by Colin Wilson
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. A Short History of Sex Crime
2. Profile of a Serial Killer
3. The Profilers
4. The Power Syndrome
5. The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome
6. Folie à Deux
7. The Roman Emperor Syndrome
8. Into the Future
9. Update
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Picture Section
Copyright
About the Book
In the 1980s, American law enforcement agencies investigating the rising number of ‘motiveless murders’ stumbled upon a worrying possibility – what if all these crimes were being committed not by many, but by a relatively small number of people? One killer, multiple victims. The serial killer.
As the number of serial killers worldwide has risen steadily – from the emergence of Jack the Ripper in 1888 to Harold Shipman and Ivan Milat, the backpacker killer of the Australian outback – the need to understand this disturbing phenomenon is becoming more urgent. But to understand why serial murder is on the rise, we must first understand how the serial killer thinks.
Using privileged access to the world’s first National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime, Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman bring you this incisive study of the psychology of serial killers and the motives behind their crimes.
From childhood traumas to issues of frustration, fear and fantasy, discover what turns an ordinary human being into a compulsive killer.
THE SERIAL KILLERS
A Study in the Psychology of Violence
Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman
This book
is dedicated to
Special Supervisory Agent Gregg O. McCrary
of the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI
and his colleagues at
The National Centre for the Analysis
of Violent Crime
at Quantico, Virginia, USA
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to place on record their gratitude to the FBI for invaluable help and guidance, freely given at all times, during research for this book in the United States; and especially for permission to visit the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) at Quantico, Virginia – the first such visit by any British publisher. Thanks are due to FBI Director William S. Sessions; also the Assistant Director Milt Ahlerich, and Supervisory Special Agent Stephen Markardt, of the FBI Office of Public Affairs, US Department of Justice, for arranging the visit to Quantico, and later providing research facilities at the FBI J. Edgar Hoover headquarters building in Washington, DC.
We also wish to thank FBI Behavioural Science Unit Chief John Henry Campbell, at Quantico; Supervisory Special Agent Alan E. Burgess, Unit Chief of the Behavioural Science Unit (Investigative Support Wing) and Administrator of the NCAVC, and Supervisory Special Agent John E. Douglas, Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme Manager, for research facilities made available there; VICAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme) analyst Kenneth A. Hanfland, and social psychologist Dr Roland Reboussin, Ph.D., both of BSIS; Supervisory Special Agent Robert R. (‘Roy’) Hazelwood, Programme Manager/Training Programme, Behavioural Science Unit (Instruction and Research); and Dr David Icove, Ph.D., P.E., Senior Systems Analyst of the NCAVC, for their individual specialist help.
Both authors owe a major debt of gratitude to Candice Skrapec, one of America’s leading experts on serial killers, for her help in establishing contact with the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, as well as providing much invaluable information. We also wish to thank the many friends who have provided press cuttings and information on serial killers, particularly June O’Shea; Stephen Spickard; Denis Stacy; Brian Marriner; Ian Kimber; and the late John Dunning.
In addition we wish to thank Dr David Canter, and Dr Anne Davies, the Principal Scientific Officer of the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory.
Finally, the authors are indebted to a number of distinguished journalists, all of whom contributed in their specialist ways to aiding research in England and/or America. Those in Washington, DC, include Ross Mark, the White House correspondent of the Daily Express; bureau chief Ian Brodie and reporter Hugh Davies of the Daily Telegraph; and Ralph Stow, public relations officer for the AMOCO Corporation; and in London James Nicoll, former Foreign Editor of the Daily Express; Derek Stark (Travel Manager) and Frank Robson (former Air Correspondent of the Daily Express); Brian McConnell, QGM, author and veteran crime reporter of the Daily Mirror; Melvin Harris; Peter Johnson, author and Sunday Times journalist; and Ronald Gerelli, former Daily Express photographer.
Introduction
This book is about the psychology of the serial killer. It is not intended to be a comprehensive history of serial murder – that would require a far longer volume – but an attempt to understand the complex mechanisms that lead to a ‘habit of killing’. So although there has been an attempt to offer at least some brief account of the most notorious serial murderers of the twentieth century, there are many omissions: for example, Adolf Seefeld, Peter Manuel, William MacDonald, Herb Mullin and Randall Woodfield. On the other hand, considerable space is devoted to some criminals who do not, strictly speaking, qualify as serial killers: notably Hiroko Nagata, Cameron Hooker, and Gary Heidnik. The reason, which will become clear from the text itself, is that these people enable us to understand an important facet of the psychology of the serial killer. This understanding, which has emerged over the course of the past decade, amounts to a minor revolution in the science of criminology. Now it is possible to state that, with the researchers of the FBI Behavioural Science Unit, and of similar groups that are following their example in other countries, we are at last in a position to understand some of the answers to one of the most disturbing riddles of the twentieth century.
One
A Short History of Sex Crime
SINCE THE EARLY 1980s, American law enforcement agencies have become aware of the emergence of an alarming new phenomenon, the serial killer.
This recognition came about, it seems, through analysis of the steep rise in sex crime and ‘motiveless murder’. Ever since the 1960s, ‘multiple murder’ had been on the increase. The ‘Manson Family’ had killed at least nine people. Vaughn Greenwood, the ‘Skidrow Slasher’ of Los Angeles, killed nine homeless vagrants. Necrophile Ed Kemper killed ten, including his grandparents and mother. Paranoid schizophrenic Herb Mullin killed thirteen. Dean Corll, the homosexual murderer of Houston, Texas, killed twenty-seven boys. John Wayne Gacy of Chicago admitted to killing thirty-two boys. Patrick Kearney, the ‘Trash Bag Murderer’ of Los Angeles, killed twenty-eight men. William Bonin, the ‘Freeway Killer’, killed a minimum of twenty-two young men. The ‘Hillside Stranglers’, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, raped and killed a dozen girls. Ted Bundy killed twenty-three. Randall Woodfield, the ‘I.5 Killer’, murdered forty-four. The South American sex killer Pedro Lopez, ‘the Monster of the Andes’, admitted to killing three hundred and sixty pre-pubescent girls. In 1983, a derelict named Henry Lee Lucas made headlines in America when he also confessed to killing three hundred and sixty people, mostly women.
All this raised a disturbing possibility: that perhaps a fairly small number of killers were responsible for the rise in sex crime and motiveless murder. (‘Motiveless murders’ had risen from 8.5% in 1976 to 22.1% in 1984.) America is a large country, and many killers roam from state to state, moving on before police have a chance to catch up with them. Twenty-two-year-old Steven Judy, who murd
ered a mother and her three children in 1979, admitted before his execution that he had ‘left a string’ of murdered women across America. The family of Sherman McCrary – three men and two women – travelled from Texas to California, robbing drug stores and restaurants, and also abducting waitresses and shop assistants, whose violated bodies were left in lonely places. For this kind of killer, murder becomes a habit and an addiction. Henry Lee Lucas told police: ‘I was bitter at the world . . . Killing someone is just like walking outdoors.’ It also became clear that such killers murder out of some fierce inner compulsion, and that after the crime, experience a sense of relief and a ‘cooling-off period’. Then, like the craving for a drug, the compulsion builds up again, until it is time to go in search of another victim. It was this type of murderer for whom the police coined the term ‘serial killer’. One police officer suggested that there could be as many as thirty-five serial killers at large in America, and that the number could be increasing at the rate of one a month. More recent estimates have been as high as five hundred.
What has caused this epidemic of mass murder? One thing at least is clear: that it is part of a pattern that has emerged since the Second World War. In order to understand it, we need to go much further back to the beginning of the ‘age of the sex crime’.
The emerging pattern first became clear (to Colin Wilson) in the late 1950s when he was engaged in compiling An Encyclopedia of Murder with Patricia Pitman: ‘The purpose was to try to provide a standard work that would include all the “classic” murders of the past few centuries and serve as a reference book for crime writers and policemen. Pat Pitman chose to deal with domestic murders and poisoning cases, while I wrote about mass murderers like Landru, Haigh and Christie.
‘I was soon struck by an interesting recognition: that sex crime was not, as I had always supposed, as old as history, but was a fairly recent phenomenon. It was true that soldiers had always committed rape in wartime, and that sadists like Tiberius, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler and Gilles de Rais certainly qualify as sex criminals; but in our modern sense of the word – that is, a man who commits rape because his sexual desires tend to run out of control – sex murder makes its first unambiguous appearance in the late nineteenth century. The Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 and the murders of the French “disemboweller” Joseph Vacher in the 1890s are among the first recorded examples. Some of the most famous sex crimes of the century occurred after the First World War: these included the murders of the “Düsseldorf Vampire” Peter Kürten, of America’s “Gorilla Murderer” Earle Nelson, of the child killer Albert Fish, and the extraordinary crimes of the Hungarian Sylvestre Matushka, who experienced orgasm as he blew up trains.
‘Were there no sex killers before the late nineteenth century? As far as I have been able to determine, the answer is no. At first I was inclined to believe that a French peasant named Martin Dumollard was an exception. In the 1850s he lured a number of servant girls seeking work into lonely places, then murdered them and buried the bodies; but the records reveal that his motive was to steal their belongings, and there is no evidence of sexual assault. For most working-class people of the period – and this included the “criminal class” – life was hard, and when they committed murder, it was for money, not sex.’
What then caused the ‘age of the sex crime’? One reason was certainly the nineteenth-century attitude to sex, the kind of prudery that made Victorian housewives conceal table legs with a long tablecloth in case the mere thought of legs caused young ladies to blush. In earlier centuries, sex was treated with healthy frankness. As soon as the Victorians started to regard it as a shameful secret, it began to exercise the fascination of the forbidden. The rise of pornography dates from the 1820s; there were indecent books before that, but their purpose was to satirise the clergy, and they were usually about priests seducing nuns and penitents. Then, in the 1820s, there emerged books with titles like The Lustful Turk and The Ladies’ Telltale, about virgins being kidnapped and raped by Mediterranean pirates and little girls being seduced by the butler.
If we wish to trace it to its beginnings, it could be argued that the age of the sex crime begins in the year 1791, with the publication of a novel called Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue, by Alphonse Donatien de Sade. The Marquis de Sade is the patron saint of pornography and sex crime. Contrary to the general impression, Sade never killed anyone; his most reprehensible exploit was making small cuts in a prostitute’s skin and pouring hot wax into them. For a number of similar misdemeanours, he was thrown into prison at the age of thirty-seven, and stayed there for thirteen years, until the time of the French Revolution. For a man of Sade’s imperious temperament, prison must have been unimaginable torment. For three years he was plunged into transports of despair and self-pity. Then he began to recover and to direct his hatred and resentment into literary channels. Resentment mingled with frustrated eroticism to produce works of almost insane cruelty. His favourite fantasy was of some virtuous, innocent girl who falls into the hands of a wicked libertine and is flogged, raped and tortured. His most characteristic work is a huge novel called The 120 Days of Sodom, a long sexual daydream about four libertines – including a bishop and a Lord Chief Justice – who retire to a château and set out to indulge every possible kind of sexual perversion. Brothel madames tell stories about their most debauched clients, stimulating the libertines to rape, flog and torture a small band of young men and women who have been procured for their pleasure. Yet, oddly enough, Sade is never pornographic in the modern sense of the word; there are no gloating descriptions of sexual acts. His real desire is to scream defiance at the Church and State; he loves to show judges abusing their authority, and monks and nuns engaged in debauchery and corrupting children. His descriptions of torture are anything but sexually stimulating; even devotees of pornography find them repetitive and nauseating.
Sade was far more than a mere advocate of torture and murder; he regarded himself as the first truly honest philosopher in the history of human thought. The so-called ‘great philosophers’ he regarded as liars and lackeys. All animals, he says, seek pleasure as the greatest good; the body was obviously made for pleasure, expecially sexual pleasure. Then why do we not spend our lives seeking pleasure? Because it would not suit our rulers. They try to persuade us that unselfishness, hard work and self-sacrifice are virtues, and that there is a God in heaven who will judge us for our misdeeds. This is untrue; there is no God, and if we were not such slaves, we would throw off our shackles and devote our lives to the pursuit of ecstasy. Would this not lead us into doing harm to others? Of course it would, says Sade. Why not? Animals devour one another; that is the law of Nature. The only truly honest attitude to human existence is one of total selfishness. The truly courageous man chooses crime rather than virtue, for he knows that virtue was invented by our rulers to keep us in subjugation. Kings and popes know better; they spend their lives in every kind of debauchery . . .
Sade was released from prison in 1789, and for a time scraped a living as a playwright. (He was never, even in his youth, a rich man, and the fierce underlying resentment of his works owes a great deal to poverty.) Then he was arrested again for publishing filthy books, and spent the rest of his life in an asylum, where he died in 1816. His works began to enjoy a certain vogue in England, and his obsession with ‘the forbidden’ gave rise to the first truly pornographic novels of the 1820s: works whose purpose was not to denounce the Church and the legal profession, but merely to serve as an aid to masturbation – what one French writer called ‘books that one reads with one hand’. It is significant that many of these early pornographic works are about the seduction of children and schoolgirls. In the Victorian age, prostitutes were cheap; in fact, few working-class girls would have turned down the offer of five shillings – a week’s wages – in exchange for half an hour in a rented room. In the circumstances, rape of adult women would have been superfluous; this is why most sex crimes were committed against children – children were stil
l ‘forbidden’.
There was one Victorian gentleman who devoted his whole life to the pursuit of sexual pleasure, and whose career may be regarded as highly instructive in the present context. In his anonymous autobiography, My Secret Life, he simply calls himself Walter, and his identity remains a mystery. He describes how his sexual education began at the age of twelve, when he lifted his baby sister’s nightdress. In his mid-teens he succeeded in pushing a servant girl on the bed and taking her virginity. From then on, Walter devoted his life to sex. He spent hours of every day peering through cracks in bedroom doors, watching servant girls undress or using the chamberpot. With his cousin Fred he spent days in a basement which had a grating through which he could peer up the skirts of women who walked overhead.
What emerges most clearly from his eleven-volume autobiography – published at his own expense in the 1890s – is that his craving for sex was not a desire to give and receive mutual satisfaction, but an expression of the will to power. In the second volume he describes picking up a middle-aged woman and a ten-year-old girl in Vauxhall Gardens, and having intercourse with the child, standing in front of a mirror, ‘holding her like a baby, her hands round my neck, she whining that I was hurting her . . .’ He adds: ‘I longed to hurt her, to make her cry with the pain my tool caused her, I would have made her bleed if I could.’ The same attitude emerges again and again in his descriptions of intercourse: ‘In the next instant . . . I was up the howling little bitch.’ ‘Her cry of pain gave me pleasure, and fetched me.’
My Secret Life affords an important insight into the mind of the Marquis de Sade. The normal reader finds it difficult to understand how sexual gratification can be associated with pain and violence: with the gouging out of eyes or the mutilation of genitals. ‘Walter’ was no sadist, yet his craving for women was basically a desire to violate them. Sade had always enjoyed flogging and being flogged. Incarcerated in a damp cell, with only his imagination to keep him company, the daydreams of flogging and violation turned into daydreams of murder, torture and mutilation. The human imagination has this curious power to amplify our desires. Yet it is important to note that, even when released from prison, de Sade made no attempt to put these fantasies into practice. He had already exhausted them by writing them down. In the same way, ‘Walter’s’ sadism never developed beyond a desire to cause pain in the act of penetration, because he had an endless supply of women with whom he could act out his fantasies. The essence of sadism lies in frustration. As William Blake put it: ‘He who desires but acts not breeds a pestilence.’