by Colin Wilson
The rise of sexual fetishism provides an interesting example of the mechanism. The word was invented by the nineteenth-century psychologist Alfred Binet, who pointed out that if early sexual excitement is associated with some object, such as a woman’s hair or shoes, it may become ‘imprinted’, so that the same object continues to produce excitement, just as the ringing of a bell made Pavlov’s dogs salivate. In fact, one of the earliest cases of fetishism on record dates from April 1790, when London was terrorised by a man who, in the words of the chronicler Archenholtz, committed ‘nameless crimes, the possibility of whose existence no legislator has ever dreamt of’. These nameless crimes amounted to creeping up behind fashionably dressed women and slashing at their clothing with a sharp knife, which occasionally caused painful wounds; it was also alleged that he would hold out a nosegay to young ladies, and as they bent to sniff it, would jab them in the face with a ‘sharp pointed instrument’ hidden among the flowers. ‘The Monster’ apparently became obsessed with the pretty daughter of a tavern keeper, Anne Porter, and followed her in St James’s Park, making obscene suggestions. On the night of 18 January 1790, when she was returning from a ball with her two sisters, he came up behind her, and she felt a blow on her right buttock. Indoors, she discovered that she had a nine-inch knife wound which was four inches deep in the centre. Six months later, out walking with a gentleman named Coleman, she recognised the ‘Monster’ in the street. Coleman followed the man to a nearby house, accused him of being the attacker, and made a kind of ‘citizen’s arrest’. The man denied being the ‘Monster’, but Anne Porter fainted when she saw him. He proved to be a slightly built man named Renwick Williams, a maker of artificial flowers. At his trial, Williams insisted that it was a case of mistaken identity; and offered an alibi. The jury chose to disbelieve him, and he was sentenced to six years in prison for ‘damaging clothes’. During the months he was attacking women, Williams created a reign of terror: rewards were offered and walls covered in posters describing his activities. The prosecuting counsel talked of ‘a scene that is so new in the annals of humanity, a scene so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible . . .’ ‘The Monster’ clearly created a profound sense of psychological shock amongst his contemporaries, of the kind produced a century later by the Jack the Ripper murders.
A century later still, another bizarre precedent was created by the behaviour of a sexual deviate who became known in California as the Panty Bandit; he would hold up underwear shops or beauty parlours in the Los Angeles area, order a woman to remove her panties and/or tights, and then masturbate with the garment draped over his face before snatching money from the till. Police were accustomed to dealing with nuisances who stole underwear from clotheslines or frequented laundromats in search of soiled panties, but had never encountered a man who would masturbate in front of a crowd of customers and then make off with the underwear. In the summer of 1988, the ‘Panty Bandit’ was nominated Public Enemy Number One in California. His activities revealed that he was at least disinclined to use his gun. In one shop, he ordered a woman to masturbate him; she made a grab for his gun, and he punched her in the face and ran away. On 23 October 1988 a shop assistant succeeded in notifying the police shortly after the bandit had left, and a man driving a Honda Civic was caught after a chase. He was thirty-three-year-old Bruce Lyons, and in his car the police found a box full of stolen underwear. Lyons was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The severity of the sentence reflects a recognition of how easily the Panty Bandit could have progressed to rape and murder.
In the two centuries that separate Renwick Williams from Bruce Lyons, it is clear that extraordinary social changes have taken place – changes that would have been incomprehensible to Dr Johnson, but which would have been perfectly understood by his contemporary the Marquis de Sade. Sade lived in an atmosphere of unreality, a world of dreams inside his own head. He was one of the privileged few who could afford that indulgence. Two centuries later, an affluent society had created conditions that could spawn potential de Sades by the thousand.
We are now also in a position to understand what has happened since the days of Renwick Williams – how, in the increased prosperity of the nineteenth century, the age of economic crime gave way slowly to the age of sex crime, and how this in turn is being displaced by an age of crimes that ‘service’ the craving for self-esteem, the will to power. Rees, Bundy, Hooker, Lake, Heidnik, simply refused to accept that they were not Haroun A1 Raschid and could do whatever they liked. Bundy admitted that, at any point during his crimes, he could have stopped himself if he had wanted to; he simply had no desire to stop. He had decided that he had a right to kill, just as a thief decides that he has a right to steal.
But exactly how great is the problem of the serial killer? In Serial Killers: The Growing Menace, Joel Norris estimates that in America there may be as many as five hundred at large at any given time; other estimates vary – Elliott Leyton guesses a hundred. An altogether more balanced estimate was provided by FBI agent Gregg McCrary. Asked about the number of serial killers, he said:
‘There were six thousand or more unsolved murders last year (1988), and the bulk of the serial killer victims will undoubtedly be somewhere in that number. (But) the unofficial estimates of three hundred, four hundred or five hundred even, do not seem to me to be reasonable . . . There’s less than a hundred out there – in my view less than fifty. My estimate is between thirty and fifty. Working on that figure, and using as a guide our experience of many serial killers averaging ten or less victims apiece at the time of their apprehension – there will be exceptions, of course – an estimate of a few hundred serial murders per year (in the US) would probably be most accurate.’
About the success rate, he commented: ‘Again this is very difficult to calculate. We reckon to “identify” between thirteen and fifteen serial killers each year. By “identifying” I mean identify as working, not as individuals: and of those we reckon that half – seven say – will be caught and brought to trial with the help of CIAP profiling. Now seven doesn’t tell you the full story. Take the Bundy case, for example. Bundy was charged with just three murders, the three he committed in Florida. But he admitted to twenty-three, and a lot of law enforcement guys think he was good for half as many again, around thirty-four murders. Now we profiled Bundy. OK, he was arrested under another name for driving a stolen car, but he was identified in custody as Bundy – and executed twelve years later, still for only three murders. But how many murders do you claim in the “success rate” – in other words, in this arrest and conviction of a man in which profiling played a part? Was it three murders, twenty-three or thirty-four? So “success rate” is not accountable in the most meaningful sense – i.e. the number of murders cleaned up with the aid of profiling.’
Between three hundred and five hundred murders a year sound an alarming total, but it is a long way short of the four or five thousand that has been suggested. These figures makes it clear that America is not full of maniacal serial killers who wander around and kill hundreds of people over the course of years. Most of them, as we have seen, commit their crimes over a fairly brief period and in a restricted area. The mobile serial killer is the exception, and the VICAP computer means that the chance of catching him has been enormously increased. Compared with the most frequent type of murder – domestic killings – the number of victims of serial murder remains relatively small. It is interesting to note that in the decade from 1979 to 1989 – the period during which most of the serial killers in this book committed their crimes – the American murder rate remained stable at around 20,000 a year. To imply that serial murder is ‘a growing menace’ comparable to AIDS is clearly something of an exaggeration.
What was clear, even as early as the 1960s, was that ‘motiveless murder’ constituted a new and baffling type of crime. Sex crime, as we have seen, was difficult to solve because in most cases there was only a casual connection between the c
riminal and the victim. Nevertheless, police were often able to catch serial rapists because a certain pattern was discernible in their crimes. In 1973, two rapists in Houston, Texas, made a habit of abducting girls who were getting into their cars late at night, driving them to a remote spot, then subjecting them to hours of sexual humiliation before leaving them naked. After forty rapes and two murders, the police decided to ‘stake out’ every car park in Houston, using vast numbers of men, including civilian volunteers. On the second night of the stake-out, when the rapists tried to abduct another girl, police heard her scream, and the men were arrested before they could escape. Michael Ohern, twenty, and Howard Braden, nineteen, both received sentences of life imprisonment without possibility of parole. It was a laborious way of catching rapists, but it worked. When, on the other hand, a killer who became known as ‘Zodiac’ committed five murders and severely wounded two more victims in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s, a vast police operation failed to trap him because the killings were motiveless and random; his identify remains unknown.
We have seen how the major breakthrough occurred in the mid-1970s, with the setting up of the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, with a grant of $128,000 from the National Institute of Justice. The oldest and most experienced of its agents was Howard Teten, who taught a course in applied criminology; he seemed to have a natural talent for ‘profiling’ criminals. On one occasion he was able to solve a case over the telephone – the multiple stabbing of a girl in California. From the frenzy of the attack, Teten judged that it was a sudden impulsive act, and that it sounded like a teenager, a ‘social isolate’, who would be weighed down by guilt and ready to confess. He advised the police to look in the neighbourhood where the girl was killed. In fact, when a policeman knocked on a door and was confronted with a skinny teenager, the boy blurted out: ‘You got me.’
We have also seen how, when the police of Platte City, Missouri, were confronted with the sex murder of a schoolgirl, Julie Wittmeyer, in 1977, the Behavioral Science Unit was able to ‘profile’ the killer so accurately that the investigators were immediately able to identify him in their list of suspects. In the case of the Anchorage killer Robert Hansen, FBI agent Glenn Flothe describes how he telephoned the Unit. ‘I started to tell the guy from the FBI about Hansen and he goes, ‘No, no, no – tell me about the crimes and let me tell you about the guy’. After describing the crimes, the agent told him that the killer probably was a respected member of the community, and probably stuttered. ‘He basically outlined Robert Hansen.’ Psychological profiling has raised the old-fashioned ‘hunch’ to the level of a science. In the FBI handbook Sexual Homicide: Its Patterns and Motives, it is estimated that psychological profiling has ‘helped focus the investigation in 77 per cent of those cases in which the suspects were subsequently identified’ – a highly satisfying success rate.
Equally important in the investigation of serial murder has been the use of computers. It was the case of Henry Lee Lucas, in 1983, that made state police forces aware of the need for co-operation; Lucas himself told Sheriff Jim Boutwell that he realised he owed his immunity to lack of co-operation between states. Computerisation of fingerprinting has also been a major advance. Los Angeles computerised its fingerprints in 1985, and within the first three minutes of the operation of the new system, it identified a fingerprint lifted from a stolen car as that of a twenty-five-year-old drifter, Richard Ramirez – thus giving an identity to the unknown serial killer so far known only as the ‘Night Stalker’; Ramirez was later sentenced to death for thirteen murders. Perhaps the most exciting advance of recent years has been the development of ‘DNA fingerprinting’ – the discovery, made by Dr Alec Jeffreys in 1985, that the DNA molecules contained in every single cell of our bodies are almost as individual as a fingerprint, so that a rapist can be identified from his semen, a fragment of skin beneath a victim’s nails, or even a single hair. It meant that virtually every rapist could be identified from some trace of evidence left on the victim. Since 1985, the number of ‘random’ sex criminals who have been caught through genetic fingerprinting has continued to increase dramatically, demonstrating that genetic fingerprinting is probably the most important innovation in crime detection since the original discovery of fingerprint classification in the 1890s.
What this book has tried to demonstrate is that the serial killer is a virtually inevitable product of the evolution of our society. What is happening today could be compared with what happened in Europe in the eighteenth century, when the soaring population rate in the large cities2 combined with the introduction of a new cheap drink called gin to produce an unparalleled crime explosion. Cities like London and Paris became vast pestilence-infected slums, and the ‘overcrowded rat’ syndrome proceeded to operate on the human population. In fact, in these two cities the crime explosion was brought under control with remarkable ease by a new and efficient police force. As the Industrial Revolution brought more overcrowding – between 1800 and 1900 the population more than doubled – the age of economic crime gave way to the age of sex crime. In the mid-twentieth century, the age of sex crime merged into a new age of self-esteem crime; and there was an important difference. Any medium-dominance male might commit rape if he happened to be drunk and sexually frustrated. As far as we can see, self-esteem crimes are always committed by members of the ‘dominant five per cent’ – and, moreover, by the type van Vogt called Right Men. (There may be examples of serial killers who are not Right Men or members of the dominant five per cent, but not one has been encountered in this study.) The attitude of the dominant male towards women is always predatory, especially towards non-dominant women. In Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf – about a lonely ‘outsider’ – a poem written by the hero captures this attitude perfectly:
The lovely creature I would so treasure,
And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,
I would drink of her red blood full measure,
Then howl till the night went by.
In the late nineteenth century there were just as many frustrated, high-dominance working-class males in the world, but poor education and the gap between social classes kept them ‘in their place’. By the mid-twentieth century increasing literacy and the erosion of class barriers meant that increasing numbers of these males were able to articulate their resentment. Some of these had the kind of traumatic childhood that seems typical of serial killers – lonely, physically abused, unwanted by parents, accident-prone (often suffering head injuries) and obsessed by sexual fantasies – and the result was bound to be, sooner or later, a sex-crime explosion. This is what we have witnessed in the last four decades of the twentieth century, and there seems no reason to assume that the early decades of the twenty-first century will show any improvement – on the contrary, it seems inevitable that Europe will follow America into the age of serial murder. Joel Norris speaks optimistically about the development of ‘profiles that could lead to the development of a diagnostic or prediction instrument’; but although we have seen how psychological profiling can be used to trap serial killers, it seems unlikely that it will ever enable psychiatrists to recognise them in time to prevent them from becoming killers. The best we can hope is that social changes will eventually remove the conditions that incubate the type.
What this means, unfortunately, is that there is no simple short-term solution to the problem of the serial killer, any more than there has ever been a simple solution to the problem of crime and violence. The long-term solution, for our descendants of the twenty-first century, would be to attack the basic causes: ‘overcrowded rat’ syndrome, child abuse, social frustration. We have seen that, so far, all serial killers have emerged from the same social group – the working class or lower middle class – and in that case, the theoretical solution would be to improve social conditions until some of the worst features have disappeared. Theoretically, a Utopian society with a low birth rate, ample living space and a high general level of prosperity
should cease to produce serial killers. However, until we have learned to control the population explosion, such a society is obviously no more than a pleasant daydream.
Nevertheless, it is worth recalling the story of how the eighteenth century crime explosion in England was brought under control by the novelist Henry Fielding. When Fielding became a magistrate in 1748, at the age of forty-one, London was swarming with footpads and robber gangs, and the roads were infested with highwaymen. With no police force except part-time parish constables, the London criminal had never known any organised opposition. Fielding suggested to Parliament that it should vote him six hundred pounds to try to stop the crime wave and the money was granted. He next organised a group of parish constables, all of who knew the most notorious thieves by sight. Victims of robberies were urged to hurry to Fielding’s house in Bow Street, from which ‘thief-takers’ would set out in hot pursuit. (This is why they became known as Bow Street Runners.) Fielding describes his satisfaction as newspaper reports of robberies diminished day by day, until eventually they ceased altogether. As the roads surrounding London were patrolled by heavily armed constables on horseback, burglars and highwaymen who were accustomed to immunity hastened to move elsewhere. In putting a stop to London’s crime wave, Fielding used only half the six hundred pounds.
The lesson – known to every police officer – is that in controlling crime, prevention is better than cure, or at least more immediately effective. In this respect, the advances in crime detection that have occurred since the 1970s are even more impressive then those of the Bow Street Runners. In 1986 special agent Roger Depue, then head of the FBI Behavioral Science Instruction and Research Unit and Administrator of the NCAVC, expressed the new sense of optimism when he declared: ‘The concerted efforts of the US Congress, the Department of Justice and Federal, State and local justice agencies to bring violent crime under control have made a difference in America. They have contributed to slowing the downward spiral, and increasing the risk for the violent offender. The NCAVC was born out of these national efforts and represents the new feeling in America. We are not only going to fight back – we are going to win.’