News media is probably the single worst contributor to the “less-dead” syndrome. In the mid-1990s, the trial of William Lester Suff, who murdered thirteen women in the Lake Elsinore region of California, went virtually unreported. Suff killed drug-addicted street prostitutes and left their bodies behind strip-mall garbage dumpsters, posed so as to call attention to their drug habits. But Suff went on trial in the middle of the O. J. Simpson case. What are thirteen dead crack whores compared to two upscale victims in tennis-white Brentwood slaughtered at the hands of a celebrity? And how about Joel Rifkin, who murdered as many as seventeen prostitutes in the New York and Long Island area? The media abandoned his story to cover Colin Ferguson’s massacre of six “respectably employed” suburban commuters. Joel Rifkin’s trial, in which he was convicted of nine murders, wrapped up in relative obscurity despite the number of victims. We might not even know his name if an episode of Seinfeld had not made it a butt of jokes.14 For the media covering serial murder, it is not the number of victims that counts anymore, but their celebrity status or credit rating—the trade-off these days is one upscale SUV in the driveway for every ten dead hookers in a dumpster.
Politicians too care less about the less-dead. When some twenty-five Indigenous women went missing in Vancouver, Canada, in the late 1990s, their families begged that the Police Board offer the same 100-thousand-dollar reward it had offered the previous month for information about a series of residential garage break-ins on the city’s affluent west side. The mayor scoffed at the families’ petition, saying, “Some of these girls have been missing for a year. All of a sudden . . . it becomes a major event.” He wasn’t financing a location service for hookers, he told the families.15
The Vancouver Police Department responded that they “would consider supporting ‘mini-rewards’ of $1,000 to the women themselves if they make their whereabouts known to police.”16 The police position was that “the women were capriciously hiding in an attempt to taunt the police and the women could be lured out by a $1,000 ‘reward.’”17
The fragmentary remains of some of the missing women were eventually found among the forty-nine victims whom Robert Pickton was later charged with killing and dismembering on his pig farm. When he was arrested in 2002, he said he was disappointed not to have made it an even fifty.
SERIAL-KILLER MODERN MOBILITY AND URBANIZATION
For some time, there was a theory that the surging rate of serial murder in the United States in the post–World War II years had to do with the unique ubiquity of the American automobile, which increased the mobility of serial killers, freeing them to roam across jurisdictions to kill with anonymous impunity. The FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative, launched in 2009 to investigate more than five hundred unsolved homicides linked to interstate freeways, appeared to confirm this sense of the US highway system “circulating” serial killers like bad blood in the body of the American nation. But despite the number of unsolved homicides along the highways, the stereotypical image of the highly mobile “drifter” serial killer is a myth. The reality is scarier: 74 percent of serial killers stay close to home, killing in the comfort of their own state.18 They are more likely to be your neighbor than a drifter.
Essayist and environmentalist Ginger Strand challenged the theory that the interstate highway system increased the number of serial killers by giving them easy mobility and anonymity.19 Strand argues that the freeways, especially because of the way they were built in the 1950s and 1960s through lower-income neighborhoods, have indeed contributed to rising serial murder—not by mobilizing killers, but by increasing the less-dead victim pool. The freeways’ construction destroyed inner-city communities and scattered people into soulless and degrading public-housing ghettos. Strand writes, “In its first decade [1956–1966], the interstate highway program destroyed some 330,000 urban housing units across the nation, the majority of them occupied by minorities and the poor. After that the pace picked up. No one knows the exact number, but estimates are that the highway program displaced around a million Americans.”20 This had dual consequences; the displacement of poor and minority communities created a pool of less-dead victims, while the chaos and degradation destabilized families and spawned serial killers.
Strand recounts how a thriving and prosperous Bronx was destroyed in the 1950s when vibrant low-income neighborhoods were razed to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway and its dispossessed residents were packed into high-rise public-housing ghetto complexes. In Atlanta too, the vital and prosperous Auburn Avenue neighborhood known as Sweet Auburn, pronounced by Forbes magazine in the 1950s “the richest negro street in the world,” was ripped apart by an elevated interstate freeway in 1966. Vibrant African-American-owned neighborhood businesses, cultural institutions, churches and family homes were destroyed, forcing low-income residents into bleak, anonymous, high-density public-housing complexes.21
The expropriation and destruction of Sweet Auburn to connect Interstate 20 would give serial killer Wayne Williams his vast victim pool of vulnerable children a decade later. Strand writes, “I-20 would play a key role in Atlantans’ understanding of why, in the late seventies, their children began to disappear.”22
The destruction of families and communities wrought by the building of highways through the hearts of poor and minority communities in New York, Miami, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles and other cities, along with the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1990s, took its toll and is still taking it. Devastated, broken and degraded families produce serial killers.
The several-decades-long process of destroying inner-city minority communities and families has produced a viral new pool of both serial killers and victims. While in the past serial killers were thought to be predominantly white males, today Eric Hickey’s survey shows that from 2004 to 2011, 57 percent of all serial killers were African-Americans; while the Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database indicates that in the 2010s, almost 60 percent of serial killers are African-Americans23 (this even though African-Americans make up only 13.2 percent of the American population).24
It is true that the overall murder rate has dropped significantly since the 1990s, but I wouldn’t feel too optimistic. Between the job losses and financial stresses on family life caused by the global recession of 2008 and the unceasing horror and death of the War on Terror that our young sons and daughters are called upon to wage before returning home to raise families, we should not anticipate any long-term reduction in serial killing as this current generation of children mature toward that average age of twenty-eight when serial killers first kill.
FIVE
Lupina Insania: Criminalizing Werewolves and Little Red Riding Hood as Victim, 1450–1650
They are aware of the pleasure they experience when as wolves . . .
—JEAN BODIN, DEMONOMANIA OF WITCHES (1580)
Species non mutatur. (The species never changes.)
—CLAUDE PRIEUR, DIALOG ON LYCANTHROPY (1596)
Even before industrialization, serial killing was not the exclusive prerogative of affluent aristocrats as once thought; in fact, there were plenty of ordinary shopkeeper, artisan, peasant and vagrant serial killers too. And despite the urbanization theory, we will see that serial-killer cases occurred in both urban and rural settings.
A thousand years before Jack the Ripper, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf featured a serial killer as its antagonist, according to Brian Meehan’s essay “Son of Cain or Son of Sam? The Monster as Serial Killer in Beowulf.” Meehan argues that the sceadugenga (“shadow walker,” “dark walker,” “moor stalker,” “night goer”) named Grendel in Beowulf is a serial killer who is targeting vulnerable warriors passed out from too much drinking.
Like trusting coeds, like prostitutes who enter strangers’ cars, these warriors have a weakness, a vulnerability the murderer exploits. Every night they drink themselves insatiable and when Grendel comes they lie as passive before him as any dozing
victim of Richard Ramirez or young male handcuffed by Wayne Gacy. Further, Grendel murders for the sake of murder . . . When he murders, he enjoys inflicting humiliation and pain, violating the human body by gutting and eating it; like Jeffrey Dahmer and his brother-in-fiction Hannibal Lecter . . . Like Albert DeSalvo, he has a bizarre reverence for the people he kills and the places where he kills them.1
Nonetheless, recognizable serial killers are sparse in the historical record until about the mid-1400s. It was during the Renaissance that serial killers began appearing in judicial records, at an annual apprehension rate almost comparable to the per capita rate of serial killers in the modern United States. As many as 300 serial killers were put on trial in Europe in the 200 years between 1450 and 1650.2 (For comparison, in the United States there were 431 serial killers in the 204 years between 1800 and 2004 according to Eric Hickey’s data.)3 Except they were not called serial killers back then. The serial killers were arrested, charged and tried as werewolves or lycanthropes, at the time a newly introduced ecclesiastical crime punishable by death.
To understand better some of the sociohistorical dynamics of how we came to define serial killers in modern times and the mystery of their surging appearance during the so-called serial-killer epidemic in the 1970s and ’80s, along with the rise of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, ViCAP and a type of serial-killer-apprehension “industry,” we can take a closer look at the rise of the “serial werewolf epidemic” and the related witch-hunting “industry” from 1450 to 1650, which in some ways foreshadowed the recent serial-killer epidemic.
THE WEREWOLF OR LYCANTHROPE
“Lycanthrope” comes from the Greek “lykánthropos” (lykos, “wolf”; and anthrōpos, “man”). “Wer” is an old Anglo-Saxon word for “man” (from the Latin “vir,” or “male” [see: “virile”]); thus “werewolf” in English. The earliest recorded use of the term “werewolf” in the Anglo-Saxon world goes back to the year 1000 AD as a synonym for the Devil in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances of King Cnut.4
The notion that animals can become evil or be possessed by evil spirits or the Devil, and that humans can in turn be possessed by those evil animal spirits once bitten by them, or transform or shape-shift into savage animal-monster predators willingly through rituals, pacts with the Devil or magic devices, or unwillingly by a curse or magic spell, is common to many cultures around the world throughout history.5 In ancient Greece werewolves were known as veykolakas (“wolf skinned”), and in ancient Rome the term was “versipellis,” meaning “turned skin.” Later in France werewolves become known as loup garou, in Italy lupo mannaro, in Portugal lob omen, in Spain hombre lobo, in Germany werewolf; in Russia volkolak (“wolf-skinned one”), in Poland wilkołak and in the Balkins vukodlak; and in Arabic qutrub (“cucubuth”). In regions where there were no wolves other predatory animals were substituted: weretigers in India; wereleopards, werelions, werehyenas and werejackals in Africa; werefoxes in China and Japan.6 Werewolf beliefs are described among the Navajo as late as the 1940s.7
The history of the belief in werewolves and their link to acts of rape, mutilation, murder, and cannibalism is a long and circular one, going back to the Greek myths of Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, who was changed into a wandering wolf as punishment for secretly attempting to feed sacrificial human flesh to the god Zeus. Greek myths tell the story of the inhabitants of Parnassus who were led by a pack of howling wolves to a mountaintop where they established a new city, Lycorea. According to the myth, the Parnassians practiced “Lycaon’s Abomination,” a ritual in which a child is sacrificed and its intestines made into a stew eaten by shepherds, one of whom would then turn into a werewolf condemned to wander for eight years, regaining his humanity only if he refrained from eating human flesh.8 (Contrary to popular myth, the term “lycanthrope” is not derived from mythical king Lycaon, but from “lykos,” the similarity in names apparently a confusing coincidence.)9
In his 1948 book on the nature of sadism, Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy (in which is found one of the earlier uses in English print of the term “serial killings”), Robert Eisler argued that the ancient werewolf myths, along with the phenomena of sadism and cannibal lust serial killing, are primordial memorial artifacts in our triune brains lingering on from the transformation of humans from their original vegetarian state to a carnivorous one as well, occurring perhaps as late as the last ice age, which fully receded only about 15 to 22 thousand years ago.10
It’s an interesting theory. There is certainly a persuasive range of evidence today that, physiologically, humans are not naturally equipped to hunt and eat meat, since we lack actual canine teeth (we only call them that) and have clawless hands, more suitable for picking fruit or vegetation than for taking down, killing and tearing into wild game. Humans have long intestines unlike the typically short intestines of carnivores, which quickly expel “rotting meat” from their digestive tracts.11 All this suggests that we are not naturally omnivorous meat eaters, and according to Eisler, that screws up our psyches today. We saw in chapter two how in times of famine and crisis, primitive vegetarian hominids from Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis to Homo sapiens turned to hunting and eating meat and even resorted to cannibalism if necessary (we did not develop agriculture until about ten to fifteen thousand years ago).
Eisler argued that before the last ice age receded, humans in cold climates with insufficient vegetation and berries to gather and eat became predatory carnivores, clothing themselves in animal skins for warmth and sometimes cannibalizing one another when animal prey became scarce. Eventually these fur-clad human predators migrated south to temperate regions like furry monsters—werewolves or turn-skinned versipellises—where they encountered gentle, still-vegetarian humans and attacked, raped, killed and sometimes ate them. These furry killers were not exclusively males either. Eisler writes of the erotic draw of the “Venus in Fur” theme in Western art and literature as representing
. . . the nude bloodstained maenad or “raving woman” in her bear, lynx or fox-pelt, coursing with her furiously excited male partners in the pack of the Wild Hunter through the primeval forests, vying with them in bloodlust when they came “in at the death” and finally assuaging in a wild embrace their common, mad excitement after the omophagic orgy, feasting on the live, raw and bloody meat of the quarry.12
Eisler ventured that sadism in humans is an artifact of the survival-hunting impulse and compares it to cats that sometimes toy with and maul a captured bird or mouse without necessarily eating it. Indeed, the FBI’s sponsored study Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives confirms that some sadistic serial killers were triggered and aroused to attack and kill mindlessly like predatory animals by the sight of their victims attempting to flee.13 For example, serial killer Robert Christian Hansen, the “Butcher Baker” who murdered between seventeen and twenty-one women in Alaska from 1972 to 1983, would fly his female victims in his small plane out to his remote hunting cabin as “guests,” then force the women to run naked through the wilderness as he sadistically hunted them down. It was all about the pleasure of the hunt, rather than of the kill.
The fur-clad-animal werewolf myth was imprinted in our collective unconscious, along with an incipient penchant for pursuing, overcoming, killing, raping and cannibalizing human prey. This sadistic impulse in humans today is like an obscure error in a line of DNA code in our primitive brain that becomes “buggy” in civilized societies and triggers in some the emergence of a viral serial killer (as with obesity as described in chapter two).
The Ancients on Werewolves
We assume that our ancestors were ignorant, believing that the world was flat and that witches float when thrown into water and that possession by the Devil and demons or transformation into wolves explained acts of what appeared to be motiveless murder. And perhaps illiterate peasants generally believed those things. But the educated elites among our ancestors were not all that du
mb. As early as 500 BC, a thousand years before Columbus, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras was arguing that the earth is spherical, not flat.14 And likewise, many ancient thinkers and academics were sensibly arguing that werewolves, vampires and other monsters were figments of our imagination, delusions or symptomatic of diseases or organic disorders.
In the early part of the first thousand years of Christianity in the Western world, theologists rejected and condemned what they saw as ancient pagan werewolf beliefs. In his De Anima (On the Soul), one of the early Christian church fathers, Tertullian (Quintus Tertullianus c. 155–220 AD), argued that it was impossible for the human soul to pass into animals and that people might “behave like an animal” but not actually transform into one. Saint Ambrose (339–97 AD) insisted that the idea of lycanthropy was nonsense and a product of “invented stories.”15
According to early Christian theology, only God has the kind of transformative power to make man into a beast. The Devil, at best, could only deceive humans into believing that they had been transformed into witches, werewolves or other monstrous creatures. In the fifth century, Saint Augustine explained in his City of God:
The demons can accomplish nothing by their natural power . . . except what God may permit . . . And indeed the demons, if they really do such things as these on which this discussion turns, do not create real substances, but only change the appearance of things created by the true God so as to make them seem to be what they are not.16
By 787 AD Emperor Charlemagne decreed that a belief in witches was a stupid superstition and that the burning of accused witches was a pagan custom and he outlawed it. To burn a witch was a crime akin to murder.17 By the year 1000 AD the Christian canon law books, the Canon Episcopi (Capitulum Episcopi) declared the belief in werewolves, witches and sorcerers and other supernatural monsters not only nonsense, but unchristian as well, a heresy punishable by ten days of penance on bread and water.18 The Canon Episcopi went on to specifically condemn as heretics (infidels) anyone believing in the literal existence of werewolves, witches, demons or monsters:
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