How Sexual Desire Works- The Enigmatic Urge

by Frederick Toates

  Handsome, articulate and charismatic, Ted Bundy was a university student of law and psychology in Seattle, who worked as a volunteer on a university Crisis helpline and was a political campaign organizer (Rule, 2006). He was entirely reasonable and pleasant until he came under the grip of his murderous urges (Masters, 1993). Similarly, between renovating the house’s torture chamber and digging holes in the back yard to bury his victims, the workaholic Gloucester builder, sexual pervert and serial killer Fred West was delighted to take time out to offer the charity of rescuing neighbours who had got into trouble with their DIY (Sounes, 1995).

  Of course, the appreciative fellow parishioners and neighbours could hardly discern the preoccupation of the conscious minds of these trusted individuals, which even in church might well have involved the depths of sexual depravity. In a number of cases, apparently neither did their wives detect anything amiss.

  Are they insane?

  That the behaviour can be so well disguised seems in a macabre way to bear witness to rationality in mental function. Trial lawyers often spend hours discussing whether such killers are insane, the outcome of which could make the difference between the gas chamber and a mental hospital (Sullivan and Maiken, 1983). Usually the guilty are not judged to be psychotic (Schlesinger, 2001). Rather, the winning case tends to be that they exhibited meticulous purposive planning (‘goal-direction’), while carefully weighing up costs and benefits, in execution of the crimes and evasion of capture, one index of a rational mind (Sewell, 1985). It would appear that the dopamine-based system of assessing costs and benefits of actions is working normally. Furthermore, they can show high functioning in other aspects of their lives, such as at work (Carlisle, 1998). At some level, they know right from wrong but don’t act appropriately on the basis of this.

  In most cases, it could not be argued that such killers suddenly and unexpectedly came under the control of an irresistible impulse that was triggered by the presence of a victim. A psychiatrist at the trial of John Wayne Gacy noted that the killer would excavate graves for future victims, remarking that (Sullivan and Maiken, 1983, p. 346): ‘I don’t think that a person who plans to have an irresistible impulse in the future could be considered having irresistible impulses.’ Having said this, the presence of a suitable victim might greatly and unstoppably increase the desire for attack. Whether this is truly irresistible is an issue perhaps best left to philosophers.

  Their perverse goal might well co-exist and compete for time with a range of other quite unspectacular and socially desirable goals, such as entertaining children while dressed as a clown, as exemplified by John Wayne Gacy, or accompanying a son during a stay at a scout camp, as with Dennis Rader. The change of consciousness from benign to deadly was described by Dennis Rader as quickly switching ‘from one gear to the next’ (Wenzl et al., 2008, p. 342). So, the task is to try to understand how such atypical goals arise and are able to dominate the control of behaviour.

  Why so few women?

  In the annals of sex-linked killing, there is an overwhelming preponderance of males (Cameron and Frazer, 1987). There have been very few females; experts give the names of only two: Jeanne Weber in France and Jane Toppan in the United States (Ramsland and McGrain, 2010). There is a possible candidate in the USA for an unattached sexually motivated female serial killer: Aileen Wournos, who stripped her male victims naked (Silvio et al., 2006). However, it seems more likely that her underlying motives were simply those of robbery and revenge for the monstrous injustices that had earlier been done to her, rather than sexual excitement. Somewhat more frequently, though still very uncommon, women have been closely involved in sexually linked serial homicide in combination with male partners. Famous cases include that of Myra Hindley (Lee, 2012) and Rosemary West (Sounes, 1995) in England and Charlene Gallego and Carol Bundy (no relative of Ted Bundy) in the USA (Silvio et al., 2006), as well as Karla Homolka in Canada (Pron, 1995) and Monique Olivier in France (Hamon, 2008).

  We cannot be certain whether the female partners derived sexual satisfaction from these actions or the satisfaction came just in their supportive role, though some appear to have derived sexual pleasure (Holmes et al., 1998b; Sounes, 1995). Rosemary West had a highly dysfunctional upbringing, was probably abused by her father and seemed to find some salvation in the powerful but perverse bond with her husband. The Wests exemplify the combination of two people each with a disturbed background coming together, which seems to create a particularly lethal cocktail. Karla Homolka’s defence was in terms of the battered wife syndrome, something comparable to the Stockholm syndrome, and there is much evidence that she was abused.

  Why the lack of women? Girls experience early attachment problems just as boys do. Some girls suffer both physical and sexual abuse, probably more so than boys do, and some go on to abuse their children. Girls are often subject to situations that trigger shame and humiliation. Women, albeit many fewer than men, have proven themselves perfectly capable of serial killing, done to gain money, revenge or notoriety. Women are to be found at the outer fringes of sex, albeit in smaller numbers than men. Some single women enter swinging circles (O’Neill and O’Neill, 1972), while others join Satanic cults and many have outlandish fantasies. A few reveal the depths of bizarre sexual taste, in such things as becoming sexually explicit groupies for serial killers (Carlo, 2010), while in one case a groupie even tried to help a notorious serial killer earn an alibi by herself committing a murder and planting bogus evidence (O’Brien, 1985). So, there is something very special and, it would seem, uniquely male about the link between murder and sexual desire. If only we could establish what it is, this could be of inestimable social good.

  A stressed animal has a decision to make on how to react: actively, as in escape or attack, or passively (Cabib and Puglisi-Allegra, 2012). It is possible that the female is biased towards coping passively.

  Writing from a feminist perspective, Cameron and Frazer (1987) suggest that lust killing arises from men’s assimilation of the dominant role from culturally transmitted masculine stereotypes. Males have traditionally played the dominant and violent role in life and it would seem logical that such role models are culturally transmitted through generations. Correspondingly, violent pornography caters for a male rather than a female market. However, this begs the question of how this gender difference arises in the first place. For a number of non-human species, males are more aggressive than females, which surely requires a biological explanation. If we adopt an integrative model of understanding human behaviour (Chapter 1), we would allocate key roles to both biology and social context. The biological difference arose prior to there being human cultures and is still with us, involving such things as the higher levels of testosterone in men as compared to women. This factor would tend to give an orientation to the way cultures institutionalize male dominance. Sex differences in early development in the womb might set the scene for the emergence of such a sex difference in behaviour (see Schore, 2003, p. 254).

  The victim

  Sexually linked serial killers tend to favour their own idiosyncratic type of victim, such as female, young, blonde and student-looking (Holmes, 1998). These are also the material of their fantasies and they will sometimes go to great lengths to find such a victim (Anonymous, 1998). However, if the ideal is not available, and depending upon the strength of their desire, these men will typically compromise by attacking a victim not fitting the ideal. Some victims are selected on the basis of what they do, such as sex workers or drug addicts, this occasionally being justified as a so-called mission killing. This motivation might well be compatible with a sexual motivation and can be supported by neutralizing definitions of the kind that ‘prostitutes are immoral so they are fair game’.

  Sexually related homicide can be illustrated by looking at some famous cases.

  Some famous cases of homicidal sexual desire

  Richard Ramirez

  In the 1980s, Richard Ramirez, also known as ‘The night stalker’, terrorized Los A
ngeles (Carlo, 2010). His story represents an example of the fusion of sex and violence, later sensitized by industrial quantities of cocaine and other drugs.

  Born in 1960 in El Paso, Texas, Richard had, as a boy, read the story of Jack the Ripper, which fired him with the prospect of murder in the pursuit of sexual desire (Carlo, 2010). A violent temper and the administration of severe corporal punishment had been transmitted through generations of Ramirez males. In addition to Richard himself being the recipient, he was witness to merciless beatings of his brothers. As a child, Richard suffered two serious accidental blows to his head, which might have contributed to later troubles, possibly mediated in part through the temporal lobe epilepsy that he manifested.

  At the age of 10 or 11, Richard acquired a ‘role model’, his cousin Mike, who had returned from Vietnam. Mike brought back photos of himself sexually assaulting Vietnamese women, which he shared with Richard. The younger man used these images as a prop for masturbation. Richard repeated the exact form of these assaults during his later spree of terror. The symbiotic bond between these two individuals was consolidated by smoking marijuana, while Mike would brag of his exploits and instruct Richard in the techniques of killing. In the presence of Richard, Mike murdered his own wife. Mike was not the only role model. From his brother-in-law, Richard was taught the skills of voyeurism and found himself turned on by nightly forays around carefully selected lighted windows.

  Subsequently Richard dropped out of school, watched horror movies, smoked large quantities of marijuana and committed ‘petty’ crime. House-breaking was starting to put him on a ‘high’, as was hunting animals and then dissecting the prey. Estranged from his parents and with El Paso being too parochial, Richard took refuge with a cousin in Los Angeles, where he was dazzled by the pornography shops, the sight of sex workers and the glamour of women bathing on the beach at Santa Monica. From the cousin he refined the art of house-breaking.

  Richard Ramirez found a job at a hotel, where he was able to hone his skills of prowling, voyeurism and theft, culminating in one attempted rape. At the relatively benign end of the sexual spectrum, he acquired a strong fetish for women’s feet. However, facilitated by viewing pornographic bondage imagery and reading Satanic literature, Ramirez fantasized about domination and violent sex, which he accompanied with masturbation (Carlo, 2010). Attempted rape was followed by ‘successful’ rape and then the full horrors of the sequence of repeated rape and murder unfolded. Carefully and stealthily planning and then ascending the approach gradient that links fantasies to real action ‘sexually charged’ him.

  Ramirez showed a ‘career path’ from dropping out of school, delinquency, petty crime and relatively minor sexual offending, through sexual assault and finally to killing. From the role models who were around during the emergence of his sexuality, he was exposed either to pure violence or the explicit combination of sexual stimulation and violent imagery.

  Excessive drug-taking could have had two effects to make things much worse. First, there might have been cross-sensitization between the systems underlying (a) drug-seeking and (b) aggression and sexual desire. Secondly, restraint processes are associated with higher brain regions, the activity of which would normally counter putting atypical desire into effect. These would most likely have been severely compromised by the trauma and drugs.

  Gary Leon Ridgway

  In Seattle during the 1980s, Gary Ridgway murdered sex workers (Hickey, 2010; Rule, 2004). Known as the ‘Green River Killer’, he was responsible for at least forty-nine killings, thereby, as far as is known, being the most prolific murderer in America’s history. His full confession exemplifies the fusion of sexual desire and anger.

  With a long-term stable job, he was described as an ideal husband by his last wife and exhibited an interest in spreading Christianity. By all accounts, his final marriage was a very happy one and between marriages there was no shortage of consensual sexual partners. Unlike the stereotype of a serial killer, Ridgeway did not come from a broken home where he had been the victim of violent abuse.

  However, his early childhood was seriously troubled. The family moved at frequent intervals such that Gary did not form any close friends. The boy felt himself to be an outsider from his family and school, a non-entity, who came to believe that he was so unlike his brothers that some mix-up of babies had happened in the maternity unit. His home was dominated by his mother, who was over-controlling and subjected the father to mild emotional and physical abuse. Gary wetted his bed, a common feature of those going on to such killing. This annoyed his mother. Indeed, everything in his life seemed to go wrong for him, including being picked on by school bullies. In desperation and in chronic anger, he fantasized about violence and this led to vandalism, animal cruelty and fire-setting. Killing an animal gave him a feeling of strength and control, while he became fascinated by murder.

  At puberty, Gary felt simultaneous anger and sexual arousal when, following bed-wetting, his mother would spend some fifteen minutes cleaning urine from his genital regions (Rule, 2004). This triggered humiliation but also gave him an erection and sexual thoughts, which were compounded by her occasionally appearing semi-naked. However, he was brought up to view masturbation as a sin. Gary started to watch neighbouring girls secretly as they swam in the garden. When invited to their house he exposed himself to them. He also became a frotteur, brushing against girls on passing them.

  Ridgeway’s first two wives made him angry after he discovered that they had cheated on him; boyhood anger developed into adult rage (Rule, 2004). Violent thoughts assailed him for most of his life. Ridgeway exhibited ambivalence in his sexual desire. He was attracted to sex workers but hated them after contracting venereal disease and sought revenge by strangling them during sex. Strangling, he reported, had a more ‘personal and rewarding’ effect than other methods of killing and was a way to gain control and ultimately, in the deceased body, a possession that was his alone (Rule, 2004, p. 577).

  Ridgeway also once subjected his second wife to temporary choking (a phenomenon also reported in some other cases of serial sexual homicide (Pron, 1995)). He reported feeling intense bouts of anger, and the pressure could only be relieved by another murder. Conversely, after a particularly good day at work, the pressure to kill would sometimes temporarily abate.

  The image of Ridgeway pursuing drug-addicted sex workers standing alongside the highway is a tragic one. Many of these young women, themselves victims of abuse and desperate to obtain money for their next fix, would ask the naïve and innocent question of each punter: ‘Are you sure that you are not the Green River Killer?’ In Ridgeway’s case, each party was seeking a form of quick and short ‘high’, traumatized predator and traumatized prey having at least this much in common.

  The sites where the bodies were left became attractive to him, a common feature amongst such killers (Douglas and Olshaker, 2006), and he would sometimes later return to the body of a victim and have sex with her. Rule (2004, p. 152) writes about Ridgeway and similar sexual killers: ‘For them, murder is addictive, and it takes more and more of the “substance” to satisfy them, or to make them feel, as two infamous serial murderers have said, “normal”.’ Ridgeway enjoyed having sex with his wife outdoors, chillingly the locations chosen included precisely where the murders had taken place, probably reflecting conditioning of arousal. It seems likely that, by means of fantasy he was aroused by reliving those last moments with his victims.

  Ridgeway would seem to exemplify rather well a fusion of negative emotion and sexual desire, both developmentally as a child and as an adult. The early experience of being washed by his mother might well have blended sexual arousal with embarrassment, shame and anger. As an adult, anger helped to trigger thoughts of erotically linked death. Sexual themes associated with prostitution, venereal disease and infidelity seemed to form a strong bond with anger, pointing to a link with mission-killing. Bouts of anger triggered by unfortunate life events served to lift inhibitions and exacerbate the lure o
f the pathological form of sexual high.

  Anger with their victims might not be a necessary ingredient in all sexually related homicides, as the following two cases suggest.

  Jeffrey Dahmer

  Jeffrey Dahmer murdered seventeen young men in association with sexual activity performed on them before and after their deaths. There was apparently no cruelty or abuse in the family and little suggestion that he felt any contempt or hatred towards his victims. Dahmer confessed to all the crimes in graphic detail, which gave investigators vivid insights.

  Dahmer was born in 1960 in Milwaukee and grew up in rural Ohio. He might well have been emotionally traumatized by his mother’s depression shortly after the birth, her unavailability for early social interaction and the acrimonious relationship and divorce between his parents. Maternal depression and an absence of early social interaction are disruptive to a child’s emotional development (Schore, 2003). When 4 years old, he had a double hernia operation, associated with intense pain in the groin area (Masters, 1993). One can speculate as to how this intrusive trauma might be interpreted by a young child or what permanent changes in connections between neurons in the emotional processing regions of the brain it might have triggered.2 Whatever such effects, it would appear to have marked a turning point, following which Jeffrey became even more withdrawn from the world (Nichols, 2006).

  At school, another boy invited Jeffrey to choke him (‘pretend strangulation’), promising not to tell the teacher. The boy betrayed the trust and Jeffrey received corporal punishment, the first in a long series of disappointments and perceived betrayals. By age 8, Jeffrey found himself alone in the world due to parental problems amongst other things, and it was claimed by his father and probation officer that he had been sexually molested by another boy (Davis, 1991).