by Colin Wilson
When the defense asked him whether he had ever come across another case of a man who had frequent consensual sex getting involved with prostitutes, he was able to cite the case of Arthur Shawcross who, like Unterweger, had been in prison for fifteen years for murder, been released, and then murdered eleven prostitutes—in spite of having a wife and a girlfriend. The amazing parallel produced an obvious effect on the jury.
As the trial dragged on for two and a half months, McCrary watched Unterweger’s support eroding away as the public realized the strength of the evidence against him. In a speech in his own defense, Unterweger did not even attempt to counter it. He merely repeated his assertion that he had no reason to kill women, since he had every reason to stay out of jail. He conceded that he had once been “a primitive criminal who grunted rather than talked, and an inveterate liar.” But, he declared with passion, he was no longer that person.
But McCrary’s evidence left little doubt that he was exactly that person. And on June 28, 1999, the jury found Unterweger guilty on nine of the eleven counts of murder—in the remaining two cases the jury reasoned that the bodies were too decomposed for the cause of death to be established. Unterweger was obviously stunned; he had confidently expected an acquittal.
McCrary had one more contribution to make to the case. By now he knew enough about Unterweger to know that an ego like his would find it virtually impossible to accept the verdict. He had sworn that he would never return to prison. This time it would be for life; there would be no second chance of parole. Suicide would be his last defiant act, his last great “Fuck you!”
Unfortunately, this warning was not passed on to the prison guards. That night Jack Unterweger hanged himself in his cell with the cord of his jumpsuit.
For McCrary, the moral of the story is also the moral of this book: It is almost impossible for serial killers to change their spots.
Epilogue: An End in Sight?
A book like this is hardly the place for philosophical reflection, but in these final pages perhaps I might permit myself some latitude.
On a hot Monday in June 1955, an ex-con named Willie Cochran saw fifteen-year-old Patty Ann Cook sunbathing in a black swimsuit in her front yard in Dallas, Georgia, and offered her a lift to the swimming pool. When she accepted, he drove her to a spot beside the Etowah River, raped her, and then shot her through the head. Since Cochran was a sex offender who had taken that day off from work, he was questioned by the police and confessed to the crime. He was duly executed in Reidsville’s electric chair.
What stuck in my mind about the case was a comment made by the presiding judge, J. H. Paschall: “The male sexual urge has a strength out of all proportion to any useful purpose that it serves.”
I suspect that comment contains the solution to the rise of the serial killer. In the West we live in a society that has seen a steady rise in the level of sexual stimulation. By the 1930s advertisements already made use of attractive young women in swimsuits, and in the postwar years these images extended to women clad only in their underwear. Nowadays anyone can access pornographic pictures on the Web. If Patty Ann had been wearing a Victorian bathing costume with a woollen skirt down to the knees, Cochran would have driven past.
Which might seem to imply that unless we revert to a Victorian code of advertising, there is no end in sight to the rise of sex crime and serial murder. This conclusion, however, is not as inevitable as it looks. There is, I would suggest, a way forward. And Christie’s remark about the “quiet, peaceful thrill” he felt after killing Muriel Eady offers a starting point for trying to explain what it is. Christie’s remark had always reminded me of a phrase used by D. H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover when the gamekeeper first makes love to Lady Chatterley: “He had come in to her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body.”
Roy Hazelwood’s comment that sex crime is about power is obviously true, but it is not the whole truth. Equally important is that sense of “peace on earth.”
Now Lawrence was a true descendant of those nineteenth-century writers and artists we call Romantics, a movement that began in Germany in the late eighteenth century, at the time of Goethe. And fifty years ago, they were the starting point of my first book The Outsider. As a teenager in the 1940s, I had been fascinated by the high rate of suicide among the Romantics, as well as deaths by tuberculosis that seemed to be part of the syndrome of misery and defeat.
The reason for the misery and defeat was their feeling of the painful contrast between “peace on earth,” and the madness of our materialistic world. This I saw as the basic “Outsider problem,” which was succinctly expressed in Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s play Axel when the hero tells the heroine: “As for living, our servants can do that for us.” He is embracing her as he speaks, and then goes on to propose that the solution would be suicide. This is the conclusion reached by so many of the Romantics. What I wanted to demonstrate was why this is illogical, and why, when we recognize this, we can also see a way forward for our chaotic civilization.
To me, it seemed obvious that the answer was for the “Outsider” to stop feeling sorry for himself, and get on with the job of trying to change the world. If he didn’t do it, then nobody else would.
At about this time, 1960, I received a letter from Abraham Maslow, an American professor of psychology. He explained that he had got tired of studying sick people, because they talked about nothing but their sickness, and decided to study healthy people instead. And he quickly learned something that no one had discovered so far: healthy people had with great frequency what they called “peak experiences,” experiences of sudden tremendous happiness. Typical was his story of a young mother who was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when she suddenly thought, “My God, aren’t I lucky?” and went into the peak experience.
He also made another interesting discovery: when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began remembering and talking about their own peak experiences, and they began having peak experiences all the time. The capacity for peak experiences is obviously quite basic and normal in human beings. Until we recognize this, we are selling ourselves short.
But Maslow said something else that struck me as relevant to the problem of crime. He talked about what he called the “hierarchy of needs.” As they evolve, human beings pass through certain levels of need. If you are so poor that you have difficulty getting enough to eat, then you will find it hard to think about anything but food. But when people have enough to eat, then the next level emerges: for a roof over your head. Every tramp dreams of retiring to a cottage with roses round the door.
If that need is satisfied, then the next level emerges—the sexual level. This is not merely the need for sex, but the need to love and be cared for.
If this is satisfied, the next level is self-esteem, the need to be liked and respected by one’s fellows, and if possible to be admired. This is the level of the “wannabe” that we have encountered so frequently in this book. As I thought about this, I saw the same levels emerging in the development of society in the past few centuries—and in the types of crime in those societies.
In the eighteenth century, the majority of people were at that basic level, the need to get enough to eat. So crime was also basic, most of it connected with robbery.
In the nineteenth century, things had advanced, and there was now a middle class whose chief needs were connected with their homes and domestic security. The crime historian thinks of the mid-nineteenth century as the age of domestic murder. But a new level is also emerging—the sexual level. In the United States, a doctor named H. H. Holmes lures women into his “murder castle”—complete with hidden doors and secret rooms—to violate them and dispose of their bodies, and Sunday school teacher Theodore Durrant murders and rapes two young women in San Francisco. In England there is Jack the Ripper, in France, Joseph Vacher, a mentally deranged journeyman who rapes and mutilates peasant women. The age of sex crime has begun, and it escalate
s in the twentieth century into serial murder.
In the 1920s, the next level, the self-esteem level, makes its tentative appearance with Leopold and Loeb, the wealthy students who wish to see themselves as intellectual supermen. But self-esteem crime gets into its stride in the 1950s, with Melvin Rees, and in the 1960s with the Moors Murders and Charles Manson. Self-esteem criminals need to impose their will on other people. DeBardeleben belongs to this type; so does Leonard Lake and Jack Unterweger.
But beyond that, Maslow posits the next level of the hierarchy of needs: self-actualization. Not all people rise to this level, but in our society, the number of self-actualizers increases steadily. It is, of course, the creative level, but not necessarily artistic or intellectual creation. It may be somebody who enjoys putting ships in bottles or making dolls. Maslow knew a woman who was so good at bringing up children that when her own were grown up she went on adopting more, just for the sheer pleasure it gave her.
And of course, there is no category of violent crime associated with the self-actualization level. The two are a contradiction in terms. This explains why no creative artist has ever committed a premeditated murder—which would seem to imply that at the next level of social evolution, crime will naturally decrease.
There is another interesting mechanism of change that points towards the same conclusion: what the biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls “formative causation,” which, in effect, guarantees the increase in the number of self-actualizers. Formative causation takes place through the influence of a factor that Sheldrake has labeled “morphogenetic fields,” which you might compare to the field around a magnet, which can be communicated to other magnets.
The wing of a bird or the tentacle of an octopus is shaped by a kind of electrical “mold”—just like the molds into which we pour jellies—which is why many creatures can regrow a limb that has been cut off. These “molds” seem to be magnetic fields, which shape the living molecules just as a magnet can “shape” iron filings into a pattern. Sheldrake suggests that these “fields” can be used to explain some rather odd observations made by biologists.
For example, in 1920 the psychologist William McDougal performed an experiment at Harvard to see if baby rats could inherit abilities developed by their parents (the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” that Darwinists regard as such a fearful heresy). He put white rats into a tank of water from which they could escape up one of two gangplanks. One gangplank had an electric current running through it, and the first generation of rats soon learned to choose the other one. Then McDougal tried the same experiment on their children, and then on their grandchildren, and so on. And he found that each generation learned more quickly than its parents—that is, he had proved that the inheritance of acquired characteristics does occur.
Now when a scientist performs an experiment on a group of animals, he always keeps an exactly similar group who are not subjected to experiments; these are called the “control group”—the purpose being to have a ready standard of comparison. When a colleague of McDougal’s—W. E. Agar of Melbourne—repeated his experiment, he also decided to test the control group at the end of several generations. To his baffled astonishment, these also showed the same ability to learn more quickly. And that was impossible, for they had merely been sitting passively in cages. It looked as if the control rats had learned by some kind of telepathy.
Not telepathy, says Sheldrake, but by “morphic resonance.” The control group of rats “picked up” the morphogenetic field of the trained rats in the same way that an iron bar can pick up the electrical field of a coil of wire and turn into a magnet: simple induction.
Incredibly, this seems to work not only with living creatures but with crystals. New chemicals, when synthesized for the first time, are often extremely difficult to crystallize. But as soon as one of them has been crystallized in any laboratory in the world, it becomes easier to crystallize in all the others. At first, it was suspected that scientists traveling from one laboratory to another might be carrying fragments of crystals in their clothes or beards—or even that tiny quantities are carried in the atmosphere. Both explanations seem highly unlikely. The likeliest, Sheldrake suggests, is a process of “induction” through morphogenetic fields.
A series of experiments has been performed to test the Sheldrake hypothesis and has produced positive results. At Yale, Professor Gary Schwartz found that people who do not know Hebrew were able to distinguish between real words in Hebrew and false words—because Jews all over the world already know the genuine words. Alan Pickering of Hatfield Polytechnic obtained the same result using Persian script. In another experiment, English-speaking people were asked to memorize two rhymes in a foreign language—one a well-known nursery rhyme, one a newly composed rhyme. The result—as the hypothesis of formative causation predicts—is that they learned the traditional rhyme more easily than the newly composed one.
We can see that this must also be true of self-actualization. When the number of self-actualizers in a society has increased beyond a certain critical mass, it will go on increasing by the action of morphogenetic fields.
Which explained why, on the whole, I do not share the current pessimism about the way the world is going. Human beings seem to have an odd ability to solve apparently intractable problems with a mixture of determination and serendipity; faced with such problems, they seem to have the ability to set unknown forces in motion. Or, as Buckminster Fuller put it: “I seem to be a verb.”
Crime is a disintegrative force. Self-actualization is an integrative force. And the lesson of history is that it is the integrative force that finally prevails.
A
Adams, Fanny, 10, 182
Adams, John, 125
addiction to violence, 10–11, 45
Agar, W. E., 227
Agius, Liz, 199, 201
Aguirre, Frank, 83, 84
Albert, Prince, 184, 185
Alekseyeva, Lyudmila, 209
Alexander, Lucy, 143, 145–46
Allen, Betty, 44
Allen, Raymond, 44
Allison, Ralph B., 107–8
Alsbrook, Patty Ann, 152
Amis, Kingsley, 200
Anders, Meg, 94, 96, 97, 99
Anderson, Dorothy, 125
Anderson, Lillian, 70
Anderson, Mylette, 70
Angel, Ron, 71
Archibald, Kenneth, 187
Atkins, Susan, 46, 47, 48
Atlanta Child Murders (1979-81), 128–34
Axël (play), 225
Aynesworth, Hugh, 96–97
B
Backpacker Killer (Ivan Milat), 203–5
Bailey, F. Lee, 18
Baker, Frederick, 10, 182
Balasz, Claralyn “Cricket,” 162, 165–66
Baldwin, James, 134
Ballard, Claude, 164–65
Baltazar, Patrick, 132
Barnes, Wendell, 125
Barrett, William, 133
Barthelemy, Helen, 187
Bastholm, Mary, 198–99
Bates, William, 70
Baulch, Billy, 83, 85
Baulch, Michael, 83, 85
Beame, Abraham, 56
Beausoleil, Bobby, 48–49
Beck, Martha, 91, 102
Beeler, Marion, 35
Behavioral Science Unit (BSU), 11, 35, 52–53, 102, 111, 114–16, 129–30, 214
Belanglo State Forest, 203–5
Bell, Camille, 128, 129
Bell, Joseph “Jo-Jo,” 132
Bell, Yusuf, 128
Bennett, Keith, 189
Berdella, Bob, 102
Berkowitz, David, 35, 55–59, 57, 121
Berkowitz, Nat, 56, 58
Bernardo, Karla Homolka, 216, 217, 218–19
Bernardo, Paul, 216, 218–19
Berry, Joanne, 204
Bianchi, Kenneth, 10, 102–11, 134
Bibb, Harold, 145
Bichel, Andrew, 182
Binet, Alfred, 158
Birnberg, Be
nedict, 191
Biryuk, Lyubov, 208, 211
Bjorkland, Penny, 9
Blackout Ripper (Gordon Cummins), 185
Bockova, Blanka, 220
Bonadies, Leigh Hainline, 67, 68
Bond, Lonnie, 163, 164–67
Bonner, Debra Lynn “Dub,” 171
Bonnin, Michael, 89
Boren, Roger, 110
Born to Raise Hell (Ziporyn), 90
Borrelli, Joseph, 56
Boston Strangler (Albert DeSalvo), 16, 17, 18–19, 22, 67
Bottomly, John S., 18
Boutwell, Jim, 137, 138
Bowman, Margaret, 95
Boyd, Kelli, 105
Brady, Ian, 10, 102, 188–91
brain trauma, role in serial killers, 91–92, 151, 177
Bramshill Police Academy, 9, 53
Breed, Kim, 109
Bresciani, Tiffany, 174
Breslin, Jimmy, 56, 59
Brett, Dean, 106, 108
Bridgeford, Shirley Ann, 22, 23
Briscolina, Mary, 65, 68
Broad River Correctional Institution, 150
Brooks, Alton, 78
Brooks, David, 78–85
Brooks, Pierce, 22–23, 25–26, 55
Brown, Frances, 30, 32, 37
Brown, Virginia, 150
Browning, Edgar, 149–50
Brudos, Jerome Henry “Jerry,” 156–59
Brunn, Irene, 164–65
Brunner, Mary, 46
Brussel, James A., 15–16, 18–19, 22, 117
“BTK” killer (Dennis Rader), 92
Budd, Grace, 91
Bukhanovsky, Alexander, 211–12
Bundy, Ted, 11, 35, 66, 93, 94–100
Buono, Angelo, 10, 102–11
Burgess, Anne, 215
Burnett, Carol, 143
Bush, George W., 139
Butkovich, John, 89
C
Calabro, Carmine, 116–17
Caldwell, Keith, 203
Call, Max, 138
Campbell, Caryn, 95, 99
Campbell, Charles F., 71
Canter, David, 194–96
Carlon, Joe, 145
Carns, Bill, 171