Republican Gomorrah

by Max Blumenthal

  The pornography commissioners soon revealed an ardent appetite for viewing and discussing porn (particularly of the violent and kinky variety) that could only have been matched by hardcore addicts. They pored over “evidence” seized by the government, such as the magazine Here’s the Beef, paperback books including Horny Holy Roller Family and Raped by Arab Terrorists, and film classics such as Romancing the Bone and Passionate Pissing. The amateur material they publicly perused included “Personal Polaroids shot at home by swinging ‘families,’” and an advertisement for “Women Who Fuck Anything Magazines” that featured “a drawing of a female bent over with a dog’s snout near the crotch.”

  As they viewed the obscene material, the commissioners copiously took notes. The commission padded its “research” with a series of field trips into the heart of the sexual underworld. Under the protective gaze of a federal marshal, commissioners burst into a Times Square adult bookstore, chasing from a peep booth two men apparently engaged in a sex act. Immediately afterwards, Sears proclaimed that the commission had to do something about the “literature of enemas.” He offered an example of this new genre: “One close-up photograph of a Caucasian female with a douche bag inserted in her nose, extending through her legs to her anus.”

  In their final report, the commissioners published (with taxpayer financing) an account of a pornographic scene so explicit, and yet so clinical, that it read like a Penthouse Forum letter from an avidly active lesbian reader:

  A white female (represented to be known porno star Marlene Willoughby) [is shown] inserting one finger in the vagina of another female (represented to be known porno star Vanessa Del Rio). Then Willoughby inserts two fingers in Del Rio’s vagina. One finger has a large ring. A close-up is shown of the insertion. Then Willoughby uses her left hand and inserts one finger in Del Rio’s vagina; then two fingers are inserted; then three fingers are inserted. Then she inserts her fist in Del Rio’s vagina, twisting it around . . .

  The fixation on the seedy and perverse rankled one of the commission’s female members. Speaking on background to a reporter, she observed that Sears was particularly obsessed. “I couldn’t figure out why he was so taken by that 42nd Street stuff,” she said.

  Unknown to most observers of the commission, or even to some of his fellow panelists, however, Sears had fallen for a woman much younger than his wife. In the heat of the commission’s sex tribunals, Sears suddenly announced his divorce and married his new fling, according to Reverend Barry Lynn, a Baptist pastor who testified against the work of the commission. (The Southern Baptist Convention routinely defrocked pastors for divorce, but Sears retained his post.) Dobson, for his part, maintained silence about the divorce and subsequently appointed Sears president of Focus on the Family’s legal arm, the Alliance Defense Fund.

  Like Sears, commission member Father Bruce Ritter was captivated by the “42nd Street stuff.” Founder of the faith-based charity Covenant House, Ritter claimed to help teen runaways “find a way out of the gutters and brothels and strip joints where their young bodies are in demand as objects of pleasure for lustful adults.” From his post on the commission, Ritter called for the abolition of pornography and strip clubs from Times Square and insisted that homosexuality was an abnormal perversion. And unlike several commission members who opposed only violent pornography, Ritter opposed any publication of graphic sexual images. “Pornography’s greatest harm,” he declared, “is caused by its ability—and its intention—to attack the very dignity and sacredness of sex itself, reducing human sexual behavior to the level of its animal components.”

  Yet four years after the commission concluded, Ritter’s own lustful ways exploded into the open when a gay porn actor and prostitute named Kevin Kite accused him of paying him $125,000 from Covenant House coffers for sexual favors. Three former residents leveled similar allegations against the priest soon thereafter. Although Ritter faced no charges after resigning from Covenant, a law firm’s internal investigation found significant evidence of his transgressions with vulnerable young men.

  These revelations could have fatally damaged the commission’s credibility. So long as they remained suppressed, the movement embraced its goals, honoring its most prominent member, Dobson, with a keynote speech at the 1986 convention of the National Religious Broadcasters, the evangelical broadcast industry’s lobbying arm. Before the rapturous audience, Dobson disclosed his relief upon returning home after a hard day of viewing scatology, fetishism, and barnyard carnality as part of his chores in the campaign against sin. “My children were safe from all that misery, molestation, death, in their bedrooms,” he sighed. But Dobson reminded the evangelicals not to be complacent. The innocent were always in peril. He recounted how a black Porsche piloted by Satan had tried to run his two children over. The master of evil, Dobson said, had sought revenge on his family for battling to restore biblical moral standards to America. “I think the Lord said to me, ‘Yes, these things are connected and I did do a miracle on behalf of your children.’” Then Dobson asked the assemblage to pray for him as he embarked on the holy work of preparing the commission’s final report.

  Yet after ten months of grueling work, and with its final report due in three weeks, the commission still had not resolved one of its central questions: Which types of porn are the most harmful? Although some commission members leaned toward urging a law enforcement crackdown on only the most violent strains, Dobson demanded that mainstream publications such as Playboy and Penthouse be censored as well.

  In a breathless letter warning that America was drowning in a “river of smut,” Dobson sought to frighten and intimidate his colleagues to back his position. In purple prose mimicking that of pornographers, he reveled in perverse detail. “Does it not insult every self-respecting female in the world to see a woman sip semen from a champagne glass after men have filled it with ejaculate? . . .” Dobson asked. “Is it degrading to women to publish magazines entitled Oriental Snatch, Blond Fuckers, Cum Hungry Girls, Chocolate Pussy, Super Bitch, Cum Sucking Vipers, Hot Fucking She Male and Pussy Pumping Ass Fuckers?”

  In the end, however, the commission fell far short of Dobson’s hopes. It concluded that only some porn—particularly of the violent variety—causes “harm,” though not quite as much as Kung-Fu or (gasp!) horror movies. After issuing a vaguely worded call for a federal law enforcement crackdown on such material, the commissioners closed their rambling 2,000-page report with an earnest but forlorn plea: “We urge that many of the recommendations we suggest be taken seriously.”

  Unknown to Dobson, Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, was passing his time on death row poring over the Meese Commission report, carefully reading its federally funded bibliography of porn page by page. Soon he had an idea for one last publicity coup.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE KILLER AND THE SAINT

  During the weeks leading up to his scheduled execution on January 29, 1989, Ted Bundy confessed to raping, bludgeoning, and strangling to death at least thirty women. Investigators suspected that he might have killed scores more. An admitted necrophiliac, Bundy sometimes visited the discarded corpses of his victims to have sex with them until they were rotted beyond recognition. As his execution date drew closer, Bundy insisted that his killings were fueled by his alleged addiction to pornography. Before facing the electric chair, Bundy demanded an opportunity to meet face to face with one man, whom he proclaimed a hero—James Dobson.

  If Dobson ever harbored ethical concerns about giving a mass murderer the chance to blame his barbarity on outside forces, they were immediately assuaged when he learned that Bundy had announced he had become a born-again Christian in prison. Dobson also saw the interview as an opportunity to bask in the national spotlight without having to endure the media’s critical scrutiny. Under guidelines that Bundy set, Dobson could control the light in which he wished to be seen. And so, on a hot, muggy evening in Starke, Florida, just hours before Bundy’s execution, Dobson strode c
onfidently past a cluster of reporters and into the prison’s death row, where Bundy prepared for his grand confession in the last scene of his drama of death.

  At the start of the interview, the child psychologist homed in on Bundy’s professed porn addiction, ignoring elements in the killer’s background that might have offered a more salient explanation of his violent tendencies. Dobson, for instance, neglected to ask Bundy whether he was beaten during his childhood. Like many who demonstrate sadistic behavior as adults, including Dobson himself, Bundy was in fact a victim of child abuse.

  Raised by his maternal grandfather, who was rumored in the neighborhood to be his biological father (his real father left his mother after impregnating her), Bundy suffered a childhood fraught with confusion and abuse. His grandfather was a fanatical racist, who routinely attacked his wife, amused himself by swinging cats over his head by their tails, and mercilessly beat the family dog. A deacon at his local church, the grandfather frequently disappeared into a greenhouse behind his house where he stashed a voluminous collection of pornography. Despite his violence, or because of its power, Bundy idolized the vicious old man.

  Imbued with ambition and endowed with handsome looks, Bundy graduated from college with a degree in psychology and, like Dobson, devoted himself to resolving the private trauma of others. While studying at the University of Washington, Bundy volunteered at a Seattle suicide crisis center. Governor Dan Evans, a Republican nicknamed “Straight Arrow” for his lofty ethical standards, appointed Bundy assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission. In that capacity, Bundy reviewed Washington state laws on hitchhiking and then authored a detailed and widely distributed rape prevention pamphlet for women.

  Soon Bundy was elevated to a key position on Evans’s 1972 reelection campaign. The young operative posed as a college student, sometimes wearing a fake moustache, to get close to Evans’s Democratic adversary, former governor Albert Rosselini. “I just mingled with the crowds and nobody knew who I was,” he said at the time. With a camera in hand, Bundy recorded Rosselini routinely altering his patrician speech inflections to appeal to the populist sensibilities of rural audiences. Bundy’s novel research tactics enabled Evans to paint the more polished Rosselini as a phony limousine liberal. The charge stuck, and it helped propel Evans to an easy victory over his rival.

  Evans rewarded Bundy again, installing him as assistant director of the Washington State Republican Party. Bundy became a frequent dinner guest of the governor’s and even babysat his children on occasion. He seemed destined for a bright future in Republican politics. Yet beneath his attractive veneer, Bundy harbored horrifically destructive impulses. A year later, when Bundy’s longtime girlfriend Stephanie Brooks ended their relationship with only a scant justification, the mask of sanity he had worn so convincingly suddenly fell, and his killing spree began.

  Bundy’s modes of savagery varied, but the profiles of his victims were nearly uniform. Each of his victims was white, middle-class, and educated, and each had dark hair parted in the middle. Bundy’s ex-girlfriend also happened to possess these characteristics. Obviously, his targeting was hardly coincidental. Though he was also addicted to pornography, his murderous impulses were clearly triggered by Brooks’s abrupt termination of their relationship. From 1974 until 1978, Bundy killed between nineteen and thirty-six young women in six states. During this period, Bundy repeatedly evaded suspicious law enforcement officers with cool denials and escaped prison twice after being sentenced to fifteen years for kidnapping one of his victims.

  In 1986, as Bundy awaited his murder trial, John Tanner, a Republican Florida prosecutor who regularly ministered to local prison inmates, befriended him. Tanner and Bundy developed a close relationship, spending at least six hundred hours together before Bundy’s execution. Tanner declared himself Bundy’s “spiritual advisor” and claimed to have helped the killer become a born-again Christian. After several intense prayer sessions with Tanner, the killer convinced his new Christian brother that the spirit of Satan had in fact controlled him.

  Tanner was no stranger to such paranormal concepts. An aggressive anti-porn crusader, Tanner was born again at the age of forty. According to a law partner, Tanner converted in the throes of a midlife crisis when he first claimed to hear the voice of God instructing him to teach his children “spiritual things.” After hearing God’s commandment again, this time ordering him to tell a handicapped stranger that God loved him, Tanner finally surrendered his will to the cause of Christ.

  Tanner saw the newly saved Bundy as a fellow Christian soldier, and he firmly believed that the killer’s execution could be prevented. Although Tanner claimed to support Bundy’s death sentence, he and Bundy conspired to postpone his date with the electric chair as long as possible by offering to assist investigators with detailed information on unsolved murders in Washington State. Reporters dubbed this plan the “bones-for-time scheme,” and Bundy’s own lawyer recoiled when he learned of the grim strategy. An outraged Governor Bob Martinez rumbled, “For [Bundy] to be negotiating with his life over the bodies of others is despicable.”

  As Bundy’s execution date drew closer, Tanner introduced the killer to Dobson’s books. Bundy declared himself to be blown away by Dobson’s insights. He demanded a copy of the Meese Commission report and claimed to have studied every one of its 2,000 pages. Finally, at Bundy’s request, Tanner approached Dobson, asking him to interview Bundy on camera. Dobson leapt at the opportunity. The Bundy interview materialized before him like a miracle. According to top Dobson aide Peb Jackson, Bundy was “a poster boy for exactly what Jim [Dobson] saw as the extreme end of what could happen if you get hooked on this stuff [pornography].”

  But even as Bundy poured his heart out to Dobson, warning, “pornography can snatch a kid out of any house today,” he remained a cunning operative. Ann Rule, a true-life crime writer who had worked alongside Bundy at the Seattle crisis hotline, believed the killer’s last confession was little more than a disingenuous ploy calculated to generate one last burst of media exposure. “I knew,” she wrote in her book The Stranger Beside Me, “that if the day ever came when Ted saw the shadow of the death chamber and knew his time had run out, he would want to go out in a glare of klieg lights and with his last words ringing in everyone’s ears.”

  By the end of Dobson’s hour-long encounter with Bundy, the Focus leader appeared convinced of the killer’s tale of redemption. During a May 1989 radio interview with Tanner, Dobson called for Bundy to be forgiven: “To those who say that Ted Bundy should burn forever in eternity,” Dobson proclaimed, “I would only say, ‘So should I. So should all of us . . . it’s not more difficult for God to forgive Ted Bundy than it is for me. It’s simple repentance and believing on the name of Jesus Christ. That’s what we teach. Do we believe it?’”

  As soon as Dobson emerged from death row, his aides distributed footage of his interview with Bundy to the frenzied media gaggle waiting outside the prison. The tapes were free, but Focus applied one condition: Media outlets were required to air the footage in its entirety without editing or interruption. This guaranteed Dobson unprecedented exposure when his interview aired on news programs and talk shows for a week after Bundy’s execution.

  The interview became Dobson’s cash cow. Selling the Bundy tapes reaped a windfall profit of nearly $1 million within the span of one year. The Focus leader initially pocketed the money for himself, but after a public outcry, he donated $600,000 of his profits to anti-pornography and anti-abortion groups, including some affiliated with his own ministry. And so, what began as a killing spree turned into a spending spree for the Christian right. But, even more significant, Ted Bundy had provided James Dobson with prolonged national media exposure. The two psychologists, the killer and the saint, had found common cause in the shadow of the valley of death.

  CHAPTER 9

  A DANGEROUS WOMAN

  In January 1992, John Tanner thrust himself into the spotlight of another serial killer’s t
rial. This time he was not the killer’s compassionate spiritual counselor but rather the prosecutor charged with securing a death sentence. Tanner’s task was complicated by the fact that the killer was a woman, Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute who had preyed on men she claimed had initially preyed on her.

  Falsely labeled America’s first female serial killer by many in the media and widely portrayed as a man-hating lesbian (primarily because she was involved in a relationship with another woman at the time of her arrest), Wuornos was in fact a mentally disturbed prostitute who killed seven of her johns for dubious reasons. On the surface, this pathetic figure, whose story was dramatized in the 2004 film Monster, seemed to be the mirror opposite of the seductive Bundy. But Wuornos shared with Bundy two important characteristics omitted from the Hollywood version of her life: She was adopted, and she was severely abused as a child.

  Wuornos’s childhood was a living hell. The man reputed to be her father, Leo Dale Pittman, was a convicted child molester who hanged himself in jail. After being abandoned by her mother, Wuornos was adopted by her grandparents. Wuornos’s grandfather, who sexually abused her and whipped her with a belt (a “neutral object,” as Dobson recommended in Dare to Discipline), had actually fathered her himself by raping his daughter. Trapped in a cycle of brutality and deceit, Wuornos became a truck-stop prostitute by the time she reached adolescence.

  Wuornos’s first victim was Richard Mallory, a middle-aged electronics repair shop owner who spent his weekends binging on alcohol and sex. Wuornos claimed that Mallory, who was drunk and drugged up when he picked her up by the roadside in December 1989, drove her to a remote location and violently raped her. Then, she said, Mallory bound her and prepared to rape her again. When he returned, however, Wuornos said she pulled a .22 pistol from her purse and fired three bullets at his chest. Wuornos’s tale of self-defense was at least plausible: Mallory had served ten years in prison for another brutal rape. A psychological evaluation of Mallory before his release from prison warned, “Because of his emotional disturbance and his poor control of his sexual impulses, he could present a potential danger to his environment in the future.”