The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  On Saturday 6 July 1985, five weeks after Lake’s capture, a security guard in a department store in Calgary, Alberta, saw a young Chinese slipping food under his jacket. When challenged, the thief drew a pistol, and as they grappled he fired, wounding the guard in the hand. The man ran away at top speed, but was intercepted by other guards. It became obvious that he had some training in Japanese martial arts, but he was eventually overpowered. Identification documents revealed that he was Charles Ng. A Canadian court sentenced Ng to four and a half years in prison for armed robbery, but resisted the demand that he should then be extradited to California, on the grounds that California still had a death penalty.

  FBI agents looking into Ng’s background learned that he was the son of a wealthy Hong Kong family. Born in 1961, Ng had been educated at a private school in north Yorkshire, from which he had been expelled for theft. Although Ng was never short of money, he was a lifelong kleptomaniac. He had lived for a while in Preston, Lancashire, then his parents sent him to San Francisco to complete his education. At the age of eighteen, Ng had been involved in a hit-and-run accident, and to escape a jail sentence, joined the marines. At Kaneoke Air Base on Oahu in Hawaii, he was arrested for thefts of weapons amounting to more than eleven thousand dollars. He escaped and made his way back to San Francisco, where he met Lake, and became his close companion; they were later arrested on burglary charges in Mendocino County, where Ng was identified as an army deserter. Convicted on the Hawaii arms theft charges, he spent some time in the Federal Prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. When paroled, he found a job as a warehouseman in San Francisco, and took an apartment there. He spent much of his time at Lake’s ‘ranch’ at Wisleyville. Comments by Ng’s attorney made it clear that Ng liked to think of himself as an anti-social ‘outsider’; he boasted of placing cyanide in the salt cellars at the Hawaii air base, dropping heat tabs into mail boxes, and of ‘assassinating’ a man in California.

  FBI agents flew to Calgary to question him. Ng’s story was that he knew about Lake’s murders, but had taken no part in them. Ng described how Lake had killed car dealer Paul Cosner, whose car he was driving when arrested, and also how Lake had killed two employees of a removal company, one of whom was burnt to death.

  Leonard Lake, born in 1946 in San Francisco, had an even more disturbing history. He had been in the marines in Vietnam, but had been discharged as having psychiatric problems. Joel Norris’s investigation into Lake’s background revealed a classic picture of a child rejected by both parents at an early age, and raised by his grandmother, a strict disciplinarian. Both his father and mother came from a family of alcoholics. The grandfather, also an alcoholic, was a violent type who subjected the child to a kind of military discipline. His younger brother Donald, his mother’s favourite, was an epileptic who had experienced a serious head injury; he practised sadistic cruelty to animals and tried to rape both his sisters. Lake protected the sisters ‘in return for sexual favours’ – from an early age he had displayed sexual obsession that seems to characterise the serial killer. He took nude photographs of his sisters and cousins, and later became a maker of pornographic movies starring his wife. His fantasies were of the same type as Cameron Hooker’s – total domination over women.

  Lake shared another characteristic of so many serial killers: he lived in a world of fantasy – boasting, for example, of daring exploits in Vietnam when, in fact, he had never seen combat. Like so many Right Men, he was skilful in hiding his abnormality, teaching grade school, working as a volunteer fire-fighter, and donating time to a company that provided free insulation in old people’s homes. Like the boy-killer John Gacy, he seemed an exemplary citizen; but his outlook was deeply pessimistic. He believed that World War Three would break out at any moment, and this is why he had built the bunker – stocked with food – at the ranch. Like other ‘survivalists’, he often dressed in combat fatigues, and talked of living off the land. Once out of the marines, his behaviour had become increasingly odd. In his original ‘survivalist compound’ in Mother Lode, Humboldt County, the police found maps of the area with crosses marking ‘buried treasure’ – almost certainly bodies. It was there that he had murdered his best friend from the marines, Charles Gunnar, and assumed his identity. After being forced to flee from the earlier compound because of burglary charges, he had moved to Wisleyville. A marriage to a girl called Cricket Balazs had broken up, but she had continued to act as a fence for stolen credit cards and other items. Lake seems to have loved her – at least he said so in a last note scrawled as he was dying – but he nevertheless clung to the paranoid notion that women were responsible for all his problems.

  In his journal, Lake describes himself ‘with death in my pocket and fantasy in my soul’. He daydreamed of a more heroic and violent era – Vikings and Norse sagas – and of having chained girls as sex slaves (the ‘cells’ in his bunker were built for them). According to Norris, the later journals show increasing disillusionment. ‘His dreams of success had eluded him; he admitted to himself that his boasts about heroic deeds in Vietnam were all delusions, and the increasing number of victims he was burying in the trench behind his bunker only added to his unhappiness. By the time he was arrested in San Francisco, Lake had reached the final stage of the serial murderer syndrome: he realised that he had come to a dead end with nothing but his own misery to show for it.’

  What has happened, we can see, is that Lake has gone one step beyond most Right Men: instead of merely fantasising about being a lone ‘outsider’, an outcast from a materialistic society, he translated his fantasies into reality, acting with a casual ruthlessness that is rarely seen even among serial killers, murdering men – even babies – so that he could lay his hands on women and turn them into sex slaves. But when fantasy is brought into contact with reality, it is bound to melt away. Our sense of our own humanity depends on feeling ourselves to be members of society, on having at least a few close relations with other human beings. To kill men – one of them his own brother and another his best friend – and rape and torture women, was bound to cause a sense of revolt in the part of him that still had a capacity for human warmth. He was systematically raping his own humanity. The published extracts from the tapes suggest that Lake and Ng were still sufficiently human to be aware of this. (For example, they tell Kathy Allen – who had gone there looking for her boyfriend Mike Carrol – that they intend to keep her prisoner for a month then let her go; but since she was their prisoner, they had no practical reason to try and spare her feelings.)

  What Leonard Lake did was to act out the fantasies of the Marquis de Sade – who, as we have seen, might be regarded as the patron saint of serial killers. What he proved was the basic incompatibility between these fantasies and our human nature. Even hangmen have to feel that they are useful members of society. Even Nazi torturers had to tell themselves that they were serving a cause. To behave like Haroun Al Raschid or Ivan the Terrible is to commit mental suicide. If Lake had chosen to bluff it out in the San Francisco police station, sticking to his story that he was Robin Stapley, he might well have walked out a free man. Yet his journals reveal that he had ceased to be a free man many months before. The time to end a meaningless existence had arrived, and Lake became his own executioner.

  Eight

  Into the Future

  THE QUESTION REMAINS; why is it that serial killers have appeared at this particular point in history? One psychiatrist, discussing Leonard Lake – who was born in 1946, the same year as Ted Bundy – suggests that an unusual number of males were born in the year after the war and that, statistically speaking, a proportion of them were bound to become killers. Others have pointed out that many serial killers have been sexually abused in childhood, and suggested that an increase in the sexual abuse of children has led to the rise of the serial killer. In Compulsive Killers (1986) Elliot Leyton has produced a ‘social’ theory of serial killers. He points out that the fifteenth-century multiple murderer Gilles de Rais – who raped and killed at least fifty
children in his château at Machecoul – lived in an era when the established order in France was striving to reassert itself against the assaults of peasants and merchants. Gilles was obsessed by the excesses of Tiberius and Caligula, and strove to emulate their lifestyles. His crimes, Leyton suggests, were a personalised expression of this aggressive attitude of his class – his victims were all children of peasants. In our own time, he suggests, serial killers have been members of the working class or lower middle class, struggling with a sense of alienation and frustration. For them, murder is a form of class assertion.

  There is certainly some truth in this notion; so far there have been no upper-class – or even upper-middle-class – serial killers. The reason for this may be the one suggested in Chapter Seven: that serial murder may be a human expression of the ‘overcrowded rat syndrome’, and that upper- and middle-class children are unlikely to suffer from overcrowding.

  The overcrowded rat theory suggests that the reasons for the appearance of serial murder are primarily social, and this tends to be confirmed by the study of sex crime. As we have seen, sex crime – in our modern sense of the word – was virtually unknown in the eighteenth century; it made its appearance in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was undoubtedly linked to ‘Victorian’ attitudes towards sex; that is, to the fact that sex was unmentionable in respectable society, and therefore ‘forbidden’.

  To understand the crimes of killers like Bundy, Gallego and Lake, we also have to recognise that, in another respect, human attitudes towards sex have hardly changed in many thousands of years. From the Iliad to the Morte D’Arthur, the image of woman has been much the same: the archetypal heroine is gentle, modest, decorous, virtuous and free from vanity. While sexually desirable, she is uninterested in sex, and only grants it to the male who has proved himself ‘worthy’ of her. As far as most males are concerned, she is essentially ‘forbidden’. If she shows preference for one of her many wooers, the others experience agonising jealousy because their goddess has rejected them. Helen’s elopement with Paris, like Queen Guinevere’s infidelity with Lancelot, seems doubly shocking because we feel her to be the embodiment of all the female virtues.

  The twentieth century has seen a gradual ‘emancipation’ of our attitudes towards sex. From Wells’s Ann Veronica, through Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to Huxley’s Brave New World, modern writers have assured us that perfectly nice girls can enjoy copulation and even commit adultery. We nowadays accept that when a girl refers to her ‘boyfriend’, she usually means the man she sleeps with, and that a girl who has had many lovers is not necessarily a harlot. Yet while the conscious mind has adjusted to this new state of affairs, our instincts continued to harbour the old ‘forbidden’ female archetype, modest, gentle and virtuous. So in spite of enormous changes in our sexual attitudes, modern man’s reaction to a pretty girl is in most respects exactly like that of the troubadours or the knights of the Round Table: she is an unknown country, a sovereign state, that he would love to be allowed to explore. Brave New World remains mildly titillating because its apparently ‘nice’ young ladies discuss the men they have slept with openly without any sense of guilt. We feel the same sense of shock that we would experience if Jane Austen’s heroines talked openly about their adulteries.

  In other words, so as far as sex is concerned, ‘modernity’ is only a superficial overlay; but there is a field in which change has been genuine and profound: that of political freedom. We are living in the first era in which, for a large proportion of the globe, the Rights of Man have become a reality. They have been discussed and analysed for more than two centuries; but the truth is that political freedom means very little without economic freedom; a desperately poor man is, by definition, one of the oppressed, whether he lives under democracy or dictatorship. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century that welfare states have been able to offer the majority of their citizens some degree of security from starvation. The result is that ‘rights’ that were once theoretical have finally become an actuality. Every tramp knows that the police have no right to arrest him without good reason; every schoolboy knows that a schoolmaster who loses his temper and hits him runs the risk of dismissal. It is no longer necessary to be wealthy or influential to ensure impartial treatment at the hands of the law.

  The negative side of the coin – and it may be a small price to pay – is an increase in the kind of boredom and apathy that were once regarded as diseases of the rich, and in the self-pity and resentment that flourish in such fertile soil. We have seen that the beginning of the thought process that leads to crime involves looking around for someone on whom we can lay the blame. In that respect there is a basic similarity between the psychology of Charles Manson and his drug-addict disciples and terrorist organisations like the Japanese Red Army faction, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Symbionese Liberation Army. When we learn that Ian Brady shook his fist at the sky after one of his murders, that Gerald Gallego declared ‘his only desire was to kill God’, and that Leonard Lake took pride in declaring himself an atheist, we can begin to understand how the logic of resentment can lead to total rejection of ‘conscience’, as it looks for an ultimate scapegoat.

  It was towards the end of the eighteenth century that political philosophers began to argue that most men are poor because the social system is unjust. Karl Marx went a step further and declared that the poor have the right to seize their neighbour’s wealth, for if the neighbour was honest he would not be wealthy. By the end of the nineteenth century, Marxism had begun to achieve a certain academic respectability. Nowadays, there are hundreds of academics in ‘capitalist’ universities all over the world who make no secret of their Marxist affiliations.

  The sexual revolution took longer to gather momentum, as we have seen, because when a society is economically deprived, sex is a secondary issue. Once a society is affluent, sex becomes one of the major issues. It is important to understand that the attitude that seems typical of sex criminals is also shared by many ‘respectable’ members of society, including its leading intellectuals. H.G. Wells was well known in London as a tireless adulterer who kept photographs of his mistresses on the mantelpiece; his wife was expected to accept his need for affaires. Bertrand Russell was a lifelong seducer who was pursuing teenage students well into his seventies, when his virility began to fail. The theologian Paul Tillich was a pornography addict who was still seducing female students in his eighth decade. A recent biography of the Catholic artist Eric Gill reveals that he practised a lifelong promiscuity, which included incest with his sisters and daughters, as well as bestiality and a passion for adolescent girls. In the various artistic communities that he formed, he demanded the droit de seigneur over all the attractive women, and became intensely jealous if they allowed themselves to be seduced by other males. The painter Augustus John shared Gill’s enthusiasm for incest (as becomes clear from Michael Holroyd’s biography), and also his attitude of droit de seigneur over women in his immediate entourage. (It may or may not be relevant that John was a mediocre artist until he dived into the sea and knocked himself unconscious on a rock; after his recovery, he became a major artist.)

  How can intelligent men justify this kind of self-indulgence? The answer is that they have no difficulty whatsoever. Wells’s argument was that in order to evolve as a writer he needed to evolve as a human being, and that it would be impossible to evolve as a human being if he went around in a state of permanent sexual frustration. His affaires, he claimed, filled him with creative energy and a sense of the wonder of the universe. His wife was expected to accept this or agree to a separation; she seems to have accepted it, but lived a lonely and unsatisfying existence, dying of abdominal cancer in 1927. (Augustus John’s wife committed suicide.)

  Wells was a member of a privileged class, an intellectual elite, and he demanded sexual freedom as a right of his class. As we have seen, the slow increase in personal liberty in the twentieth century means that the ‘privileged class’ has e
xpanded until it includes most dominant and intelligent males. If Melvin Rees or Ted Bundy or Leonard Lake had been called upon to present a reasoned defence of their crimes, they would all have sounded much like H.G. Wells. The main difference, they would have argued, is that Wells, as a famous writer, had a queue of young ladies eager to share his bed. They, as intelligent nobodies, were forced to take a short cut. But since they all believed that ‘only individual standards make murder right or wrong’, and that nature intended us all to be predators, they had no hesitation in risking life and liberty in the name of individual self-development. They would also have gone on to argue, with the self-justification that never fails the Right Man, that the blame should be placed squarely on modern society, with its endless sexual stimulation – from soft-porn magazines on every newsstand to the obligatory bedroom scene in every film. Man surely has a right to get rid of his frustrations?

  There has been, so far, no sexual equivalent of Karl Marx to argue that women have no right to withhold their bodies from sexually frustrated males, and ought to be raped. Yet this obviously describes the attitude of Rees, Bundy, Gallego, and most of the other serial killers in this volume. Every rapist could be regarded as an advocate of the ‘propaganda of the deed’. And the ‘elitist argument’ summarised above is sound in at least one respect: that if the level of sexual stimulation in a society continues to rise, an increasing number of highly-sexed dominant males will cross the threshold into rape. As suggested elsewhere, ‘when there is underlying social frustration, it is the criminal who provides a measure of that tension. If a new and horrifying type of crime occurs, a type that has never been known before, it should not be regarded as some freak occurrence, any more than the outbreak of a new disease should be dismissed as a medical oddity.’ Criminals might be compared with the rats who die first in a plague.1