The Serial Killer Files (46 page)
The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long and were too elaborate.
—Edmund Kemper
The twisted fantasies of serial killers begin at a young age. While other little boys are daydreaming about scoring the winning run in a Little League game or becoming a member of the X-Men, these budding psychopaths are already lost in all-consuming reveries of sadism and mass murder. In their groundbreaking 1988 study Sexual Homicide, Robert Ressler, John Douglas, and their collaborator Ann Burgess discuss one serial murderer who, as a schoolboy, drove his teachers crazy by spending so much time woolgathering in class. When psychiatrists later asked him what he had been thinking about, he replied: “Wiping out the whole school.” At the tender age of twelve, another future sex-killer was so obsessed with masochistic fantasies of slow, agonizing death that he regularly forced his little sister to tie him up in a chair and pretend that she was executing him in a gas chamber.
As psychopaths reach puberty, their fantasies become increasingly sexual and more alarmingly aberrant.
Normal adolescent daydreams of wild sex with an enthusiastic partner are replaced, in the psychopathic mind, with sadistic thoughts of dominance and degradation, perversion and pain. While jailed for double murder in 1874, Jesse Pomeroy, the so-called Boy Fiend, begged his friend Willie Baxter, who was occupying an adjacent cell, to provide him with detailed written descriptions of every flogging Willie had ever received, urging him to “tell me of the hardest licking you ever got. Tell me all the particulars of it!” The sadistic Pomeroy then used these lurid accounts of punishment and humiliation to enhance his own autoerotic pleasures. Jeffrey Dahmer told his examiners that he began masturbating at the age of fourteen to conventional homosexual fantasies of sex with well-built young males. A few years later, however, he was getting off while imagining that he was rendering his partners unconscious and exposing their viscera.
It’s not just extreme deviance that distinguishes the fantasy life of psychopaths but their overpowering urge to translate their sickest fantasies into fact. The most extravagant erotic daydreams of normal people always run up against what Freud called “the reality principle.” However much fun it might be to lie in bed and masturbate while imagining that you are making love to your favorite movie star or pop singer, the average person understands that such erotic pipe dreams are never going to come true.
Serial killers, on the other hand, have only a tenuous hold on reality. They live inside their heads, locked within their own bizarre, pathological dreamworlds. Isolated from most social contacts—unconstrained by the scruples of conscience—possessed of an infantile narcissism that places their own sordid needs above all other concerns—they eventually cross the threshold that separates imagination from actuality and carry out the horrors they have been brooding over for so long. According to the testimony of many serial killers, the experience of stepping over that line fills them with an intoxicating sense of power, even invincibility. Once they have taken that fateful step, they cannot—and have no wish to—go back.
Far from satisfying their degenerate desires, each new act of violence only supplies more fuel for their fantasies. In the “cooling-off” periods between their crimes, they masturbate to the memories of the horrors they have already perpetrated and fantasize of the outrages still to come.
Because of the prominent role that such vicious daydreams play as a preliminary to the act of serial murder, Robert Ressler and his colleagues reached the conclusion that fantasy is the mainspring of sexual homicide. “My research convinced me that the key was not the early trauma but the development of perverse thought patterns,” Ressler has written. “These men were motivated to murder by their fantasies.”
Recommended Reading
Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess, John E. Douglas, Sexual Homicide (1988) Robert I. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream, (1996) Killer Fantasy
Since fantasies are, by definition, private, imaginary scenarios that are played out in the secrecy of the mind, it’s hard to get a direct firsthand sense of the unspeakably fetid inner worlds inhabited by serial killers.Thanks to one notorious psychopath, however, that distinctly unpleasant experience is not entirely impossible.
A reasonably skilled writer who studied with Southern Gothic novelist Harry Crews, Gerard J. Schaefer
—the onetime Florida deputy sheriff who committed an indeterminate number of horrendous torture-slayings in the early 1970s—churned out a series of hair-raising short stories collected by former girlfriend Sondra London and published under the title Killer Fiction. Exactly how much of this appalling stuff is make-believe and how much memoir is unclear, though that very ambiguity is in itself an accurate reflection of the twisted mentality of serial killers, whose depraved fantasies eventually spill out into the real world, wiping out the barrier between fantasy and fact. Schaefer himself was deliberately coy about this question. In the typical way of psychopaths, he was also utterly hypocritical and self-serving about his intent in composing his stories. Though they undoubtedly served as a form of masturbatory pornography for him, he claimed that they were written with a serious sociological purpose
—to give readers an unvarnished view of the “horrible malignancies” perpetrated by serial killers.
To give the devil his due, his stories do, in fact, offer unparalleled insight into the obscene workings of a psycho-killer’s mind. Since the experience of reading them is a bit like opening the cover of a septic tank and sticking your head inside for a better look, his book can only be recommended with an asterisk.
The selection reprinted here, from a story with the straightforward and typically Schaeferian title
“Whores,” is one of the milder passages to be found in his work. The narrator—having read a magazine article about an Old West prostitute named Cattle Kate who was hanged for her sins—picks up a young woman and offers her thirty dollars if she will “model like Cattle Kate for me.” When she agrees, he drives her to an abandoned garage:
We got out of the car and I fetched a rope from the carry-all section of the station wagon. I leaned against the bumper and fashioned the line into a hangman’s noose while she watched. She’d picked a wild daisy and was twirling it in her fingers, picking it apart petal by petal and chanting as she dropped each piece, “He loves me loves me not.” She finished up on “he loves me not” and shot me a crooked smile. “Bad luck in love.”
“Ah, you don’t believe in bad luck, do you? Come on over here, Kate!”
I tossed the noose over the heavy beam at the front of the garage where at one time engines were raised from the bodies of cars. I widened the loop and placed it over her head. She fiddled with her long ponytail while I adjusted the coil around her neck. I set the knot behind her ear just like the picture in the magazine. I asked her if it was too tight. She said it wasn’t tight at all. Then I tied her wrists behind her with green nylon twine, and arranged her ankles the same way: took a few turns around them and made a nice tight knot. I moved a few steps back, put my hands on my hips, and told her that she made a perfect Cattle Kate.
She smiled, stuck out her tongue, and crossed her eyes. I told her to hold the pose, and I’d take a picture of her and mail it to Otto Preminger in Hollywood with a movie suggestion. She thought that was a great idea. I told her I’d get the camera from the glove compartment, turned and picked up the loose end of the rope and tied it to the car bumper. I slid behind the wheel, cranked up the ignition, put the car in reverse and backed up.
The whore rose right up in the air and once again stuck out her tongue. It was comical the way it popped right out of her mouth, all wet and pink. Her eyes were wide open and staring straight at me. Her expression was fascinating. Her face turned pink, then red, then blue—a pleasant lavender-blue. Her body quivered and shimmied; as she turned blue she wet her pants. A dark stain materialized at the juncture of her thighs, then quickly slid down the legs of her pedal pushers. The pee streamed down over her calves and dribbled from her toes making a puddle on the concrete floor under her. The pretty face turned purple, her body shivered violently; then she went limp. It was interesting to watch.
BAD BOOKS, MALIGNANT MOVIES, VILE VIDEOS
Ever since cheap, mass-produced popular art first appeared in the eighteenth century, critics have blamed it for debasing public taste, corrupting the morals of minors, and providing potential psychopaths with helpful hints on how to commit crimes. When thirteen-year-old Jesse Harding Pomeroy was arrested for the mutilation-murder of two younger children in 1872, for example, critics immediately pointed an accusing finger at the action-packed “dime novels” beloved by juvenile readers in post–Civil War America. The fact that there was not a single shred of evidence to show that Pomeroy had ever read such literature made no difference to these moralists, who insisted that the frontier bloodshed depicted in books like Raiders of the Rawhide Range and Rattlesnake Ned’s Revenge had inspired the “Boy Fiend” to perpetrate his atrocities.
As soon as movies were invented, attention shifted to the new medium. Shortly after the release of the first cinematic Western, Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery, a train was held up near Scranton, Pennsylvania, and one passenger murdered. Critics immediately blamed the film, despite the fact that (as it later turned out) none of the culprits had seen it.
The story has been the same ever since. Whenever a new mass medium comes along, it is immediately accused of undermining moral values and instigating crime. During the “Golden Age” of radio, one critic claimed that children were being “rendered psychopathic” by popular on-air melodramas like Lights Out and The Shadow, which glorified “every form of crime known to man.” In the 1950s, self-proclaimed child-rearing experts declared that comic books caused everything from juvenile delinquency to homosexuality (a type of behavior that, at the time, was regarded as only slightly less heinous than mass murder).
By the early 1960s, the culprit of choice had become television—particularly violent cop and cowboy shows. Nowadays, it is gangsta rap and Grand Theft Auto. In another fifty years, it will undoubtedly be virtual reality shooter games in which players actually feel the blood-spray from the blown-off head of a cannibal zombie (at which point, of course, today’s media scapegoats will be looked at in the same way we now regard radio shows and television Westerns—as the quaint relics of a more innocent past).
Though media violence makes a convenient whipping boy (particularly for people who would rather blame their child’s behavioral problems on The Matrix and PlayStation 2 than on their own parental shortcomings), there is—despite the countless scientific studies devoted to the question—no definitive proof of a direct relationship between watching make-believe violence and committing real-life murder.
In his exceptionally well informed and levelheaded book, Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children, Jonathan Kellerman is so insistent on this point that he puts it in italics: “Not a single causal link between media violence and criminality has ever been produced. ”
To be sure, the occasional serial killer might be incited by a movie, book, or piece of music. The problem with psychopaths, however, is that there’s no telling what will set them off. In 1959, German lust-killer Heinrich Pommerencke—aka the “Beast of the Black Forest”—felt compelled to commit four savage murders after watching Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. And the atrocities perpetrated by the Manson family were at least partly inspired by their leader’s obsession with the Beatles’ “White Album,” one of the most benign works of pop art ever produced.
Moreover, when a person commits an appalling crime after watching a movie or reading a book or hearing a rock song, it’s invariably because he was severely disturbed to begin with. In his 1999 study, Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion, for example, David Lester describes a case in which psychiatrists initially tried to pin the crimes of one serial killer on his addiction to lurid detective magazines. As they probed into his background, however, they discovered that, throughout his childhood and early adolescence, his mother had relentlessly subjected him to public ridicule for bed-wetting, while his stepfather had routinely tortured him with lighted cigarettes and forced him to drink his own urine.
Moreover, on two separate occasions during his boyhood, he had suffered head injuries severe enough to put him into a coma.
In short, it became clear that this man’s sadistic compulsions were rooted in his severely abused upbringing (as is so often the case), and that his psychopathology was firmly established long before he became such an obsessive reader of true-crime magazines. His insatiable appetite for sleazy entertainment, in other words, was a symptom of his sickness, not its cause.
One particularly twisted individual—a serial killer named David Harker, who strangled a thirty-two-year-old woman during sex, then cut up her body and ate chunks of her thigh with pasta and cheese—put the matter in perspective. Known to be a fan of The Silence of the Lambs, he was questioned after his arrest about the possible influence of the film on his own cannibalistic crime. “People like me don’t come from films,” he replied. “Films come from people like me.”
Nowadays, of course, whenever a horrific murder occurs, the reading, listening, and viewing habits of the perpetrator are immediately scrutinized for evidence that his crimes were somehow triggered by today’s supposedly debased popular entertainment. When mass murderer Michael McDermott slaughtered seven employees of a Boston high-tech company in December 2000, reports quickly surfaced that his home video library was heavily weighted with action films like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard— as though his enjoyment of these Hollywood blockbusters explained his appallingly violent act.
Only later did the press reveal that his video collection also included the Steve Martin comedy, The Jerk; the Academy Award–winning drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; the Grade-Z sci-fi flick, Plan 9