by Colin Wilson
Again, some of these people may develop into ‘achievers’ – even such dubious achievers as Hitler and Stalin. Others may simply become remarkable for the size of their egos. Others become boasters and liars. Van Vogt noted that a certain percentage of these people achieve a sense of security in a peculiar manner: they marry, produce a family, and then behave exactly like a dictator, treating their wife and children as their subjects. Not even the slightest hint of contradiction is allowed. The personality of such a man (or woman) is totally non-flexible. In no circumstances will he ever admit that he is in the wrong, or has made a mistake. If evidence that he is in the wrong is placed so firmly under his nose that he can no longer ignore it, he is likely to explode into violence. This is why van Vogt christened him ‘the Violent Man’ or ‘the Right Man’.
Van Vogt began by studying newspaper accounts of divorce proceedings, and noting how often husbands could treat their wives – and children – with appalling irrationality, flying into a rage at the least sign of opposition, and yet expecting to be allowed to do exactly as they liked. One such man, a commercial traveller, had an endless series of affairs (these being an important prop to his self-esteem), yet would knock his wife down if she so much as smiled at another man. Oddly enough, most such men seem to their colleagues at work to be perfectly normal; the Right Man never tries to indulge his power fantasies with his superiors or equals.
He is, of course, living in a kind of sand castle, and it can be destroyed if his wife has the courage to kick it down – that is, to leave him. Van Vogt noted that in such cases – when the ‘worm turned’ – the husband would often experience total psychological collapse, sometimes resulting in suicide. His security is built upon a fabric of self-delusion, and he has become skilled in refusing to face this fact. If it is no longer possible to avoid facing it, he feels that the foundation of his life has been swept away.
Bundy was good-looking and intelligent; but he was a late developer, and early frustrations and disappointments seem to have convinced him that he was a ‘loser’. This may be deduced from his compulsive thieving – potential ‘winners’ are too concerned with their future to risk being labelled a criminal. Bundy’s stealing became a compulsion after Stephanie Brooks had ‘dumped’ him; it obviously contained mildly suicidal elements, the feeling that ‘Nothing matters any more’. In spite of his intelligence he was a poor student, and his grades were usually Bs. The tide began to turn when he worked for the Justice Department and the Republican candidate, but by that time he was already a compulsive Peeping Tom. ‘Revenge’ on Stephanie Brooks also came too late; it only served to rationalise his feeling that all women were bitches and deserved to be raped. The Right Man can justify any action that he wants to take, no matter how immoral. Most of the cases van Vogt observed involved Right Men ‘cheating’ compulsively on their wives. Bundy went several steps further and became a compulsive rapist and killer as he had become a compulsive thief.
As soon as we understand this curious mechanism of self-deception, we can see that it seems to apply to most serial killers. Angelo Buono was another ‘Right Man’, a man who was capable of sodomising his wife in front of the children to ‘teach her a lesson’. When one of his prostitutes ran away, it was the kind of ‘desertion’ that all Right Men fear. When his threatening phone calls led to humiliation at the hands of an outsize Hell’s Angel, all his outraged self-esteem became directed – with typical irrationality – against women. Murdering women and dumping them like trash on hillsides restored his macho self-image. There was no reason to chant ‘Die, cunt, die’ as he sat on Lissa Kastin’s legs and watched Bianchi strangling her; she had never done anything to merit his hatred. But the Right Man was murdering and humiliating all women.
Similarly, the Right Man syndrome can be seen to be the key to Cameron Hooker, Melvin Rees, Harvey Carignan, Gary Heidnik, Gerald Gallego, David Birnie, Douglas Clark and Ian Brady. Heidnik’s collapse into insanity when his Filipino wife walked out on him is typical of the Violent Man. So is Heinrich Pommerencke’s sudden decision that all women deserved to die. The same applies to cases of folie à deux, like the Moors Murder case. For Ian Brady, Myra Hindley was the equivalent of the Right Man’s family – a kind of little dictator state, which enables him to indulge his power fantasies. When the sense of power-starvation is so overwhelming, the appetite increases with feeding, the starved ego swells like a balloon.
It should now be clear that the Right Man syndrome is a form of mild insanity, allied to that of a madman who believes he is Napoleon. It cannot be described as true insanity because it does not involve psychotic delusions. (Fish, for example, was not a Right Man; he was genuinely insane.) Gary Heidnik occupies a blurred space between the Right Man syndrome and genuine psychosis; it is almost impossible to say how far he was insane, and how far he was merely suffering from the Right Man’s delusions of power and grandeur. The Right Man syndrome, in its most primitive form, is simply a desire to behave like a spoilt child, to punish those who refuse to do what the child demands. Robert Hansen and Douglas Clark are examples of this stage: they only killed girls who failed to bring them to orgasm.
It is easy to understand the development of the syndrome. There is nobody in the world who does not want ‘his own way’. Most of us learn to make realistic adjustments to not getting our own way. This is obviously easier for someone whose life is fairly stable. Children with serious problems – difficult parents, broken homes, traumatic frustrations – tend to react to disappointments with an out-of-proportion sense of misery and defeat. They compensate by fantasy, and perhaps (like Bundy) by lying and stealing. These reactions have an identical root; both are attempts to take what the world refuses to give freely. If this ‘naughty boy’ aspect goes unpunished (as with Bundy) it can develop into a kind of self-indulgence that strikes us as insane, but which is actually a calculated and conscious form of wickedness.
This type of serial killer is epitomised by Dean Corll, the homosexual mass murderer of the 1970s. Corll, like most serial killers, had a difficult childhood, with a father ‘who did not like children’, and the parents eventually divorced. Meanwhile, Dean (born 1939) had become a mother’s boy. His mother started a candy company which was to provide her sons with a living. In 1968, on the advice of a psychic, she moved away from Houson, and left Dean, who was then in his late twenties, on his own. Life was easy; he smoked pot, sniffed glue – although he had a heart condition – and made advances to young boys. When he turned thirty, he became thin-skinned and secretive about his age. His former friends noticed that he became moody; he preferred the companionship of a number of teenage juvenile delinquents. These included Elmer Wayne Henley, a child of a broken home, and David Brooks. The latter, a convicted thief and something of a sadist, had on one occasion been knocked unconscious by Corll, tied to a bed, and repeatedly sodomised; nevertheless, he and Corll remained friends. He had introduced Henley to Corll. With the aid of his two friends, Corll began luring teenage boys to the house, then raping and killing them, often after various forms of torture, such as biting the genitals.
The first killing took place in 1970, when Corll murdered a hitchhiking student named Jeffrey Konen. Most of the other victims came from the run-down Heights area of Houston. Corll’s usual method was to wait until they were unconscious from glue-sniffing, then to chain them to a board and sodomise them, sometimes for days, before strangling them with a rope. In December 1970 he murdered two boys – James Glass, fourteen, and Danny Yates, fifteen – at the same time. Two brothers – Donald and Jerry Waldrop – were killed in January 1971. Between 1970 and 1973, Corll murdered twenty-nine boys, with the aid of Brooks and Henley. (Brooks seemed to enjoy causing pain, and on one occasion, shot a boy after inserting the barrel of the revolver up his nose.) Most of the bodies were buried in a rented boatshed, wrapped in plastic sheeting. The youngest victim was a nine-year-old boy who lived in a shop opposite Corll’s apartment.
The end came on the morning of 8 August 1973.
Henley had arrived at a glue-sniffing party with another youth and a fifteen-year-old girl. Corll was furious about the girl – ‘You’ve spoilt it all’ – and Henley woke up to find himself tied and handcuffed, and the vindictive Corll standing over him with a gun. ‘I’ll teach you a lesson.’ Finally, by offering to help rape and torture the other two, Henley succeeded in persuading Corll to release him. The two semiconscious teenagers were then undressed and chained up. Henley tried to rape the girl, but failed. Corll was in the process of raping the youth when Henley said: ‘Why don’t you let me take the chick outa here? She don’t want to see that.’ When Corll ignored him, Henley grabbed the gun and ordered him to stop; Corll taunted him: ‘Go on, kill me.’ Henley fired repeatedly, and Corll collapsed. Henley then rang the police and informed them: ‘I’ve just killed a man.’ When the police arrived, Henley told them the story of the attempted rapes and the shooting, and added that Corll had boasted of having killed other boys and burying them in a boatshed. In the boatshed in south Houston, police uncovered seventeen bodies, then Henley led them to sites where another ten were buried. Henley’s estimate was that Corll had murdered thirty-one boys.
Henley’s knowledge of the burial sites made it clear that he was not as innocent as he pretended; eventually, both he and David Brooks were sentenced to life imprisonment.
One of the most widely published photographs of Corll, as an adult, shows him clutching a teddy bear. Jack Olsen’s book on the case, The Man With the Candy, makes it clear that Corll never grew up. The murders were simply the expression of a kind of ‘spoiltness’, a desire to have his own way.
The same also seems to be true of another widely publicised case of mass murder in the 1970s. Between 1976 and his arrest in December 1978, John Wayne Gacy, a Chicago building contractor, killed thirty-two boys in the course of sexual attacks. Gacy’s childhood – he was born in 1932 – was in many ways similar to Corll’s, with a harsh father and a protective mother. He was a lifelong petty thief. Like Corll, he also suffered from a heart condition. In childhood, he had been struck on the head by a swing, which caused a bloodclot on the brain, undetected for several years. He married a girl whose parents owned a fried-chicken business in Waterloo, Iowa, and – again like Corll – became a successful businessman. (Maslow would point out that this indicates that both belong to the ‘dominant five per cent’.) He was also known as a liar and a boaster. His marriage came to an end when Gacy was imprisoned for sexually molesting a teenager (although Gacy always claimed he had been framed). Out of jail, he married a second time and set up in business as a building contractor. He was successful (although notoriously mean), and was soon regarded as a pillar of the local community – he was even photographed shaking hands with First Lady Rosalynn Carter, the wife of President Jimmy Carter. His own wife found his violent tempers a strain, and they divorced.
In 1975, while he was still married, one of his teenage employees vanished; it was after this that his wife noticed an unpleasant smell in the house. After their separation in the following year, Gacy made a habit of picking up teenage homosexuals, or luring teenagers to his house ‘on business’. handcuffing them, and then committing sodomy. They were finally strangled, and the bodies disposed of, usually in the crawl space under the house.
In March 1978, a twenty-seven-year-old named Jeffrey Rignall accepted an invitation to smoke pot in Gacy’s Oldsmobile. Gacy clapped a chloroform-soaked rag over his face, and when Rignall woke up he was being sodomised in Gacy’s home. Gacy raped him repeatedly and flogged him with a whip; finally, he chloroformed him again and left him in a park. In hospital, Rignall discovered that he had sustained permanent liver damage from the chloroform. Since the police were unable to help, he set about trying to track down the rapist himself, sitting near freeway entrances looking for black Oldsmobiles. Eventually he saw Gacy, followed him, and noted down his number. Although Gacy was arrested, the evidence against him seemed poor.
On 11 December 1978 Gacy invited a fifteen-year-old boy, Robert Piest, to his house to talk about a summer job. When the youth failed to return, police tracked down the building contractor who had offered him the job, and questioned him at his home in Des Plaines. Alerted by the odour, they investigated the crawl space and found fifteen bodies and parts of others. When Gacy had run out of space, he had started dumping bodies in the river.
Gacy’s story was that he was a ‘dissociated’ personality, and that the murders were committed by an evil part of himself called Jack. In court, one youth described how Gacy had pulled him up, posing as a police officer, then handcuffed him at gunpoint. Back in Gacy’s home, he was sodomised, after which Gacy made an attempt to drown him in the bath; but Gacy changed his mind and raped him again. Then, after holding his head under water until he became unconscious, Gary urinated on him, then played Russian roulette with a gun which turned out to contain only a blank. Finally, Gacy released him, warning him that the police would not believe his story. Gacy proved to be right. The jury who tried him believed a psychiatrist who told them that Gacy was suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder that did not amount to insanity, and on 13 March 1980 John Wayne Gacy was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In cases like these, it seems clear that the answer should not be sought in psychological diagnoses so much as in weakness and self-indulgence. Although Gacy’s biographer Tim Cahill tries hard to make a case for Gacy as a doom-haunted necrophile (he once worked in a morgue), the psychological evidence shows that both he and Corll were childish and undisciplined personalities in the grip of total selfishness.
The same probably applies to the only British example of a homosexual serial killer, Dennis Nilsen. Between December 1978 and February 1983, Nilsen murdered fifteen young men whom he had lured to his flat in north London, and got rid of the bodies by dissecting them, boiling the pieces, and disposing of them in various ways – even leaving them in plastic bags for the dustbin men to collect. On 8 February 1983 a drains maintenance engineer called at a house in Muswell Hill to examine a blocked drain; he found that it contained decaying flesh that looked human. When Dennis Nilsen, a thirty-seven-year-old employment officer, returned home, he was questioned by the police, and immediately pointed to a wardrobe; inside were two plastic bags containing two severed heads and a skull.
Nilsen insisted that there was no sexual motive in the crimes, but this is hard to believe. The son of a drunken father and a puritanical mother, he had the kind of lonely childhood that seems typical of serial killers. His troubles began, according to Nilsen, when he was seven years old, and was taken by his mother to see the corpse of his grandfather – to whom he had been deeply attached. A necrophiliac obsession began to develop. After twelve years as an army cook, and a period in London as a policeman and security guard, he obtained work in a job centre in Soho and began living with a man. It was after this man left in 1977 that Nilsen began to invite young males – picked up in pubs – back to his flat, get them drunk, then strangle them.
Nilsen’s biographer Brian Masters accepted Nilsen’s curious explanation that he was killing out of loneliness – the book is entitled Killing for Company – and that having a corpse around the flat gave him a sense of companionship; but since Nilsen admitted that he was a necrophile, this explanation is hard to accept. What is quite clear from Masters’ book is that Nilsen was a man of high dominance; Masters went to see him in prison and reported that Nilsen behaved as if interviewing him for a job. One of his acquaintances reported: ‘The only off-putting thing about him was his eyes. They can stare you out, and not many people can stare me out.’ Others found his immense loquacity tiresome; Nilsen regarded himself as an intellectual, and had a high opinion of himself. This seems to be the most probable explanation of why he turned to murder. When the man with whom he was living, David Gallichan, announced that he was leaving – he had been offered a job in the country – he was surprised when Nilsen’s reaction was a cold and highly controlled rage. ‘It was as though I had insulted him, and he
wanted me to go immediately.’ This is, of course, the reaction of a Right Man on being abandoned by someone whom he has been accustomed to dominate; the whole foundation of his insecure self-esteem is shaken. This may also explain why, since his arrest and life imprisonment, Nilsen seems to have taken a certain pride in being ‘Britain’s biggest mass murderer’.
One final important fact must be taken into account: that Nilsen, like Ted Bundy, was an extremely heavy drinker. He met his victims in pubs, then brought them back home to consume large quantities of vodka. Alcohol had the same effect on Nilsen and Bundy that drugs had on Dean Corll and on the Manson clan, creating a sense of unreality, a kind of moral vacuum without inhibitions. In this vacuum, murder meant very little.
Perhaps the most basic characteristic of the serial killer is one that he shares with most other criminals: a tendency to an irrational self-pity that can produce an explosion of violence. In that sense, Paul John Knowles may be regarded not merely as the archetypal serial killer but as the archetypal criminal.
Knowles, who was born in 1946, had spent an average of six months of every year in jail since he was nineteen, mostly for car thefts and burglaries. In Florida’s Raiford Penitentiary in 1972 he began to study astrology, and started corresponding with a divorcee named Angela Covic, whom he had contacted through an astrology magazine. She flew to Florida, was impressed by the gaunt good looks of the tall red-headed convict, and agreed to marry him. She hired a lawyer to work on his parole, and when he was released on 14 May 1972, Knowles hastened to San Francisco to claim his bride. She soon had second thoughts; a psychic had told her that she was mixed up with a very dangerous man. Knowles stayed at her mother’s apartment, but after four days Angela Covic told him she had decided to return to her husband, and gave him his air ticket back to Florida. We have seen that, when the Violent Man is rejected by a woman, the result is an explosion of rage and self-pity that contains a suicidal component. Knowles conformed to type; he later claimed that he went out on to the streets of San Francisco and killed three people at random.