Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  In the “triumph of survival” model, Money compares paraphilic sexual addicts to people who become addicted to the danger of extreme sports, or marathon runners who thrive on transcending their pain and exhaustion to feed on the euphoria that the body generates to buffer the pain.

  This “survival” model complements the very popular “trauma control” model of serial-killer psychopathology. Many argue that serial killing is not so much about sex and lust as about an extreme need for power and control by the serial killer to compensate for their loss of control in childhood when they were subjected to trauma or abuse.

  Like Krafft-Ebing and Lombroso, John Money has fallen out of favor; his controversial beliefs included an insistence that gender identification is learned and not innate and that pedophilia can be of a benign, affectional type.14

  Even though there are legions of forensic psychiatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians, profilers, criminologists and sociologists studying the question of why and how the powerful sexual reproductive instinct is merged with the aggressive killing or feeding instinct, we still have not entirely figured it out. While we have some sense of the paraesthesia process, its root causes remain an elusive mystery.

  In general, there is a consensus that early-childhood traumas can trigger an abnormal fusion of the sexual-reproductive impulse with an ostensibly unrelated emotion or impulse—resulting in a variety of paraphilias.15 The cause could be behavioral, or it could be environmental, or it could be genetic, or psychological, or biochemical, or a combination of all; we just don’t know yet or understand how serial killers are spawned.

  (For a more extensive overview of the nuances of serial-killer psychopathology, I refer the reader to my first book, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters, and to the excellent sources listed at the end of this book.)

  The problem with all these theories and scenarios is that millions of people have the same childhood traumas, family disorders or head injuries that serial killers do, and many even have the same dark fantasies, but only an extremely rare few act on them to become predatory serial murderers.

  The final X factor that “completes” a serial killer remains elusive, and as long as it does, we should not be too hasty in discounting good, old-fashioned biblical Evil (see Ockham’s razor in chapter ten).

  FROM FANTASY TO REALITY: THE CYCLE OF ACTING OUT COMPULSIVE SERIAL-KILLING FANTASIES

  While paraphilias give a conceptual structure to a serial killer’s fantasies—a “signature,” in profiling terminology—these fantasies on their own do not make a serial killer. Many people have transgressive fantasies without acting them out or becoming obsessed by them. In surveys of healthy college-aged males with no criminal convictions, 62 percent admitted to fantasies about having sex with a female child and 33 percent admitted they would rape a woman “if nobody would ever know and there wouldn’t be any consequences.”16

  Many men are turned on by a woman wearing high heels, but they do not even imagine killing her and cutting her foot off the way Jerry Brudos did. Loving couples can engage in various degrees of “rough sex” (groping, nibbling, “love biting,” scratching, hair pulling, etc.)—as Shakespeare put it, “a lover’s pinch, which hurts, and is desired” (Antony and Cleopatra, act 5, scene 2). This kind of aggressive consensual sexual play may tap into primordial animalistic mating urges, but to actually harm one’s partner is not part of it.

  What makes a serial killer different is his willingness to take these aggressive urges off the playful-fantasy map and put them on the road to reality, to literally act them out, even if doing so injures or kills the unwilling subjects of the fantasy.

  The “trauma control” model of serial homicide argues that the child not only develops paraphilias in a fusing process, but, to survive the trauma, withdraws emotionally in an attempt to control it. The child forms an emotional scar by developing what we refer to as psychopathy—a defensive emotional flatness that protects the victim from the psychological pain of trauma but results in an absence of limbic-system emotion across the board, especially a lack of empathy for others or a sense of conscience or feelings of guilt, responsibility or remorse. Psychopathy combined with fantasies of revenge and need for control, which become sexualized with puberty, can produce a raging adult serial killer.

  There are some who believe that psychopathy can begin as early as infancy when a baby is not physically bonded with his mother. For example, serial killer David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam,” as he referred to himself in a letter to police) was adopted as an infant and raised by apparently loving, nurturing parents, yet he possessed an inexplicable rage that drove him as a child to kill his adoptive mother’s canary.

  Given up by his birth mother in a prearranged adoption, the hours-old child was torn from his first grasp of her, perhaps forcing the skittish little infant David to angrily scuttle off into the dark emotional safety of psychopathy, never finding his way out again. Fuse blown, wires melted, an irreparable microbreak in the baby’s neural pathways.

  Twenty-three years later, after finding his birth mother and feeling rejected by her again, Berkowitz went on a serial rampage, shooting women and happy couples on dates while sending taunting letters to the press.

  The problem with the trauma-control model is that while some serial killers score highly on psychopathy tests, only a tiny minority of psychopaths become serial killers. Many psychopaths end up as successful and productive business executives, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Wall Street fund managers, real-estate developers, attorneys, performing artists, Hollywood agents, television evangelists or politicians—people with careers in which a lack of empathy and concern for the feelings of others is a plus rather than a detriment. Some use their destructive hypertalents to destroy their rivals and collect salary bonuses and praise for doing so. Others crash and burn, destroying their lives and the lives of those around them with their lies, irresponsible risk-taking, double-life secrets and crimes and misdemeanors, but without murdering anybody.

  The FBI sexual homicide study concluded that psychopathy is only one of many factors in the making of a serial killer. The most common characteristics of serial killers’ childhoods are trauma and family instability. In adolescence, a range of sexual paraphilias combine with trauma-induced psychopathy or with one of its variants, such as sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and other behavioral syndromes. (The simplest explanation I’ve heard for the difference between psychopathy and sociopathy is that a sociopath is defined by what he does, a psychopath by what he is.) It’s a diagnostic issue: a difference in opinion on the nature of the same thing between factions of psychiatrists.

  Sexual abuse is not the only type of trauma experienced by serial killers as children; family dysfunction that results in feelings of abandonment is frequently reported too. It causes them to withdraw into a fantasy world in which they seek control and revenge. Often their post-traumatic psychopathy or distancing leads them to behave in a way that triggers further rejection or bullying by their peers, fueling a deepening sense of abandonment, loneliness and isolation, and retreat into violent and vengeful fantasies in which the child finds comfort and control. For a serial killer it is all about control.

  All this is occurring at the same time as the child is developing his sexuality. While most children develop “normal” relationships with understood boundaries, the lonely “serial killer” child is excluded from this kind of interaction and becomes withdrawn and isolated in his own private fantasy world.

  In that dark universe of developing hormonal sexual impulses the adolescent begins psychologically “self-medicating” with compulsive masturbation to arousing and comforting primitive, aggressive revenge and control fantasies, a powerful conditioning process often involving angry sensual interaction with increasingly fetishized dolls, erotic imagery, or fetish items—especially items of female attire, which symbolize those who wear them: the punishing and re
jecting subjects of the gestating serial killer’s infantile desires and angers. These objects or substitutes are often mutilated or destroyed in a child’s rage, which continues to pulse and grow in the adolescent until it matures in the adult offender when that rage and destruction can dangerously shift from the inanimate fetish item to the animate female figure draped in it.

  As children, serial killers sometimes subject themselves to sexualized ritual abuse before they shift the rituals to others in adulthood. Harvey Glatman, the “Glamor Girl Slayer,” tied his female victims in elaborate “detective magazine” bondage poses, photographed them and then raped and strangled them. (see chapter fourteen for more on Glatman.) When he was three years old his mother discovered him tying his penis to a string attached to a bureau drawer. When he was an adolescent, his parents found him in a bathtub practicing autoerotic asphyxiation with his penis and neck tied to the faucets. When he was fourteen his parents took him to a psychiatrist after discovering rope burns around his neck. Some of the killers in the FBI sexual homicide study reported that by the age of six they had obsessions for high-heeled shoes, female underwear and rope, which as adults they incorporated into their serial-killing rituals.

  Gradually as adolescents they will begin “test driving” their fantasies out in the real world. Before he began killing, Ted Bundy used to disable women’s cars with no concrete motive other than to see what the victims would do. Doing so satisfied in Bundy a need to bring under control the subjects of his desire. Ed Kemper mutilated his sister’s dolls before graduating to voyeurism. One day his sister teased him that he liked his schoolteacher and wanted to kiss her. Ed replied, “If I kissed her I’d have to kill her first.”

  Sometimes young offenders act out their fantasies by committing lesser crimes, such as setting fires or committing acts of animal cruelty (cats are most frequently targeted) or voyeurism, or through thefts of female garments or break-ins where they simply stand over a sleeping victim observing them without acting further, an act of control over the sleeping subject. Having tested their limits of excitement, they escalate; for example, they break in to stand over a sleeping victim, this time with a knife in hand. When Ted Bundy was three years old, his fifteen-year-old aunt once awoke to find little Ted slipping three butcher knives under her bedcovers.17 Eventually the offender is no longer satisfied with the control they exert over an unaware sleeping victim and increase the level of control by plunging that knife into them and making them dead. Many of Bundy’s victims were attacked and mutilated in their beds as they slept. Taking possession of a corpse—necrophilia—is the ultimate level of control. While Ted Bundy also abducted some of his victims, the actual abduction was instrumental to his “collection” of a victim he could make into a corpse to later enjoy under his control in secret remote locations where he would keep clusters of victims. (Just like the Green River Killer.) Other serial killers might thrive on the actual abduction as a means of control. Profilers will often start breaking down in that way whether a serial killer’s specific actions are instrumental (MO—modus operandi or method of operation) or purely pathological (“signature”). (see chapter ten for more on “signature.”)

  So-called “facilitators” like alcohol, drugs and pornography are also used to enhance fantasy scripting and lower the inhibitions on acting fantasies out. The drug of choice for serial killers is alcohol; one recent study of sexual killers found that 64 percent were drinking at the time of their offense.18 Other substances reported by serial killers are amphetamines, cocaine, hallucinogenics and cannabis.

  Finally, there is often a trigger or “last straw” event: a firing from work, a marriage collapse, a breakup, the birth of a child, an accident, even an unintended murder (such as when a sleeping victim unexpectedly wakes up). Often the identification of a serial killer begins with a survey of stressful-event triggers in the suspect’s history plotted on a timeline of homicides.

  Every serial killer has a first murder, when he becomes a onetime killer, not yet transformed into a serial killer. Some bungle it on the first try and are apprehended before they can kill again, leaving behind only a serial killer’s pathological “signature,” but not the requisite number of victims; some of them after serving a long sentence for their first murder or even two murders are then paroled and begin killing again.

  For example, serial killer Peter Woodcock (David Michael Krueger) murdered three children as a teenager and was confined to a psychiatric facility for thirty-four years until he was deemed sufficiently healed to be allowed a day pass to go to a pizzeria in town. He immediately killed and mutilated his fourth victim, a fellow inmate, on the grounds of the facility, and then went for the pizza, after which he turned himself in to the police.19 Arthur Shawcross murdered two children in 1972, served a fourteen-year sentence and, within two years of his release, began a series of twelve necrophile murders.

  Some serial killers are so troubled by their first murder that they resist committing another murder for years before a fantasy or some new trigger finally unleashes them into their serial killing spree (Jeffrey Dahmer or Richard Cottingham, for example). Others become addicted from their very first kill.

  As symptoms of psychopathy seem to fade along with testosterone levels in middle age, unapprehended successful serial killers begin to kill less frequently and even stop altogether in their forties and fifties. Like Gary Ridgway or Dennis Rader, offenders can accumulate huge numbers of victims before going into retirement or semiretirement, only to be identified years later by new investigative techniques applied to decades-old evidence.

  GOING SERIAL: CHASING THE “DRAGON’S TAIL” OF THE SECOND-KILL ADDICTION

  The second murder is the transformational one that differentiates the “ordinary” onetime murderer from the serial killer. Ian Brady, who murdered five children in the 1960s, described his second murder as “the psychic abolition of redemption,” and explained that “the second killing will hold all the same disadvantages, distracting elements of the first, but to a lesser degree. This allows a more objective assimilation of the experience. It also fosters an expanding sense of omnipotence, a wide-angle view of the metaphysical chessboard. In many cases, the element of elevated aestheticism in the second murder will exert a more formative impression than the first and probably of any in the future. It not only represents the rite of confirmation, a revelational leap of lack of faith in humanity, but also the onset of addiction to hedonistic nihilism.”20

  Paraphilias function simultaneously in the imagination as fantasies and in the reality of attempts to realize those fantasies. The attempt to express the paraphilia as perfectly as it is fantasized is highly addictive, especially when the addiction is conditioned by years of masturbatory orgasmic response. The average male serial killer begins killing around the age of twenty-eight, which means that it may take more than twenty years for deeply harbored and escalating childhood fantasies to develop into actual acts of killing.21

  When murder, rape or mutilation is acted out, the perpetrator is frequently overwhelmed and depressed to find that this newly tasted reality is nowhere near as satisfying and comforting as the long-held fantasy had been. Thus he can become addicted to “improving” and perfecting reality to the standard of the fantasy, while at the same time feeling despondent over his inability to return to the pleasure and comfort of the fantasy before he had tasted the reality.

  Over time a serial killer will attempt to develop skills and techniques to gain more control over the victim to ensure that he or she “performs” exactly like the victims in his fantasy script. For some serial killers, reducing victims to inanimate objects by killing them—“evicting them from their bodies” and “making dolls,” as Edmund Kemper described his murders—is often the easiest way to gain that control. The offender might also escalate his brutality to compensate for losing the satisfaction derived from his previous fantasies.

  Despite this, the serial killer can never achieve a reality a
s perfect as his fantasy. (That’s why it’s called “fantasy,” stupid!) The perpetrator is now perennially chasing the dragon’s tail of his sexual fantasy, never able to catch it. Serial killing is an addiction.

  Some serial killers with no fantasy world left to retreat into, or imagination to create a new one, become sloppy and berserk and are apprehended by the police—like Ted Bundy in his final frenzied murders in Florida, or Richard Cottingham as described above, or Kenneth Bianchi, one of the Hillside Stranglers. Some serial killers just stop killing and retreat into a new parallel matrix of fantasies that might not involve murder (Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” for example), while others vanish into the prison system for other dysfunctional offenses, commit suicide or just surrender and confess to the police, the way Ed Kemper did after killing his mother.

  Some serial killers become dormant and, if DNA technology or some other break doesn’t help cold-case detectives catch up to them, might never be identified. Others, of course, die before being caught. Some of the most famous unidentified serial killers are Jack the Ripper (London, 1888), the Cleveland Torso Killer (1930s) and the Zodiac Killer (California, late 1960s).

  II

  Serial Killer Chronicles: The Early Forensic History of Monsters

  FOUR

  The Dawn of the Less-Dead: Serial Killers and Modernity

  That which surprises you so much is the daily habit of that beast; for this he lives, for this he loses sleep, for this he burns the midnight oil.