The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (61 page)

Still, various moral crusaders have used this statistic to help bolster their argument that pornography—along with other types of transgressive entertainment (like “slasher” movies and “death metal” rock)—is a leading cause of sexual homicide. Social scientists remain divided on this issue. For every psychologist who insists that there is a direct, causal link between X-rated entertainment and violent crime, there are others who argue the opposite—that material that depicts graphic sex and violence may actually help defuse aggressive impulses.

In short, the relationship between media violence and real-life crime remains
extremely murky. It is worth noting, however, that, for as long as there has been such a thing as popular culture, it has been blamed for everything from juvenile delinquency to multiple murder.

A hundred years before porn videos and splatter movies, the favorite target of social reformers was the genre known as “dime novels”—cheap little paperbacks relating the lurid adventures of bloodthirsty bad men, cutthroat pirates, and two-fisted detectives. Writing in the late 1800s, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell—America’s first female physician—warned that “the dangers arising from such vicious literature cannot be overestimated by parents.” The appalling case of the Boston child-fiend, Jesse Pomeroy, seemed to bear out Blackwell’s claim. The grotesque-looking Pomeroy began torturing younger children when he was eleven. He graduated to murder at fourteen, savaging a ten-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. After his arrest, outraged moralists blamed his crimes on the corrupting influence of dime novels like
Desperate Dan, the Dastard
and
The Pirates of the Pecos.
Unfortunately, their argument was somewhat undermined by the fact that Pomeroy had apparently never read a book in his life.

In our own times, other forms of pop entertainment have been attacked for their presumably pernicious influence. In the 1950s, horror comics were condemned as a major cause of juvenile delinquency. More recently, America’s rising crime rate has been blamed on everything from
Friday the 13th
movies to gangsta rap.

In truth, it is very hard to establish a straightforward link between media images and human behavior, particularly when it comes to serial killers, whose minds work in such bizarre ways. The notorious 1930s cannibal-killer, Albert
Fish
, found certain passages in the Bible wildly arousing. Charles
Manson
’s murderous fantasies were inspired by one of the most benign works of popular art ever created—the Beatles’
White Album.

German sex murderer Heinrich Pommerencke—known as the “Beast of the Black Forest”—is another case in point. One night in February 1959, Pommerencke went to the movies, and after seeing a bunch of women cavorting on screen, he became convinced that all females deserved to die. Shortly afterward, he committed the first of four savage rape-murders.

The film that inspired this rampage? Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments.

Pornography Made Me Do It

The night before his execution, Ted
Bundy
gave his final interview to evangelist James Dobson. With death just hours away, Bundy—the slayer of anywhere from thirty to fifty young women—had a message for America: Beware of pornography. Bundy confessed that at an early age, he had become addicted to images of sexual violence and claimed that his exposure to brutal pornography had turned him into a sex killer.

Antiporn crusaders embraced Bundy’s statement. Here, they argued, was conclusive proof of everything they’d been claiming—pornography leads to ultimate evil.

There were a couple of problems with Bundy’s statement, however. For one thing, he was born in 1946, which means that he grew up during the 1950s—an era when it was considerably harder to come by sadomasochistic porn than it is today. Back in the Eisenhower era, you couldn’t just stroll into your neighborhood video shop and rent
Teenage Bondage Sluts
from the “Adults Only” section. If Bundy was really getting off on violent pornography back then, there must already have been something dark and twisted inside him that was driving him to go out and hunt for these images.

There is another serious problem with Bundy’s admission, conveniently ignored by antiporn activists: Bundy was a psychopathic liar. For ten years, he had done everything possible to deny his guilt. Even when the jig was finally up, he found a way to shrug off responsibility for his atrocities by putting the blame on outside influences.

He
wasn’t responsible for his crimes. Pornography made him do it.

X R
AYS

In the view of many crime buffs, the single most perverted killer in American history was the cannibalistic pedophile Albert
Fish
. Perhaps the most compelling evidence in support of this opinion were a series of X rays taken shortly after Fish’s arrest for the kidnapping and murder of twelve-year-old Grace Budd.

Interviewed in his jail cell by two state-appointed psychiatrists who were
trying to evaluate his sanity, Fish revealed that—as an act of contrition for killing the girl—he had purchased a pack of sewing needles and, using a thimble, had shoved five of them up behind his testicles so deeply that they had remained permanently embedded inside his body.

Though this story seemed too outrageous to believe, Fish was a degenerate of such extravagant proportions that the authorities decided to check it out. The old man was taken from prison to a nearby hospital, where his pelvic region was X-rayed by the hospital’s chief radiologist.

One of the X rays of Albert Fish’s pelvic region, showing more than two dozen needles shoved into his lower body

(New York Daily News)

As it turned out, Fish’s incredible claim was actually an understatement. The X rays clearly revealed a number of sharp, thin objects scattered throughout the area of the old man’s groin and lower abdomen. These objects—which resembled long, black splinters floating in the bright tissue around and between the hip bones—were unmistakably needles. Their location—around the rectum and bladder, just below the tip of the spine, and in the muscles of the groin—made it clear that they had been inserted into Fish’s body from below, evidently through his perineum, the flesh between his anus and scrotum.

Unbelievable as it seemed, the old man had been telling the truth—or at least part of it. He had told the psychiatrists that he had punished himself by pushing five needles into his body. But when the physician counted the objects in the X rays, he came up with a significantly different figure. Lodged inside Fish’s body were no fewer than twenty-seven needles! Among his dizzying array of masochistic pleasures, the wildly perverted old man had been sticking sewing needles into his own groin for years (see
Paraphilia
).

“These X rays are unique in the history of medical science.”

D
R
. F
REDERICK
W
ERTHAM
,
commenting on the X rays of Albert Fish’s pelvic region

Y
ARDS

A few years back, the satirical paper
The Onion
ran a pseudo-news story headlined “Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer.” The article quoted (the entirely fictitious) Will Rowell of Dunedin, Florida, who recalled his neighbor, Eddie Lee Curtis, as “kind of a murderous, insane, serial killer-type of fellow. . . . He sort of kept to himself, killing nurses, having sex with their corpses, and then burying their bodies in his backyard.”

As Homer Simpson might say, it’s funny because it’s true. While some suburban serial killers go to great lengths to dispose of their victims (Long Island psycho Joel Rifkin, for example, routinely drove all the way to New Jersey to get rid of the dismembered remains of the prostitutes he had lured to his home and then strangled), others are content simply to bury them in their own backyards.

Of the nine young women who met hideous deaths at the hands of the British
Killer Couple
Fred and Rose West, for example, a number—including their own seventeen-year-old daughter—ended up interred in the Wests’ backyard garden.

Billy Mansfield, a refugee from a trailer park in Weeki Wachee, Florida,
murdered twenty-nine-year-old Renee Salings shortly after relocating to Santa Cruz, California. A few months later, authorities in Florida dug up Mansfield’s property back in Weeki Wachee and discovered the remains of four other women buried in his backyard.

Another Santa Cruz psychopath, Edmund
Kemper
, the “Coed Butcher,” began using his yard for diabolical purposes at the tender age of nine, when he dug a hole in back of his house and buried the family cat alive. Years later, after graduating to sadistic sex murder, he fatally shot a nineteen-year-old student named Cynthia Schall, transported her body home in the trunk of his car, and kept it overnight in his closet. The following day, while his mother was at work, he dissected the corpse in the bathtub, then buried Schall’s head in his backyard with her face turned toward his bedroom window. “Sometimes at night,” he later confessed, “I talked to her, saying love things, the way you do to a girlfriend or wife.”