During a conference of experts in 2005 at the San Antonio Serial Murder Symposium sponsored by the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), the FBI finally proposed a new definition of serial murder as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) in separate events” for any reason, including “anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking.”41
In other words, women, genocidal killers, contract and gangland killers, missionary-type serial killers like those who might target abortion doctors or interracial couples, and even terrorists are included under the FBI’s new broad umbrella defining what constitutes a serial killer today: anybody who kills two or more people in distinctly separate incidents.
Most experts today agree on this definition of serial killing as the murder of two or more victims for any motive on separate occasions with a cooling-off period in between.42 There are, however, still ongoing debates as to what exactly constitutes a cooling-off period and its minimum length.43 Consider, for example, Andrew Cunanan, who murdered Gianni Versace after killing four victims over several weeks; Paul John Knowles, who killed eighteen victims in a four-month spree in 1974; Christopher Wilder, who killed eight women in a six-week cross-country spree in 1984; or the Washington Beltway snipers, who killed seventeen victims over a period of weeks. None of these serial killers returned to their everyday lives in a cooling-off period; they remained on the road in their “killing state” for weeks or even months. Are they a species of “spree serial killers”? Or is their crime a single incident stretched over a longer period?
The new definition would seem to open the book on past killers, to include profit killers, health-care killers, Munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy killers, black widows, war criminals, genocidal murderers, terrorists and contract killers, all of whom we find often have behavioral psychopathologies and disorders similar to those of “traditional” sexual serial killers, and cooling-off periods between their killings. We are going to have statistically more serial killers from the past than we thought, and a lot more coming at us in the future, under the new definition. It skews and confuses the statistical picture.
For simplicity’s sake, in this book we will not dwell on the several categories of serial killers that lie outside the classic conception of the sexual-fantasy-driven killers, like for example:
comfort-hedonist serial killers, who kill purely for material gain, a fee or profit, like the traditional female serial-killing “black widows” or organized-crime hit men or drug-cartel sicarios;
thrill-hedonist serial killers, who seek amusement or publicity, or to reassert their “life force” or sense of power and control;
missionary serial killers, who kill for revenge, or for racist, cult or religious or ideological motives, a category we can put genocidal war criminals and terrorists into, as well as murderers of abortion doctors, of interracial couples, of immigrants, of homeless people, and even some categories of serial killers who target prostitutes to “cleanse” society of them and serial-killing custodial “death angels of mercy,” like nurses and caregivers to the terminally ill, elderly or infants who “put them out of their misery”;
visionary serial killers, who are insane in the legal sense of the term, suffering from delusions or hallucinatory visions brought on by mental illness and who are unaware of their actions (a very rare category);
Munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy serial killers, who seek sympathy and attention when people around them die. They are frequently but not always female, and include mothers and babysitters who kill children in their care, and nurses (including male nurses) who kill their patients to appear more heroic and attract attention from their peers, patients and family.
Although all these categories fit the current definition of a serial killer, they are not what we popularly imagine a serial killer to be: a man who kills to realize a sexual fantasy. These other typologies are less frequent than the “average” sexual serial killer and involve different psychopathologies. While subscribing to the two-victims-or-more-in-separate-incidents-for-any-reason definition, in this book, I mostly focus on the history of “traditional,” fantasy-driven sexual serial killers, mostly male (although occasionally these types of sexual serial killers have had female accomplices).
THE NEW WORD: SERIAL EROTOPHONOPHILIA
While the FBI’s organized/disorganized typology is useful from an investigative perspective, it is not helpful in the clinical-forensic-psychiatric field in understanding why sexual serial killers do what they do. Current forensic literature sometimes uses a rape-profile typology that classifies serial killers in terms of the following four motives:
power reassurance (low-self-esteem “gentleman” serial killer): the offender seeks from the victim reassurance of his own virility and prowess as a lover in a delusion that he is pleasing his victim. The rape is planned, but the murder is not, and occurs when a victim’s behavior shatters the fantasy of enjoying the rape and the perpetrator either coldly kills the victim in embarrassment or kills in a sudden rage of disappointment;
power assertive (entitlement serial killer): the assertion of masculine power over a female or male victim, in which a rape is planned but the murder again is not, and occurs when the offender loses control over the extent of violence and force necessary to bring the victim under control;
anger retaliatory (revenge-displaced anger serial killer): both the rape and the murder are planned. The murder often involves “overkill”— violence beyond what is necessary to kill the victim, who is usually female. The primary motive driving the killer is his need to avenge, get even with or retaliate against a female who somehow offended him, or her substitute. The rage is often inspired by a female with power over the offender in the past or present—his mother, wife, girlfriend, teacher or work supervisor;
anger excitation (sadistic serial killer): both the rape and the murder are planned. The primary motive is a sadistic need to inflict pain and terror on the male or female victim for the sexual gratification of the perpetrator. The crime is characterized by prolonged torture and mutilation of the victim, generally before death but sometimes after. The murder itself is a lower priority for the offender, who focuses on the process leading up to it.
Some experts use a resurrected archaic term—“lust murder” or “hedonist lust murder” or, in academic-speak, “erotophonophilia”—to distinguish these offenders from all the many types of nonsexual serial killers.
The term “erotophonophilia” (lust murder) is derived from the name for the Greek god of love, Eros, and the word “phonia” (bloodshed or murder). It is defined as “murdering sadistically and brutally, including the mutilation of body parts, especially the genitalia,”44 or “cruelty, torture, or other acts sexual in nature that ultimately culminate in the death of the victim and includes those acts of homicide commonly referred to as sexual sadism . . . This more broadly inclusive definition of sexualized torture includes conscious, unconscious, live, or dead victims.”45
Because of its matrix of predominantly male psychopathological dysfunctions, this definition of serial erotophonophilia almost entirely excludes female serial killers from the classification, except in those relatively rare cases where women act willingly as accomplices of sadistic male erotophonophiliacs (the “Bonnie and Clyde syndrome,” or hybristophilia).
Most of us can grasp the psychology of killing for profit or revenge, or for ideological motives, or because of delusions brought on by mental illness. It is altogether more difficult to wrap our minds around serial killing that includes acts of rape, torture, mutilation, cannibalism or necrophilia (sex with a corpse)—often perpetrated by what appear to be sane and functioning members of society, like the friendly neighbor with three kids, or the reliable coworker, or the guy at your front door delivering your packages.
A NEW HISTORY OF THE WO
RLD OF MONSTERS
This book offers a new, updated macrohistory of sexual serial killing and its investigation, expanding on the modern history I described in Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters, which began roughly from the age of Jack the Ripper, in the 1880s. This book starts at the beginning, with the Stone Age a million years ago, and Jack the Ripper comes only in the middle. This is a new history of the world of monsters from then until now.
Since my first book came out in 2004, an enormous amount of new research into the psychopathology and biochemistry of serial killers has been completed. Many of the emerging new theories on why there are serial killers are plausible and compelling, but at the same time contradictory and inevitably inconclusive. The mass of new research has revealed to us just how little we understand about serial homicide and how much more work there is left to do before we fully comprehend how these monsters are spawned.
I am not a profiler, forensic psychiatrist or clinician, but an investigative historian. My objective here is not to produce a comparative analysis of the many dozens of serial-killer theories, but to stand at a distance and attempt to understand serial killing from a historian’s linear-narrative perspective and try to frame serial killing in a long-term historical-social-anthropological context. Entirely new fields and discoveries in anthropology have emerged over the last twenty years, giving us surprising insights into the nature of humans and our behavior, including our penchant for serial killing, both as spectator and as perpetrator. I seek to understand how serial killing fits into the arc of human history going back to the prehistoric era, which I have come to strongly believe holds the key to understanding serial-killer behavior in its essence and not just serial killers as a category of criminal themselves.
Every case of serial murder has its time and its place, a history and a geography, leading to that fateful instant when a serial killer and a victim intersect on an independently but synchronously chosen ground. The murder unfolds on a trajectory through time and space, history and geography, but one circumscribed by a hidden matrix of dark fantasies and bizarre sexual addictions, developed in some cases as early as the age of five. These fantasies and behaviors do not arise out of thin air but develop in a dense cultural, historical and social ecology, a cultural dialog of rage and madness that is fluid and changing and often defined by its time and place; a process that can be described as Diabolus in Cultura. (see chapter fourteen.)
Because the nature of serial killing is determined by historical, mythical and cultural parameters, including religious and moral precepts, the focus of this book is primarily on serial killers in Western society. In other civilizations and cultures, serial killing can take different forms. For example, South African police today contend with so-called sangomas muti, ritual serial killers who harvest children’s body parts for magical medicinal practices, while police in Mexico (arguably a mix of Indigenous and Western cultures) face a phenomenon of narco-gang-cult ritual murders, and Shanghai, China, has seen serial murders of underclass migrant laborers.46 The historical-economic-social dynamics of serial killing outside the world of Western Christendom is still waiting to be researched and explored.
TWO
Genesis: The Stone Age Reptilian Zombie Serial-Killer Triune Brain
Animal prius est homine.
[The animal is prior to man.]
—ANICIUS BOETHIUS, ARITHMETICA, 1.1.
Life is a never-ceasing duel between the animal instinct and morality.
—RICHARD KRAFFT-EBING, PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS
I am convinced that our popular-culture obsession with zombies today is inspired by the surge of serial killers over the last fifty years, in the same way as in the past our shared myths about monsters, vampires, werewolves, ghouls and ogres were really all about unidentified human predators in the form of lust killers, cannibal murderers and necrophiles that have always been part of the fabric of humanity. In fact, two of the most enduring monsters in human imagination—the preservative, calculating, quasi-necrophilic vampire and the destructive, frenzied, cannibalistic werewolf—roughly correspond to the FBI’s serial-killer typology of the calculating, coldly neat organized serial killer (Dracula) and the messy, impulsive, disorganized serial killer (the Wolf Man).
Having slowly shuffled up on us through the 1950s and 1960s, serial killers were overrunning us in what seemed like zombie herds by the 1970s and 1980s. And some of those serial killers were akin to sexualized horror-comic-book zombies, with bared teeth and drooling mouths, driven by unexplained, primordial, reptilian impulses to attack, bite, rape, kill, rape again, mutilate, dismember, harvest or eat body parts of their victims in ritual and instinctual-like frenzies. They were drinking blood (Richard Chase); trying to reanimate the corpses of their victims with electric current (Jerry Brudos) or injections of car-battery acid to the brain with turkey basters (Jeffrey Dahmer); harvesting human body parts for sex (Ed Gein, Jerry Brudos, Edmund Kemper, Douglas Clark); lipsticking satanic pentagrams on victims’ bodies and scooping out their eyeballs (Richard Ramirez); keeping decaying corpses in chemical drums stored in their bedrooms, in the fridge to eat (Jeffrey Dahmer) or in garbage bags in their parents’ attic and basement (“Dead raccoons,” Kendall “Stinky” Francois told his parents when they complained about the smell coming from eight bodies hidden in their house); burying bodies under their suburban bungalow crawl spaces (twenty-six buried by John Wayne Gacy), in their rose garden (seven by Dorothea Puente), in a fruit orchard (twenty-five by Juan Corona) or under their boat shed (seventeen by Dean Corll); dumping them on Hollywood hillsides (ten by Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono); collected in forested or bushy boneyards where they could be revisited for necrophilic sex (Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross, Gary Ridgway); and posing them, dismembered, mutilated or decapitated, in weird tableaus at crime scenes to greet arriving first responders (Richard Cottingham, Rodney Alcala and Danny Rolling). It seemed like the stuff of Hollywood slasher horror movies, but those fictional killers had nothing on these real-life monsters.
WHAT MAKES A SERIAL KILLER: THE CURRENT THEORIES
Current theories about how the psychopathology of the serial killer is shaped in his early childhood include such causes as a lack of infantile bonding and neglect; or its opposite, stifling maternal overprotectiveness; or formative childhood trauma, or sexual or physical abuse, or rejection; abandonment; loneliness; lack of familial stability; or personality disorders like psychopathy, sociopathy, borderline personality disorder, antisocial disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, dissociative amnesia or dissociative fugue states; or physical injuries to the head; or exposure to violent media or to true detective magazines or pornography or biblical passages; or religious ecstasy; or substance abuse; or genetic propensity; or by Asperger’s syndrome or autism spectrum disorder; or some organic brain disorder or chromosome abnormality or abnormal blood or urine chemistry, allergy or a combination of all of the above.1 In other words, we know very little—next to nothing—about why there are serial killers.
All the factors we’ve discovered in convicted serial killers, in their biochemistry, their childhood histories, injuries and traumas and in their psychopathology, we can also find in the backgrounds of many non–serial killers, some even ostensibly productive members of society with no criminal record. The X factor that makes a serial killer has not been conclusively identified, certainly not by the standards that define modern scientific, medical and psychiatric clinical practice.
One thing we do agree upon is that serial killers are made in childhood, approximately twenty years before they start killing (at the average age of twenty-eight).2
One other thing we know for sure about serial killers is that most of them are not insane in the legal sense of the word. They know exactly what they are doing—the illegal nature of their acts as well as the consequences—and take extraordinary measures to conceal their crimes. Some serial killers are highly self-aware and curious about the sick co
mpulsions that drive them. They research forensic psychiatric literature to understand themselves, but in the end, they have little empathy for their victims, and no remorse. As serial killer Richard Cottingham recently explained, he was very aware of his impulses, but “my inability to ‘want’ to control these impulses is what made me who I am.”3
Many serial killers (but not all) can be diagnosed as psychopaths on Robert Hare’s standard test Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), but that fails to definitively explain their behavior, because we have not figured out what exactly psychopathy is either, or why some psychopaths become serial killers while others become successful corporate CEOs or congressmen.
It is estimated that one in every 83 Americans4 and one in 166 Britons5 is a diagnosable psychopath. That gives us some 3.8 million psychopaths in the current United States population alone. That would be a lot of serial killers! Most of us have at least once either dated a psychopath or worked with one—or are psychopaths ourselves—but only a rare few psychopaths become serial killers.
My approach here will be to go beyond social, psychological and biochemical theories to take an evolutionary view of human serial-killing behavior to explain its origins. Whether we interpret it in the language of psychology, sociology, criminology or biochemistry, I propose that the unifying underlying impulse driving serial killers is defined by natural evolutionary prerogatives; serial killers are what Mother Nature intended all of us to be in the wild before civilization.
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