by Colin Wilson
On 23 October 1942 Fearn was executed in the gas chamber in Canon City jail.
The Fearn case exhibits an important aspect of the psychology of the sex killer: that the victim is not, in fact, chosen totally ‘at random’. Fearn had selected Alice Porter, and followed her around for a week before he killed her – establishing her routine – partly because she lived on a lonely block, but also because she conformed to his fantasy image of the girl he wanted to violate. The fantasy has already determined the type of person to be selected as the victim. In most cases she is selected because she strikes the fantasist as the victim-type; there may be some look of vulnerability about her that excites him. This can again be seen in the case of Cameron Hooker. He apparently murdered the first girl he picked up – Marliz Spannhake – because she screamed and struggled. She was not the ‘victim’ type. Colleen Stan was. Janice Hooker commented after the case that her husband had picked a victim who was submissive, compliant, and who tended towards destructive relationships. She went on to make the perceptive comment: ‘I chose not to be a victim. I hope Colleen makes that choice. Not just to walk out, but to make a total change, to become an unvictim, to take charge’. If Colleen Stan had been that kind of person – an unvictim, the dominant type who ‘takes charge’ – it is almost certain that Cameron Hooker would not have kidnapped her; he would have recognised her as unsuitable for his purposes, and let her go.
In order to understand a psychopath like Cameron Hooker, it is also necessary to recognise the importance of Reinhardt’s observation that sadism and masochism are simply a development of tendencies that are already present in the reasonably ‘well socialised’ male. It is not unnatural for a young and healthy male to want to ‘fuck some girl’, as Robert Poulin put it: any girl. The act of penetration brings a sense of triumph, a sudden expansion of self-esteem. The self-esteem of the Casanova-type of male – and most young men would like to emulate Casanova – depends upon ‘conquest’, as the self-esteem of the hunter depends on the amount of game he can ‘bag’. In 1980 in Hanover, West Germany, a plumber named Robert Bilden – who had acquired himself a reputation of being irresistible to women – was tried for a particularly brutal rape. In the spring of that year, he met a pretty nineteen-year-old girl named Tina Schuster, who was shy and intensely prudish. Bilden began assiduously courting her, assuring her that his bad reputation was entirely unmerited. When he had established his good behaviour over a period of many months, she finally consented to go to dinner in his apartment when he told her that his schoolmistress from fifth grade would also be present. The ‘schoolmistress’ was, in fact, a prostitute named Helga Tallman. After the meal, the prostitute threw herself on the girl and held her down while Bilden removed her clothes; then Helga Tallman subjected her to oral sex, which was intended to excite Tina but in fact made her feel sick. After this Bilden raped her violently – her inner thighs were bruised as she struggled to prevent penetration – and continued to do so for the rest of the night. Bilden and the prostitute also engaged in sex, urging the girl to watch them in the mirror over the bed. As soon as she managed to escape, early the following morning, she rushed to a doctor, who called the police. Bilden was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, Helga Tallman to sixteen months. But the case raises the question: why had Bilden risked jail when he could have spent the night with any number of willing girls? Because, with her innocene and prudishness, Tina Schuster struck him as ‘the perfect victim’. The ultimate pleasure was to rape a shy virgin. It produced a far more powerful sense of conquest, of self-esteem, than the seduction of a ‘willing’ victim.
It must be recognised that this element of ‘conquest’ is present in all male sexuality. If it were absent, the male would find the female totally undesirable. In ‘normal’ relationships, protectiveness and affection outweigh the desire for ‘conquest’, but do not replace it; without it, the relationship would be non-sexual. The novelist Thomas Mann remarked that the words of the marriage ceremony ‘These twain shall be one flesh’ are misleading, for if they were really ‘one flesh’ they would have no attraction for one another; attraction is based upon ‘strangeness’, which in turn implies ‘forbiddenness’.
In a fantasist like Cameron Hooker – and Hooker, like most fantasists, had been a shy and introverted child – the normal male desire for ‘conquest’ is raised to a pathological level by fantasy. Reinhardt’s chapter on sadism is entitled ‘Fantasy Finds a Victim’, and includes a typical case in which sadistic fantasy was translated into actuality. In the autumn of 1953, Raymond and Betty Allen set out to drive from Pennsylvania to their new home in San Jose, California, towing an aluminium trailer behind their car. On the morning of 1 December a big, white-haired man struck up a conversation at a gas station; the Aliens saw him several times later that day, driving in the same direction. That night, when they were parked at a caravan site in Arizona, Raymond Allen woke up to find a flashlight on his face, and was knocked unconscious by a blow on the chin. When he woke up, he and his wife were tied hand and foot. The white-haired man – Carl J.Folk – demanded money, then drove the car – still towing the trailer – for several miles before he went too close to a ditch and half-overturned it. For the next hour or so, he raped and tortured Betty Allen, burning her with matches and cigarettes, and biting her all over. Allen had to lie there in the next room, listening to her screams. These eventually ceased. Finally Folk went to sleep, and Allen managed to untie his legs. He escaped from the caravan and ran down the road; a car stopped, and the driver untied his hands. Allen went back to his car and took a revolver from under the front seat. In the trailer, Folk was pouring petrol over Betty Allen and her baby. When he went into the next room, he discovered that Raymond Allen was missing. He looked outside, saw Allen, and asked with mild surprise: ‘What are you doing there?’ Allen then shot him in the stomach. (Five other shots missed.) Betty Allen was dead, strangled with a sheet round her neck.
Folk recovered from his wound, and was found guilty of murder and executed in March 1955. An earlier victim – a seventeen-year-old girl – had been luckier than Betty Allen. In 1949, she had answered an advertisement for a domestic in an Albuquerque newspaper; the big white-haired man who met her seemed harmless, so she climbed into his car. He drove her to a lonely stretch of road, then ordered her out and tore off her clothes. Then he tied her to a tree, and beat and raped her repeatedly. She noted the number of his car as he drove off, and Folk – the proprietor of a travelling carnival – was arrested. By the time the case was due for trial, the girl had had a mental breakdown and was in hospital. Folk was confined to the same hospital for three years, and was then released to act out his sadistic fantasies with Betty Allen.
If the case of Carl Folk demonstrates the incubation of the sadistic ‘power syndrome’ in a mentally unbalanced individual, the case of Robert Hansen is an example of how it can develop in an apparently stable one.
In the early 1980s, police in Anchorage, Alaska, took note of the disappearance of a number of ‘exotic dancers’. In Anchorage, the temperature is so low that it is impractical for prostitutes to walk the streets. The majority of them solve the problem by working in topless bars, and making appointments with clients for after hours. Few people notice when such a girl vanishes, although bar owners were often puzzled when their dancers failed to show up to collect their pay. And when, in 1980, building workers on Eklutna Road discovered a shallow grave which had been partly excavated by bears, and containing the half-eaten body of a woman, it seemed likely that she might be one of the missing women. Since the state of the body made it impossible to identify, she became known in the records as ‘Eklutna Annie’.
Two years later, on 12 September 1982, hunters found another shallow grave on the bank of the Knik River, not far from Anchorage; this time it was possible to identify the body in it as twenty-three-year-old Sherry Morrow, a dancer who had disappeared in the previous November. She had been shot three times, and shell casings near the grave indicated that the w
eapon had been a high-velocity hunting rifle which fires slugs – a .223 Ruger Mini-14. Here, once again, the investigation reached a dead end since it was impossible to interview every owner of such a rifle. An odd feature of the case was that the clothes found in the grave had no bullet holes, indicating the that the girl had been naked when she was killed.
A year later, on 2 September 1983, another grave was found on the bank of the Knik River; the girl in it had also been shot with a Ruger Mini-14. The victim was identified as Paula Golding, an out-of-work secretary who had found herself a job as an exotic dancer in a topless bar. She had started work on 17 April 1983 and had failed to return eight days later, leaving her pay cheque uncollected. The bar owner commented that he had been reluctant to hire her because she had obviously been a ‘nice girl’, who was only doing this because she was desperate for money. Again, there were no clues to who might have killed her.
Investigators checking the police files made a discovery that looked like a possible lead. On the previous 13 June a policeman had seen a girl running frantically towards him with a handcuff dangling from one of her wrists. She was a seventeen-year-old prostitute, and a medical examination at police headquarters revealed that she had been tortured. She told of being picked up by a red-haired, pockmarked little man with a bad stutter, who had offered her $200 for oral sex. She had accompanied him back to his home in the well-to-do Muldoon area, and down to the basement. There he had told her to take off her clothes, then snapped a handcuff on her, and shackled her to a support pillar. The tortures that followed during the next hour or so included biting her nipples and thrusting the handle of a hammer into her vagina. Finally, he allowed her to dress. Then he told her that he owned a private plane, and was going to take her to a cabin in the wilderness. The girl knew that he intended to kill her – she knew what he looked like and where he lived. So as they crossed the airfield, she broke away and ran; the man gave up the chase when she reached the street lights.
Her description of the ‘John’ convinced the police that it was a respectable citizen called Robert Hansen, a married man and the owner of a flourishing bakery business, who had been in Anchorage for seventeen years. Driven out to the Muldoon district, the girl identified the house where she had been tortured; it was Hansen’s. She also identified the Piper Super Cub aeroplane that belonged to Hansen. The police learned that Hansen was at present alone in the house – his family were on a trip to Europe.
When Hansen was told about the charge, he exploded indignantly. He had spent the whole evening dining with two business acquaintances, and they would verify his alibi. In fact, the two men did this. The girl, Hansen said, was simply trying to ‘shake him down’. Since it was her word against that of three of Anchorage’s most respectable businessmen, it looked as if the case would have to be dropped.
However, after the discovery of Paula Golding’s body three months later, the investigating team decided that the case was worth pursuing. If Hansen had tortured a prostitute, then decided to take her out to the wilderness, he could well be the killer they were seeking.
The investigators decided to contact the NCAVC team in Quantico, Virginia. What they wanted was not a ‘profile’ of the killer – they already had their suspect – but to know whether Robert Hansen was a viable suspect. What the Alaska authorities were able to tell the Quantico team was that Hansen was a well-known big-game hunter, who had achieved celebrity by bagging a Dall sheep with a crossbow in the Kuskokwim Mountains. The answer was that Hansen was indeed a viable suspect. A big-game hunter might well decide to hunt girls. Since he collected trophies, then it would be likely that he had kept items belonging to his victims. If the police could obtain a search warrant, they might well find their evidence.
What was also clear was that if Hansen knew he was a suspect, he would destroy the evidence; it was therefore necessary to work quickly and secretly. The first step was to try to break his alibi. No doubt his friends had been willing to provide a false alibi because it would cost them nothing. If they could be convinced that it might cost them two years in prison for perjury, they might feel differently. The police approached the public prosecutor and asked him to authorise a grand jury to investigate the charges of torture against the prostitute. Then the businessmen were approached, and told that they would be called to repeat their alibi on oath. It worked; both admitted that they had provided Hansen with an alibi merely to help him out of a difficult situation. They agreed to testify to that effect.
Now Hansen was arrested on a charge of rape and kidnapping. A search warrant enabled the police to enter his home. There they found the Ruger Mini-14 rifle, which a ballistics expert identified as the one that had fired the shells found near the graves. Under the floor in the attic the searchers found more rifles, and items of cheap jewellery and adornment, including a Timex watch. Most important of all, they found an aviation map with twenty asterisks marking various spots. Two of these marked the places where the two bodies had so far been found. Another indicated the place where the unidentified corpse of a woman had been found on the south side of the Kenai Peninsula in August 1980, a crime that had not been linked with the Anchorage killings. The investigators discovered that her name was Joanna Messina, and that she had last been seen alive with a red-headed, pockmarked man who stuttered.
At first Hansen denied all knowledge of the killings, but faced with the evidence against him, he finally decided to confess. The twenty asterisks, he admitted, marked graves of prostitutes. But he had not killed all the women he had taken out to the wilderness. What he wanted was oral sex. If the woman satisfied him, he took her back home. If not, he pointed a gun at her, ordered her to strip naked, and then run. He gave the girl a start, then would stalk her as if hunting a game animal. Sometimes the girl would think she had escaped, and Hansen would allow her to think so – until he once again flushed her out and made her run. Finally, when she was too exhausted to run further, he killed her and buried the body. Killing, he said, was an anticlimax; ‘the excitement was in the stalking’.
In court on 28 February 1984 the prosecutor told the judge (a jury was unnecessary since Hansen had pleaded guilty): ‘Before you sits a monster, an extreme aberration of a human being. A man who has walked among us for seventeen years, selling us doughbuts [sic], Danish buns, coffee, all with a pleasant smile on his face. That smile concealed crimes that would numb the mind.’ Judge Ralph Moody then imposed sentences totalling 461 years.
For the investigating detectives, the most interesting part of Hansen’s confession was the explanation of why and how he had become a serial killer. Born in a small rural community – Pocahontas, Iowa – he had been an ugly and unpopular child. His schoolfellows found his combination of a stutter and running acne sores repellent. ‘Because I looked and talked like a freak, every time I looked at a girl she would turn away.’ He had married, but his wife had left him – he felt that it was because he was ugly. He married again, came to Alaska, and started a successful bakery business – his own father’s trade. But marriage could not satisfy his raging sexual obsession, his desire to have a docile girl performing oral sex. Since Anchorage had so many topless bars and strip joints, it was a temptation to satisfy his voyeurism in them; then, sexually excited, he needed to pick up a prostitute. What he craved was oral sex, and many of them were unwilling. Hansen would drive out into the woods, then announce what he wanted; if they refused, he produced a gun.
Since he was by nature frugal, he preferred not to pay them. In fact, it emerged in his confession that he was a lifelong thief, and that this was a result of his meanness. ‘I hate to spend money . . .1 damn near ejaculate in my pants if I could walk into a store and take something . . .1 stole more stuff in this damn town than Carter got little green pills.’ Yet his next sentence reveals that it was more than simply meanness that made him steal. ‘Giving stuff away, you know, walk out in the parking lot and walk to somebody’s car, and throw it in the damn car. But I was taking it . . .1 was smarter than people
in the damn store. It would give me – uh – the same satisfaction – I don’t know if you want to call it that – but I got a lot the same feeling as I did with a prostitute.’ The link between stealing and oral sex was ‘the forbidden’. This seems to explain why many serial killers – Ted Bundy is another example – begin as habitual thieves.