The Serial Killer Files (66 page)

And the oft-maligned genre of serial killer comic books has produced some highly literate and visually sophisticated works. Especially noteworthy are Rick Geary’s elegant recreations of sensational Victorian cases, including the Lizzie Borden murders, the Jack the Ripper crimes, and, most recently, the story of Dr. H. H. Holmes; Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s celebrated graphic novel, From Hell; and the moody, noirish Torso by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko, about the still-unsolved case of the 1930s Cleveland maniac known as the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.”

Recommended Reading

Martha Grace Duncan, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons (1996) Robert I. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream (1996) ART

Serial killer art is generally divided into two categories: works of art about serial killers and works created by serial killers. Both types have been known to spark firestorms of outrage, though for different reasons.

In 1997, for example, an exhibit called “Sensation”—featuring works by edgy young British artists—provoked heated controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. In New York City, the show (mounted at the Brooklyn Museum) became the target of a widely publicized attack by then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was deeply offended by a painting by artist Chris Ofili: a portrait of the Virgin Mary that used, along with other materials, lumps of dried elephant dung. In England, however, the work that incited howls of protest was not Ofili’s African-inspired icon but Marcus Harvey’s Myra: an enormous black-and-white mug shot of Myra Hindley—the female half of the infamous “Moors Murderers”—created in a kind of pointillist style out of hundreds of children’s handprints.

The accusations leveled against Harvey’s work—that it trafficked in cheap sensationalism, that it was an obscene exploitation of an unspeakable atrocity, that it profaned the memories of the child victims while glorifying a monster—are typical of the kinds of charges aimed at artists who treat such disturbing subject matter. Since most of us have been educated to think of art as something spiritually elevated, even sacred, the mere notion of hanging a picture of a sadistic lust-murderer on the walls of a museum strikes many people as blasphemous—a symptom of the debased, anything-for-a-shock, sex-and-violence-obsessed culture we live in.

It is helpful to remember, however, that—since they deal with every aspect of human behavior, including the most painful and grotesque—serious artists have never shied away from portraying our proclivity for cruelty and violence. Medieval art is full of pictures showing religious martyrs being subjected to every variety of unspeakable torture, from flaying to slow evisceration. Goya’s astonishing suite of etchings, The Disasters of War— with its appalling images of castration, impalement, beheading, and dismemberment—makes the most graphically gory “splatter” movie seem almost laughably tame.

Art scholar Robert Simon has shown that, between 1859 and 1872, the great post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne—associated in the public mind with ravishing landscapes and still lifes—turned out a string of paintings and drawings depicting exceptionally grisly sex crimes: “bizarre, violent, aggressive images in which women are raped, strangled, and stabbed.” Another late-nineteenth-century artist, the Victorian painter Walter Sickert, produced a series of dark, disturbing works inspired by the savage slaying of a prostitute. (Indeed, crime writer Patricia Cornwell found Sickert’s paintings so brutal and morbid that she became convinced he was the real Jack the Ripper—an accusation that has been greeted with hoots of derision by both serious art critics and responsible Ripperologists.) In the twentieth century, serial killers have been a frequent subject of serious art, from the Expressionistic works of Weimar-era painters like Otto Dix and George Grosz (who were both obsessed with the subject of sex-murder) to the cartoon-inspired creations of Pop surrealist Peter Saul, whose oeuvre includes the 1984 painting Sex Deviate Being Executed, which depicts John Wayne Gacy molesting one final victim while seated in the electric chair. Though it doesn’t deal with serial killers per se, In the Realms of the Unreal— the epic masterwork of “Outsider” genius Henry Darger—contains scenes that would have warmed the heart of Albert Fish: graphic depictions of little girls being mutilated, disemboweled, and slaughtered. Another important American artist affiliated with the

“Outsider” movement, Joe Coleman—whose paintings seem like some fantastical hybrid of Byzantine icons and carnival freak show banners—has produced astonishing portraits of some of our country’s most notable serial killers, including Fish, Ed Gein, Carl Panzram, and Charles Manson.

When discussing the second category—works created by serial killers—it’s necessary to place quotation marks around the word “art,” since the paintings and sketches produced by these homicidal maniacs are generally devoid of anything approaching aesthetic value. There are a few exceptions: the ingenious, if predictably bizarre, pop-up greeting cards of Lawrence Bittaker, the surprisingly delicate watercolors of

“Lipstick Killer” William Heirens, and some of the charcoal studies of Elmer Wayne Henley. The erotic fantasy-drawings of Bobby Beausoleil—an associate of the Manson “family” convicted of one count of murder—display the draftsmanship of a professional illustrator, while Nicolas Claux, a Parisian mortician and self-confessed cannibal, has provided powerfully unsettling portraits for Sondra London’s 2003 book, True Vampires (in which he is also featured as a subject). For the most part, however, the average piece of serial killer artwork has all the technical skill and aesthetic interest of a badly applied prison tattoo or a paint-by-numbers picture done by an especially clumsy grade-schooler.

Torture illustration by John Wayne Gacy

(Courtesy of Adam Parfrey)

The seminal figure in the brief history of this unsavory genre was John Wayne Gacy, who took up painting in prison and began turning out crude, if creepy, oils of a range of subjects. These included Disney characters to Renaissance Pietàs to portraits of himself in the guise of Pogo the Clown—the role he assumed in his prearrest days, when he would entertain children at local hospitals. The growing popularity and monetary value of Gacy’s work among collectors of the macabre led a Louisiana funeral director and horror enthusiast named Rick Staton to contact other imprisoned psycho-killers and encourage them to create works of their own. Before long, Staton was staging “Death Row Art Shows”

featuring everything from Charlie Manson sock puppets to Elmer Wayne Henley sunflowers to New Testament scenes painted by Henry Lee Lucas. These public exhibitions never failed to attract intense media attention and arouse outrage.

“Art” by Richard Ramirez

(Courtesy of Adam Parfrey)

What people have found so reprehensible about art produced by serial killers is not the subject matter itself. With some exceptions (like the demon-obsessed doodles of Richard the “Night Stalker” Ramirez or some of the degenerate scratchings of Ottis Toole), most of the imagery is utterly banal, often highly sentimental: sunsets and seascapes, angels and koala bears. What inspires such widespread disgust is the mere notion that convicted lust-killers are allowed to be treated like minor celebrities and enjoy the ego gratification of having their work put on public display.

Those boys died in agony. This guy up here gets an art show. That’s not right.

—Brother of a teenage boy tortured and killed byDean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley, protesting ashow of Henley’s work at a Houston art gallery.

There is also the issue of money. Though “Son of Sam” laws bar criminals from profiting from their crimes by writing books, doing interviews, or selling film rights, current legislation doesn’t ban the sale of art. This situation led to a highly publicized uproar in April 2001, when the New York Daily News

reported in a page-one story that a state-sponsored art show for inmates included a pencil portrait of Princess Diana done by cannibal killer Arthur Shawcross, who stood to make 50 percent of the five-hundred-dollar asking price from its sale. This disclosure caused such a flap that, within a month, the state Senate passed legislation prohibiting inmates from pocketing any of the proceeds of the sales.

Poster for Julian Hobbs’ documentary “Collectors”

(Courtesy of Julian Hobbs. Art by Andrew Brooks and Chris Trent) For a fascinating look at the world of serial killer art, its creators, devotees, and detractors, see Julian Hobbs’s compelling 1999 documentary Collectors.

Recommended Reading

Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence, and Martyrdom (1991) Robert Simon, “Cézanne and the Subject of Violence,” Art in America (May, 1991) Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimer Germany (1995)

Joe Coleman, Delineator of America’s Dark Soul

A cult figure since the 1970s when he burst (quite literally) onto the underground scene as the self-exploding, rodent-chomping Professor Mombooze-o, Joe Coleman possesses a genius for generating controversy that has shown no signs of abating in more than a quarter century. It’s a testimony to the profoundly unsettling power of his work that it still manages to shock and offend everyone from mainstream critics to the self-appointed arbiters of “Outsider” art. With his shattering portrayals of American pathology, he is the anti–Norman Rockwell—a painter who renders with visceral force the nightmare realities behind the sugar-coated delusions that are generally referred to as the American Dream.

Joe Coleman

Though Coleman’s subjects are international in scope, ranging from the depravities of ancient Rome to infamous British criminals like the juvenile psychopath Mary Bell, the majority of his paintings explore our country’s anarchic shadow side as embodied by our indigenous outlaws and madmen, fanatics, and freaks. His portraits of legendary psycho-killers like Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Carl Panzram, and Charles Manson (a self-proclaimed admirer of Coleman’s art) present these figures as all-American icons, no less representative of our violence-drenched culture than the mythicized heroes we are taught to worship in grade school. To study his riveting depictions of Devil Anse Hatfield (of the notorious Hatfield-McCoy feud) or Boston Corbett (killer of John Wilkes Booth) or Outsider artist Henry Darger (creator of the epically bizarre In the Realms of the Unreal ) is to gain unparalleled insight into poet William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum, “The pure products of America go crazy.”

In his life no less than his art, Coleman immerses himself in the lurid underside of our history. Crammed with countless bizarre artifacts, his home—the “odditorium,” as he calls it—resembles a nineteenth-century dime museum, where a visitor can view everything from P. T. Barnum’s original Feejee mermaid to the actual letter that Albert Fish sent to his child-victim’s mother (a document that Coleman proudly describes as the Magna Carta of serial killer collectibles).

Though he has been compared to everyone from Hieronymus Bosch to Otto Dix, his dense, obsessively detailed paintings are inimitably his own—a wholly unique and original body of work that has been reproduced in three volumes to date: Cosmic Retribution (1992), Original Sin (1997), and The Book of Joe (2003).

Coleman’s Life of Panzram

Though the sheer body count he tallied in his ferocious life of wide-ranging destruction puts Carl Panzram high on the list of America’s worst serial murderers, he was not a sexual psychopath like most of the deviants in this book. True, by his own proud estimate, he committed more than one thousand acts of forced sodomy, along with nearly two dozen murders and more felonies than he could keep track of.

But his homosexual rapes—like his countless other outrages—were motivated less by sexual sadism than by his savage will to power.

Having been brutalized in various institutions from his childhood on, Panzram grew up to believe that—beneath its sanctimonious veneer of God-fearing righteousness—American society, like every other human culture throughout history, operated according to only one primal rule: the exploitation of the weak by the strong, “might makes right.” Embracing this law of the jungle, he turned himself into an implacable predator, heaping murderous contempt on everyone from lawmen to well-meaning reformers whose kindness he dreamed of repaying by wrapping his hands around their throats and squeezing until their eyeballs popped from their skulls.

However appalling their crimes, America’s other infamous serial killers were no match for Panzram in terms of sheer hard-bitten fury. Locked in a jail cell with Panzram, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or Jeffrey Dahmer would have ended up becoming his bitch.

Here is his story, as told in pictures by today’s premiere artist of American pathology, Joe Coleman.

Contrary to popular belief, songs about criminal violence existed long before rap artists started celebrating the thug life. Back in the premodern era, when literacy was largely confined to the clergy and aristocracy, accounts of sensational crimes were circulated among the peasantry by means of grim little ditties known as “murder ballads.” Whenever a particularly ghastly homicide occurred, it was immediately translated into a song that could be transmitted orally from person to person, village to village.

In later centuries, as reading became more widespread among the common folk, these graphic true-crime lyrics were printed up on cheap sheets of paper and peddled to the hardworking masses eager to brighten their overburdened lives with a little morbid titillation. Throat slittings, stranglings, bludgeoning, and ax murder were among the most popular topics of these crudely composed verses. One surviving ballad describes a ghastly case of child murder, perpetrated by a woman named Emma Pitt. Typically, the anonymous author omits no detail of the grisly killing:

This Emma Pitt was a schoolmistress,

Her child she killed we see,

Oh mothers, did you ever hear,

Of such barbarity.

With a large flint stone she beat its head

When such cruelty she’d done,

From the tender roof of the infant’s mouth

She cut away its tongue.

The tradition of the murder ballad continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, one of the most popular songs of the 1950s, the Kingston Trio’s early hit “Tom Dooley,” was a somewhat sanitized version of a traditional murder ballad about a man about to hang for slaughtering his girlfriend (“Met her on the mountain/ There I took her life/ Met her on the mountain/ Stabbed her with my knife”).