to authorities and confessed to killing seven people. He explained that he was obsessed with blood and would have an orgasm at the sight and smell of it. All of his victims were extremely mutilated. According to the evidence presented in court, Eusebius came from a “highly respectable family” and was well educated. His home was located across the street from a butcher shop; according to Eusebius, “The smell of fresh blood, and appetizing meat, the bloody lumps—all this fascinated me and I began to envy the butcher’s assistant, because he could work at the block, with rolled up sleeves and bloody hands.” Although his parents were opposed, Eusebius found employment with the butcher, intending to apprentice. He was overjoyed at the opportunity to butcher animals all day long. But his father eventually took Eusebius away and apprenticed him to a notary. This threw Eusebius into a deep depression and he began killing people; his first victim was a fifteen-year-old girl whom he stabbed and mutilated. He killed six more times, the last victim being the butcher he first worked for. Then he surrendered.

Across the ocean in the United States, in 1874 in Boston, a fourteen-year-old youth named Jesse Pomroy was sentenced to life imprisonment for the torture murders of a ten-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. The boy had been found with thirty-one knife wounds; the girl, who had disappeared the month before, was found buried in the basement of the house that Pomroy lived in. Because of his youth, Pomroy was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served the first forty-one years of his sentence in solitary confinement and died on a prison farm in 1932 at age seventy-two.

The same year in Boston as well, Tomas Piper, a church bell-ringer in his midtwenties, battered to death and raped two women and a five-year-old girl. A few days before his hanging in 1876, he confessed to an additional four homicides.

At the time these crimes occurred, none of them were recognized as sex crimes. The killers were all characterized as “monsters” with animal-like appetites. They were paralleled with vampire and werewolf legends—they were no longer humans. It was during this period that Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing was working with the Berlin courts and witnessing all manners of sexual crimes. Krafft-Ebing was inspired to write
Psychopathia Sexualis,
a textbook on sexual abnormalities, including serial homicide, in which he identified and catalogued the sexual nature of homicides committed by so-called “monsters,” which he termed “joy murder” or “lust murder”
(lustmord).
Krafft-Ebing maintained that in such murders, the vicious mutilation of victims, and the killing itself, was sexually motivated and a substitute for normal sex.

Written in the 1880s, some of Krafft-Ebing’s conclusions are still hauntingly applicable today. The authorities, he wrote, are ill-equipped to combat sex crime:

This contest is unequal; because only a certain number of sexual crimes can be combated, and the infractions of the laws by so powerful a natural instinct can be but little influenced by punishment. It also lies in the nature of the sexual crimes that but a part of them ever reach the knowledge of the authorities. Public sentiment, in that it looks upon them as disgraceful, lends much aid.

Criminal statistics prove the sad fact that sexual crimes are progressively increasing in our modern civilization. This is particularly the case with immoral acts with children under the age of fourteen.
⁶⁶

Statistics in France had indicated 136 cases of sexual assault on children in 1826 but 805 in 1867. In England there were 167 assaults during 1830–1834, but 1,395 for 1855–1857.

JACK THE RIPPER AND AFTER

Jack the Ripper—known in his time as the Whitechapel Murderer—is probably the most infamous serial killer of all time. He struck at the height of the Victorian era in London’s East End, butchering at least five prostitutes between August and November 1888. He made headlines worldwide and even today he continues to capture the imaginations of countless readers and moviegoers—and other serial killers as well. He appears as a character in at least twenty-eight major motion pictures, hundreds of fiction and non-fiction books, and several specialized books about other books on Jack the Ripper or studies of the press coverage he received in his time.
⁶⁷
There would be no point to dealing at any length here with Jack the Ripper’s crimes in the face of the torrent of material still being produced about him today. It is sufficient to say that his crimes, committed in a newspaper publishing capital, received unprecedented coverage. He was raised to mythical proportions for his abilities to evade the authorities and for his choice of prostitutes as victims whom few would pity: He did not kill children or “innocent” women. He set the stage for crime literature where the serial killer takes the leading role in an almost heroic capacity.

The early victims were killed on the street by having their throats slit, and were hastily mutilated. But as he progressed, Jack the Ripper gradually became more proficient at gaining control over his victims. The last victim, twenty-five-year-old Mary Jane Kelly, was found in her own room where the killer had privacy to unleash his deepest and darkest fantasies. London police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond wrote the report describing the condition of Kelly’s body as it was discovered at the crime scene:

The body was lying naked in the middle of the bed, the shoulders flat, but the axis of the body inclined to the left side of the bed. The head was turned on the left cheek. The left arm was close to the body with the forearm flexed at a right angle & lying across the abdomen. The right arm was slightly abducted from the body & rested on the mattress, the elbow bent & and the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. The legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk & the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes.

The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs was removed & the abdominal Cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds & the face hacked beyond recognition of the features. The tissues of the neck were severed all round down to the bone.

The viscera were found in various parts viz: the uterus & Kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the Liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side & the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table . . . the neck was cut through the skin & other tissues right down to the vertebrae the 5th & 6th being deeply notched . . . The skin & tissues of the abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes were removed in three large flaps . . . The left thigh was stripped of skin, fascia & muscles as far as the knee. The Pericardium was open below & the Heart absent.
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Mary Jane Kelly’s missing heart was never recovered and Jack the Ripper was never captured, leaving behind more than a century of speculation as to his identity and to why he stopped killing.

What was clear was that Jack the Ripper was not some frenzied out-of-control individual, but someone who was able to disguise his insanity and appear normal to those around him. Jack the Ripper was ushering in the twentieth-century phenomenon of the serial killer.

While Jack the Ripper was a typically “territorial” type of serial killer, choosing his victims in London’s East End, France’s Vacher the Ripper was typically “migratory,” killing in different regions of the country. Joseph Vacher was a twenty-eight-year-old vagrant when he was charged in 1897 for the murder of a seventeen-year-old shepherd boy. The victim had been strangled and afterward his abdomen had been cut open. Vacher confessed to eleven previously unsolved homicides that had occurred in different parts of France between 1894 and 1897, and was suspected in fifteen more.

In 1893 Vacher had been discharged from military service after displaying confused talk, persecution mania, and threatening language. The same year he wounded a girl who had refused to marry him and then shot himself in the head. He survived his suicide attempt, which left him deaf in one ear and with facial paralysis, and was confined in an insane asylum. He was declared “cured” and released on April 1, 1894.

On March 20, 1894, he strangled a twenty-one-year-old woman, cut her throat, tore out a portion of her right breast, trampled upon her abdomen, and had intercourse with the corpse. In November he strangled a thirteen-year-old girl and in May 1895 he murdered a seventeen-year-old girl. In August he strangled and raped a fifty-eight-year-old woman; shortly afterward he cut the throat of a sixteen-year-old girl and attempted to rip her abdomen open. In September he killed a fifteen-year-old boy, cut off his genitals, and sexually assaulted the corpse. Traveling through France, he killed women, girls, and boys, by either cutting their throats or strangling them. He mutilated and violated their corpses, taking away with him their genitals.

On August 4, 1897, Vacher attacked a woman gathering pinecones but she successfully resisted him, shouting for her husband and children. They overpowered Vacher and took him into custody. Vacher was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for indecent assault, but during his incarceration he wrote the authorities with a confession to eleven murders. Although Vacher insisted he was insane, a panel of psychiatrists pronounced him sane. He was executed in December 1898.

EXPLAINING MUTILATION AND PICQUERISM

The motives behind the extraordinary and brutal mutilation of female victims with edged-weapons remain a mystery even today. It is an act that seems to be largely perpetrated by angry heterosexual males on females or homosexual males on males—in other words, an act directed by males onto the object of their sexual desire.

Some argue that the formation of a serial killer is rooted to gender identification involving a boy’s ability to successfully negotiate his masculine autonomy from his mother—a challenge not faced by females. When a boy cannot achieve this autonomy or when there is no solid foundation for him from which to negotiate this autonomy, a sense of rage develops in the child, and he subsequently carries the anger into adolescence and adulthood.

A serial killer’s sexual assault on a victim can take one, or both, of two forms of expression. First, there are the primary mechanisms: intercourse and oral copulation. The killer does whatever is physically necessary to ejaculate during his attack. Frequently, however, no evidence of ejaculate is visible at a crime scene. It is here that the killer engages in secondary sexual mechanisms. These are a substitution for the primary act, a type of sexually delayed gratification. The actions that the killer performs will later lead to his climax when he is in a safe place. It is not a question of safety, however, but one of control. Having committed his act, and taken his souvenirs from the victim, the killer escapes to later masturbate until his sexual energy is drained. In this manner he exercises maximum control over his own sexuality and over his victim and is able to sustain himself between murders.

These secondary mechanisms take the form of torture, bondage, the posing of the victim’s body in humiliating positions, cannibalism, stabbing, slashing, and mutilation. The preference to use a knife for mutilating a victim beyond what is necessary to kill is called
picquerism.
The killer expresses his sexuality by penetrating the victim with a knife. The victim’s screams, the bloodletting, and the odors all create for the murderer a harmonic sexual experience. Some killers ejaculate uncontrollably without touching their genitals as they stab or hack at their victims.