The irony is that no exaggeration was necessary; the actual numbers are extremely disturbing. An increase from 51 serial killers in the 1950s to 692 in the 1980s is alarming, no matter how you look at it. In the next chapter, I will address the central question, still debated today: why were there so many serial killers so virally emerging in this period of the 1960s to 1990s? Why?
FOURTEEN
Diabolus in Cultura: Serial-Killing Rape Culture “Sweats,” the “Greatest Generation,” and Their Sons of Cain
Killing becomes like sex and sex like killing.
—LT. COLONEL DAVE GROSSMAN, ON KILLING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF LEARNING TO KILL IN WAR AND SOCIETY
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.
—ROBERT F. KENNEDY, US ATTORNEY GENERAL, QUOTING LACASSAGNE
I am an American, and I killed Americans. I am a human being, and I killed human beings; and I did it in my society.
—NECROPHILE SERIAL KILLER EDMUND KEMPER
My fantasy is a girl screaming . . .
—SERIAL KILLER LAWRENCE “PLIERS” BITTAKER
In trying to explain the mysterious surge of serial killers in the 1970s to 1990s, there has been much toying with the idea that somehow the radical transformation of society in the 1960s must have had a role in it. We keep searching for some direct sociohistorical phenomenon that triggered and unleashed the viral rise of serial killers. It is hard not to assume that the rise of serial killing was somehow nested in the decadelong surge of overall violence, chaos, rebellion, riot, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll during the reboot of American society in the sixties.
It really was a reboot in all senses of the word. For those trapped in the very limited black-and-white world of American society up until the 1950s, the 1960s brought a saturated color wheel of opportunities and freedoms and ways of being unimagined in previous decades. From youth culture, civil rights and gender equality to the emergence of a more tolerant, progressive and pluralistic American culture, despite all the divisions that still trouble us today, America was fundamentally transformed. Anything became possible. But there was a dark side to it also.
For all the progressive things to come out of the sixties, a lot of previously repressed ugly things were also slipping off the leash. The transformation of American society from the 1950s to the 1960s freed a lot of people, but it also left a lot of casualties. Leave It to Beaver’s Wally Cleaver ended up in a rice paddy nursing a sucking chest wound while the Beaver put flowers in his hair and ran away on the magic bus with Charlie Manson at the wheel. And when Woodstock was stabbed and beaten to death by Hells Angels at Altamont and Wally came home from ’Nam with nightmares, penicillin-resistant gonorrhea and a heroin habit, the only things to hold on to through the disillusionment were the violence, greed, hedonism and serial killing of the next three decades, until Osama bin Laden brought the house down on 9/11 in 2001. That, in a nutshell, is the basic “social chaos” model offered to explain the surge of serial killers.
One can add to that Ginger Strand’s observation of the dispossession and marginalization of vibrant low-income urban communities, which vastly increased the pool of “less-dead” potential victims for serial killers to feed on. It wasn’t just that there were more serial killers; there were more available victims too. (See chapter four.) But these explanations, though plausible and helpful, in the long run are unsatisfactory.
DIABOLUS IN CULTURA
Anthropologist Simon Harrison, an expert on the necrophilic collection of body parts as war trophies by soldiers, wrote that just like the discordant tritone musical chords forbidden in the Medieval era, known as diabolus in musica (“Satan in music”), there are also discordant tones in culture, a type of “diabolus in cultura—a forbidden conjunction of cultural themes, each unexceptionable in itself, but highly disturbing when brought together.”1 This notion best describes a serial-killer culture or serial-killing “ecology” as I sometimes call it when I attempt to describe the ebbs and surges of serial killing at various points in history. At its root is never one thing, but a diabolical alchemy of several things that together drive and inspire the surges of sexual-fetish serial killers at certain times in history, like the example of the divisions in Christendom and the rise of witch hunting, or dense urbanization of the marginalized destitute and the rise of violent pornography, or the migration of impoverished female labor and the demands of the middle classes for well-dressed servant girls (see chapters six, ten and eleven). As I strove to figure out what diabolus in cultura could possibly trigger and inspire the epidemic increase of serial killing in the US starting in the 1970s, it dawned on me: we were looking into the wrong time period for the triggers!
If the psychopathology of evolving serial killers is shaped and formed when they are children, but they first kill when they are around twenty-eight years old, then the historical triggers we are seeking need to be backed up chronologically some twenty to twenty-five years, to when those killers were growing up, not when they began killing as adults.
A quick, selective thumbnail list of some of the notorious “golden age” American serial killers reveals a disturbing chronology.
SERIAL KILLER
BIRTH DATE
MAIN KILLING YEARS
(earlier killings in brackets)
David Carpenter
1930
1979–1981
Juan Corona
1934
1970–1971
Angelo Buono
1934
1977–1979
Henry Lee Lucas
1936
1976–1983 [1960]
Joseph Kallinger
1936
1974–1975
Gary Taylor
1936
1972–1975
Carroll Edward Cole
1938
1971–1980 [1948]
Jerry Brudos
1939
1968–1969
Dean Corll
1939
1970–1973
Patrick Kearney
1939
1965–1977
Robert Hansen
1939
1980–1983
Lawrence Bittaker
1940
1979
Samuel Dixon
1940
2000–2001 [1962, 1968]
John Wayne Gacy
1942
1972–1978
Rodney Alcala
1943
1971–1979
Lowell Edwin Amos
1943
1979–1994
Donald J. Beardslee
1943
1981 [1969]
Gary Heidnik
1943
1986–1987
John Ed. Robinson
1943
1984–2000
Robert Frederick Carr
1943
1972–1976
Richard Valenti
1943
1973–1974
Richard Tucker Jr.
1943
1978 [1963]
Anthony Scully
1944
1983
David James Roberts
1944
1974
Norman Parker Jr.
1944
1978 [1966]
SERIAL KILLER
BIRTH DATE
MAIN KILLING YEARS
(earlier killings in brackets)
Billy Richard Glaze
1944
1986–1987
Andre Rand
1944
1972–1987
James D. Canaday
1944
1968–1969
James E. Christian
1944
1970
Morris Solomon Jr.
1944
1986–1987
Ward Weaver Jr.
1944
1981
Robert Joseph Zani
1944
1967–1979
Vaughn Greenwood
1944
1974–1978 [1964]
Arthur Shawcross
1945
1988–1989 [1972]
Dennis Rader
1945
1974–1991
Robert Ben Rhoades
1945
1975–1990
Chris Wilder
1945
1984
Randy Kraft
1945
1972–1983
Manuel Moore
1945
1973–1974
James Emery Paster
1945
1980
Eugene Blake
1945
1982–1984 [1967]
Wm. D. Christenson
1945
1981–1982
Fred Wm. Coffey
1945
1975–1986
Lawrence Dalton
1945
1977–1978
Bobby Joe Maxwell
1945
1978–1979
Donald Lang
1945
1965–1971
Edward D. Kennedy
1945
1981 [1978]
Wm. Luther Steelman
1945
1973
Eugene Spruill
1945
1972–1973
Paul Knowles
1946
1974
SERIAL KILLER
BIRTH DATE
MAIN KILLING YEARS
(earlier killings in brackets)
Ted Bundy
1946
1974–1978
Richard Cottingham
1946
1977–1980 [1967]
Gerald Gallego
1946
1978–1980
Gerard Schaefer
1946
1971–1972
William Bonin
1947
1979–1980
Ottis Toole
1947
1974–1983
John N. Collins
1947
1967–1969
Herbert Baumeister
1947
1983–1998
Herbert Mullin
1947
1972–1973
Eddie Lee Mosley
1947
1973–1987
Edmund Kemper
1948
1972–1973 [1964]
Charles Norris
1948
1979
Douglas Clark
1948
1980
Randy Greenawalt
1949
1978 [1974]
Gary Ridgway
1949
1982–1993
Robert Berdella
1949
1984–1987
Richard Chase
1950
1977
William Suff
1950
1986–1992 [1974]
Randy Woodfield
1950
1980–1981
Joseph Franklin
1950
1977–1980
Russell Elwood
1950
1991–1997
Lorenzo Gilyard
1950
1977–1993
Gerald Stano
1951
1970–1980
Kenneth Bianchi
1951
1977–1979
Gary Lee Schaefer
1951
1979–1983
Robert Yates
1952
1975–1998
SERIAL KILLER
BIRTH DATE
MAIN KILLING YEARS
(earlier killings in brackets
)
William Hance
1952
1978
Carlton Gary
1952
1977–1978
Larry Eyler
1952
1982–1984
Donald Harvey
1952
1970–1987
David Berkowitz
1953
1976–1977
Carl Eugene Watts
1953
1974–1982
Robin Gecht
1953
1981–1982
David A. Gore
1953
1981–1983
Sons of Cain Page 35