Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  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