—SENECA ON CALIGULA
I thought I was doing you guys a favor . . .
—SERIAL KILLER GARY RIDGWAY, THE “GREEN RIVER KILLER,” TO POLICE
Psychology alone does not explain the existence of serial killers. Many premodern serial-killing cases were circumstantial “crimes of necessity” perpetrated by so-called “comfort-hedonist” serial killers: bandits, robbers, pirates or cannibals whose primary motive was survival or material gain in an era when life was cheap and institutional law enforcement virtually nonexistent. Among the comfort-hedonist killers were notorious female poisoners who killed for personal gain, power or revenge, or at the behest of paying clients.
Closer to our current understanding of sexual-fantasy-driven serial killing, there were also cases of gratuitous, sadistic murders perpetrated by powerful tyrants and aristocrats for their personal amusement. Unlike those college-aged males who fantasized about rape “if they could get away with it,” despots and tyrants could get away with it. Early historical serial killings that featured elements of a sexual-sadistic pathology were frequently perpetrated by individuals who had the wealth, power and leisure time to fantasize about and indulge in serial murder for pleasure and recreation. (One of the early terms used for serial killers was “recreational killers.”)
For a very long time, it was a popular notion that “ordinary” male sexual serial killers did not exist until the last two centuries. Jack the Ripper stands in our imagination as the first “modern” sexual serial killer, and there are several theories to explain him, notably the urbanization and industrialization that began in the Western world around the 1750s.
SERIAL KILLING AND LEISURE
One theory about the rise of sexual serial killers goes like this: From prehistory until Western civilization became industrialized and modern, most human beings were too busy desperately seeking safety, food and shelter to think about their sexual needs and fantasies. People fantasized mostly about surviving the night. The daily priority of most humans was finding something to eat and a warm, safe place to spend the night where they wouldn’t be robbed and killed.
Few had time for a “hobby” like sexual serial killing; everyone was too busy struggling not to die.
However, a rare few despots and aristocrats had the affluence and leisure time to indulge desires beyond survival, like political power, imperial expansion, sexual variety and erotica, and the patronage of artists.
For example, there are historical accounts of Roman emperors who killed for no reason other than hedonistic pleasure, like Caligula (12–41 AD) and Nero (37–68 AD); sadistic rulers like Ivan the Terrible (1530–84); and mad warlords like Vlad Drăcul, “the Impaler” (1428?–77?), who inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Gilles de Rais, “Bluebeard” (1405–40), one of the richest men in France and Joan of Arc’s battlefield companion, was accused of torturing, raping and murdering hundreds of children. Elizabeth Báthory (1560–1614), the Hungarian “Blood Countess,” was accused of murdering peasant girls and bathing in their blood in the belief that doing so would restore her youthful appearance.
While they were aristocrats, what differentiates them from other sadistic tyrants is that neither Gilles de Rais nor Elizabeth Báthory had formal power over life and death the way Caligula might have had over his victims. Their murders were “private” criminal acts, illegal even by the feudal law under which they ruled and exercised their powers. Unlike Caligula and other imperial despots, de Rais and Báthory were arrested, put on trial, convicted and sentenced for their crimes despite their aristocratic rank (although there are good arguments made by some historians that they were both framed for reasons of power politics).1
These despots who were reported to revel in “hands-on” killing had the leisure time to indulge in it. They did not kill for political motives, for example, to acquire or retain power. Their killing had no practical purpose but was compulsive and committed for personal satisfaction. Many serial killers today seek exactly that kind of power over life and death that murderous tyrants had in the past. Power and control, not sexual lust, often drive serial killers, even if they express their power and control through sexual means.
THE ANCIENT ARISTOCRAT SERIAL KILLERS: BLOODLUST AND POWER
Characterizing demented despots as serial killers is not simply an exercise in hindsight. They were recognized as human monsters in their own time and condemned by their contemporaries and peers. Today we often shrug off serial killings by ancient warlords, tyrants and despots as acts of primitive power politics and assume their behavior was accepted as such in their time. Historical records show, however, that these murderers were perceived by observers in their own times as unusual or pathologically aberrant.
Accounts of King Herod’s biblical-era murder of his wife Mariamne include accusations that he kept her corpse for seven years, during which he performed acts of necrophilia.2 Talmudic references to “the doing of Herod” are linked to The Last Gate, a second-century volume in the Babylonian Talmud, which reports that Herod “preserved her body in honey for seven years. Some say that he had intercourse with her, others that he did not. According to those who say that he had intercourse with her, his reason for embalming her was to gratify his desires.”3
Caligula (12–41 AD)
The Roman Empire, with its crucifixions and gladiatorial “games,” seems barbaric in many ways, but even in this society where gratuitous killing was a popular public amusement, “private” serial killing was condemned. Take the case of Roman emperor Gaius Caesar, “Caligula” (12–41 AD).
Caligula was suspected of impregnating his own sister Drusilla and then disemboweling her to prevent the birth of a child who would rival his own divinity. But by many accounts, Caligula also tortured and murdered dozens of victims merely for the fun of it.
The Roman statesman, philosopher and author Seneca the Younger (4 BC–65 AD) in his essay On Anger (De Ira) described Caligula’s wanton killings and condemned his obsessive impatience to torture and his propensity (or “signature,” in modern serial-killing profiling terms) for gagging his victims as he watched them die. Seneca wrote:
Only recently Gaius Caesar slashed with the scourge and tortured . . . both Roman senators and knights, all in one day, and not to extract information but for amusement. He was so impatient of postponing his pleasure—a pleasure so great that his cruelty demanded it without delay—that he decapitated some of his victims by lamplight, as he was strolling with some ladies and senators on the terrace of his mother’s gardens . . . What was ever so unheard of as an execution by night? Though robberies are generally concealed by darkness, the more public punishments are, the more they offer as an admonition and warning. But here also I shall hear the answer, “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.” But surely you will find no other man who has commanded that the mouths of all those who were to be executed by his orders should be gagged by inserting a sponge, in order that they might not even have the power to utter a cry. What doomed man was ever before deprived of the breath with which to moan? . . . If no sponges were to be found, he ordered the garments of the poor wretches to be torn up, and their mouths to be stuffed with the strips. What cruelty is this?4
Imagine: Caligula’s cruelty (he gagged his victims and killed them at night!) was shocking in a society where serial killing was institutionalized as a spectator sport staged for thousands in huge arenas. Men being tortured to death or thrown to wild animals or forced to kill one another with exotic weapons in gladiatorial games while prostitutes plied their trade beneath the stands to customers sexually aroused by the spectacle of death and bloodletting—that’s entertainment. But gagging and killing people at night? Sick! To paraphrase a line from Apocalypse Now, accusing Caligula of cruelty in Imperial Rome was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.
Like the cl
iché that Eskimos have many different words for snow, the Romans really did have a vocabulary for different states and degrees of violence and cruelty. Seneca categorized violence and torture with a functional purpose, such as crucifixion or public executions in arenas, as crudelitas, and considered it to be rational; it had a constructive objective, such as to prevent rebellion or to punish criminals. (The word “cruelty” has its origin in the Latin “crudos,” meaning “bloody” or “raw,” or “unfeeling.”) But gratuitous violence without profit or purpose (compendium), killing for its own sake, was called feritas (“wildness,” “animal ferocity”). This violence was attributed to an irrational ira (anger or rage) and Seneca argued that unlimited power and luxurious affluence was an excītum (excitation) of ira.*
The audience appeal of public killings concerned some observers at the time. An intoxicating excitement induced by viewing bloodshed was called cruenta volupatate inebriabatur (“voluptuous inebriation on cruelty”).5 Athenagoras, in Embassy 35, states that “seeing a man killed in the arena is much like killing him.” Seneca wrote, “Throwing a man to the lions is like tearing him apart with your own teeth.”6 Lactantius in Divine Institutes (6.20.9–14) defines the death-game spectator as a particeps—“participant.”
It was not just the actual violence and cruelty of the “games” that concerned our ancient ancestors. They were as concerned as we are today about simulated violence and death in entertainment, in theater. The ancients had not yet coined a term for what we today call sadism, but back in 350 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato recorded this dialog with his former teacher Socrates, about the pleasure audiences derive from seeing people suffer in theatrical plays: “Must I remind you . . . of the pleasures mixed with pains, which we find in mournings and longings? How people enjoy weeping at tragedies? And are you aware of the condition of the soul in theater, how there also we have a mixture of pain and pleasure?”7
Almost exactly six hundred years later, Saint Augustine had the same concerns about joyful responses to suffering portrayed in theatrical drama. “Stage plays also captivated me, with their sights full of the images of my own miseries: fuel for my own fire. Now, why does a man like to be made sad by viewing doleful and tragic scenes, which he himself could not by any means endure? Yet, as a spectator, he wishes to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very sense of grief his pleasure consists. What is this but wretched madness?”8
PREMODERN SERIAL KILLING: THE ROUTINE LIFE OF TRAUMA
According to the “leisure” theory of serial killing, ordinary people in the premodern world did not have the leisure to percolate their childhood traumas into a serial killer’s rage and need for revenge and control; ordinary people didn’t even have childhoods back then; children were perceived as “small adults.”
Not only was there no time to brood but no social concept of “child abuse”; sexual violence, abandonment and other traumas that we today associate with the serial-killer psychology were simply facts of daily life. Everyone saw animals slaughtered for food and tortured for amusement, witches and heretics were publicly burned at the stake, criminals were tortured and executed in the public square, exposure to sex was unavoidable in communal living quarters and incest must have been ubiquitous, considering we developed deep religious proscriptions against it (along with those to rape, cannibalism, necrophilia and murder). Children routinely lost their parents to disease or violence and were themselves so often subjected to violence and rape that victims did not necessarily feel different from everybody else in the way traumatized children today might feel alienated.
SERIAL KILLING: PRINT MEDIA, INDUSTRIAL URBANIZATION AND THE “ADMINISTRATIVE STATE”
Another reason that medieval children didn’t grow up to be serial killers more frequently might be that people lived predominantly in small villages and hamlets where everybody knew one another and traveling strangers were feared, suspected and closely watched. It would have been difficult to commit multiple murders without calling attention to oneself.
Or perhaps we just don’t know how many serial killers there really were. As I and others have argued, it was so difficult to conceive of such monstrous human beings that the most gruesome crimes were attributed to monsters: werewolves, vampires or witches. We’ll look at this further in chapter five.
Then we have the emergence of newspapers and the rise of literacy in the nineteenth century. These resulted in an increase in the reporting of human serial predators. So perhaps it wasn’t that there were more serial killers but that they were made more known by the new media, which were consumed by an increasingly literate public.
At the same time newspapers were spreading reports of crime, a new modern policing system was being implemented. The first modern police force in the Western world was the London Metropolitan Police, formed in 1829. (While European cities like Paris and Berlin had “police departments,” these were royal or federal paramilitary gendarmeries concerned with public order and defense of the monarch or the republic against rebellion and revolution, not crime-fighting police forces in the modern sense.) Thus, the apparent rise of serial killers in the nineteenth century, per this theory, had to do with the rise of modern state-sponsored crime-fighting institutions that had not previously existed and media reporting on them. In other words, there were not more serial killers per se, but more police to discover and apprehend them, and more newspapers to report their apprehensions.
The other part of this modernity argument is that with industrialization, the anonymity in huge new cities bursting with masses of impoverished people not only cloaked the identity of the serial killer but provided him with a large and anonymous victim pool of destitute strangers about whom nobody cared. It was one thing to kill a peasant child in an agrarian village where the entire community, kin and clan would raise an alarm: the hue and cry. It was an entirely different matter to target a resident of the teeming slums of industrial-era London, Paris, New York or Chicago, where nobody would notice or care about the victim.
With the emergence and rise of the middle classes with industrialization, there was an accompanying attitude held by them that they were surrounded by “dangerous classes”—the urban poor, unskilled industrial laborers, servant girls, gin-plague alcoholics, prostitutes, orphans, beggars, unwed mothers, vagrants and homeless.
Desperate and marginalized people were feared and loathed by the growing middle and upper classes, which is what led to the formation of police forces; they were to protect the affluent from the lower classes, not to protect the lower classes.
Jack the Ripper victimized the same kind of person despised by the property-owning middle class of his time, and which many serial killers prefer to this day: marginalized street prostitutes.
THE DAWN OF THE LESS-DEAD: “MIMETIC COMPULSION”
That classist fear and loathing of Jack the Ripper’s time remains to this day, according to criminologist Steven Egger. It is not that there are more serial killers but that there are more available victims whose worth is discounted and devalued by society. Egger maintains that there is a climate today—a serial-killing ecology or culture—in which certain categories of murder victims are considered “less-dead” than others, such as prostitutes, homeless transients, drug addicts, the mentally ill, runaway youths, senior citizens, minorities, Indigenous women and the inner-city poor; these victims are all perceived by society as less-dead than, say, a white college girl from a middle-class suburb or an innocent fair-haired child. Sometimes the disappearance of these victims is not even reported. Criminologists will label them the “missing missing”9 (see chapter thirteen).
Egger writes:
The victims of serial killers, viewed when alive as a devalued strata of humanity, become “less-dead” (since for many they were less-alive before their death and now they become the “never-were”) and their demise becomes the elimination of sores or blemishes cleansed by those who dare to wash away these undesirable elements.10<
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We popularly regard serial killers as disconnected outcasts, as those who reject societal norms, but more often the opposite is true. In killing prostitutes, Jack the Ripper was targeting the people that Victorian society chose for its most vehement disdain and scorn. As Angus McLaren observed in his study of Victorian-era serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who murdered at least five less-dead victims (prostitutes and women coming to him seeking abortions), Cream’s murders “were determined largely by the society that produced them.”
The serial killer, according to McLaren, rather than being an outcast, is “likely best understood not so much as an ‘outlaw’ as an ‘oversocialized’ individual who saw himself simply carrying out sentences that society at large leveled.”11 Social critic Mark Seltzer suggests that serial killers today are fed and nurtured by a “wound culture,” “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound,” to which serial killers respond with their own homicidal contributions in a process that Seltzer calls “mimetic compulsion.”12
Or, as the late Robert Kennedy once put it more simply, “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.”13
As Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer of forty-eight prostitutes, said to police after his arrest, “I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing, killing the prostitutes. Here you guys can’t control them, but I can. You can’t hurt anybody. You can’t; you can arrest them and put cuffs on them, might be a little bit rough on them a little bit. But you can’t stop the problem. I was doing you a favor that you couldn’t, you guys couldn’t do.”
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