Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  formicophilia (arousal from being crawled upon by ants or other insects);

  gerontophilia (a preference for a partner from an older generation);

  hyphephilia (arousal at the touch of certain things, such as feathers or hair, or a particular textile, such as leather);

  klismaphilia (sexual arousal from receiving or giving enemas);

  maschalagnia (a partialism for armpits);

  masochism (arousal from being dominated, restrained or hurt);

  mixoscopia (a desire to watch others having sex, with their consent);

  nasophilia (a partialism for noses);

  oculophilia (a partialism for eyes);

  plushophilia (a fetish for stuffed toy figures);

  raptophilia (simulated rape with a consenting partner);

  trichophilia (a fetish for hair).

  Other paraphilias are more blatantly transgressive, dangerous and often criminal because their very premise is coercive or destructive:

  amokoscisia (a desire to slash or mutilate females);

  anthropophagolagnia (rape accompanied by cannibalism);

  anthropophagy (cannibalism);

  biastophilia (rape/sex with a nonconsenting partner);

  colobosis (mutilation of male genitalia);

  erotophonophilia (“lust murder” accompanied by mutilation of the victim before or after death);

  exhibitionism (exposing oneself to unwilling strangers);

  flagellationism (sexual satisfaction from whipping or beating a person);

  frotteurism (rubbing against unwilling subjects);

  hybristophilia (a desire in a female to partner with a male serial killer, one of the few female paraphilias);

  mazoperosis (mutilation of female breasts);

  necrophagia (cannibalism of corpse flesh in advanced stages of decomposition);

  necrophilia (sex with a corpse);

  necrosadism (mutilation of corpses);

  pederasty (anal sex with male children);

  pedophilia (sex with prepubescent children);

  perogynia (mutilation of female genitalia);

  piquerism (or picquerism) (sexual gratification through the use of a knife or other sharp object as a substitute for a penis to penetrate, stab or slash a victim);

  sadism (sexual arousal from dominating, humiliating or causing pain to an unwilling subject);

  scopophilia (voyeurism; watching others undress or have sex without their consent).

  While Krafft-Ebing can be considered a pioneer in recognizing the pattern and nature of paraphilias, his vision of what constituted “normal” sexuality was firmly of its time. For Krafft-Ebing any sexuality “that does not correspond with the purpose of nature—i.e., propagation—must be regarded as perverse.”4 But despite his heteronormative value judgments, Krafft-Ebing did successfully identify a psychological process and catalog its various manifestations.

  A paraphilia emerging in childhood, he discovered, is usually the axle around which serial killing will rotate in adulthood.

  RAISING CAIN: MAKING CHILDREN INTO SERIAL KILLERS

  We generally believe male serial killers are “made” at a very early age, sometimes as young as four or five, when a child is experiencing a mess of instinctual sexual impulses (which he does not understand as “sexual”) and simultaneously experiences some kind of traumatic event with which the sexual impulse is fused.5 (Female serial killers also develop in childhood; however, the psychosexual component is less central to their development. There are far fewer instances of female paraphilics, and dysfunctional female child and adolescent fantasies are more focused on revenge, self-esteem, control and aggression, rather than on the sublimation of trauma and rejection into sexual violence. That’s why female serial killers tend not to abduct, torture, mutilate or rape their victims unless partnered with a male serial killer.)

  An obstacle to understanding this early process of “fusing” is that child sexuality under normal circumstances is a taboo subject; it is ethically and technically difficult to study in a “normal” clinical context. Childhood sexuality usually falls within the purview of clinicians when the child is dysfunctional or a victim of abuse, but the average sexual behavior and development of “normal” children mostly occurs outside an event horizon visible to clinical observation. But some general observations can be noted: sonograms show that male fetuses experience erections in the womb. (There is no way of determining corresponding vasocongestion in the genitals of female fetuses.) Male infants have erections, and children of both sexes engage instinctually with the pleasurable sensations resulting from touching themselves and sometimes one another.6 This sexual instinct, at its primary subconscious childhood stage, can be shaped, hammered, guided, misguided, distorted, traumatized, abused, misused, exploited, shamed and punished by an array of human, cultural, religious, media, environmental and circumstantial factors.

  It is a perilous world for children, and their sexual instincts can be attacked or distorted or “vandalized” by intentional or unintentional interactions with other people, both their peers and adults. This “vandalism” of the sexual instinct can sometimes come from television, a video game, the Internet or the pages of a magazine, or in its worst and most damaging form, from predatory sexual abuse. Most children grow up routinely dodging psychosexual dangers, but as adults we somehow tend to forget (or supress in our own memories) the daily sexual perils of childhood.

  Any one of these minor or major disruptions of the sexual instinct can trigger the evolution of a paraphilic state. Of the killers in the FBI sexual homicide interview study, those reporting childhood sexual abuse (43 percent) began to fantasize about rape at an average age of 11.6 years.7 And trauma is not necessarily what we as adults might perceive as traumatic—although often it is—but what the child perceives at the time as traumatic, from parental divorce, verbal abuse or spanking, or unintentionally glimpsing pornographic images all the way to being beaten or raped or witnessing such acts. The degree of every trauma and its damage is personal to the individual exposed to it.

  Jerry Brudos, “Lust Killer” or “Shoe-Fetish Killer”—Oregon, 1969

  One of the more dramatically simple and vivid examples of childhood paraphilic paraesthesia in a serial killer can be found in the case of Jerry Brudos, who murdered four women, dressed their corpses in attire he had a fetish for, photographed them and had postmortem sex with them. He cut off and kept the foot of one of his victims in a freezer and used it to model his collection of high-heeled shoes, which he had accumulated through burglaries and by knocking women down in the street and fleeing with their shoes. He dressed another victim in his favorite heels and attempted to reanimate her with currents of electricity, causing her corpse to kick off the shoes in spasmodic convulsions that aroused him.

  Brudos recalled that when he was five he found a beautiful pair of shoes in a garbage dump and brought them home. Playing on the floor, he would have observed up close his mother or other women wearing these kinds of shoes and in some way this proximity to female power excited him, although he would not have understood this at the time. In playful innocence and curiosity, and perhaps even lust, little Jerry put on the shoes to show his mother his mastery over the objects of his desire. But his mother freaked out at the sight of her son tottering about in high heels in a state of naïve pleasure. Shrieking, she admonished him for being wicked, and made a big show of burning the shoes and shaming Jerry.

  A minor trauma in the scheme of things, but from that moment on, high-heeled shoes were shamefully sexualized and Brudos became saddled with a secret fetish, an infantile instinctual lust fused with loathing, anger, humiliation and submission to his mother’
s controlling punishment. For the rest of his life, Brudos was left trying to reconcile the living female foot with her inanimate high-heeled-shoe substitute.8 His journey to murder and necrophilia began with his early need to mediate the sacred-sexual animate with the profane-sexual inanimate, something only death can bridge.

  By itself, the high-heeled-shoes episode did not make Brudos a serial killer. He had many other issues typical of serial-killer childhoods, including a dysfunctional family and constant rejection and abuse by his mother. He also suffered the abandonment by other female figures typical of serial-killer childhoods. Unwanted by his mother, little Jerry became attached to a neighbor who treated him kindly; he fantasized that she was his real mother and found comfort in her presence, but the woman died of diabetes. He also developed a close friendship, which he described later in very sweet and tender terms, with a girl of his own age, who died of tuberculosis. These losses and a sense of abandonment deeply marked Brudos’s psychology.

  In first grade he was caught stealing his teacher’s shoes from her desk drawer and humiliated in front of his classmates. His mother’s disdain for him and other females’ abandonment of him now fueled rage toward women in general, a need to control them, force them to stay with him. Come under his will.

  As he progressed into puberty, his sexual development expanded his foot fetish and shoe fetish to other parts of the female figure that shamed him to anger or abandoned him to despair. Brudos branched out to stealing lingerie, tight skirts and clingy sweaters.

  At the age of seventeen, Jerry Brudos crossed the danger line. He was arrested after he involved an unwilling human victim in his fetish fantasies. He forced a neighborhood girl to pose and perform sexual acts while he photographed her and beat another girl with his fists when she refused to do the same. Brudos was shunted into counseling, and allowed to graduate high school. He did not immediately reoffend, and he found gainful employment at a radio station. When he was in his twenties, he married and fathered two children and seemed to settle down. He appeared to be healed. Saved. Redeemed.

  His wife later testified that Brudos was a gentle and considerate lover with her but that he insisted she dress in lacy underwear and high-heeled shoes before he could become aroused. She was happy to play along, but after the birth of their first child, his once-compliant wife found herself too busy and too fatigued for playful sex; she began refusing to “dress up” to satisfy his paraphilias. Brudos was catapulted back into his fantasy world of infantile hurt and rejection, abandoned and humiliated by yet another significant woman in his life.

  In the basement and garage of their home he constructed off-limits “man caves,” where he kept a growing collection of lingerie and high-heeled shoes. Sometimes he dressed up in them, posing in front of a mirror or taking photos as he compulsively masturbated to fantasies of possessing scantily clad females in high heels (as did serial killers Dennis Rader and Russell Williams).

  All that remained for his paraphilia to go homicidal was some kind of trigger.

  Two things happened shortly before Brudos began killing. At the radio station he was severely injured and lost consciousness in an electrocution accident that nearly killed him. Those who knew him observed that “Jerry was never quite the same after that.” Whether it was the final cause of or trigger for his killing we will never know for sure. But Jerry took a heavy electric shock to the head, no question about that.

  Shortly after the accident, his second child was due to be born. Brudos had planned to attend the birth in the delivery room, to hold his wife’s hand and wipe her brow, but at the last minute, he was rebuffed by his wife. Once again, he felt rejected or abandoned by a significant female. Shortly after that, the killing began.

  Now twenty-nine years old, close to the average age of twenty-eight when serial killers begin to kill, Brudos began abducting females and taking them to his garage and basement, murdering them and storing their corpses in the household freezer to take out and thaw to use as dress-up sex dolls before harvesting some of their body parts and dumping the rest of their remains into rivers, while his wife and children lived and played upstairs. Brudos amputated the breast of one victim and severed the foot of another victim,

  A harmless fetish for high heels became deadly when a socially inept Brudos felt compelled to kill in order to harvest a foot for his collection of shoes. In this way, an ostensibly harmless fetish, like the calm eye of a storm, can center in its repression a hurricane force of swirling homicidal paraphilic compulsions.

  DESTIGMATIZING “HAPPY” PARAPHILICS TODAY

  The stigmatization of paraphilias that Brudos experienced growing up in the 1940s and 1950s is a frustrating notion because in the West today, so many paraphilias have become acceptable practices to be playfully enjoyed by consenting couples. Recently many paraphilias have been formally delisted as disorders requiring treatment in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

  In the DSM-5, a paraphilia is not considered a disorder needing intervention if it causes no “distress or impairment” to the individual and if there is no coercion, harm or risk of harm to others. The DSM-5 concludes, “A paraphilia is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for having a paraphilic disorder, and a paraphilia by itself does not necessarily justify or require clinical intervention.”9 This is the current psychiatric view of the wide new open ranges of consensual human sexuality in the context of “normal” versus “abnormal” (or in the language of the DSM, the normophilic).

  In its treatment of all paraphilias, psychiatry has progressed toward the recognition of gender and sexual nonconformity by delisting from classes of disorders all distress-free, “happy” paraphilics. This reevaluation of what constitutes “abnormal” sexuality began with the delisting of homosexuality as a mental disorder from the second edition of the DSM in 1973.10

  Had Jerry Brudos been reassured that his foot fetish and shoe fetish were nothing to be ashamed of—no big deal—he might not have been compelled to shamefully and secretively pursue it to the death of his objects of desire.

  In summary, paraphilias can be socially constructed in childhood by the disruption of the relationship between the reptilian brain and the limbic region, caused by environmental-circumstantial cultural experiences rather than disruptions of the “natural” state of sexuality, which today we no longer securely define simply and exclusively as being for the mere purpose of reproduction.11

  One question is, what if high-heeled shoes did not exist? Would Jerry Brudos have become a serial killer?

  When we take a historical look at serial murder in later chapters, we will see how some homicidal paraphilias indeed change over time along with changing social, cultural, technological, fashion and decorative psychosexual norms.

  “VANDALIZED LOVEMAPS”: FROM LOVE TO LUST, FROM CHILD TO PARAPHILIC SERIAL KILLER

  John William Money (1921–2006), a professor of medical psychology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, proposed the “vandalized lovemap” theory of paraphilias. He focused on the clash between love and lust in Western Christian culture, between the male perceptions of the female as either “Madonna or whore” in a social and cultural construct shaped by archaic theology. Money defined a “lovemap” as the way a person navigates the dichotomy between lust and love. He wrote:

  The definitive characteristic of the sexosophy of Christendom is the doctrine of the split between saintly love and sinful lust. This doctrine is all-pervasive. It penetrates all the institutions of contemporary Christendom . . . The cleft between saintly love and sinful lust is omnipresent in the sexuoerotic heritage of our culture. Love is undefiled and saintly. Lust is defiling and sinful. Love exists above the belt, lust below. Love is lyrical. Lust is lewd. Love is heralded in public. Lust is hidden in private. Love displayed is championed, but championships for lust are condemned. Love is candid, and speaks its name. Lust is clandestine and euphemizes its na
me. In some degree or other, the cleavage between love and lust gets programed into the design of the lovemaps of all developing boys and girls.12

  It explains the good husband/father/boyfriend serial killer—who is capable of sustaining a lyrical, saintly love for his wife and children while he harbors a defiling and sinful, murderous lust toward other women—like Richard Cottingham, who separated his love for his wife and two mistresses from his sadistic lust for the women he abducted, tortured, raped and murdered; or Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, who raised a family and was a Lutheran church elder all while he stalked and killed women; or Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, a gainfully employed and reliable truck painter raising a family while having necrophilic sex with at least forty-nine female murder victims.

  John Money described paraphilias as emerging in the form of “tragedy or trauma turned into triumph.” The trauma is the defacement of a child’s conventional, heterosexual—“normophilic”—lovemap by abuse or neglect or rejection or humiliation or one of the many other traumatic things that can occur in childhood; the triumph is the rescue of lust from the sexual-psychological wreckage left by the trauma and the assignment of that lust to a new, redesigned paraphilic lovemap or fetish. Money argued:

  The new map gives lust a second chance, but at a price. The price is that the new map dissociates the saint from lust, and the sinner from love. The Madonna and whore are forever sundered, and likewise the provider and the profligate. Lust belongs only to the whore and the profligate, love to the Madonna and the provider. The Madonna and the provider are, like Dr. Jekyll, dissociated from the whore and the profligate, their equivalents, respectively, of Mr. Hyde.13