by Colin Wilson
sake catch me
Before I kill more
I cannot control myself
Frances Brown was kneeling beside the bath, and she was naked. A pyjama top had been folded loosely round her neck; when this was removed, police discovered a knife driven in with such force that it protruded from the other side of her throat. She had also been shot twice. The body had been carefully washed after death, and wet bloodstained towels lay on the floor.
Four weeks later, on the morning of 7 January 1946, James E. Degnan went into the bedroom of his seven-year-old daughter Suzanne, and saw that she was not in her bed, and that the window was wide open. He called the police, and it was a policeman who found the note on the child’s chair; it said she had been kidnapped and demanded $20,000 for her return. Later that afternoon, Suzanne’s head was discovered beneath a nearby manhole cover. In another sewer police found the child’s left leg. The right leg was found in another sewer, and the torso in a third. The arms were discovered – also in a sewer – some weeks later. The case shocked the nation, but the police seemed to be unable to develop any definite leads.
Six months later, on 26 June 1946, a young man walked into an apartment building in Chicago, and entered the apartment of Mr and Mrs Pera through the open door; Mrs Pera was in the kitchen preparing dinner. A neighbour who had seen the young man enter called to Mrs Pera to ask if she knew a man had walked into her apartment. The young man immediately left, but the neighbour called him to stop. Instead, he ran down the stairs. He pointed a gun at a man who tried to stop him, then ran out of the building. Minutes later, he knocked on the door of a nearby apartment and asked the woman who answered for a glass of water, explaining he felt ill. She sensed something wrong and rang the police. In fact, an off-duty policeman had already seen the fleeing youth, and ran after him. When cornered, the young man fired three shots at the policeman; all missed. As other police answered the call, the burglar and the police grappled on the floor. Then one of the policemen hit him on the head – three times – with a flowerpot, and knocked him unconscious.
The prisoner turned out to be a seventeen-year-old youth named William George Heirens, and he had spent some time in a correctional institution for burglary. When his fingerprints were taken, they were found to match one found on the Degnan ransom note, and another found in the apartment of Frances Brown. In the prison hospital, Heirens was given the ‘truth drug’ sodium pentathol, and asked: ‘Did you kill Suzanne Degnan?’ Heirens answered: ‘George cut her up.’ At first he insisted that George was a real person, a boy five years his senior whom he met at school. Later, he claimed that George was his own invisible alter-ego. ‘He was just a realization of mine, but he seemed real to me.’ Heirens also admitted to a third murder, that of a forty-three-year-old widow, Mrs Josephine Ross, who had awakened while he was burgling her apartment on 5 June 1945; Heirens stabbed her through the throat. In addition to this, he had attacked a woman named Evelyn Peterson with an iron bar when she started to wake up during a burglary, then tied her up with lamp cord; he had also fired shots through windows at two women who had been sitting in their rooms with the curtains undrawn.
The story of William Heirens, as it emerged in his confessions, and in interviews with his parents, was almost predictably typical of a serial sex killer. Born on 15 November 1928, he had been a forceps delivery. He was an underweight baby, and cried and vomited a great deal. At the age of seven months he fell down twelve cement steps into the basement and landed on his head; after that he had nightmares about falling. He was three years old when a brother was born, and he was sent away to the home of his grandmother. He was frequently ill as a child, and broke his arm at the age of nine. The family background was far from happy; his mother had two nervous breakdowns accompanied by paralysis, and his father’s business failed several times.
Heirens matured very early sexually – he had his first emission at the age of nine. Soon after this, he began stealing women’s panties from clotheslines and basement washrooms, and putting them on. (After his arrest, police found forty pairs of pink and blue rayon panties in a box in his grandmother’s attic.) He came to think of sex as something ‘dirty’ and forbidden. This was confirmed when, at the age of thirteen, he walked into the school washroom and found two boys playing sexually with a mentally retarded boy; he refused to join in. Being a good-looking boy, he was attractive to girls; on eight occasions he attempted some form of sex play, touching their breasts or pressing their legs, but this had the effect of upsetting him so much that he cried. There was a deep conflict between his sexual obsession and his rigid Catholic upbringing. He found normal sexual stimulation repellent. From the age of thirteen he had been burgling apartments, entering through the window, and experiencing sexual excitement – to the point of emission – as he did so. After this, he lost interest in underwear, and began to experience his sexual fulfilment by entering strange apartments through the window. He often urinated or defecated on the floor. He also began lighting small fires.
He was arrested for the first time in the same year – 1942 – charged with eleven burglaries and suspected of fifty; in many of them he had stolen guns and women’s dresses. He was sentenced to probation and sent to a semi-correctional Catholic institution. After a year there he transferred to a Catholic academy, where he proved to be a brilliant student – so much so that he was allowed to skip the freshman year at the University of Chicago. Back in Chicago, the sexual obsession remained as powerful as ever, and led to more burglaries. If he resisted for long, he began to experience violent headaches. On one occasion, he put his clothes in the washroom and threw the key inside in order to make it impossible to go out; halfway through the night, the craving became too strong, and he crawled along the house gutter to retrieve his clothes.
Once inside an apartment, he was in such a state of intense excitement that any interruption would provoke an explosion of violence. This is why he knocked Evelyn Peterson unconscious with an iron bar when she stirred in her sleep. On another occasion he was preparing to enter what he thought was an empty apartment when a woman moved inside; he immediately fired his gun at her, but missed.
None of the victims was raped – the thought of actual sexual intercourse still scared him. Sexual fulfilment came from the ‘forbiddenness’, the excitement of knowing he was committing a crime. After the ejaculation, he felt miserable; he believed that he was a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. He even invented a name for his Mr Hyde – George. Although he later admitted that the invention of an alter-ego was partly an attempt to fool the psychiatrists, there can be no doubt that he felt that he was periodically ‘possessed’ by a monster. This is why he scrawled the message in lipstick on the wall after killing Frances Brown. It may also explain why he eventually courted arrest by wandering into a crowded apartment block in the late afternoon and entering a flat in which a married woman was cooking the dinner as she waited for her husband to return from work. Dr Jekyll was turning in Mr Hyde. In July 1946 Heirens was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment in Joliet penitentiary.
It is clear that, unlike most of the sex killers discussed in the previous chapter, Heirens was young enough to experience deep guilt about what he was doing. The same is true of Heinrich Pommerencke, a German serial killer of the postwar years.
On the morning of 9 June 1959 a tall, slim young man with a girlish complexion entered a tailor’s shop in Hornberg, in the Rastatt-Karlsruhe district of West Germany. The tailor, Johann Kohler, was glad to see him, for the youth had ordered some clothes two months earlier, and had failed to collect them. He explained that he was working as a waiter in a hotel in Frankfurt, and pulled out a wad of notes to pay for the clothes. After changing in a cubicle, the customer looked at himself in a mirror and asked if he could leave his old grey suit behind while he went for a haircut. When the young man had gone, the tailor decided to move the suit – as well as a bulging briefcase – to a safer place. As he lifted them, the lid of the briefcase opened, and a sawn-off rifle fell out. It seem
ed a strange item for a respectable young man to be carrying about, and the tailor decided to notify the police.
The inspector who arrived from the local police station looked through the contents of the briefcase; it proved to contain money, a box of cartridges, some pornographic literature, and half a rail ticket from Karlsruhe to Zingen. These items made the inspector thoughtful. He had already received a report of a robbery at nearby Durlach railway station the previous night, and the burglar had been interrupted by a railway employee. He had pointed a sawn-off rifle at the employee and made his escape. It was obviously possible that the young man, whose name was Heinrich Pommerencke, was the burglar.
The pornography and the railway ticket gave rise to another suspicion. A girl had been raped in Zingen less than two weeks earlier by an intruder who had climbed through her bedroom window, and throttled her into submission. She had seen the rapist in the moonlight, and her description sounded like the owner of the briefcase.
When Pommerencke returned, the inspector asked him to accompany him to the police station. As soon as they were outside, the young man fled like a hare. The inspector chased him on his bicycle, and another passing policeman joined in the chase. Pommerencke was cornered in a fairground and taken in handcuffs to the police station.
Commissioner Heinrich Koch also examined the contents of the briefcase, then accused the young man of the burglary at Durlach. He observed the look of relief that passed briefly over Pommerencke’s face, and knew that the inspector was probably right about the rape. In fact, Pommerencke not only admitted the Durlach burglary, but three others in the surrounding area. Two of these had been at Karlsruhe and Rastatt. And Koch was aware that there had also been rape murders in these places. In the previous March, there had been a rape murder in Hornberg itself. But for the time being, Koch decided, he would allow Pommerencke to think that he was only suspected of burglary.
Two weeks later, in police headquarters in Freiburg, Heinrich Pommerencke was identified by the rape victim from Zingen as the man who had entered her bedroom. Pommerencke heatedly denied that he was the rapist. Then a waitress who had been attacked in Karlsruhe – but managed to escape – also identified him as her assailant. When Koch tried a bluff, and told him that blood spots found on his grey suit had been identified as belonging to the same group as three murder victims, Pommerencke finally lost heart and decided to confess.
It was the typical story of a sex criminal. Born in Bentwisch, near Rostock in East Germany, in 1937, Pommerencke had been the child of a broken marriage. He had been an abnormally lonely child, but had been in the grip of a powerful sexual urge from an early age. ‘When I was a boy I never had a friend in the world . . .Other men always had girlfriends with them. I wanted girlfriends too, but I never succeeded.’ He was shy, clumsy and tongue-tied. At the age of fifteen he began hanging around the local dance hall and made a few clumsy attempts to attack girls. In 1953, at the age of sixteen, he fled to West Germany and found work as a waiter and a handyman. He also served a term in jail for burglary. He always lived alone in rented rooms, read pornography, and daydreamed of sex.
Then, in late February 1959, in Karlsruhe, he went to see a film called The Ten Commandments. ‘I saw half-naked women dancing around the golden calf. I thought then that many women were evil and did not deserve to live. I knew then I would have to kill.’
When he left the cinema he bought a knife, then followed a pretty waitress down a deserted street. He seized her from behind and threw her to the ground, tearing at her clothes. When he held a knife to her throat, she screamed, and a passing taxi driver heard her. As the taxi approached, Pommerencke fled. His desire was so overpowering that he continued to stalk women. He followed a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman, Hilda Konther, and attacked her near her home. This time no one heard the scream. The next morning, her body was found lying in some bushes; she had been raped and stabbed to death, and the clothes had been literally torn from her body by a man who was obviously in a sexual frenzy.
On 26 March 1959 he stalked an eighteen-year-old beautician, Karin Walde, in Hornberg; he knocked her unconscious with a heavy stone, then tore off her clothes and raped her. Finally, he killed her, using the stone as a bludgeon.
On 2 June 1959 Pommerencke bought a platform ticket at Freiburg, and slipped on board the Italian Riviera Express. There he waited on the front platform of one of the carriages until he saw a girl go into the toilet. He removed the bulb from the ceiling of the corridor, and as the girl came out, seized her and hurled her out of the open platform door and on to the line. Then he pulled the communication cord and, as the train came to a halt, jumped off and hurried back down the line. He found his victim – twenty-one-year-old teaching student Dagmar Klimek – unconscious beside the tracks, about two miles back. He dragged her into the bushes, tore off her clothes and raped her. Then he stabbed her through the heart. When daylight came, he walked to the village of Ebringen, washed in the fountain, then hitched a lift with a motorist back to Freiburg.
Five days later, on 8 June, he waited near the station at Rastatt. An eighteen-year-old secretary, Rita Walterspacher, came out of the station and turned down a deserted road. As Pommerencke moved swiftly towards her, the girl sensed that she was about to be attacked, and ran away screaming. A woman on the train saw the running girl, and noted that the man who was pursuing her was tall, young and wore a grey suit. As she watched, he flung his arms round the girl and pulled her into some woods at the side of the road. The woman assumed that they were a courting couple playing games, and forgot about it until she heard on the radio of the disappearance of a young girl near Rastatt. Rita Walterspacher’s body was found concealed under a pile of branches. She had been strangled, and her clothing torn off her. Her purse was missing from her handbag – Pommerencke made a habit of taking any money he found on his victims.
To the police investigating the case, it was obvious that the murderer was a man in the grip of such sexual frenzy that he would pursue a screaming girl in full view of a train, and drag her into the woods. The similarity in method in all four rape murders convinced them that all were committed by the same man, and that he would go on killing until he was caught. By the time Rita Walterspacher’s body was discovered later that day, the rapist was already in custody in the Hornberg police station, having made the absurd mistake of leaving his briefcase containing the sawn-off rifle in a tailor’s shop . . .
Like William Heirens, Pommerencke was not cut out to be a serial killer; his crimes produced a powerful inner conflict, deep feelings of guilt. Commissioner Gut, head of the Freiburg murder squad, had speculated that the murderer of Hilda Konther and Karin Walde was a Jekyll and Hyde personality. And Pommerencke admitted after his arrest: ‘Everything I did was cruel and bestial. From the bottom of my heart I would like to undo all this.’ His incredibly careless act of leaving a gun in a tailor’s shop may be interpreted as his own attempt to undo it all. On 22 October 1960 he received a life sentence with hard labour.
The foregoing cases underline a point of fundamental importance for the understanding of the criminal personality: that by definition, all criminals are self-divided. The criminal is one who decides to take what he wants from society by force or stealth. In the act of doing this, he has become an ‘outsider’ – that is, he has placed himself outside society, ‘beyond the pale’. But he has no desire to remain outside society; that would amount to psychological suicide. In 1961, two American psychologists, Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, began a programme to study criminals in St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington DC. Both were liberals who believed that criminals were really ‘victims of society’, people with ‘deep psychologic problems’. The conclusions they reached dismayed them both. In their book The Criminal Personality, they admit that they have found that the chief characteristics of the criminal are weakness, vanity and self-delusion. ‘The greatest fear of these criminals was that others would see some weakness in them and they reacted very angrily to being “put d
own”.’ That is to say, the urge to self-esteem – to be liked and respected by others – was paramount in them. Men who distinguish themselves in the public eye, from creative geniuses to famous sportsmen, are doing something of which everyone can approve. As the criminal commits a crime, he knows that he is doing something which, if discovered, will turn him into an outcast. So there is a basic conflict between his criminality and his craving to be admired. (In this respect, the Mafia forms an exceptionally interesting subject of sociological study, in its attempt to transform the criminal into an accepted member of society, a ‘man of respect’.) A part of him dreams of taking the ‘social route’ to self-esteem, becoming respected and famous. Another part is in a hurry and is in favour of taking short-cuts. (Every crime is in essence a short-cut.) Robert Poulin, William Heirens and Heinrich Pommerencke developed an exceptionally powerful sex-drive at an early age, when normal fulfilment seemed only a remote possibility. Since most young people are notoriously amoral – a child is more concerned with his own needs than other people’s – they found it easy to drift into sex crime. As the personality matures, there is a subconscious recognition that this conflicts with the urge to self-esteem, the desire to be ‘recognised’. Jekyll becomes increasingly resentful of the Hyde who is obstructing his evolution. It is arguable that, in Poulin’s case, this led to the decision to commit suicide, and, in the case of Heirens and Pommerencke, to the act of carelessness that led to arrest.
We have seen that specific patterns of crime can be identified with specific periods. You would not expect a sadistic sex murder to be committed in, say, 1810 – not because men were less corrupt and degenerate in 1810, but because sexual sadism had not yet emerged in the field of criminal activity. Similarly, the crime of self-esteem seems to be a phenomenon that emerges in the 1960s. It is hard to imagine a murderer of the 1940s saying, like Robert Smith: ‘I wanted to become known, to get myself a name.’