by Colin Wilson
One question remains unanswered – the question that Christine McGuire raises on the last page of her book about the case, Perfect Victim: how did Cameron Hooker develop his peculiar taste for torturing women? She has an interesting comment from someone on the case who wished to remain anonymous:
‘People like to believe in an Einstein or a Beethoven – geniuses – but they hate to believe in their opposites. A genius is a mutant, something unnatural. But just as some people are born with extra intelligence, others are born without much intelligence or without fingers or limbs or consciences. The human body is phenomenally complex, with trillions of cells, and trillions of things can go wrong. Cameron Hooker is a fluke, an accident of internal wiring. His instincts are simply the opposite of yours and mine.’
Many police officeers who have had to deal with serial killers would concur with that analysis: that however old-fashioned and unsubtle it sounds, some people are simply born bad. Or, to put it less crudely, that some unknown hereditary factors cause some people to be naturally more vicious than others. But while this is undoubtedly true, the Quantico interviews with thirty-six killers demonstrated that family background plays a crucial role. The interviewers noted a ‘high degree of instability’ in the family backgrounds, hostile or poor relationship with the father, and physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood or teens. Another study1 pointed out that a large proportion of criminals are ‘highly sexed’ in childhood, and have peeped in through bathroom keyholes on females undressing, or initiated sexual games – sometimes amounting to rape – with girls at school.
Equally important is the fact that, as every psychiatrist knows, sexual perversions seldom appear fully fledged; they sprout, like seeds, from small beginnings. In his book Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes, James Melvin Reinhardt cites a typical case of a urophile – a man who liked to sniff and drink women’s urine – who began (as a child) simply by being sexually attracted by little girls. One day after he had seen a little girl urinating, he lay down on the ground and sniffed the spot, masturbating at the same time. The taste thus initiated finally developed into an obsession with female urine. We can see clearly that it was merely a matter of association of ideas. Reinhardt goes on to point out that the same thing applies to sadism and masochism: that they are simply a development of ‘moral and aesthetic sensitivities that are ordinarily prevalent in a reasonably well socialised man’. He cited the case of a patient whose masochism dated from the day – when he was seven years old – when a maidservant encouraged him to fondle her feet and toes. Then he experienced orgasm while watching a poodle licking the toes of a maid while she was reading. One day he persuaded the maid to allow him to lick her toes, and again experienced an ejaculation. This led to fantasies of being beaten and humiliated by women. If the maid had asked him to bite or scratch her instead of fondling her toes, it is conceivable that he might have developed into a sadist instead.
Fantasy, Reinhardt believes, is the key to the development of sexual perversion. The perversion often has its origin in some casual incident, like the maidservant who enjoyed having her toes fondled. Since the fantasist feels ashamed of his autoerotic activities, he tends to avoid too much contact with everyday reality, preferring to spend as much time as possible in the dream world inside his own head, and so fantasy reinforces itself and develops though long sessions of autoerotic daydreaming. The daydreams are often given a direction by pornography. Eventually, a time may come when the dreamer feels the compulsion to burst out of this world of unreality with some act that gives him a sensation of being truly alive. The following case is typical.
In October 1975 Robert Poulin, an eighteen-year-old schoolboy, suddenly went berserk with a shotgun in Ottawa; he entered a classroom at his school and shot seven students, afterwards blowing out his own brains in the corridor. In the room where he lived – in the basement of his parents’ home – firemen called to a blaze found the charred naked body of seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Kim Rabat, who had been repeatedly raped and sodomised, then stabbed to death. She was a girl on whom Poulin was known to have a ‘crush’, and he had spoken to her at the bus stop that morning and persuaded her to go back to his room. A trail of sex magazines running up the stairs revealed that the fire had been intended to burn down the house. Investigators also found his journals, which revealed that he had spent the past two years daydreaming of sex and reading pornography. Seven months before his suicide he had written: ‘I thought of committing suicide, but I don’t want to die before I have had the pleasure of fucking some girl.’ He planned to waylay a girl in a dark alleyway and force her to have sex at gunpoint – he even bought a model gun for that purpose. He also seems to have made a few attempts to waylay a few girls in a local park – at least, he answers the description of a youth who had been exposing himself and attempting sexual assault. Then he saw an advertisement for a blow-up life-size doll, and wrote: ‘I no longer think that I will have to rape a girl’. When he bought the doll, it proved to be a disappointment, and he went back to his schemes for rape, culminating in the morning that he spent violating Kim Rabat. He left no record of his feeling after the rape, but it seems safe to assume that he found the reality totally unlike his daydreams.
Why did Poulin, unlike most sexually frustrated young men, turn to rape and murder? The inquest revealed all the essential clues. Poulin had been considered by everyone who knew him a perfectly normal youth, quiet and intelligent. (The book about him – by Christopher Cobb and Bob Avery – is called Rape of a Normal Mind.) But there had been a great deal of parental conflict, particularly with his father, an ex-Air-Force pilot with a disciplinary obsession, now a schoolteacher. Poulin felt deep hatred for his family, and had considered killing them all. The fact that he lived alone in a basement that was separate from the rest of the house – and had done so since he was twelve – is a measure of his failure to communicate with the rest of the family (which included three sisters but no brother) or theirs to communicate with him. His father’s interests were military, and he wanted Robert to follow suit. In fact, Robert had decided that he wanted to enter the Royal Military College in Kingston when he left school. A few days before the murder, he had been turned down for officer training. This disappointment – and the thought that he would not be able to escape from his family after all – was clearly what motivated the decision to rape and kill. It could be seen as a form of suicide, but, as the investigators finally concluded: ‘He was crying out for some sort of recognition: something he had wanted all his life.’
A case that bears many resemblances to that of Robert Poulin – and which occurred two decades earlier – allows us a glimpse of what might have happened to Poulin if he had actually carried out his intention of becoming a serial rapist. In the late 1940s, a young masochist named Harvey Murray Glatman was receiving psychiatric treatment in Sing Sing, where he was serving five years for robbery and attempted rape – he had pointed a toy gun at a girl in Boulder, Colorado, and ordered her to undress. Released in 1951, he set up a TV repair shop in Los Angeles, and became an enthusiastic amateur photographer. For the next six years he remained solitary, daydreaming of tying up girls and raping them. At the age of twelve he had discovered that looping a rope round his neck and half-throttling himself brought on an orgasm. His mother had been deeply concerned – Harvey was very much a mother’s boy – but was reassured when a doctor assured her that her son would outgrow it.
On 30 July 1957 Glatman called at the apartment of a young model who had recently arrived from Florida and looked at her portfolio. His story was that he was a magazine photographer named Johnny Glynn. He was fascinated by a photograph he saw on the wall of a nineteen-year-old model named Judy Ann Dull. She was married, with a fourteen-month-old daughter, but separated from her journalist husband. Glatman finally obtained her telephone number. The following day, he contacted her and asked her to pose for photographs later that afternoon. She was reluctant until he explained that they would have to use her apartment, since his own
was being used. Her own home seemed safe enough; but when he arrived that afternoon, he told her that he had managed to borrow a studio from a friend. It was, in fact, his own apartment.
Once there, he told her to take off her dress and put on a skirt and sweater. Then he explained that he had to tie her hands behind her – he was taking a photograph for the cover of a true detective magazine. Dubious but compliant, she allowed him to tie her hands behind her, tie her knees together, and place a gag in her mouth. He took several photographs, then unbuttoned her sweater, pulled down her bra, and removed her skirt. After that he took more photographs. Finally, when she was clad only in panties, he laid her on the floor and started to fondle her. She struggled and protested through the gag. Glatman became impotent if a girl showed signs of having a mind of her own – total passivity was required for his fantasy. He threatened her with a gun until she promised not to resist, then raped her twice. After that, both sat naked on the settee and watched television. Judy promised that if he would let her go she would never tell anyone what had happened. Glatman pretended to agree – he wanted to make her co-operate. He told her that he would drive her out to a lonely place and release her, then he would leave town. Then he drove into the desert near Phoenix, Colorado, and strangled her, after first taking more photographs. He buried her in a shallow grave.
Seven months later, Glatman met twenty-four-year old divorcee Shirley Ann Bridgeford, a mother of two children, through a lonely-hearts club; he was registered as George Williams, a plumber by profession. When he made a date with her over the telephone on 8 March 1958 he told her they were going square-dancing. But when he picked her up at her mother’s home in Sun Valley, he told her he would rather take her for a drive in the moonlight. A hundred miles south of Los Angeles he stopped the car and tried to fondle her; when she protested he produced a gun and ordered her into the back seat; there he raped her. Then, in the Anza Borrego desert, he tied her up, took more photographs, and strangled her with a rope. He took her red panties as a keepsake.
Shirley’s mother reported her disappearance, but ‘George Williams’ proved to be as untraceable as ‘Johnny Glynn’.
Five months later, he dialled a nude modelling service, and spoke to twenty-four-year-old Ruth Rita Marcado, a strip-tease dancer who also modelled nude. He gave his name as Frank Johnson. When he called on her on 22 July 1958, some instinct made her plead illness and send him away. The following evening he went to her apartment with his automatic pistol, and took her up to her bedroom. There he tied her up and raped her. Then, telling her they were going for a picnic, he marched her down to his car. He drove her out to the desert, where he had killed Shirley Bridgeford, and spent a day taking photographs of her – bound and gagged – and raping her. In between rapes he released her and allowed her to eat. Then he told her he would take her home. On the way, he stopped the car for ‘one more shot’, tied her up once more, and strangled her with a rope.
Three months later, in September, he tried to persuade another model back to his studio; she found him ‘creepy’ and declined. She finally contacted a friend named Lorraine Vigil, who was short of money. Glatman called at her house and drove off with her. On a quiet road in a small town called Tustin, he stopped and threatened her with the gun. When he told her he wanted to tie her up, she tried to jump out of the car. He threatened to kill her, but she felt she had nothing to lose, and grabbed for the gun. It went off, frightening them both. She jumped from the car and struggled with him; she even managed to grab the gun and pull the trigger; but it had jammed. They were still struggling when a passing motor-cycle policeman pulled up, and produced his own revolver.
When police searched his apartment, they found the ‘bondage’ photographs of his three previous victims. Identified in a line-up by witnesses who had seen him, Glatman confessed in full to the three murders. At his trial he asked for the death penalty. The judge agreed, and on 18 August 1959 Glatman died in the San Quentin gas chamber.
There is a sense in which Glatman is the archetypal sex killer – and therefore the archetypal serial killer. He was an ugly little man with a face like a rabbit and ears like jug handles – the kind who never looks anyone straight in the eyes – and from a fairly early age, he must have taken it for granted that no woman would ever gaze at him with adoration. Before his attempt at rape in Boulder, Colorado, he had undoubtedly spent years daydreaming about sex, until the loss of contact with reality that springs from daydreams made it seem an unattainable ideal. Forcible rape seemed the only way of losing his virginity. In fact, the girl screamed, and he was arrested. He broke bail to flee to New York, where he had more success as a stick-up man – always preying on women – until he became known as the ‘Phantom Bandit’. Caught breaking and entering, he received five years in Sing Sing. On his release, his mother paid for him to set up a TV repair business. For six more years he indulged in autoerotic daydreams. Apart from his interest in bondage, his sexual desires were normal; he merely wanted to be allowed to explore the body of an attractive girl and then make love to her. He took up photography because it gave him the opportunity to photograph unclothed models in a public studio, but his glimpses of the nude female form only made his celibacy more agonising. At the age of thirty-one – and probably still a virgin – desperation finally overcame Glatman’s nervous timidity, and he persuaded Judy Ann Dull back to his apartment. His intention was probably not rape – he realised that this would probably land him in Sing Sing again – but merely to reach a climax of autoeroticism looking at a bound and half-naked girl. But when it came to removing her skirt, nothing mattered but to satisfy a craving that had been tormenting him for almost two decades; whatever it cost, he had to possess her. When he had raped her, and she sat submissively beside him on the settee, watching television, he must have realised that he had burnt his boats. For this delightful but in some ways perfectly ordinary experience he had bartered away the next ten years of his life. Like Robert Poulin after the murder of Kim Rabat, he must have felt like a man who has awakened from a bad dream. If only he could trust her not to go to the police he would undoubtedly have been glad to let her go, but commonsense told him that was unlikely, and that his only chance of escaping the consequences was to kill her. He later described how, when she lay dead, he was consumed by remorse, and begged forgiveness of her dead body. As he drove back to Los Angeles, he knew that what he had done might cost him his life. If the police found his fingerprints in the flat from which he had collected her, they would quickly identify him as New York’s ‘Phantom Bandit’ and trace his present whereabouts – they might even be waiting for him when he got back home. At that point, Harvey Glatman was ready to swear that if he escaped the consequences of this day of insanity, he would live a life that would do credit to a Trappist monk.
As the days and weeks passed, and the police made no headway with the case of the disappearing model, fear and remorse were replaced by memories of a submissive girl who had allowed him to do whatever he liked. Eight months later, the craving to repeat the experience had become overwhelming.
The murder of Shirley Bridgeford again filled him with remorse. This time it might be easier for the police to trace him, since he had joined the lonely-hearts club that had supplied her name. Once more, weeks of anxiety gradually gave way to confidence. Now there was a new fear: the realisation that, sooner or later, he would have to do it again. The desire to rape submissive girls had become a compulsion.
He later confessed that the murder of Ruth Rita Marcado was his most traumatic experience so far. In the hours he spent with her – raping her ‘four or five times’ – he found her so likeable that he was strongly tempted to let her go, but that would have been too dangerous. After her death, he felt far worse than after killing the other two girls.
Only three months later, he was again in the grip of the old compulsion. He realised that the times between rapes was becoming shorter: eight months after Judy Ann Dull, four months after Shirley Bridgeford, now only three mo
nths after Ruth Marcado. He was like a man who has fallen into the clutches of a blackmailer, and realises that he will never escape. When the final rape went disastrously wrong, and the door of the police cell clanged behind him, there must have been a certain feeling of relief. Now at least he could no longer give way to the compulsion to which he had become a slave. When the case finally came to trial all desire to escape the consequences of his acts had vanished. Like Carl Panzram, he only wanted to die. This is why he begged his defence lawyer to make sure that he received the death penalty.
To understand Glatman is to understand the basic psychology of the serial killer. The first crime produces fear, revulsion, remorse. But it is also like a dose of an addictive drug. Again and again, serial killers have confessed that they were unable to stop: again and again – from America’s first serial murderer H.H.Holmes to the Yorkshire Ripper and Henry Lee Lucas – they have used the same image: that it was if they had fallen into the power of the devil.
In the case of Robert Poulin and Harvey Glatman, the sex was uncomplicated by sadism. In an earlier case, that of Donald Fearn, the power fantasy also involved torture. Fearn, a twenty-three-year-old railway mechanic of Pueblo, Colorado, was fascinated by the practices of a sect of Indians called the Penitentes, whose religious ceremonies involved torture and crucifixion. In August 1941 Fearn’s wife became pregnant, and by the following April, when she was in hospital giving birth, he decided to carry out his plan of kidnapping and torturing a girl. On the evening of 22 April 1942, as a pretty seventeen-year-old named Alice Porter walked home from a nursing class, he pulled up alongside her with a gun, and bundled her into his car. A neighbour heard the girl scream, and looked out in time to see a light-coloured Ford sedan disappearing down the street. Fearn drove the girl out to an old one-room ranch building twenty-five miles away, and there raped and tortured her for six hours, binding her with red-hot wires and stabbing her with an awl. Finally he struck her with a hammer, shot her twice through the head, and threw her body down a cistern. Three days later, police located a garage owner, who had been aroused at 4 a.m. on the day after Alice Porter’s disappearance, to tow a light-coloured Ford sedan out of the mud. Police went to the spot, and found the abandoned ranch at the top of the nearby hill. A table inside was covered with bloodstains, and on the floor there were scissors, pliers, baling wire and a shoemaker’s awl – Fearn’s torture kit. In the cistern outside, police found the body of Alice Porter. From the handle of an awl they were able to lift distinct fingerprints, but these failed to match those of any known sexual offender. The police visited every garage in Pueblo, asking if the proprietor had seen a light-coloured, mud-stained sedan. One of them had – it was in the garage at that moment, waiting to be washed. When Donald Fearn walked in to collect it, the police asked him to come to the station for questioning, and took his fingerprints; these matched those found on the awl. When the two sets of prints were placed in front of him, Fearn confessed. ‘I always wanted to torture a girl.’ He went on to describe how he had waited outside a nursing class every night for weeks and followed the student nurses home; Alice Porter was the one he finally chose as his victim.