Clarnell hated his choice to work as an electrician while she stayed at home with their daughter, Susan. As a single woman, Clarnell had been on the way up: an empowered female, federal employee and community leader. She wanted a power husband for her power marriage. She wanted her killer commando back, in a suit-and-tie uniform. Instead, she got this tired, burned-out husk from the war. A blue-collar slob. Like her father had been. Like his father had been.
Clarnell pushed the twenty-seven-year-old Edmund to go to college and better himself. She would later complain, “The war never ceased. Upon his return he tried college under the G.I. Bill, couldn’t get back into studying, argued like a staff sergeant with the instructors, dropped out, and worked rapidly into the electrical business.”29
Edmund would later say that his wife “affected me as a grown man more than three hundred ninety-six days and nights of fighting on the front did. I became confused and I was not certain of anything for quite a time.”
By 1948 their daughter, Susan, would soon be away at school during the days. With a little help from the in-laws, Clarnell would have some time for herself to get back into the social scene, do some volunteer work, maybe even get a part-time job. She could see the light getting brighter at the end of the tunnel. But then she got pregnant again.
On December 18, 1948, their second child was born, Edmund Emil Kemper III, one of the most notorious serial killers of the 1970s.
Roy Shawcross’s Homecoming
Twenty-one-year-old US Marine corporal Roy Shawcross from the scrublands of Jefferson County near Watertown, New York, would become one of those “Guadalcanal Neurosis” cases. In the 1930s, Roy had dropped out of school after eighth grade and was lucky enough to find work with his father for the county road maintenance department. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Marines, and in August 1942, at the age of nineteen, Roy was deployed with the First Marine Division at Guadalcanal in the first major offensive against the Japanese in the Pacific. It was a brutal campaign, in which some 7,100 Americans would be killed over six months.
Roy barely survived being buried alive under tons of coral sand after being hit by a Japanese shell. His buddy next to him suffocated to death as Roy prayed for rescue. Lucky to be dug out by fellow Marines, Roy and his unit ended up cut off in the jungle, separated from US forces for four months, surviving on abandoned maggot-ridden Japanese rice rations. Roy would later say they never picked the maggots out because there’d be nothing left to eat.
Roy earned four battle stars but was never the same after Guadalcanal and was evacuated to Australia as a neuropsychiatric casualty in February 1943, rather than being redeployed in the next campaign in the Pacific.
While recuperating, Roy met an Australian girl, Thelma June, and promptly married her on June 14, 1943. They had one child, Hartley Roy Shawcross. But after Roy was shipped back to the United States in July 1944, he didn’t send for Thelma or Hartley. He seemed to forget all about them.
Roy had been either posted to or hospitalized at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in New Hampshire. Shortly after his arrival there, Roy met Elizabeth “Betty” Yerakes from Somersworth, an eighteen-year-old assistant pipe fitter working in the naval yards. Betty was a petite five feet two but tough as nails; a “Rosie the Riveter” war teen. Betty’s parents were factory workers; her dad was Greek, her mom maybe the same, or Italian, or Mediterranean French.30
Betty and Roy were married on November 24, 1944, despite the fact that Roy apparently did not file for divorce from his first wife nor tell Betty he had a son and wife in Australia.
On June 6, 1945, their first son was born two months premature in a US Naval hospital in Kittery, Maine: Arthur John Shawcross, the future necrophile cannibal serial killer, the Genesee River Killer, who would kill the first of his thirteen victims in 1972.
And so it went.
Dennis Rader, “the BTK Killer,” born in 1945, would tell his biographer Katherine Ramsland, “My dad, William Elvin Rader, a Marine, was still in the Pacific when I was born, on Midway Island.”31 “Golden Age” serial killers Douglas Clark, Richard Cottingham, Herbert Mullin, Carl Eugene Watts and Chris Wilder all had fathers serving in World War II. John Wayne Gacy’s father, a shell-shocked World War I veteran, brutalized him.
Mostly, however, the biographies of the fathers of serial killers are sketchy and vague. Often they were just not there. Gone. The FBI “mindhunter” study of serial killers conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s concluded that 66 percent of serial killers reported their mother as the dominant parent, and 47 percent reported their father gone before they reached the age of fourteen.32
Indeed, during 1945 and 1946, the divorce rate doubled from what it was in 1939 to an average of thirty-one divorces for every hundred marriages, the highest rate in the world. And the divorce rate among veterans was twice that of civilians. Some 53 percent of marriages in Los Angeles County in 1944 landed in divorce court by 1945.33
The 454,699 neuropsychiatrically impaired veterans did not include those who had been too crazy to send into war. At the height of the recruitment drive in 1942 and 1943, 1.25 million young American men were rejected “because of mental and emotional abnormalities.”34 This included men like Otto Wilson, “the Walking Dead Killer,” who disemboweled two women in Los Angeles.
These men rejected by the Army were just too crazy to kill or be killed and were left behind at home. Some of them too went on to father kids; some even tried to raise them.
Postwar Fevers, Red Meat Movies and the Pulp Sweats
It wasn’t just the war over there that affected people. There was a seismic shift in popular culture at home that took a darker and more paranoid turn. In his disturbing study of postwar America, The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War, historian Richard Lingeman describes an era of anxiety and dread rather than the optimistic Norman Rockwell impression that we have of happy-to-be-home soldiers and optimistic baby-boom years. After describing the mass arrivals in 1947 of hundreds of thousands of coffins from Europe and the Pacific (the war dead had been temporarily interred overseas, and families had the option to leave them there in military cemeteries or have them shipped home for reburial), Lingemen describes how Hollywood launched a new genre of brutally violent and cynical crime movies, the so-called red meat movies that French film critics would later dub “film noir.” Lingemen writes that the typical film noir was “peopled with recognizable contemporary American types who spoke of death in callous, calculating language and shot with dark chiaroscuro lighting, told an unedifying tabloid-style story of greed, lust, and murder. . . .”35
It was something the New York Times pondered in the last days of the war, describing a crop of “homicidal films” either just released or in production, like Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet, Conflict, Laura, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Lady in the Lake, Blue Dahlia, Serenade and The Big Sleep.
Hollywood says the moviegoer is getting this type of story because he likes it, and psychologists explain that he likes it because it serves as a violent escape in tune with the violence of the times, a cathartic for pent-up emotions. . . . The average moviegoer has become calloused to death, hardened to homicide and more capable of understanding a murderer’s motive. After watching a newsreel showing the horrors of a German concentration camp, the movie fan, they say, feels no shock, no remorse, no moral repugnance when the screen villain puts a bullet through his wife’s head or shoves her off a cliff and runs away with his voluptuous next-door neighbor.36
The femme fatale was now raised to iconic heights, starring in the film noir as a greedy, narcissistic, bored, oversexed female often plotting to do away with her poor husband. An article in the New York Times in 1946 entitled “The American Woman? Not for This GI” gave voice to the thousands of frustrated veterans coming home to find women transformed:
Being nice is almost a lost art among American wome
n. They elbow their way through crowds, swipe your seat at bars and bump and push their way around regardless. Their idea of equality is to enjoy all the rights men are supposed to have with none of the responsibilities. . . . The business amazon would not fit into the feminine pattern in France or Italy. . . . They are mainly interested in the rather fundamental business of getting married, having children and making the best homes their means or condition will allow. They feel that they can best attain their goals by being easy on the eyes and nerves of their menfolk. . . . Despite the terrible beating many women in Europe have taken, I heard few complaints from them and rarely met one, either young or old, whose courtesy and desire to please left anything wanting.37
The diabolus in cultura of postwar America is evidenced most dramatically in the pages of popular men’s magazines directed at returning veterans and at their young sons growing up in the years that followed the war. If there was ever a discernible homicidal-rape “mimetic compulsion,” a popular cultural phenomenon extolling vengeful woman-hunting, rape, torture, cannibalism, mutilation and killing, then it was garishly celebrated in the pages of true-detective and men’s adventure magazines with monthly circulations in the millions. They were sold openly on newsstands and in supermarkets everywhere from the late 1940s until the end of the 1970s. And it was an ugly thing to behold. Where did it ever come from, what dark and ugly part of the American male psyche?
Cave drawings, myths, popular lore, folktales and fairy tales, fables and literature often reflect the hidden, unspoken yearnings and deep, dark fears and hates in a society, as well as its traumas and triumphs. In the limited three-TV-channel-plus-Hollywood-movies world of postwar American popular culture, without cable and satellite TV, without video, without video games, DVDs, the Internet or Netflix, guys read mainstream magazines, comics and paperbacks for entertainment. Other than movies, radio and later TV, there wasn’t much of anything else in the way of popular narrative entertainment.
What entertained and came to obsess some boys of Ted Bundy’s and John Wayne Gacy’s generation, and their fathers, were dozens of men’s adventure magazines like Argosy, Saga, True, Stag, Male, Man’s Adventure, True Adventure, Man’s Action and True Men.
From the 1940s to the 1970s, these magazines often presented salaciously exaggerated accounts of wartime Nazi rape atrocities. The magazine covers featured garish images of bound and battered women with headlines like SOFT NUDES FOR THE NAZIS’ DOKTOR HORROR; HITLER’S HIDEOUS HAREM OF AGONY; GRISLY RITES OF HITLER’S MONSTER FLESH STRIPPER; HOW THE NAZIS FED TANYA SEX DRUGS; CRYPT IN HELL FOR HITLER’S PASSION SLAVES.38
Even today, more than seventy-five years after the war, the Nazis and their psychosexual sadistic cruelty remain a major theme in our popular culture and imagination, from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, The Night Porter and Seven Beauties to the more recent Inglourious Basterds and The Reader.
The adventure magazines were known as the “sweats” for the luridly colored cover illustrations of male torturers and female victims glistening with sweat, an effect enhanced by casein paints and acrylics used by the cover artists. These magazines featured not only a gamut of Nazi and Japanese atrocities but sweaty cannibal stories based in the South Seas and Africa; Middle East harem rape scenarios; and eventually Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War vice and torture themes.39
Parallel to the “sweats” was a genre of grotesque crime tabloids like the National Enquirer (before it turned to celebrity gossip) and titles like Midnight, Exploiter, Globe, Flash and Examiner and true-detective magazines that mixed staged bondage photos with horrific crime scene photos and tales of sex, death and mutilation, with headlines like 39 STAB WOUNDS WAS ALL THE NAKED STRIPPER WORE; HE KILLED HER MOTHER AND THEN FORCED HER TO COMMIT UNNATURAL SEX ACTS; I LIKE TO SEE NUDE WOMEN LYING IN BLOOD; SEX MONSTERS! THE SLUT HITCHHIKER’S LAST RIDE TO DOOM; RAPE ME BUT DON’T KILL ME.
All these hundreds of magazines had one thing in common: their covers featured a photograph of a professional model posing as a bound victim (detective magazines) or a lurid painted illustration of a bound victim (men’s adventure magazines). Either way, she was inevitably scantily clad or her dress was in disarray or tatters, her skirt hiked up to expose her thighs or stockings, her breasts straining under the thin material of her torn clothing, her bronzed flesh glowing with a fine sheen of perspiration, often with bound legs or legs spread open, tied up in a torture chamber, in a basement, on the floor, on a bed, on the ground outside; tied to a chair, a table, a rack, a sacrificial pole; in a cage or suspended from a dungeon ceiling next to red-hot pokers and branding irons heating on glowing coals, turning on a roasting spit to be cooked by lusty cannibals, strapped spread-eagle on surgical tables for mad Nazi scientists to probe and mutilate. The woman’s face is contorted in fear and submission, sometimes gazing out from the magazine cover toward the male reader, as if she was the reader’s victim, his personal slave who could be possessed for the price of the magazine.40
Norm Eastman, one of the cover artists for those magazines in the 1950s, recalled in 2003, “I often wondered why they stuck with the torture themes so much. That must have been where they were heavy with sales. I really was kind of ashamed of painting them, though I am not sure they did any harm. It did seem like a weird thing to do.”41
Women in these blatantly misogynistic publications were portrayed in only two biblically paraphilic ways: either as captives bound and forced into sex against their will or as sexually aggressive, bare-shouldered women with a cigarette dangling from their lips, subject to punishment or death for their evil-minded sexuality. In this paraphilic world of the “sweats,” women were either a sacred Madonna defiled or a profligate whore punished; there were no other options available.
These magazines were not squirreled away behind counters or in adult bookstores or limited to some subculture; they were as mainstream as apple pie. Some had monthly circulations of over two million copies at their height and were openly sold everywhere: on newsstands; in grocery stores, candy stores, supermarkets; on drugstore magazine racks, right next to Time, Life, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics and Ladies’ Home Journal.42 They would be found lying around anywhere and everywhere men and their sons gathered, in workshops, barbershops, auto shop waiting rooms, mail rooms, locker rooms and factory lunchrooms. At their peak, there were over a hundred monthly adventure and true-detective magazine titles, available to all ages.
All this in a country where it is still taboo to show even a glimpse of a bare female breast or buttock on television.
In a colorless world, where photographs, movies and television were mostly black-and-white, I remember in the late 1950s and the early 1960s going to the local supermarket with my mom and waiting for her by the magazine and comic book racks, facing row after row of these magazines with their candy-colored covers of bound women in distress, offered up for the taking. “GIRLS PRICED TO SELL,” as one headline advertised.
I was five or six years old and had no notion of sex, but I remember that those images stirred some kind of powerful primordial male reptilian euphoria. I recognize it today as entirely a sexual stirring for dominance and possession of my prim and bossy older-sister humans, from babysitters and nurses to female store clerks and teachers towering over me, under whose supervision and authority I constantly found myself as a male child. These magazine images of prostrate females drew me into a fantasy world in which women were tipped over into a powerless and vulnerably disheveled state.
I was one of those lucky kids given no reason to be hurt, traumatized or angry, and I was encouraged and raised to be independent and autonomous by both the men and women in my young life. I had a trauma-free childhood with no episodes of abuse or head injury. But I can only imagine now, if some severe abuse, humiliation or trauma had been fused with that powerful, primitive, reptilian sensation I describe, what might have happened and to what dark place I potentially could have taken those impulses stirred by this constant
imagery had I been angry at women, or desperately craved control, revenge or even redemption, as psychiatrist John Money described sexual paraphilia: “tragedy or trauma turned into triumph.”
These men’s magazines, along with true-detective magazines, would increasingly be cited as favorite childhood and adolescent reading by “golden age” serial killers.
Already in 1941, Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe claimed he was aroused by stories of rape and murder in true-detective magazines.
John Joubert, “the Nebraska Boy Snatcher,” a serial killer who murdered three young boys from 1982 to 1983, stated that when he was eleven or twelve he had seen true-detective magazines in the local grocery store and become aroused by the depiction of bound women on the covers. He began acquiring these magazines and masturbating to the images, eventually superimposing the fantasy of bound young boys over the images of the women. He could not recall whether these images brought on the masturbation or the masturbation brought on the fantasies.43
Serial killer Dennis Rader, “the BTK Killer,” in his recent interviews with forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland, described his adolescent obsession with illustrations of bound women. Rader said, “I was soon addicted to them and was always looking for ‘strung-up’ models in distress.”
Rader described fantasizing about attacking women: “She became a ‘True Detective Horror Magazine’ hit and fantasy. Her bedroom appeared to be in the center east. I was planning on tying her up on the bed, either half naked or totally. Then I would either strangle her or suffocate her. Her hands would be bound in front and tied to her neck—like a True Detective Magazine model I had seen. I used to fantasize about women on the cover, showing terror in their eyes, bound hand up near her neck, a man with a threatening knife overhead.”
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