by Meyer Levin
“A little bit, all of us. But we got out of it. The trouble for Judd was, with all the girl stuff in his childhood, he still didn’t know-what he was. So he got into it. And his conflict must have been worse than ever. Because don’t forget his nurse got him all tangled up when he was a kid, got him mixed up about sexual release, so that even if he didn’t know it he wanted it the way she showed him, the first way, the oral stage, or probably he was polymorphous perverse – the exploratory stage. He gets a fixation on Artie, and even when he tries sex with a girl, he sees her as Artie. But he must have been struggling all the time in himself to become a male. He’s in this adolescent period, the worst period, when his mother dies – the one real attachment, apparently, that he had.
“Then the scheme starts. The revenge on life. In Judd’s mind, it is a scheme to kill a girl. He kept pulling for it all the time, trying to convince Artie it ought to be a girl.”
“He had that mixed up with the war,” I reminded Willie.
“All right. That’s where he got the image. From a war poster. Man stuff. But that only added to the hatefulness of the world. And himself in it. And he was going to rid himself of all this by killing a girl. What girl?” Willie looked at me and said with finality, “The girl in himself. Judd had to kill the girl-part of himself, before he could become a man.”
It was really ingenious, I told him. He had built up a really clever theory. Perhaps it was a good thing the alienists had not brought such an idea into court, because Horn would have had a field day with it.
“Yah?” Willie’s voice became argumentative. “Now look at the act of murder. How were they going to accomplish it? They talked about it for weeks, they developed the details. There was the chisel, to knock the victim on the head – that was Artie’s part, we know that. And it was Artie who used it. But then they had all these other things they planned to use. There was the ether. They were going to put the victim to sleep. Judd saw it not as killing, but the sleep of death, the sleep before life, you could say. The ether was Judd’s idea, connected with the birds. But the ether wasn’t all. After that, the plan was to use a cord, strangling the victim with the cord, a silken cord they wanted, not a rope, each holding on to an end for equal participation.
“Isn’t this idea a birth in reverse? What were they reading at the time? Judd was full of Huysmans’ A Rebours. And the perversity, the inverted ideas of writers like Huysmans, the ideas like the Black Mass, the conception of doing everything backwards, by the substitution of opposites, black for white, girl for boy, death for life – the cord – you can’t discard that clue entirely.”
I said I would admit it as an obscure possibility; I would still go along to see where it would all lead.
“It led to the cemetery,” Willie said. And, reflectively: “You know, that’s a possible connection I hadn’t thought of before. Judd was driving. And in his confession he says they went up a side road to a cemetery and waited there until it got dark – a couple of hours. Now, why the cemetery? Certainly because death was in his mind, by then, and Judd must have been as though calling for his mother, the way a kid does when everything has gone wrong and he is scared. This wasn’t the particular cemetery where his mother is buried, but he had been visiting his mother’s grave, he said, almost every week, and so the association was there, and he was drawn to a cemetery as to his mother; and that was where they waited, with the dead kid, until it got dark. Then they drove to the real burial place he had picked out in advance, and before they put the body into the cistern there was one more ritual, and this was Judd’s too. Remember, he was so queasy he couldn’t strike anyone, he couldn’t touch a dead body, yet this was a thing Judd did and not Artie: he took the can of hydrochloric acid that was intended to obliterate recognizable parts of the body – they imagined it would dissolve the flesh-” Willie glanced at me and his eyes emphasized again the birth in reverse. “Judd took this acid, and he said he poured it on the face, and he poured it on the penis.” He became silent.
“They said it was with the idea that a boy might be identified-”
“Look, they knew better than that,” Willie said.
“Well, it was circumcised – he could be identified as a Jew. In fact, that’s how I came to identify him.”
“And wasn’t that part of it, for Judd?” Willie said, rather softly. “Wasn’t that one of his conflicts? Didn’t he have to obliterate the problem of being a Jew? To dissolve it, so that the sign would be gone, the mark in the flesh, it was even in his fantasy, the brand on the inner side of the leg, the brand that could sometime be removed.”
Something in me gasped at this leap of his imagination. Yet, resist the idea as I might, wasn’t it a possible connection?
“And there was more,” Willie said. “Oh, the id is extremely cunning, that’s one thing we’ve learned, it is poetic and cunning. You don’t know how clever it can be, how the associations leap – I suppose because it’s all open, there’s nothing to block them; and how literal it can be, too.”
Willie brought out his last point, quite casually, the way an actor sometimes throws away his most important line, using reverse emphasis. “If there were no penis at all, wouldn’t it be a girl that he had killed?”
I could, indeed, see how his whole argument came together. If Judd had always wanted to cease being feminine, if this had been his great conflict, if he had wanted to kill a girl symbolically in an act that was self-destruction as all murder is self-destruction, then in this final gesture with the annihilating acid – had he not been doing it? Killing the girl in himself? He had first sought to obliterate identity in the face, so that the child could be himself, and he had then sought to obliterate the male sex. The child, thus, could be representationally himself as a girl, and this child had been placed naked in a womb, returned to pre-birth. And the womb was a sewer – the way he had always thought of females.
If he wished he had never been born – wished he had never been born as a girl kind of boy – then the gesture was complete; he had exorcised the curse on himself. He had become unborn, in the womb of the mother who was in the earth.
And then there came to me the other possibility. If he had destroyed the male element and returned the body to the womb, was it not equally understandable as a way to rectify a mistake, to say that it was as a girl that he really should have been born? There was, indeed, as Willie had said, an incredible cunning, an amazing poetic compression in this way of thinking. For here was the duality of nature symbolized – here was Judd’s conflicting wish to be a boy, to be a girl – expressed in the symbol that could be fitted in either direction!
And would Judd not there, together, have had a seeming solution of both his conflicts, since a girl could not have the mark in the flesh of the Jew? It was both a death gesture, then, and a life gesture that he had made, impelled by a wish for being unborn, and a wish for rebirth.
We walked on silently.
Finally I asked of Willie, “You once thought the killing could have proven a catharsis for him. If they hadn’t been caught.”
Willie said, “In physical infections, the body creates poisons with which to kill the pathology and cure itself. Perhaps so does the psyche.”
Another thought came to me, changing the conception I had had until then of the crime. “Then Judd was not merely Artie’s accomplice. He wasn’t there only because he was in love with Artie. He had to do the murder because of some compulsion in himself. Just the way Artie did.”
“That’s what I think,” Willie said. “Once Artie started them on it.”
Automatically we had turned, to circle back. Willie remarked again about the choice of spot. Wasn’t it there that Judd took his class of children, perhaps literally to watch for a stork, a rare visitant in the Chicago area? And the children must have echoed for Judd his own childhood absorption in the source of the birth mystery. Thus it became inevitable that he should return the child’s body there, almost as though he had delivered his soul to the original source. And w
hat did he lose, there? His glasses, his eyes. He didn’t need to see any more, in the womb or in the tomb.
For me, the depths of Willie’s explanation brought on an oppressive feeling. If something like this were valid, then we were hopelessly driven, in the grasp of such dreadful forces. This was only an elaboration of Wilk’s mechanistic philosophy, with the physiological determinants augmented by the mechanics of psychology and psychoanalysis.
If someone had seen what was happening in Judd, could he not have helped him? Couldn’t a less dangerous form of catharsis have taken place? Hadn’t he been on the verge of emergence into normal relationships with women?
Willie’s mind seemed to have walked with mine. “What became of Ruth?” he asked.
Even then, her name affected me. “I don’t know.”
“Myra was here,” he said.
“In Vienna?”
“She was in analysis.” Suddenly there had come over his face a grin so painful that I was caught in the pain. I wondered if Willie could have been in love with Myra. And only then did I fully see her in her own wretched frenetic prison, another innocent victim of the tragic crime.
Willie continued, with an air of complete control. “I don’t suppose you know you entered into her fantasies. Perhaps at a given moment you could have helped her. She’s gone back to the States.” He added, almost in a mutter, “I think she made a fairly good adjustment.”
When we parted he met my eyes with a kind of furtive look, his mouth grinned, and he turned and strode away.
A few years later, I met Myra in New York. She was a psychiatric social worker, still over-tense. I took her to the theatre, then we went back to her interior-decorated little apartment, filled with modern art; we drank a good deal; she told me all about herself, her affairs – there had even been a brief marriage. So generous, so quick, so filled with the latest things, the newest books, the newest psychoanalytic theories, playing the newest jazz records – boogie-woogie at the time. And always staggering with a host of illnesses and calling them psychosomatic.
She died of cancer. It was in the same year that Artie Straus was murdered, in prison, by a jealous inmate.
During those years I thought occasionally about Willie’s hypothesis. There was, for example, the fact that the burial place, the womblike cistern, was under a railway track. And as the train as a sex symbol became part of our popular vocabulary about dreams and fantasies, I saw a final detail in Judd’s compulsive selection of the place – the ruthless engine of sexuality for ever running over the cistern-image of the mother.
But then I would discard such ideas as intellectual play. In the thirties, in the forties, we elaborated, rather, on economic causation, and the Straus-Steiner case faded from importance.
Yet all this time, the analytical way of thinking had progressed, and today Willie’s hypothesis does not seem particularly bizarre. Nor does it seem so hopeless. For even in this short span of time, a single generation, we have seen some success in the manipulation of the dark forces.
It must seem ironic to speak with an accent of hope, when during these same years we have seen an outbreak of paranoia and a Nietzschean mania connected with the death of millions. Yet today an Artie or a Judd, while still in childhood, might more likely arrive at the desk of a therapist.
Although the alienists of the twenties were careful to predict that this crime in its peculiar form could scarcely be repeated, we have had adolescents in pairs and in larger groups, and also alone, in whom the destructive urges broke through. Perhaps this very pattern of disturbance increases shortly before the controls become generally available, just as the incidence in polio seemed to increase enormously shortly before the preventive vaccine was developed. And I sometimes believe that for me, in a curious way, the case itself served as a vaccine. For there was an incident, or a potential incident. It came during the war.
I married, divorced, and during the war I was a correspondent with the Third Army. It was toward the very end of the war, in the last weeks, that the Steiner-Straus case came finally home to me.
We had crossed the Rhine; we were, in those weeks, all in a state of unrecognized battle shock, a kind of wind-up frenzy, and I, like some other correspondents, rode with a tank column running wild and free across Germany. For jeepmate, I had a daredevil photographer from one of the news weeklies, a man who had jumped with the paratroopers and made something of a legend of himself.
The drive from press camp to the front strung out longer each day, as the tank penetration went into high, and on those long rides, Frank and I took turns driving, and we played a kind of game. It was a game almost all men at war have played. The game was imagining a rape.
It began with tales of G.I.s, of a pair who had somehow ruled a German village for a day and had commanded the mayor to bring them two virgins. And how the townsfolk had finally conceded.
And somehow these tales evolved into a fantasy that we should find us a German girl and rape her. We had had our share of complaisant German girls and chocolate-bar girls, but this idea, this game, persisted, on the pretext that we would not truly have known war or known life until we had given ourselves this ultimate war experience.
Our game consisted in elaborating on the set-up: Some day on a road just opened by the tanks, with the infantry not yet come up to occupy the area, there would appear a lone girl…
The game held us together in a peculiar way. Only far back, in Chicago on my first job on the Globe, had I partnered so well. And here, as in those Chicago days with Tom Daly, it was because I felt my partner to be the real thing, the tough, complete newspaperman.
As for the imaginary game of rape, I told myself it gave vent to hatred burned deep into Frank in those early Normandy days when he had had it rough with his paratroop outfit. He had seen boys picked off while they hung in their caught silk in the trees, and he needed a revengeful release on the krauts.
Then one day we found the ideal situation. It came as we were drawing near the Elbe. Frank and I went a little farther forward than the others had gone. It was a nice open road, and Germans could be seen working in the fields here and there, as though there had never been a war.
As we rounded a bend, we saw a felled tree across the road. We pulled up. And there was a fraulein. She was walking along a field, carrying a lunch basket. She was everything we had specified in our game: young, perhaps seventeen, and very pretty.
Frank shouted, “Halt!” and she halted. “Come here!” She approached. We both got out of the jeep. Only a shallow ditch was between us and the girl. All around, the area was deserted. Moreover, we were beyond the final line; our army would never come here to receive complaints.
“Where are you going?” Frank demanded in pidgin German. She said she was fetching lunch to her father, in the field.
“Have you seen any Russians?”
“No,” she said, trying to keep her air of calm.
Frank looked at me. “This is it,” he said. And he ordered the girl, “Lie down.”
She stared at us.
“Lie down!” he commanded and pulled out his revolver. Though correspondents were not supposed to be armed, most of us carried pistols.
“Nein – nein-” the girl began to stutter.
I felt parched. All these weeks we had been building ourselves to this. Surely we had meant it. Surely I had meant it too.
And at the same time I felt terrified of Frank. He’d do it and then shoot her. I had shared it all the way, goaded him on; I had wanted it, too. And if I stopped him I was a quitter, a coward.
I laughed, a forced laugh. “Can it, Frank. The hell with her,” I said.
He gave me a wild look, as though he would slam me one. The whole thing could just as well have gone the other way. “It isn’t worth it,” I said. “The war’s over.”
He seemed to sway a little. Then he stuck back his revolver. He laughed. The girl gasped, turned and ran. We climbed into the jeep.
After the war I was living in New York, wor
king on the foreign desk of a news service. One evening at a respectable kind of party of United Nations people and such, I met Ruth. She was there with her husband, an economist. She was sitting across the room from me, and for a moment we weren’t sure we recognized each other.
I got up and went to a refreshment table, and presently she stood beside me. “Yes, it’s me,” she said.
She looked nice. That was always the word, a nice girl, a nice woman. It was twenty-five years since I had seen her.
We filled in about our lives. Ruth had two kids in high school.
We didn’t speak of Judd. When the party broke up and we were both at the door in a little crowd, there was a moment of hesitation between us. Looking at her, I was thinking, It could have been. It all could have been. And it could all come back. And I thought, it could even have been, for Judd.
So I said, as she was about to invite me, “I suppose you’re in the phone book. I’ll give you a ring sometime.”
And I tended my job and married again, and we live in Norwalk.
I’m fifty this year. So is Judd Steiner.
So it happened that one day the news came through that Judd was going to have a parole hearing. And somebody around the place, an old-time newsman like myself, said, “Say, weren’t you…”
Later, I recalled Jonathan Wilk saying something about there being no thought of a chance for freedom for those two, “not until they are forty-five or fifty, when they have come into another phase of life”.
My editors put through this assignment for me to go and interview Judd in prison, for after all, perhaps better than anyone else still alive, they said, I knew the story. What I wrote about him, they said, might have a good deal to do with whether or not he would be released.
About the author
Meyer Levin (October 7, 1905 – July 9, 1981) was an American novelist who commented on the Leopold and Loeb case and wrote the 1956 novel Compulsion inspired by it. Levin had attended college with Leopold and Loeb at the University of Chicago, before the murder of Bobby Franks.