Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  With abridged, serial quotations from different sources, authors such as Krafft-Ebing tried to overcome the problem of a complexity of motives that led to the killings. The monotonous repetition of descriptions of murder, lust, and hereditary taints was one of the solutions to this problem. This style of narrative gave the impression that these cases revealed a common driving force that was hidden only from the untrained gaze and exerted its influence at all times and at all places.34

  Indeed, in Krafft-Ebing’s book, the case of Bichel is offered as “the most horrible example, and one which most pointedly shows the connection between lust and a desire to kill . . . Lust potentiated as cruelty, murderous lust extending to anthropophagy [cannibalism].”35

  Labeling the case in Latin—puellas stupratas necavit et dissecuit (“girls raped, killed and dissected [hewed]”)—Krafft-Ebing offers no case details other than a single short paragraph quoting Bichel:

  I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy parts of the body. Then I arranged the body as a butcher does beef, and hacked it with an ax into pieces of a size to fit the hole which I had dug up in the mountain for burying it. I may say that while opening the body I was so greedy that I trembled, and could have cut out a piece and eaten it.

  In his confession, however, Bichel stated that his first murder was on a “sudden impulse” to kill Barbara Reisinger “for the dress she was wearing”—not to rob her of her dress, but literally for the dress she was wearing. It was as fetishistic a sex crime as were Dumollard’s killings. Bichel would state, “My only reason for murdering Reisinger and Seidel was desire for their clothes.” His various statements that his victims no longer needed their clothing because they now wore “French style” dresses are strangely elaborate and repetitive, revealing a preoccupation with female style and attire, suggesting, again, some sort of pathological obsession.

  Numerous serial killers have been triggered by a victim’s attire or kept collections of fetish clothing they forced abducted victims to wear. Obviously, these homicidal clothing fetishes are shaped not only by the fashion of the era, but by what the fashion is associated with, what meaning it is imbued with and how that meaning is imprinted and sexualized and portrayed in the cultural media available at the time. There is somewhere a doctoral thesis waiting to be written on the history and evolution of homicidal-fetish fashion wear.

  For Krafft-Ebing, who was instrumental in identifying fetishes—the sexualization of inanimate objects—the pathological motives for Bichel’s murders were crystal clear. The tying of the victim’s hands behind her back, the blindfolding, the mutilation and dismemberment—these were “signature” serial murders. The dismemberment of the bodies was entirely unnecessary for concealment, since he buried them in his yard rather than transporting the body parts to distant locations. The dismemberment and burial weren’t for concealment but for control and eventually possession of his victims beyond their deaths. The clothes that Bichel kept, just as in the case of Dumollard, became the fetishistic totems of that control and possession. That’s why so many choice items of the victims’ clothing in both cases were found among the killers’ possessions and not sold, as they would have been if profit had been the motive.

  The “Race of Bichels”

  The Bichel case would raise its head during the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888. After his first “canonical” murder, that of Mary Ann Nichols on August 31, before he was nicknamed Jack the Ripper, the London newspaper the Pall Mall Gazette referred to a “race of Bichels” and to the sexual psychopathology of the murder.

  A PRECEDENT FOR THE WHITECHAPEL MURDER

  Owing to its exceptional atrocity and seeming purposelessness, it has been suggested that the Whitechapel murder must need be the work of a maniac. The utter poverty of the woman is against the supposition that the murderer’s motive could be greed; jealousy is equally out of the question; there is nothing to show that she had enemies; and, even assuming a motive, no sane malefactor, after cutting his victim’s throat, would deliberately mutilate her out of pure fiendishness.

  A striking case of this sort, resembling in several of its features the Whitechapel murder, occurred some four score years ago in Bavaria. In 1806 there lived at the village of Regensdorf a day laborer of the name Andreas Bichel . . . His motive, as he alleged, was to appropriate the girls’ clothing—of which, however, he admitted he had no need, and could only dispose of with great difficulty . . .

  There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that the race of the Bichels is extinct. It is probable that the miscreant who committed the Whitechapel murder has much in common with him. None but a densely stupid man, devoured by greed, would risk his neck for such insignificant plunder as he could obtain from a street-walker; none but a stealthy coward would steal on a woman unawares and cut her throat; and, finally, none but a creature with a lust for blood and devoid of all sense of pity would, after killing his victim, mutilate her body.36

  There are no references in the Pall Mall Gazette article to Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis because the book would not be translated into English until 1892. But by 1888, on the eve of Jack the Ripper, in the days before the Whitechapel serial killer would become legendary as the archetypal modern serial killer, the notion of sexual-lust mutilation killing was familiar even for newspaper readers, with or without Krafft-Ebing.37

  Dumollard and Bichel were hardly the only serial killers of the pre–Jack the Ripper era. They are only the tip of a large iceberg. Cases of pathological sex crimes, including serial murder, were cropping up everywhere on both sides of the Atlantic.

  What follow, in chronological order, are outlines of the more prominent “forgotten” serial killers in the Western world before Jack the Ripper made his appearance.

  Giorgio Orsolano, the “Hyena of San Giorgio” or “Cannibal Sausage Maker”—Italy 1835

  Giorgio Orsolano was born in 1803 in the small town of San Giorgio Canavese, near Turin in northern Italy. After his father died he was given up by his mother to be raised and educated by his uncle, a priest. Apparently, the uncle was unable to manage the unruly Orsolano and returned him to his mother, who essentially allowed him to run wild. As a teenager, he committed several petty thefts, including stealing candles from a church.

  In June 1823, he was arrested at the age of twenty for attempting to rape sixteen-year-old Teresa Pignocco, whom he ambushed while she was relieving herself in a forest. The victim’s cries had brought her mother to the scene, forcing Orsolano to flee, but he was easily identified in the small town. (A more recent version of this case on Italian Wikipedia, citing the original court records, claims that Orsolano held Pignocco prisoner in her home for six days.38) On December 15, 1823, Orsalano was sentenced to eight years in prison for the attempted rape and several counts of theft. He proved to be a model prisoner and was apprenticed in the prison pharmacy.

  After serving his full sentence, Orsalano was released on December 13, 1831, with a certificate of good conduct and returned to his small town, where he was employed in a pharmacy and then leased a store where he attempted to operate a delicatessen, which failed. During this time, he began dating his second cousin, Domenica Nigra, a twenty-four-year-old widow who owned a wineshop.39 After his business failed, Orsolano moved into her premises and the couple added a tailor-and-textiles shop and sausage making to Domenica’s wine store.

  On June 24, 1832, approximately six months after his release from prison—Orsolano would have just turned thirty, close to the average age of twenty-eight when a serial killer first kills—nine-year-old Catherine Givogre disappeared from town. Search parties failed to find any trace of her.

  On February 14, 1833, ten-year-old Catherine Scavarda vanished. Again, search parties could find no trace of the missing girl. Even though wolf attacks on humans are extremely rare, it was believed that wolves attacked and carried off both girls in a famine year. Despite his record, no suspicion fell o
n Giorgio Orsolano, who appeared to have settled down into the life of a respectable village shopkeeper. On July 7, 1833, a daughter, Margherita, was born to Orsolano and Domenica, and in April 1834 they married.

  March 3, 1835, was the Tuesday market day in San Giorgio, and also the last day of the carnival leading up to Lent. The town was chaotic with celebrants, visitors and merchants. Fourteen-year-old Francesca Tonso came in from the nearby village of Montalenghe to sell eggs in the market square. She never returned home. Her parents went into town to search for their daughter. Perhaps Orsolano thought he and the girl would not have been noticed together in the carnival crowds that day, but witnesses very quickly recalled that he purchased eggs from the girl in the market and that she was last seen accompanying him to his store to be paid. But when the parents called on Orsolano’s store, they were rudely rebuffed by him.

  The distraught parents now filed a complaint with a magistrate, who questioned Orsolano. He claimed that the girl left after being paid and perhaps had been robbed on her way home, a plausible scenario. There was insufficient evidence to search Orsolano’s premises. Orsolano in the meantime fled to his uncle’s house, where he asked for funds and prepared to become a fugitive. The record is murky as to what exactly happened next, but it seems that suspicious citizens broke into Orsolano’s store and searched it themselves, discovering a pair of clogs, a girl’s cap and a scrap of cloth, which the parents identified as belonging to their missing daughter. A more thorough search of the store revealed a cabinet with fresh bloodstains and indications that an attempt had been made to wash them out. A wet sack was also found, and it was assumed that the body of the girl was transported in it.

  In the village a cry broke out for the “werewolf” to be immediately lynched, and Orsolano was transported to a nearby police barracks for his own safety and to be questioned again. Orsolano vehemently denied murdering the girl and claimed that the fresh blood was from a goat he had slaughtered that day. One of the gendarmes questioning Orsolano played the “good cop” and plied the suspect with wine and brandy, suggesting that he confess and claim insanity. His tongue loosened by drink, Orsolano now confessed that he had lured the girl to the store, raped her and dismembered her, then carried her body parts in the sack out to a riverbank in the forest. Gendarmes located the body parts.

  Orsolano confessed to luring the two other missing girls to his store, raping them, dismembering them and scattering their body parts in the forest for animals to consume. No trace of them was found. Orsolano was charged with the three rape-murders and stood trial with due haste on March 10, 1835, a week after the murder. He was sentenced to death by hanging, and a week later in the public square of San Giorgio Canavese his sentence was executed before a crowd of ten thousand people who came to see the “monster” put to death. Many were disappointed that instead of a savage werewolf giant they saw a diminutive (1.63 meters, or 5 feet, 4 inches), pale-skinned fellow who appeared courteous and calm.

  After his execution, Orsolano’s body was taken away by three surgeons from the University of Turin who autopsied the corpse in search of anomalies that might explain his behavior. Other than larger-than-average testicles, no anatomical abnormalities were observed. A plaster mold taken from his head and a pencil sketch of it are on display in the University of Turin’s Luigi Rolando Museum of Human Anatomy.40

  The wheels of justice in Piemonte moved fast—fourteen days from crime to trial to execution. But the fame, rumors and legends behind what is probably Italy’s first modern serial killer took a little longer to mature in a world on the cusp between ancient myths and modern history. Rumors began to circulate that Orsolano confessed to eating parts of the girls he murdered. Eventually these rumors expanded to say he ground the girls’ body parts into sausages, which he sold from his shop. Orsolano was nicknamed in local dialect as the “Jena (hyena) of San Giorgio” while the townspeople became known as the mangiacristiani—the “Christian eaters” or cannibals.

  Orsolano became the subject of lore, a bogeyman story told to frighten children. According to the legend, Orsolano would lay out sausage treats and samples to lure children to his store and was caught when a customer found a child’s fingertip in a salami. By the early twentieth century The Hyena of San Giorgio became a popular children’s puppet-theater play in the Piemonte region; it was banned by Mussolini in the 1930s and revived as a theater play in the 1980s. Recently the case has been rediscovered in Italian media and popular culture as that of Italy’s “first serial killer.”41

  Manuel Blanco Romasanta, “Werewolf of Allariz”—Spain, 1852

  Manuel Blanco Romasanta murdered fourteen victims in the Galicia region of Spain. Romasanta was born in 1809 and was raised as a girl until the age of six.42 That is a familiar theme in the childhoods of serial killers. For example, the mother of American serial killer Henry Lee Lucas sent him to the first day of school dressed as a girl, wearing a dress, with his long hair set in curls. Lucas would eventually kill his mother. Serial killer Ottis Toole, who would partner with Lucas in a murder spree, was also dressed as a girl by his mother. Carroll Edward “Eddie” Cole, who murdered fifteen victims, was dressed as a “Mamma’s little girl,” in frilly skirts and petticoats, and forced to serve drinks to his mother’s guests. John Wayne Gacy was forced to wear his mother’s underwear as a humiliating form of punishment. Numerous other serial killers, including Doil Lane, Charles Albright, and Charles Manson (if you accept him as a serial killer by proxy—a cult serial killer), are known to have been forcibly dressed as girls in their childhoods.43

  Romasanta was apparently bullied in school and further humiliated as an adult when he grew to only four feet eleven in height. He eventually married and was employed as a tailor. (Reading these pre-twentieth-century cases, one is left with the impression that tailors were as prominent among serial killers as are long-distance truck drivers today.) Romasanta also freelanced as a guide and a trader (perhaps as a smuggler as well) through the bordering mountain ranges.

  In 1844 Romasanta fled his home after being accused of killing a bailiff attempting to enforce a debt collection. Settling in a small village under a false name, he worked as a cord maker, cook and weaver making yarn. Working mostly with women, Romasanta was considered effeminate by the villagers. Romasanta continued to act as a mountain guide, and at some point he began murdering women and children he was guiding. He was seen selling small items belonging to the missing victims. Romasanta was arrested and charged in nine murders in September 1853, but confessed to thirteen (not including that of the bailiff). Victims’ families accused him of being a sacamantecas (“fat extractor”), a traditional Spanish bogeyman that captures children in a sack and extracts their body fat for soap. (This is a common theme in nineteenth-century Spanish serial-killer cases.)

  At trial he claimed that his uncle initiated him in lycanthropy, earning him the nickname “Werewolf of Allariz.” The court immediately dismissed his claims of supernatural lycanthropy, but psychiatrists came forward suggesting that perhaps Romasanta was suffering from clinical lycanthropy. There was a familiar debate in the pioneering psychiatric community: was Romasanta mentally ill or faking clinical lycanthropy? Eventually the court concluded, “His inclination to vice is voluntary and not forced. The subject is not insane, dim-witted or monomaniacal, nor were these [conditions] achieved while incarcerated. On the contrary, he instead turns out to be a pervert, an accomplished criminal capable of anything, cool and collected and without goodness but [acts] with free will, freedom and knowledge.”44

  Romasanta was sentenced to die by garrote, but the queen of Spain commuted his sentence to life in prison. Romasanta apparently died in prison on December 14, 1863.45

  Louis-Joseph Philippe, the “Terror of Paris”—France, 1866

  On January 8, 1866, seventy-three-year-old Marcel Maloiseau came home to his apartment building late in the evening. As was his habit, he stopped at the second-floor apartment, intending to bid g
ood night to Marie Bodeux, a prostitute he had befriended. (Ironically, her apartment was above a police station.) The door was ajar, and when Maloiseau stuck his head in, he saw by the flickering light of a candle a man standing before a mirror, adjusting his tie. Not wanting to disturb his friend’s business, Maloiseau retreated into the hall to await the man’s departure. When the man did not emerge, Maloiseau stepped back into the doorway, and the man now hastily exited, muttering a good night. Maloiseau found Marie Bodeux dead on the floor, soaked in blood, her throat so deeply cut that she was nearly decapitated. Maloiseau raised the alarm and police rushed into the apartment, but it was too late to catch up to the man.46

  The scene was a familiar one to the Paris police. Over the past five years, eight women, mostly prostitutes, and two of their children had been murdered in the same way as Marie Bodeux: first strangled into unconsciousness, and then their throats cut to near decapitation. The killer would then wash up in a sink or basin and ransack the victim’s apartment for valuables. It is unclear from the reports whether the victims were raped. The police even had a physical description of the killer from several witnesses, including a woman who escaped his attack. Some described him as an ordinary-looking man except for a distinctive tattoo that read “Born under an unlucky . . .” with a star beneath.47

  Three days later, on January 11, Madame Midy, an artist, heard a knock on her door. When she opened it, she immediately recognized thirty-five-year-old Louis-Joseph Philippe, who had recently done some work in her apartment. Philippe was inquiring about a tool he claimed to have left in her apartment. When she told him she had found no tools, he drew from beneath his jacket a pillow case, asking if it belonged to her. Annoyed by Philippe’s questions, Midy turned her back on him. That was when he suddenly pounced on her, threw the bag over her head and forced the cloth with the fingers of his one hand into her mouth while attempting to strangle her with his other hand.