The Serial Killer Files (36 page)

The drawers of the bedroom highboy were crammed with Polaroids of body parts and mutilated corpses

—including one shot of a torso eaten away from the nipples down by acid. That was just the beginning of the nightmare. Inside a freezer, police found three human heads plus an assortment of organs: intestines, lungs, livers, kidneys, and a heart. Dahmer told the police that he was saving the heart to “eat later.”

Another head was stored in the refrigerator next to an open box of baking soda. Seven skulls and five complete skeletons were stashed in various places around the apartment, along with miscellaneous remains: bone fragments, decomposed hands, sexual organs in a lobster pot. The police also found bottles of acid, chloroform, and formaldehyde, and three electric saws.

Altogether, these ghastly trophies represented the remains of eleven victims. Dahmer would later confess to seventeen murders in all.

The revelation of Dahmer’s unspeakable deeds sent shock waves across America. At his 1992 trial, his attorney argued that the very nature of Dahmer’s atrocities—“skulls in a locker, cannibalism, making zombies, necrophilia, lobotomies, defleshing”—was proof of his madness. The jury, however, rejected the insanity defense and found Dahmer guilty. During his own final statement, Dahmer expressed a desire to die—a wish that was fulfilled in November 1994, when he was bludgeoned to death by another prisoner.

Dahmer was cremated, though not before his brain was removed, setting off one last bitter dispute between his parents. Arguing that her son “always said that if he could be of any help, he wanted to do whatever he could,” Dahmer’s mother petitioned to have the brain donated to science for research into the neurological roots of antisocial behavior. His father, on the other hand—claiming that he wanted “to put the whole thing behind him”—was eager to have the organ destroyed. The matter was settled in December 1995, when a judge, citing Dahmer’s own wishes as conveyed in his last will and testament, ordered the brain cremated.

It goes without saying that serial killers tend to have extraordinarily aberrant sex lives. Their brutalized upbringings render them incapable of experiencing anything resembling real love. Many of them are impotent under normal conditions. They can only get aroused when they have another human being in their absolute power—a helpless, terrified object to be tortured, debased, slaughtered, and perhaps violated after death.

Lacking any capacity for empathy or guilt, serial killers are unconstrained by the inhibitions that keep other people from acting out their darkest fantasies. To these psychopaths, there is nothing forbidden, nothing taboo. They exist in a realm beyond the bounds not only of civilized behavior but even of ordinary criminal behavior. As a result, they indulge in activities that most people would find not just incomprehensible but inconceivable.

The technical term for a sexual perversion is “paraphilia,” which literally means “abnormal love.” In our own anything-goes age, of course, it’s seriously unhip to suggest that there is something “abnormal”

about any form of sex play between consensual adults, whether it’s smearing baked beans all over each other or watching videos in which scantily clad females squish earthworms beneath their feet. Still, even the most diehard erotic libertarian would be hard put to defend the kinds of practices routinely engaged in by serial killers.

The average panty fetishist, for example, might purchase some lingerie from Victoria’s Secret under the pretense of buying a sexy gift for his girlfriend—or, in more extreme cases, acquire a used pair of female underpants from a sleazy adult-oriented Web site. A serial killer like William Heirens, however, is more likely to break into the bedroom of a sleeping woman, rifle through her bureau, have an orgasm while slipping into her undies, then murder and mutilate her when she wakes up and discovers him in the act.

Clipping and saving pubic hair from their sexual conquests is another common fetish among men. The serial killer’s version of this practice is to remove the entire vulva of a victim, as exemplified by the Wisconsin ghoul, Ed Gein, who collected a whole shoe box full of preserved female genitalia.

Sexual voyeurism—which the average Peeping Tom satisfies by peering into his neighbors’ bedroom windows—is another aberration that serial killers practice in a particularly malevolent way. They may masturbate while watching an accomplice rape and kill a captive. In the case of Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, they produced their own pornographic videos by abducting victims and subjecting them to horrendous sexual torture before the camera.

In short, anyone delving into the sex lives of serial killers will find that these psychopaths often take common paraphilias to the most hideous extremes. Others indulge in the kind of unspeakable acts described by Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis: cannibalism, vampirism, necrophilia. And a few serial killers have engaged in practices so outrageously sick, so grotesquely depraved, that it is impossible to find parallels to them, even in the pages of Krafft-Ebing’s massive survey of sexual deviancy.

The standard psychiatric reference book known as the DSM— the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders— distinguishes between two forms of sadism. The first is “Sadistic Personality Disorder,” a condition in which someone “is amused by or takes pleasure in the psychological or physical suffering of others.”

It’s safe to say that all serial killers fit this diagnosis. Whatever other rewards they may derive from their crimes—a warped sense of omnipotence, media celebrity, even, at times, money—the fundamental fact is that they enjoy what they do. Making other people suffer and die is their idea of fun. Their credo is summed up by one of the scariest characters in American fiction, the psychopathic killer in Flannery O’Connor’s famous story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” who declares: “No pleasure but meanness.”

The second type of sadism identified by the DSM is “Sexual Sadism.” This is one of the major paraphilias

—a perversion of the erotic instinct in which the suffering of a victim is not just generally enjoyable but intensely arousing, often to the point of orgasm.

While not every serial murderer suffers from this perversion, a great many do. Indeed, the figures most closely associated in the popular mind with the term “serial killer”—from Jack the Ripper to John Wayne Gacy—were all, to one extent or another, sexual sadists.

The Man Who Invented Sadism

No single person “invented” sadism, of course. The love of cruelty is a component of human psychology as old as the species itself. From the enormities of Caligula to the unspeakable crimes of Vlad the Impaler and Gilles de Rais, there have always been people who revel in inflicting torture and death on their fellow beings.

Sadistic sketch by Gerard Schaefer

(Courtesy of Adam Parfrey)

Until relatively recently, however, there was no technical term to describe such behavior. In the English language, the word “sadism” only goes back a hundred years or so. (It wasn’t until 1897 that it first appeared in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. ) In that sense, “sadism” is like “serial killer”: a modern expression for an age-old phenomenon.

The man we have to thank for this useful addition to our vocabulary was Comte Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, commonly known as the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Possessed of a “volcanic” sex drive coupled with a taste for extreme depravity, de Sade was tossed into the Bastille in 1778 for various perverse activities. (Knifing prostitutes and pouring hot wax into their wounds and masturbating on a crucifix were just a few of the “excesses” he was accused of.) During his many years in prison, he passed the time dreaming up the most violently pornographic fantasies imaginable and turning them into books like Justine, Philosophy of the Boudoir, and The 120 Days of Sodom.

Anyone who has seen the movie Quills might get the impression that de Sade was a champion of sexual and artistic liberation, unjustly persecuted by a repressive, hypocritical regime threatened by his lust for life. In fact, he was a fantastically depraved aristocrat with a nihilistic contempt for everything that ordinary people value as decent, moral, and virtuous. To say that his notorious work, The 120 Days of Sodom, is a catalogue of every conceivable perversion is not quite accurate, since the activities it describes are so sheerly monstrous as to go well beyond what most of us are capable of conceiving.

Formerly he loved to fuck very youthful mouths and asses; his later improvement consists in snatching out the heart of a living girl, widening the space that organ occupied, fucking the warm hole, replacing the heart in that pool of blood and come, sewing up the wound, and leaving the girl to her fate, without help of any kind.

—from The 120 Days of Sodom

Science Looks at Sadism

The first psychiatrist to look closely at the more extreme forms of sadistic behavior was the eminent German physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Besides coining the term “masochism” (named after the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose famous novel, Venus in Furs, deals with a man who craves humiliation), Krafft-Ebing made a major contribution to the literature of morbid psychology with his classic book, Psychopathia Sexualis— a massive compendium of every known perversion, illustrated with hundreds of detailed case histories. At the time of its initial publication in 1886, the book was considered so shocking that its author was nearly expelled from the prestigious British Medico-Psychological Association. Even today, it makes for deeply disturbing reading. Still, it is a significant work, one that clearly demonstrates there’s nothing new about serial murder.

Of course, Krafft-Ebing doesn’t use the term “serial murder,” which wouldn’t enter the language for another hundred years. The term he uses is the German word lustmord or “lust-murder.” The essence of this crime is extreme sadistic violence against the victim. The lust-murderer doesn’t just kill his victims.

His ultimate pleasure comes from savaging their bodies: disemboweling them, cutting out their genitals,
etc.
For such blood-crazed sadists, violence is a substitute for sex. In a later edition of his book Krafft-Ebing cites Jack the Ripper as a classic example, noting that the killer did “not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims, but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act.”

Besides Jack the Ripper, Krafft-Ebing included case studies of other equally deranged, but far less famous, lust-murderers of the day. There was a man named Gruyo, who strangled six prostitutes in the course of ten years. After each murder he “tore out their intestines and kidneys through the vagina.”

There was an English clerk named Frederick Baker, who abducted and butchered a little girl, then went home and wrote in his diary: “Killed to-day a young girl; it was fine and hot.” There was a young Frenchman named Leger who, while wandering through a forest, “caught a girl twelve years old, violated her, mutilated her genitals, tore out her heart, ate of it, drank the blood, and buried the remains.”

There was a Hungarian hospital worker named Tirsch, who waylaid an old woman in the woods, strangled her, then “cut off the dead woman’s breasts and genitalia with a knife, cooked them at home, and in the course of the next few days, ate them.”

One of the cases to which Krafft-Ebing devotes particular attention was that of an Italian man, Vincenz Verzeni. Though infinitely more obscure than his contemporary Jack the Ripper, Verzeni committed a series of crimes so appalling that Krafft-Ebing regarded him as the “prototypical” lust-murderer for whom “sadistic crime was a substitute for coitus.”

Verzeni was born in a small Italian village in 1849. As is often the case with serial killers, his perverted predilections began to manifest themselves in childhood, when he discovered that strangling chickens gave him “a peculiar feeling of pleasure.” From the age of twelve, he killed large numbers of hens, then covered up the act by claiming that a weasel had gotten into the coop.

By the time he reached adulthood, he had begun to crave human victims. He assaulted several women, including a twenty-seven-year-old named Gala, attempting to strangle her while kneeling on her abdomen. For unexplained reasons, he was not arrested for these attacks. In the meantime, his blood mania was growing more intense by the day.

In December 1871, a fourteen-year-old servant girl named Johanna Motta set out for a neighboring village at around seven in the morning. When she failed to return by evening, her master set out to look for her. He found her naked corpse lying by a path near some fields not far from the village. The girl had been horribly mutilated. Her intestines had been torn from her body and were lying nearby. Her mouth had been stuffed with dirt. A chunk of her right calf had been ripped from her leg and was hidden under a pile of straw, along with scraps of her clothing. There were strange abrasions on her thighs.

Nine months later, early on the morning of August 28, 1871, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Frigeni set out into the same fields. Several hours later, her naked body was found by her husband. She had been strangled with a leather thong. As with the previous victim, her abdomen had been ripped open and her intestines yanked out.

The following day, as nineteen-year-old Maria Previtali was walking through a field, she became aware that someone was following her. It was her cousin, Vincenz Verzeni. All at once, the twenty-two-year-old Verzeni sprang at the girl and began to strangle her. As he loosened his grip for an instant to see if anyone was near, the girl scrambled to her knees and begged for mercy. Verzeni relented and let her go.

He was quickly arrested.

In custody, Verzeni readily confessed to his crimes. Strangling women gave “indescribable feelings” of pleasure. As soon as he wrapped his fingers around their throats, he got an erection. It didn’t matter if the victims were “old, young, ugly, or beautiful.” Choking them, he said, was better than masturbation.