Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (52 page)

Porn stores are now few, but unlike before, the product they distribute is
everywhere:
It pours out from the Internet like hot and cold water. Porn consumers can now electronically search, browse, and fine-tune to their desires. They can subscribe to Web sites featuring images to their precise taste, or browse through the Internet “discount bins” on newsgroups where pirated images are available for free—for the mere cost of an Internet account.

The range of violent imagery, much of it explicit, is now wide and flexible and available in a way it never was when the market economics of printed pornography still dictated a minimum number of mass consumers clustered into major fetish groups. Today there are Web sites that specialize in violent micro perversions: unconscious women shown explicitly date-raped (“sleepy sites”); posed dead women penetrated (“necro–dark fantasy sites”); fake crime scenes of semidressed or naked victims or simulated recordings of murders (“snuff-violence sites”); actual crime scenes of heavily mutilated victims and images of torture in Third World conflicts (“ disgusting-shocking-dead sites”), rape images, of which Japan appears to be a big contributor (“rape-forced sites”), and a wide range of bondage, punishment, and torture sites. Unlike child pornography, which lurks on the Internet in hidden sites and is illegal, all of these other types of images are trafficked and promoted openly, and are available for free on newsgroups.

PARAPHILIAS

All of these various sexual predilections are known as
paraphilias—
“unusual loves,” from the Greek
para,
meaning “beyond” or “outside the usual,” and
philia,
the word for “love.” Psychiatrists define paraphilia as a persistent need, for more than six months, for unusual objects, fetishes, rituals, or situations to achieve sexual satisfaction. Paraphilias can be severe, where the subject cannot engage in sex of any kind outside his paraphilia, or moderate, where the paraphilia enhances otherwise conventional sexual conduct. Multiple paraphilias often occur in one person, but usually one is dominant until it is replaced by another. Nobody is quite sure how paraphilias are developed, but they are linked to traumatic childhood and adolescent experiences that are reinforced or “short-circuited” to sexual drives. For example, after the World War II bombings of England, when thousands of children drilled in fear of gas attacks by the Nazis, there was a higher rate of fetish sex involving gas masks and rubber clothing among adults in England—especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when the children came of age. Paraphilias are then further reinforced by masturbation, which conditions a cognitive response in the subject to his fantasy. Often serial homicides incorporate or express various paraphilias. (See also the case study of Jerry Brudos in Chapter 4.)

The most extreme paraphilia is
erotophonophilia—
the preference for brutalizing and killing a victim as a means of sexual satisfaction. In a sense, erotophonophilia is what serial killing is. Other paraphilias in the context of serial murder include the following:

• anthropophagy—
  eating the victim’s flesh or slicing off portions of it
  
• colobosis—
  a desire to mutilate male genitalia
  
• coprolagnia—
  a desire to eat feces
  
• coprophilia—
  a desire to see defecation or a fetish for feces
  
• exhibitionism—
  deliberate exposure of one’s genitals to achieve a sense of power or control
  
• flagellationism—
  a desire to whip or beat a sexual victim
  
• gerontophilia—
  a desire for elderly victims
  
• hematophilia/hematomania—
  a desire to see or drink blood
  
• kleptomania—
  theft as a form of sexual expression
  
• klismaphilia—
  substitution of enemas for sexual intercourse
  
• mazoperosis—
  a desire to mutilate female breasts
  
• necrophilia—
  a preference for sex with corpses
  
• necrophagia—
  eating corpses in advanced stages of decomposition
  
• necrosadism—
  a desire to mutilate corpses
  
• parthenophagy—
  cannibalism of young girls
  
• pedophilia—
  sexual preference for children
  
• pederasty—
  a desire to sodomize male children
  
• perogynia—
  a desire to mutilate female genitalia
  
• picquerism—
  stabbing or cutting as a substitution for sex
  
• pygmalianism—
  a desire to have sex with dolls or mannequins
  
• pyromania—
  setting fires for sexual pleasure
  
• pyrophilia—
  a desire to watch fires for sexual pleasure
  
• sadism—
  infliction of pain for sexual satisfaction
  
• scatophilia—
  a desire to make obscene phone calls as a way of exerting control over a victim
  
• scoptophilia—
  voyeurism; seeking sexual pleasure by peeping through windows, an early behavioral trend found in some serial killers who graduate from voyeurism to rape to murder
  
• zoophilia—
  a desire for sex with animals
  

One can easily understand how some of these paraphilias become incorporated in acts of serial murder—especially ones like the desire for sex with dead bodies or cannibalism, which preclude a surviving victim. For other serial killers, the actual act of taking of a life is the primary fantasy driving them. For others, the need to kill is secondary.

The question remains, and nobody has come forth with a definitive answer: Does pornography promote and facilitate the acting out of violent behavior, or preempt it? As these images are now widely available in a way that printed pornography never was, and a generation of expanded viewers is consuming them, the resolution of this question of facilitation or preemption becomes urgently critical.

Television programmers still have not figured out what is right or wrong. Explicit images of real violence are censored, while beautifully photographed and elegantly choreographed violence is broadcast. Should we not show the full disgusting horror of an actual gunshot wound and instead censor the lie that violence is slow-motion beautiful and accompanied by music? Or would repeated showings of real violence only desensitize our repulsion to it?

DETECTIVE MAGAZINES

Perhaps a more prevalent facilitator in several serial murder cases was not explicit pornography, but illustrated men’s adventure stories and detective magazines once sold at every supermarket and newsstand in America. Detective magazines became a subject of a detailed study in the mid-1980s, as their presence was found not in only serial homicide cases, but in cases of child molestation, rape, and autoerotic deaths. The covers of these magazines almost always featured a luridly illustrated or photographed image of a frightened, often bound female, thrown to the floor or ground, skirt hiked up or blouse torn. Bondage was depicted in 38 percent of the covers studied, and the subject bound was a woman in 100 percent of the covers. In 71 percent of the covers, the aggressor was a male who loomed over the woman and was always indistinguishable or lurking beyond the edges of the page. Sometimes the victim looked out to the reader as the source of her anguish. While no explicit violence or nudity was depicted in any of these magazines, numerous serial killers have reported being highly excited and inspired by such publications. It can be argued, perhaps, that precisely because the nudity was not explicit, it functioned as a stimulant rather than as a release of fantasy: The offender was driven to “fill in” with his own imaginative resources the remainder of the fantasy, instead of having it preempted by an explicit image.

When the study was conducted in the 1980s, unlike pornography, these magazines were readily available in corner stores, newsstands, and supermarkets. Some twenty magazines were regularly published, and four magazines alone accounted for a monthly circulation of nearly one million copies.
¹⁸¹

Ted Bundy recalled a fascination for detective magazines and their images of abused females. In 1957, Harvey Glatman hired professional models, posed them gagged and bound as on the covers of detective magazines, took photographs, and then raped and killed them. He killed three victims in that manner. Ed Gein, the real-world
Psycho,
had a huge collection of
Startling Detective
magazines and confessed that he got the idea of skinning the heads of his victims and making them into masks from men’s “true adventure” magazines, which during the 1950s and 1960s often featured sensationalized stories of Pacific cannibals and Nazi death camp atrocities. John Joubert, who murdered several young boys, reported that when he was eleven or twelve, he had seen detective magazines in the local grocery store and became aroused by the depiction of semidressed, frightened, and bound women on the covers. He began acquiring these magazines and masturbating to the images, eventually superimposing the fantasy of young boys over the images of the women. One should not, however, easily conclude that pornography or detective magazines
cause
homicidal fantasies. Joubert also reports that at age six or seven, at least six years
before
he saw his first detective magazine, he fantasized about strangling and eating his babysitter.

Detective magazines were not the only type of easily available magazine during the 1970s and 1980s depicting victimized females in various states of undress. There was a whole genre of monster movie magazines, often showing images of women attacked by creatures or being carried away unconscious by monsters. These magazines were especially directed at adolescent and teenage males, as were series of bubble-gum trading cards depicting wartime atrocities in lurid color. Comic books, especially pulp horror ones, were also cited as inciting youths to commit violent acts and were partially banned in the 1950s and early 1960s.

OTHER LITERATURE

Pornography, comics, and detective magazines are not the only types of literature, however, cited as inspiring serial killers in their first kill. The fifteenth-century child killer Gilles de Rais had been inflamed by Suetonius’s
Lives of the Caesars,
which detailed (and probably exaggerated) some of the crimes of the Roman emperors.
¹⁸²
According to Charles Lemire, a nineteenth-century biographer of the aristocrat–serial killer, de Rais showed his official reader and chamberlain, the university-educated Henriet Griart, “certain passages and invited him to read the text. It was the chronicle of the life and customs of the Roman Caesars. The book was illustrated with beautifully painted pictures showing the crimes of these pagan emperors. There one could learn how Tiberius, Caracalla and the other Caesars took special delight in the massacre of children. Listening to Griart read, Gilles’s fine feline face was transformed. It took on a ferocious form and his eyes glowed. He did not hesitate to assert that he would imitate the said Caesars. That same night, he began to do so, following the lesson and the pictures of the book.”

Although technically not a serial killer because he was apprehended after committing his first murder, Donald Fearn became obsessed with torturing a woman to death after he read historical accounts of a Colorado sect of Indians called the Penitentes, whose religious ceremonies involved torture and crucifixion. In April 1942, when his wife was in the hospital giving birth, Fearn kidnapped a seventeen-year-old nursing student and drove her to a remote one-room shack in the desert.
*
There he raped and tortured her with a pair of pliers and red-hot strands of baling wire for six hours before killing her.

Herbert Mullin had just been reading accounts of Michaelangelo’s dissections in Irving Stone’s
The Agony and the Ecstasy
when he dragged Mary Guilfoyle out into the woods and cut open her abdomen, taking out her organs and inspecting them.

THE BIBLE AND SERIAL KILLING

We might be concerned with sexual pornography, but the Bible has had a leading role in many serial homicides as well. During the mid-1920s, Earle Leonard Nelson traveled the United States and Canada clutching a Bible and raping and strangling “sinful” landladies; he is known to have killed twenty-seven before he was arrested. In Stamford, Connecticut, Benjamin Franklin Miller, a preacher who focused on reforming prostitutes and drug addicts, strangled five of them with their own bras between 1967 and 1971. In Chicago, homosexual killer John Wayne Gacy, while strangling and sodomizing some of his thirty-three victims, recited the 23rd Psalm to them: “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” In Germany in 1959, when he was nineteen, Heinrich Pommerencke raped and killed four women after seeing a biblical film called
The Ten Commandments.
Pommerencke said, “I saw half-naked women dancing around the golden calf. I thought then that many women were evil and did not deserve to live. I then realized I would have to kill them.”
¹⁸³

In Scotland in 1968–1969, an unknown serial killer was nicknamed “Bible John” because the sister of one of three female victims, who met him in a dance hall, remembered him quoting from the Bible and condemning adultery. All three women were strangled, had their purses stolen, and were menstruating at the time of their murders.

Gary Ridgway, the confessed murderer of forty-eight women, was an avid Bible reader, often reading it as he watched TV. Robert Yates, upon his conviction for the brutal murders of thirteen women in Spokane, addressed the jury referring to the Bible:

Scripture says the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure; who can understand? Our hearts can be deceitful beyond our own understanding, and surely mine was. I couldn’t rid myself of this sinful nature. Somewhere, through all this devastation, God was knocking on the door of my heart, but I wouldn’t let him in. I thought to myself, how could a God love or hear anything that was not clean. I thought I wasn’t good enough to even speak to God, and if He wouldn’t listen to me, then who would?