by Colin Wilson
These four ‘levels’ could be clearly seen in the history of criminality over the past two centuries. In the eighteenth century there was so much poverty and starvation that most crime was committed out of a simple need for survival – Maslow’s first level. By the mid-nineteenth century, the most notorious crimes are domestic murders that take place in respectable middle-class homes, and the motive is a desire to preserve domestic security. Towards the end of the century, Maslow’s third level emerges: sex crime. In the mid-twentieth century, the fourth level – self-esteem – becomes a motive for murder. It is as if society is passing through the same stages as the individual; and since society is composed of individuals, this may be less absurd than it sounds.
Now obviously, no murder can be genuinely without motive; when we label a crime motiveless we are simply admitting that it cannot be classified under the usual headings. When we drum our fingers impatiently on the tabletop, the action seems to have no motive, but a zoologist would say that it is a ‘displacement activity’, and that it is due to frustration. In the same way, Robert Smith’s murders in the Arizona beauty parlour were not truly motiveless; they were an expression of boredom and resentment. This leads to the recognition that resentment can be detected in the majority of motiveless crimes. This resentment is often totally paranoid in character – like the desire to ‘do something about the population explosion’ that drove Norman Foose to shoot two children. A more recent example occurred near Santa Cruz, California, when a ‘dropout’ with an obsession about the environment murdered a whole family. On 19 October 1970 the house of Dr Victor Ohta, an eye surgeon, was seen to be on fire. Firemen discovered five bodies in the swimming pool – those of Dr Ohta, his wife and two children, and his secretary Dorothy Cadwallader. Under the windscreen wiper of his Rolls-Royce was a note that declared that ‘today World War III will begin’, and that anyone who misused the environment would from now on suffer the penalty of death. ‘Materialism must die or mankind must stop.’ It was signed: ‘Knight of Wands – Knight of Pentacles – Knight of Cups – Knight of Swords’ – these being cards in the Tarot pack. The surgeon’s estate car had been driven into a railway tunnel, obviously in the hope of causing a serious accident, but a slow-moving goods train had pushed it out of the way.
In nearby woods there was a colony of ‘hippies’, and one of these told the police about a twenty-four-year-old car mechanic named John Linley Frazier who had recently deserted his wife and moved into a shack near the village of Felton; it was approached by a kind of drawbridge across a deep ditch, and Frazier apparently drew this up every night. He had told other hippies that he had burgled the Ohtas’ house on an earlier occasion, and that they were ‘too materialistic’ and ought to be killed. Frazier was taken in for questioning, and his fingerprints on the Rolls-Royce established his guilt beyond all doubt. The evidence indicated that he had planned the murders several days in advance, and he was sentenced to death. It also became clear at the trial that there was no foundation for his charge that the Ohtas were destroying the environment – they had taken care to leave the woodland around their house untouched. Nor could Ohta be accused of materialism – he helped finance a local hospital and often gave free treatment to those who could not afford his fees. The murders were based upon the same kind of paranoid resentment that had led Charles Manson to write ‘Death to pigs’ in blood on the bedroom wall of one victim.
Does not the use of a term like ‘paranoid resentment’ indicate that such a killer should be regarded as insane, and therefore not responsible for his actions? There are certain cases where this is obviously true – as when the killer suffers from delusions or hears imaginary voices; but it is difficult to draw an exact dividing line between paranoia and a resentment based on self-pity and envy. When Judge Ronald George, who tried the case of the Hillside Stranglers of Los Angeles, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, was asked whether such acts did not prove them insane, he replied: ‘Why should we call someone insane because he or she chooses not to conform to our standards of civilised behaviour?’ This seems to apply to the majority of ‘motiveless murders’ since the 1950s, as well as to many acts of political violence, as will be seen.
There is an additional complication to be taken into account. In the case of the Ohta killings, there was no evidence of sexual assault. But many ‘motiveless murders’ involve rape or other forms of sexual violence. At first this sounds like a contradiction in terms until we recall that most ‘motiveless murders’ involve boredom and resentment. The murder of Bobbie Franks is a case in point. Leopold and Loeb had originally meant to kidnap a girl and rape her. Yet even if they had done so, the murder would still be classified as a motiveless crime, since the motive was not sex, but a desire to prove themselves ‘supermen’. The determining factor has to be the psychology of the killers.
This can also be seen in the case of multiple killer Carl Panzram, executed in 1930. When Panzram was arrested for housebreaking in Washington, DC in 1928, no-one suspected that he was a murderer. For many years he had been known in many American prisons as the toughest troublemaker they had ever encountered – in one prison he had burned down the workshop and wrecked the kitchen with an axe. When guards discovered a loosened bar in his cell, Panzram received a brutal beating and was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists. A young guard named Henry Lesser was shocked, and sent Panzram a dollar by a ‘trusty’. At first Panzram thought it was a joke; when he realised that it was a gesture of sympathy, his eyes filled with tears. He told Lesser that if he could get him a pencil and paper, he would write him his life story. The result was one of the most extraordinary documents in the annals of criminality. Born on a mid-western farm of Prussian immigrant parents, Panzram had been in trouble from an early age. His father had deserted the family and life was hard. Carl envied more well-to-do boys at school and, when he burgled the house of a neighbour, was sent to reform school. Always tough and rebellious, he was repeatedly beaten, and the more he was beaten, the more he dreamed of revenge. Hitching a lift on a freight train, he was sodomised by four hoboes. From then on, he frequently inflicted sodomy – at gunpoint – on people he disliked. His sense of injustice drove him to a frenzy of resentment. This in turn finally drove him to murder. He stole a yacht, then lured sailors aboard and raped and killed them. In Africa, working for an oil company, he sodomised and murdered a black child, and shot six negroes in the back ‘for fun’. Back in America, he continued to rape and kill male children, bringing his total of murders up to twenty.
When Henry Lesser asked him: ‘What’s your racket?’, Panzram smiled and replied: ‘I reform people.’ When Lesser asked how, he replied: ‘By killing them.’ He liked to describe himself as ‘the man who goes around doing good’. He meant that he regarded life as so vile that to murder someone was to do him a favour. He explained in his autobiography that he felt that the guilt for his murders would somehow be visited on the people who had done him harm. This is a typical example of the strange upside-down logic of the ‘motiveless’ killer: when he kills, he feels he is somehow taking revenge on ‘society’ – unaware that there is no such thing as ‘society’, only individuals.
In Leavenworth Jail – where he had been sentenced to twenty-five years on the basis of his confession – Panzram murdered a foreman with an iron bar and was sentenced to death. When the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment tried to intervene, he told them not to waste their time. ‘I look forward to death as a real pleasure . . .’ His wish was granted on 5 September 1930.
The same ‘suicidal’ urge can be seen in many mass murderers and serial killers. In his book Compulsive Killers, the psychiatrist Elliott Leyton speaks of ‘the serial killer whose murders provide both revenge and a lifelong celebrity career, and the mass killer who no longer wishes to live, and whose murders constitute his suicide note’. The ‘resentment killer’ feels that he is killing with a definite aim: to prove to himself that he is not a weakling and a loser, to take revenge on society, and so o
n. He soon realises that killing brings him no closer to his objective; in fact, it leaves him with a curious sense of meaninglessness and emptiness – and the knowledge that he has placed himself beyond the bounds of normal society. The result may be suicide, or an act of carelessness that invites arrest. Panzram challenged the jury to sentence him to death, declaring: ‘If I live I’ll execute some more of you.’ Steve Judy, the rapist killer already mentioned, told the jury: ‘You’d better put me to death. Because next time it might be one of you, or your daughter.’ Harvey Glatman, a Los Angeles photographer who raped and murdered three girls, asked his public defender to request the death penalty. Gary Gilmore, who committed two pointless murders in the course of robbery in 1976, begged the jury to sentence him to death, and died by firing squad in January 1977.
The element of resentment can clearly be seen in one of the most widely publicised cases of the 1960s, the ‘Moors murders’ (which will be discussed more fully in Chapter 5). Like Carl Panzram, Ian Brady, the illegitimate son of a Glasgow waitress, became a burglar at the age of eleven because he envied the well-to-do boys in the ‘posh’ school to which he had been sent by the local authorities. After several years on probation and a period in reform school, he discovered the ideas of the Marquis de Sade, and became enthusiastic about Sade’s ‘philosophy of selfishness’. He began to daydream about ‘the perfect crime’; but it was not until he met an eighteen-year-old typist, Myra Hindley, who became completely infatuated with him, that he began seriously to consider putting the dreams into practice. Between 1963 and 1965, with Myra Hindley’s help, he raped and murdered five children. Myra was completely dominated by Brady, and it seems to have been this heady sense of power over another person – Brady had always been a loner – that led, eighteen months after they became lovers, to the first murder, that of sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade. It was in planning his fifth murder, that of a seventeen-year-old homosexual named Edward Evans, that he made the mistake that led to his arrest. He had become friendly with Myra’s brother-in-law, sixteen-year-old David Smith. Brady had already converted Myra from Catholicism to atheism and Nazism. David Smith proved an equally apt pupil, writing in his journal: ‘Rape is not a crime, it is a state of mind. Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure.’ ‘God is a superstition, a cancer that eats into the brain.’ ‘People are like maggots, small, blind and worthless.’ However, when he witnessed Brady murdering Edward Evans with an axe, he suddenly understood the gap between the theory and practice of sadism, and telephoned the police.
The result was the murder trial whose impact on the British public can only be compared with that of the Jack the Ripper case nearly seventy years earlier. Before Brady and Hindley had murdered ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, they had taken pornographic photographs, then made a tape recording of her screams and pleas for mercy, which they concluded with some lively music. Played in court, it created a sense of unbelief and shock. The novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, who, together with her husband C.P. Snow, attended the trial, found that it had the quality of a nightmare. She records that one of the most frightening things about the accused was their sheer ordinariness. They seemed unaware of the enormity of what they had done. She goes on to cite other recent crimes of brutality and vandalism, and the strange ‘affectlessness’ of the perpetrators – the plea: ‘I was bored.’
Yet in assuming that Brady’s murders were committed out of boredom, she is overlooking the real motive. Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping, in his book on the case, quotes Myra Hindley: ‘She felt he enjoyed the perverse sense of power that his physical superiority over children gave him . . .’ And in fact, the Moors murder case is about power rather than about sex. And the craving for power springs, in turn, out of resentment. In this respect, at least, Brady is not unlike the majority of human beings – the need for self-esteem is common to everyone. Ernest Becker analyses it in his book The Denial of Death: ‘We are all hopelessly absorbed with ourselves . . . In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguised . . . His whole organism shouts the claims of his natural narcissism.’ And this does not apply merely to spoilt children. ‘It is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation . . . he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anyone else.’ When this ‘urge to heroism’ and self-assertion is frustrated, it turns into resentment. And in Brady’s case, as with so many other serial killers, the resentment turned to murder.
Four years later, a Los Angeles jury found themselves baffled as they listened to the evidence against Charles Manson and three of his female ‘disciples’, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie van Houten, accused of involvement in the death of nine people, including film star Sharon Tate. There was a slightly insane air about the whole trial, and it was the weird logic of Manson’s supporters that created the mad atmosphere. Like Hitler after his unsuccessful putsch of 1923, he seemed determined to turn it into a trial of his accusers. ‘You make your children what they are . . . These children – everything they have done, they have done for the love of their brothers.’ Asked if she thought that killing nine people was unimportant, Susan Atkins countered by asking if the killing of thousands of people with napalm was important, apparently arguing that two blacks make a white. Yet in private, reported the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, Manson had allegedly confessed to thirty-five murders.
It is tempting to dismiss all this as the confused rhetoric of drug addicts. Yet it is worth studying more closely because it is so typical of the self-justification of the serial killer. What Manson was really implying was that the laws of an unjust society deserve to be broken, and that in doing this, criminal violence is justified. Even if we accept his argument, it is difficult to see how his victims were responsible for the injustice. His attitude is based on self-pity; he told the psychiatrist Joel Norris that he saw himself as the ‘ultimate victim of society’. Manson played guitar and wrote songs, and he believed that he deserved to be as successful as Bob Dylan or the Beatles. His reasoning seemed to be that since he was not successful, then someone must be to blame, and someone deserved to suffer. Carl Panzram had written: ‘Before I left [home] I looked around and figured that one of our neighbours who was rich and had a nice home full of nice things, he had too much and I had too little.’ And punishment only made him dream of getting his own back. ‘Then I began to think that I would have my revenge . . . If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.’ This is what Jean Paul Sartre has called ‘magical thinking’ – which means thinking with the emotions rather than reason. And it inevitably leads to absurd results. An old joke tells of an Arab in the desert who asked another Arab why he was carrying an umbrella. ‘I bought it in England. If you want it to rain you leave it at home.’In 1959 a labourer named Patrick Byrne, who had raped and then decapitated a girl in a Birmingham hostel, told the police: ‘I was trying to get my own back [on women] for causing my nervous tension through sex.’ But then none of us is free of this tendency to irrationality. Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t swear when he stubs his toe, or feel victimised when a traffic light changes to red just before he arrives?
Sartre himself was not free from the tendency to magical thinking; his leftism was based on a lifelong detestation of the bourgeoisie (the class to which his own family belonged), and he once declared that true political progress lies in the attempt of the coloured races to free themselves through violence. In fact, much of the extreme leftism that Sartre espoused has its roots in the kind of negative thinking that we have observed in Panzram, Brady and Manson. (The same, of course, applies to many extreme right-wing groups, such as the American Weathermen or the Italian Ordine Nero.) When we analyse the thought process that leads to crime, we see that it involves looking around for someone on whom we can la
y the blame. What Panzram, Manson, Sartre, Karl Marx and the majority of serial killers in this book have in common is that they lay the blame on ‘society’. And what these people also have in common is that they have blinded themselves to the idea that they themselves might be partly to blame for their problems.
The nearest Japanese equivalent to the Manson case involved members of a group who called themselves the United Red Army Faction, the Rengo Sigikun, an organisation formed in 1969 by radical students. Nine members of the Red Army Faction were responsible for hijacking a Japanese Air Lines jet on 31 March 1970 and were released in North Korea. After a raid on a Mooka gunshop in February 1971, members of the group escaped with large quantities of arms. Later that year, thirty-seven policemen were injured in a bomb explosion while trying to control a demonstration in the Meiji Park in Tokyo. In the autumn, the wife of a police official died when she opened a parcel bomb that arrived through the mail. In both cases, the suspects were Tsuneo Mori, leader of the Red Army Faction, and Hiroko Nagata.
In February 1972, police searching empty holiday residences in the area of Mount Kasha, Gumma province, found fingerprints of a wanted radical in a cottage at the foot of the mountain. While police watched the cottage from hiding, a van containing five young people was spotted in the nearby town of Matsuida. Two were captured; the other three escaped into the mountains. The following day, an army of police with tracker dogs combed the area. Suddenly an armed man ran out of the bushes and tried to stab a policeman; a woman came to the man’s aid as he struggled. When finally subdued, they proved to be Tsuneo Mori, the twenty-seven-year-old leader of the Red Army Faction, and Hiroko Nagata. The operation also seems to have flushed out six more revolutionaries – four men and two women – who went into a shop in the railway station of Karuiwaza, Nagano – a holiday resort – to buy cigarettes. Their smell and the state of their clothes led the woman behind the counter to suspect that they had been sleeping rough, and she told the station manager, who notified the police. The radicals fled to an empty villa, taking hostage the wife of the caretaker, and it was soon surrounded by police. After a ten-day siege and the death of two policemen the radicals surrendered. The youngest of the captives was a sixteen-year-old youth.