by Suruthi Bala
And if that’s not enough eye-opening misery for you, don’t worry—there’s more to come.
“Slaughterhouses of the Souls”
For a horribly sad mass example of the devastating impact of a lack of healthy emotional bonding in childhood, we need to head to Romania. In 1966, then dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned abortion and any form of contraceptive in order to keep the country’s population from plummeting after World War II. But, predictably, forcing people to have children they aren’t willing or able to look after led to thousands and thousands of children ending up in orphanages across Romania.
It is estimated that around 170,000 Romanian children were abandoned in such institutions, which became known as “child gulags” or “the slaughterhouses of the souls.” At the end of 1989 the communist dictatorship finally fell, and Romania’s plight would be one of such horror that it would go on to be dubbed “the shame of the nation.”
It was in 1990 that the outside world discovered the nightmarish truth of what was really going on. The story broke in a brutally visual way: ABC’s 20/20 aired a stomach-turning exposé that showed hundreds of skeletal children living in unspeakable conditions. The buildings were dark, freezing, and overcrowded; tiny, dirty children sat muttering and rocking back and forth alone in cribs and cages. The floors were covered in feces and urine and it was clear that most of the children were suffering from untreated medical conditions. Some of the “children” were later discovered to be in their twenties and were no bigger than three feet tall.
In 2000, Harvard pediatric neuroscientist Charles Nelson led the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. Researchers worked with 136 children, aged between six months to two and a half years, from these Romanian orphanages to assess the quality of the attachment relationships between the children and their caregivers or parents. In the control group (made up of children from the local community) 100 percent of the children had a fully developed attachment relationship with their mother. Only 3 percent of the institutionalized kids had this. Even worse, 13 percent of the institutionalized children were deemed “unclassified,” meaning they showed no attachment behaviors at all. This was unbelievable to the researchers, because the theory prior to this experiment had been that a child would attach to even the most abusive of adults, like the baby monkey clinging to the fake monkey mommy that shows it no love. No one had ever considered that there could be children who simply didn’t form attachments.
This revealed that seeking comfort for distress is a learned behavior (another point for team “nurture”). These children had grown up with no idea that an adult could make them feel better. This discovery, alongside Harlow’s experiments, showed that a strong emotional bond with one’s parents or caregivers—or what psychologists call “secure attachment”—is crucial to good health and flourishing later in life. Not forming a healthy emotional bond was also proven to cause an extremely wide range of issues; these children developed autistic-like behaviors, like repetitively rocking or banging their heads. They were also affected physically: their head circumferences were significantly smaller than average, they had severely weakened immune systems, and they struggled to gain weight.
Once again, these are very extreme examples and most people who have poor parental relationships or attachment disorders do not go on to become violent in any way, much less killers. But as British psychiatrist and father of attachment theory John Bowlby put it, there is no denying that attachment is an emotional bond that affects behavior “from the cradle to the grave.” Some sociologists and psychologists now actually consider psychopathic or sociopathic behavior to be the brain’s defense mechanism when dealing with a neglectful childhood or early trauma.
So, given that we now know early infant bonding is absolutely vital to personality development, it will come as no surprise that a common experience shared by some serial killers, such as David Berkowitz, Joel Rifkin, and Kenneth Bianchi, is that they were adopted during this vital period of their lives. Now, we have to remember that that was just one of many factors. Obviously, it’s certainly not the case that all adoptees have serious personality issues; many, many people are adopted into loving homes and go on to live healthy lives. What we can say is that if these men had experienced warm parenting right from the very start and throughout their childhoods, it’s possible that their violent behavior might never have expressed itself.
Let’s get back to Germany and baby Karl. As he was about to turn one, Karl was adopted by a couple—a butcher named Gerhard Bartsch and his wife Gertrud. They renamed the baby boy Jurgen and took him home. As discussed, the first 12 months of a person’s life are vital. Although he was adopted relatively early, it’s clear Jurgen hadn’t received the right amount of love, affection, or attention by age one. And if anyone thought that being adopted was the start of an amazing new life for baby Jurgen, they would be very wrong indeed. Life post-adoption would be anything but easy for him. Jurgen’s new father paid him absolutely no attention—except, that is, when he was beating little Jurgen on the floor of his abattoir. He would also often lock Jurgen up overnight in his underground cellar for even the most minor misbehavior.
Jurgen’s mother, on the other hand, seems to have been incredibly overbearing. Paul Moor, the author of the book Jürgen Bartsch: Selbstbildnis eines Kindermörders, described Jurgen’s mother as “completely overprotective and emotionally withdrawn,” which is bad enough, but then to top it off it appears that Gertrud was also far too hands on with her son. She was obsessed with cleanliness and became convinced that if Jurgen ever played with the other children he would become “dirty.” Her rather unconventional remedy for this was to personally bathe Jurgen with her own two hands, even when he was no longer a small child. She did this until he was arrested for a series of horrific murders at the age of 19.
Mommy Issues
At this point, Jurgen Bartsch is starting to rack up some serious points on the old serial killer bingo sheet, because another common characteristic among serial killers, as some of us know, is their dysfunctional relationships with their mothers. In the book Whoever Fights Monsters, former FBI agent Robert Ressler concludes: “Without exception the relationship of the interviewed serial murderers to their mother was determined by coolness, distance, lack of love, and neglect. They hardly experienced emotional warmth or body contact.” And no, being washed by your mom until you’re 19 doesn’t count as decent body contact.
In her 2016 documentary series Murderers and Their Mothers, Dr. Elizabeth Yardley, professor of criminology and director of Birmingham City University’s Centre for Applied Criminology, examines the complex nature of the killer-mother relationship. She, like most other researchers, finds that the mother’s influence in the making of a murderer cannot be overstated. But why? I hear you scream. Isn’t laying the blame at the feet of their mothers just more sexist bullshit? Well, unfortunately, our society is deeply engendered whether we like it or not, and we expect mothers to be the safety net, emotionally speaking. If we were to look at killer after killer and examine their relationship with their mother, we’d find to varying degrees—either through outright abuse, their willingness to ignore the red flags in front of them, or their indifference—mothers begin to shape these killers right from the start.
During his early childhood, Jurgen Bartsch was already dealing with some pretty hefty trauma being piled on him at home. And as if this regular psychological and physical abuse weren’t enough, things were about to get a whole lot worse.
At the age of 12, Bartsch was sent off to everyone’s favorite God-sponsored abuse pit—a Catholic boarding school. And in a thoroughly on-brand scenario, some pretty dark shit went on there. When Bartsch was just 12, he was stricken with polio; during a particularly bad night in bed, writhing from a raging fever, the school’s choir leader Father Pütlitz raped him. The abuse went on for years and Pütlitz was quite the entertainer; he went so far as to lace his abuse of Bartsch with sadistic stories of a medieval knight who killed little boys (
see sidebar).
GILLES DE RAIS: THE SATANIC CHILD-KILLING KNIGHT
Obviously, once we read about a serial-killing knight, we had to look it up to see if it was real, or if it was just from the dark recesses of Pütlitz’s mind. As it turns out, it was very real indeed.
Baron de Rais was a knight and Lord from Brittany, Anjou, and Poitou (let’s just call it France).
He was a big deal in King Charles VII of France’s army and also mates with good old flame-fighting warrior of God Joan of Arc. But his CV doesn’t end there, oh no. Rais was like an olden-timey QAnon conspiracy theorist’s wet dream; he was massively into alchemy, demon summoning, and child murder. He was convinced that if he could just find and read the right old books and manage to get his hands on enough candles and incense, he’d be able to summon a demon, no matter what it cost him. So like a nineties teenager at a Halloween sleepover, Rais started to dabble in the occult and tried to summon a demon named Barron.
After three unsuccessful attempts, and no demon manifesting itself, Rais decided that the ritual was lacking a little je ne sais quoi in the shape of child body parts. So off he went, and kicking off in the spring of 1432, he abducted, sodomized, and murdered anywhere between 100 to 600 young boys. Although he was finally caught and put to death in October 1440, Gilles de Rais has forever marked his place in popular culture, as he was the main inspiration for the folktale of Bluebeard.
Just three years later in 1962, at age 15, Jurgen Bartsch would kill his first victim, eight-year-old Klaus Jung. He convinced Jung to follow him into an abandoned air-raid shelter and then forced Jung to strip before he raped and killed him.
This in itself is highly unusual; often with serial killers there first is a buildup of escalating crimes. Very few go straight to rape and murder at the age of 15. Typically, they have a long rap sheet of misdemeanors, including petty crimes, theft, and Peeping Tom–like behavior, well into their late teens and early twenties. Although their fantasies of dominance, control, and power usually begin to kick in in childhood and their early teens, the average serial killer doesn’t typically commit their first murder until their mid to late twenties.
A lot of serial killers, particularly power and lust killers, get started as Peeping Toms as a way to dip their toes into the dirty pool of boundary-violation and get their first taste of dominance over others. Some of the most notorious and prolific serial killers, such as Joseph DeAngelo (a.k.a. the Golden State Killer), Dennis Rader (a.k.a. BTK), and Ted Bundy, all started off as Peeping Toms. Jurgen Bartsch is a rare serial murderer in that he skipped all of this and went straight for the kill. He was having violent fantasies as a child and he acted on them immediately.
Bartsch’s second victim was 13-year-old Peter Fuchs in 1965. As you can see, Bartsch waited three years between his first two kills, which is typical of serial killers. Often they have cooling-off periods between kills that get shorter and shorter as the killer needs more of a thrill more frequently to sustain their appetite. But once again Bartsch was a fast mover—he escalated greatly and within the next two years he had killed two more boys: 12-year-old Ulrich Kahlweiss and 12-year-old Manfred Grassman.
Usually, a serial killer’s MO and behavior evolve over time as they learn what they like, work to refine their “art,” and increase their criminal sophistication to evade capture. But Bartsch went so hard and fast there was very little deviation between his kills. As outlined in his 2005 study “Two Homosexual Pedophile Sadistic Serial Killers,” Mark Benecke explains that all of Jurgen Bartsch’s kills, generally speaking, were incredibly similar: he would lure the boys somewhere secluded, rape them, and usually kill them by strangulation. Afterward, Bartsch would dismember the boys’ bodies; he would decapitate them, chop them up, and remove all of their innards. He removed the boys’ eyes, castrated them, and removed chunks of flesh such as the thighs and buttocks. He would then bury the remains in a tunnel a few miles outside of the town. He did all this between the ages of just 15 and 19. His fifth would-be victim—15-year-old Peter Frese—managed to escape by using a candle to burn through the ropes that were binding him. He went straight to the police and Jurgen Bartsch was caught.
It is morbidly fascinating how many children Bartsch was able to kill at such a young age. It is also believed that he made at least another one hundred unsuccessful murder attempts before being apprehended. As we’ve highlighted, to see such serial offenses in someone so young is highly unusual, but Bartsch also stands out in another way because he straddled the line between being a process killer and a product killer. His testimony at trial revealed that he was quite the hybrid. Let’s take a look at the differences:
A process killer is a killer who enjoys the buildup to a kill and the actual kill itself. They want to hear their victim scream and watch the life drain from their victim’s body. These killers will usually prolong the killing process as long as possible and engage in torture and captivity. They want their victims to suffer because that’s what turns them on. Sexual sadist Dennis Rader (a.k.a. BTK, for Bind, Torture, Kill) is the perfect example of a process killer.
A product killer, on the other hand, doesn’t get pleasure from the actual kill; they just want the body and the remains after the murder is complete. The murder is a necessary hurdle to cross in order to get what they really want—a dead body. Jeffrey Dahmer is a classic example of a product killer; he killed to get what he wanted—a sex zombie. The kill itself didn’t give him pleasure; it was the body he got to possess afterward that satisfied him.
Bartsch kind of falls into both camps. According to reports, at trial he talked openly about his fantasies; he emphasized that he only reached sexual climax while masturbating and cutting the flesh of his victims after their death. But Bartsch also stated that he wanted to skin a live child with soft skin, little hair, and a “non-aggressive mood.” He claimed that this particular goal was not reached because the children had always died too fast. However, this didn’t really stand in his way as he carried on regardless and dismembered the children’s bodies and ejaculated onto their flesh. As you can see, Bartsch was very candid. The only part of his behavior that he would not openly comment on was if he had eaten any of the human meat. When asked, he would only say that he had “touched it with his lips.” (Hmmmm.)
We know Bartsch’s childhood and adolescence were filled with abuse, indifference, and sexual violence. This, possibly coupled with that first year he spent deprived of affection in an orphanage, as well as his own genetic predisposition toward violence, created a killer who was so filled with violent fantasies and rage that he didn’t even wait until adulthood to strike. He didn’t bother with slowly pushing boundaries. Jurgen Bartsch pounced as soon as he was able to and wouldn’t have stopped until he was caught.
We have spent the majority of this chapter so far looking at how childhood abuse can form a killer, and we said at the start most serial killers had pretty fucked up childhoods. But did you know that recent studies show that more than a third of killers don’t report any abuse or trauma from their younger days? Dennis Rader is a perfect example. A sexually sadistic serial killer, he had a (verifiably) perfectly ordinary childhood. So since there are killers that seem to be “natural born killers,” the question becomes: Could anything be done in childhood to prevent one from heading down a murder-y path?
To explore this idea, let’s consider the work of psychologist John Marshall. Dr. Marshall has spent more than two decades working with psychopaths, and in 2019 he put together a report on Aaron Campbell, a Scottish teenager who brutally killed a six-year-old girl, Alesha MacPhail. In his analysis, Dr. Marshall raised some important points that received their fair share of backlash. In a controversial article he penned in The Scotsman that same year, he said that he believed some social workers are in denial about child psychopaths, and that the children’s services system in the UK clings far too closely to the idea that almost everything negative we see in a child who offends must be linked to some past trauma.
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bsp; In his report on Campbell, a boy who had been showing worrying signs for a long time, Marshall writes: “No one becomes a psychopath on their sixteenth birthday. Psychopathic traits start in very early childhood, have predictable pathways, and yet we do not assess children for this neurodevelopmental problem. At the age of 16, such traits are already entrenched and chronic so it is time for policy to catch up with research, given the enormous social costs of psychopathy. We have to deal with psychopathy trajectories in childhood head-on now to divert budding psychopaths.”
As we saw in chapter 1, this is highly accurate, because psychopathy is a congenital condition. So while of course not all psychopaths will go on to commit horrific crimes, they are at greater risk of becoming violent offenders, whether they experience trauma and abuse or not. However, as you can imagine, even in the wake of a young girl’s murder these words were met with skepticism. The notion that by age 16, psychopathic traits are so deeply ingrained that, for all intents and purposes, that child could end up a lost cause hit hard. Dr. Marshall’s main point in his report was that early identification is key, because multiple studies have shown that warm parenting can make a huge difference for children with psychopathic traits—but it has to happen early. The questions then are: How do you identify such traits in young children? And when would you label such children? And with what?