“I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing, that it was going to end up like that,” one multiple murderer told us. “The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long, and were too elaborate.” After the murders actually began, the fantasies continued. “It is a development,” the killer reported, “Getting tired of a certain level of fantasy and then going even further and even more bizarre … it got off in such deep ends that I’m still not exposed to the worst of the fantasies that I have.”
All the murderers that we interviewed had compelling fantasies; they murdered to make happen in the real world what they had seen over and over again in their minds since childhood and adolescence. As adolescents, instead of developing normal peer-related interests and activities, where they couldn’t completely control what went on, the murderers retreated into sexually violent fantasies, where they could, in effect, control their world. These adolescents overcompensated for the aggression in their early lives by repeating the abuse in fantasy—but, this time, with themselves as the aggressors. As one murderer told me, “Nobody bothered to find out what my problem was, and nobody knew about the fantasy world.”
It is because these murderers deal in fantasy that we characterize serial murders as sexual homicides, even when physical penetration or other sexual acts do not appear to have been perpetrated on the victim. Sexual maladjustment is at the heart of all the fantasies, and the fantasies emotionally drive the murders.
Fantasy is defined as a happenstance unattainable in normal life. A normal male fantasy might be to have sex with a perfectly beautiful movie star. Carnally possessing a sex goddess is not a perverse thought, merely the mental expression of a wish that is, for most people, beyond what can be attained. An abnormal fantasy might be to immobilize and slash such a movie star during sex. The normal guy accepts the fact that he’s never going to have access to Madonna or Cher or Jane Fonda or whoever he thinks is really cool or sexy; he finds a substitute. Normal people learn to accept social control and moderation as limits on their behavior. The deviant person, having had very few true restraints on his behavior since childhood, believes he can act out his fantasy and that nobody will be able to stop him. Many young men had a crush on Jodie Foster, but only John Hinckley felt he was entitled to stalk her in New Haven, send her notes, and tape-record their conversations, while planning to assassinate President Reagan.
Similarly, we all know that many children play with pets and are fascinated by wild animals. They generally don’t engage in deliberate torture, however. One deviant felt entitled to slit a dog’s stomach to see how far it could run before falling into death spasms; another attached cherry bombs to cats’ legs and made many cats in his neighborhood three-legged. A third strangled a cat without compunction but was outraged and deeply hurt when someone fed ground glass to his own dog.
The offenders’ greater commitment to their fantasies deepens as they become loners in adolescence, subject to the onset of puberty and sexual arousal. Aggressive, and with a feeling of having been cheated by society, they channel their hostility into fantasy. Several murderers reported early attachments to high-heeled women’s shoes, female underwear, rope for strangulation and asphyxiation, the last not only for others but for themselves, principally for sexual stimulation. Twelve-year-old Edmund Kemper played “gas chamber” with his sister, a game in which the sister was required to tie him in a chair and click an imaginary switch that released the gas, so he could keel over in the chair and “die,” a joyless, hostile, repetitive game that mingled sexual and death themes. A second adolescent male masturbated openly into his sisters’ undergarments—often in front of his sisters—and then wondered why the family was angry at him. A third, at age fifteen, dragged younger males into the bathroom of his treatment facility to force them to have anal and oral sex with him, recapitulating the way he had been victimized at age ten. A fourth boy had been discovered at age three with his penis tied to a bureau drawer, strangling and stimulating it; at age thirteen, he was found by his parents in the bathtub, trying to tie up his penis and his neck to a bar above the faucets; by age seventeen, the young man turned his aggressive instincts from himself to a young female, whom he abducted and kept all night at gunpoint.
The fantasies are characterized by strong visual components, and by themes of dominance, revenge, molestation, and control. Whereas the normal person fantasizes in terms of sexual adventures, the deviant links sexual and destructive acts. Normal fantasies of interpersonal adventure are fused with abnormal attempts to degrade, humiliate, and dominate others. Most normal fantasies have at their center the idea that the partner will have as much fun as the dreamer. With these deviant men, the more fantasy fun they are having, the more danger their fantasy partner is in.
Therein lies the key: In these sorts of fantasies, the other person is depersonalized, made into an object. “I’m sorry to sound so cold about this,” Ed Kemper apologized to me, “but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I wanted to; I had to evict them from their human bodies.” Once evicted from a body, however, a person cannot reenter it. In other words, Kemper was saying that in order to have his sexual fantasies fulfilled, he had to kill his partner.
Fantasies about sex are not discussed in families, even intact and functional families. Adolescent males are not routinely advised that now that they’ve reached puberty it’s okay to think about girls and nude bodies and doing things to females in bed. A child in a normal family, however, observes appropriate behavior between his parents, Mom and Dad hugging and kissing and holding hands; he accepts that his parents have a love relationship and expects that he, too, will have a similar one. Our murderers grew up without observing this sort of parental closeness, and without feeling any affection directed toward them, either. Normal people relate to sexual activity as part of loving. Deviants feel the sexual urge without having learned that it has anything to do with affection. And so they become boys who think about going out and “getting it,” or “getting laid,” without reference to the potential partner as an individual or even as a human being. Most deviants don’t even know what they’re going to do with a female when they “get” her.
What psychologists call the “cognitive mapping” process is almost complete by this time. Cognitive mapping is the development of thinking patterns that affect how the person relates to himself and to his environment; it determines how the individual gives meaning to the events that happen in his world. He moves more and more into an antisocial position, viewing the world as a hostile place. He becomes almost incapabable of interacting properly with the outside world, because his thinking patterns are all turned inward, designed only to stimulate himself in an attempt to reduce tensions, which only reinforces his isolation. A loop is developed. The lonely teenager has aberrant fantasies and tries partially to live these out by tentative antisocial acts—the lie that is not found out; the cruelty to an animal, which does not have any ill effects on his own life; the fire that burns brightly; the frightening of a younger child that is not reported. He “gets away” with such acts. The effects of these accomplishments then become incorporated into his fantasies, which are pushed to a more intensively violent level. More retreat from society follows, and, eventually, so do more experiments with actualizing the fantasies.
In my interviews, I learned that the most difficult thing for murderers to discuss was the early expression of fantasy. Ed Kemper’s fantasies began quite young, yet in our interview he did not connect these with his first murders—at age fifteen, he shot and killed his grandparents. Probing, I learned that he did connect these deaths with his grandparents’ previous chastizing of him for killing the birds and small animals on their farm, after which they had taken away his gun. Many children in rural areas are given guns and they use them for hunting, but the creatures Kemper killed were not game animals. Kemper was angry at not being allowed to have the gun. There was a hidden agenda at that time, how
ever, and his grandparents did not address it. Unfortunately, all that the grandparents did was remove his gun, believing that the absence of the killing tool would stop Kemper’s bad behavior. They did not ask Kemper what was going on in his head—what his fantasies were—that made him want to use the gun to kill small animals just for the “fun” of it. I couldn’t get him to talk about this directly, but I guessed that part of Kemper’s reason for killing his grandparents was in order to keep his murderous fantasy from their view.
What begins as fantasy ends as part of a homicidal ritual. A man who in childhood play pulled off the heads of his sister’s Barbie dolls beheaded his victims when he reached adulthood. Another man ran around the yard as a child, chasing a friend with a hatchet; as an adult, he used a hatchet in his murders. John Joubert at age thirteen, while riding a bicycle, drove a pencil into the back of a young girl. He found the act stimulating. When he was not caught or punished, he escalated his violence; next time while on his bike, he slashed someone with a razor blade. Going back into Joubert’s life, we discovered that just prior to this first attack, he had lost a friend. He and a younger boy had started to develop a benign and possibly latent homosexual relationship; then John went away for the summer and came back to learn that his friend had moved away. Joubert’s mother said she didn’t know where the friend had gone, and that John would just have to adjust to the loss. Another mother might well have helped her son locate a forwarding address, encouraged him to write to the friend, said they might be able to visit during the next vacation, and so on; Mrs. Joubert crushed the delight that her son had in this relationship, and, soon after, John jabbed the pencil in the back of the young girl. In doing so, he stepped over the line into actively criminal behavior. Once John Joubert’s fantasies had pushed him to attacking another human being, very little could have prevented him from going on to later murders. Perhaps if he had been caught, punished, and actively counseled so that the stresses in his home environment could have been countered, he might have been deterred from further antisocial violence, but—and this is the sad thing—such actions were unlikely to quell the fantasies that drove the behavior.
* * *
Though the home and social environments were nonnurturing ones, and seriously violent fantasies developed, many potential offenders still do not step over the line to commit violent acts. These young men are ticking bombs waiting to go off, but their histories show that they are not pushed over into acts of great antisocial violence unless certain precrime stresses were present. In Joubert’s case, it was the sudden removal of his only friend that precipitated his first attack. Later in his life, when he was in the Air Force, it was the removal by choice of his roommate at the air base, coupled with an unexpected and expensive repair that he had to have made to his car, that put him in the frame of mind in which he could make terribly real his fantasy to abduct and murder a young boy.
The escalation of Monte Rissell’s crimes from rape to murder came when he was back in high school after serving some time in juvenile institutions, and he was actually receiving psychiatric counseling as part of his probation. Before this, he had committed rape, but had not progressed beyond that to even greater violence. His girlfriend, a year ahead of him in high school, had graduated, gone on to college, and had sent him a Dear John letter saying that she preferred to spend time with other men. Rissell drove to the college and observed the woman with her new boyfriend, but he took no immediate action. Back at home near Washington, D.C., he sat in his car in a parking lot, had a beer and smoked a joint, and thought about things until quite late at night. At around two in the morning, a woman appeared, alone in a car; she was a prostitute. There was no one around, and Rissell thought to himself that he would take from this woman—at gunpoint—what he could no longer obtain from his former girlfriend. With a .45 pistol in his hand, he approached the prostitute’s car and then abducted, raped, and killed the woman. Later, he went on to kill four more women.
Richard Marquette’s first murder was triggered by his inability to perform sexually with a woman he had picked up in a bar. Ted Bundy’s first murder was supposedly precipitated by his loss of the financial support that had allowed him to go to law school. Some will argue that if Bundy had had no precrime stresses, had completed law school and met a woman who satisfied a lot of his needs, he might never have murdered; he might have become a viciously aggressive lawyer, someone who visited prostitutes, sought sadomasochistic relationships, and otherwise tried to get rid of his anger—his deviance might have been more socially acceptable—and he might never have stepped completely over the line. We have no way of knowing that, of course, but judging from Bundy’s later behavior, it seems more likely that he would have stepped over the line at some point, no matter whether he had stayed in law school or not, and no matter whether he found a woman who would satisfy some of his sexual fantasies or not. In his mind, he had long since fused sexual desire with the need to damage and destroy. David Berkowitz’s troubles reached the boiling-over point when he failed to convince his birth mother to make him part of her family; of course, his wish to be part of that family was doomed to failure, anyway. Ed Kemper, after coming out of prison for the murder of his grandparents, went back to live with his mother, at her insistence. Yet, having fought to get him out of an institution, she then berated him steadily, saying that he was responsible for her dating problems. After one particularly harrowing argument with his mother, Kemper slammed the door, got into his car, drove away, and said to himself, “The first good-looking woman I see tonight is going to die.” Then he went out searching for a likely victim, and soon found one, a woman on the college campus, to whom he offered a ride home.
Many of the precrime stresses that seem to precipitate murderous actions are the same as those that happen to lots of people every day—the loss of a job, the breakup of a relationship, money problems. Normal people cope with such problems, and do so from a scaffolding of a helpful, normal pattern of development. In potential murderers, however, the scaffolding is faulty to begin with, and so are the mental mechanisms for dealing with the stressful events. Faced with a difficult happenstance such as the loss of a job, they turn inward and focus on their own problems to the exclusion of all else, and on fantasies as the solution to the problems. A breakup with a girlfriend causes the man to be less attentive on the job, resulting in his getting fired; now, without income and without solace, he encounters other problems, matters that earlier he might have handled in spite of pressures but that now seem overwhelming. The precrime stress is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Crossing-the-line behavior is fundamentally self-destructive and socially destructive. It entails the offender doing things that he actually knows are wrong, and that will bring him untold grief if he is caught. Yet he is impelled to cross the line by everything that has previously occurred in his life. Only later, after many such acts, will he come to believe that he is invincible and will never be caught. Just before he edges to the line, the young man isn’t so certain.
Things have been building up to a point where the potential murderer is ready to commit his violent act—and then a possible victim appears, one who is in a particularly vulnerable position—and the potential murderer becomes an actual murderer.
The deed is done. The threshold has been crossed, and there is no return possible. He’s frightened and he’s thrilled. He has experienced a state of heightened arousal during the crime, and liked it. He waits for several days, expecting arrest and punishment, but nothing happens. Perhaps the deed makes him feel badly, and he seeks to control his impulses. Bill Heirens reported that he locked himself in a bathroom when he began to sense that he wanted to go out and commit a new crime, thereby hoping to prevent the feeling from overwhelming him. However, he managed to get out the bathroom window in a bathrobe and do something heinous, anyway. More usually, after the first murder, the man starts to feel more egocentric than ever and becomes convinced that he can do it again, with impunity. He incorpora
tes details of the first murder into his fantasies and begins to construct future crimes. What if I toyed with her more before I strangled her? What if I dismembered the body so that the police wouldn’t be able to identify the victim? What if I made the boy say and do certain things before I assaulted him physically? What if I took a ring from her so I could use it later in my fantasy replay of the crime? What if I looked for a victim in the next town, rather than five blocks from my home? What if I prepared some restraints and took them with me, so I wouldn’t have to improvise at the scene? Used a gun to control the victim next time, instead of a knife?
Now that the first murder has occurred, in subsequent crimes the life stresses that preceded the first one may not need to be present. Now that he’s over the line, the murderer usually and more conspicuously plans his future crimes. The first one may have had some of the earmarks of spontaneity. The next victim will in all likelihood be more carefully sought out, the murder more expertly done and displaying more violence to the victim than was evident in the first crime. And the lonely boy from the nonnurturing home has become a serial killer.
5
DEATH OF A NEWSBOY
In the fall of 1983, I was on my way to my alma mater, Michigan State University, to teach at an annual homicide seminar. It was a warm September day at Michigan State, the leaves were turning color, and the campus looked beautiful. When I walked into my hotel, I was handed a message to phone the office immediately. Anytime I get a message like that, a chill goes through me, because I know something rotten has happened; bad news travels fast, especially if you’re a law-enforcement officer. I called in and my immediate superior told me that a young newsboy named Danny Joe Eberle had been abducted and murdered in Bellevue, Nebraska, near Omaha, and that I should go to Omaha and see what I could do to help find the killer. I leapt at the chance.
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