Bobby Joe Long
1953
1984
Vincent D. Groves
1953
1978–1988
Danny Rolling
1954
1980
Daniel Siebert
1954
1979–1986
Michael Swango
1954
1981–1997
Keith Jesperson
1955
1990–1995
Joseph Christopher
1955
1980–1981
Alton Coleman
1955
1984
Elton M. Jackson
1955
1987–1996
Michael Hughes
1956
1986–1993
Manuel Pardo
1956
1986
Eugene Victor Britt
1957
1995
David Leonard Wood
1957
1987
Wayne Williams
1958
1979–1981
Joel Rifkin
1959
1989–1993
Anthony Sowell
1959
2007–2009
Robert J. Silveria
1959
1981–1996
Richard Ramirez
1960
1984–1985
James Rode
1960
1991–1993
Jeffrey Dahmer
1960
1978–1991
Charles Ng
1960
1983–1985
Ángel Reséndiz
1960
1986–1999
Charles Cullen
1960
1984–2003
There is an enormous glut of serial killers who grew up either during World War II or in the first fifteen baby boom years following the war. The list is densely clustered with notorious serial killers born and raised in the postwar years who, increasingly near the average age of twenty-eight, began to kill for the first time between the 1970s and 1990s, at the height of the “golden age.”
They all lived in the wake of a receding shock wave of humanity’s biggest, most viciously primitive and most lethal war ever fought.
While most of us acknowledge that World War II was a war like no other and that it fundamentally changed our world, to this day we have not completely grasped the entire nature of that war and how American combatants experienced it. Our vision of how we fought that war, its history as told to us, is still fossilized in propagandistic necessities of the time, regarding how we defined ourselves—as a righteous democracy—and how we defined the enemy—as evil totalitarian states—and how that kind of enemy was going to be fought and defeated by us. To paraphrase Mark Seltzer’s comment, “The Western was really about serial killing all along,” I suggest that war in general is also really about serial killing all along, in the most primitive and savage way. And World War II arguably was humanity’s largest orgy of state serial killing since the Great Witch Hunt.
WORLD WAR II AS THE LAST “GOOD WAR,” AND THE “GREATEST GENERATION” WHO FOUGHT IT
Sixty to eighty million people, or 3 percent of the world’s entire population, predominantly civilian women and children, were killed during World War II between the invasion of China by Japan in 1937 and the fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.
The Nazi German and Imperial Japanese enemies that American GIs—our fathers and grandfathers—were dispatched to fight were without exaggeration far more savage, sadistic and murderous than anything we see today in the form of the Taliban, al-Qaida or ISIS. In the span of six years between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis and their allies in Europe murdered—that is, shot, gassed, tortured, hanged, battered, raped, bayoneted, immolated, mutilated, injected, X-rayed, drugged, poisoned, decapitated, massacred, subjected to medical experiments, worked and starved to death in captivity and enslavement—an astonishing eleven million people, of whom six million were Jews. This number of the criminally murdered does not include the unintentional or “negligent,” collateral killing of millions more civilians by wanton bombing and deprivation at the hands of the German conventional armed forces and paramilitary during combat and pacification operations. ISIS are petty amateurs compared to the Nazis.
While our Nazi enemies were motivated in their state serial killing by kooky racial cult theory, our Imperial Japanese enemies killed wildly in a recently revived cult of Bushido—the “way of the warrior”—introduced in its bastardized form into Japanese military culture by fascistic imperialists who seized power as a junta in the 1930s. In 1937 these Japanese “warriors” captured the Chinese city of Nanking, where they tortured, raped, killed and horrifically mutilated an estimated 50 thousand to 300 thousand Chinese victims in a six-week orgy of mass murder.2
Young American men were catapulted overseas to fight these enemies in the most horrific four-year paroxysm of slaughter Americans have ever experienced. Yes, the 620 thousand casualties in the American Civil War in the 1860s were far more numerous than US casualties in World War II, but the Civil War slaughter took place mostly with a dumb chivalry on both sides, in which women and children were rarely targeted, but men were prepared to die en masse in heroic but futile charges in which they were, as one historian put it, “funneled like pigs into a slaughter pen.”3 During a suicidal charge up a slope by Union troops against dug-in Confederates at Marye’s Heights in Fredericksburg in 1862, the Confederates were so impressed by the gallantry and courage of their enemy that they cheered and applauded them as they inflicted 8,600 Union casualties below them.4 World War I was stupidly fought in the same way, devastating a “lost generation” of young American men. World War II, however, was worse: a “total war” of annihilation in which women and children were explicitly and murderously targeted by our enemy, way beyond the scope, focus and scale of our own aerial bombings of civilian populations. American Marines were not going to be cheering suicidal Japanese “banzai” charges. Americans had not fought a war like that before and haven’t since.
Our fathers and grandfathers were the “good guys”—no question about that. It is more than just a cliché that World War II was the “last good war,” because we clearly knew how sick and evil our enemy was and how truly noble a cause it was to destroy them. That is not historical myth. But today we forget that World War II was a total war, unlike the “limited wars” of “containment” we fought later—Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, even the War on Terror.
Our enemy in World War II was so evil and powerful that we were called upon not just to utterly annihilate its armies but to bomb and bu
rn its cities along with its people, including the women and children, until their governments collapsed or surrendered. That kind of war could not have been fought anywhere near as nobly or gallantly as claimed. Unlike in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, in World War II we were not giving any lip service to “bringing democracy” to our German or Japanese enemies: we were just trying to kill as many of them as quickly as we could, until they unconditionally surrendered. Period.
After pounding Germany into rubble and dropping two nukes on Japan, we won total victory in that horrible war in 1945. But as we transitioned directly from World War II into the fear and paranoia of a possible new conflict with the Russians, we never had the time or a secure peace to catch our breath and consider the actual nature of the war we had just fought and what it took out of our soldiers. We welcomed home our World War II veterans with medals and parades as heroes who had just fought for democracy, as was right, but we posed no questions about what we had asked them to do, just in case we had to do it again soon in a war with Communist Russia.
We were told we had fought the war as noble, chivalrous liberators were expected to fight. Many of the vets coming back from their combat experience knew better. There was no nobility in the slaughter, and a lot of men returned home deeply disturbed by what they’d witnessed and experienced. Other than totally debilitating “shell shock” there was no PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder, or “flashback syndrome”) on the diagnosis books until after Vietnam. In 1945 there was no talking about the obscenity of total war. The wartime GI Joe–John Wayne–Why We Fight propaganda continued. Our returning soldiers were patted on the back and told they did their duty, given medals and a parade and tossed a GI Bill and then sent home to suck it up in sullen silence in the privacy of their own trauma. They couldn’t even talk to their families about it. Nobody wanted to hear it . . . at least not the truth. Our traumatized World War II veterans were forever trapped in silence, like prehistoric life preserved in transparent amber as “the greatest generation any society has ever produced,” a term journalist Tom Brokaw coined in his 1998 book, The Greatest Generation.5
THE POSTWAR SADISTIC TORTURE “SWEATS” AND TRUE-DETECTIVE PULPS: “. . . A WEIRD THING TO DO.”
The first clue to something amiss carried home from the war into the diabolus in cultura of postwar America appears in the pages of popular men’s magazines directed at returning veterans and at their young sons growing up in the years that followed the war. If there was ever a discernible “mimetic compulsion,” a popular cultural phenomenon extolling woman-hunting, rape, torture, cannibalism, mutilation and killing, then it was garishly celebrated in the pages of true-detective and men’s adventure magazines with monthly circulations in the millions and that sold openly on newsstands and in supermarkets everywhere from the late 1940s until the end of the 1970s. And it was an ugly thing to behold. Where did it ever come from, what dark and ugly part of the American male psyche?
Cave drawings, myths, popular lore, folk and fairy tales, fables and literature often reflect the hidden unspoken yearnings and deep, dark fears and hates in a society, as well as its traumas and triumphs. In the limited three-TV-channel-plus-Hollywood-movies world of postwar American popular culture, without cable and satellite TV, without video, without video games, DVDs and the Internet, many of the males returning from war, those that stayed at home, and their sons and grandsons read mainstream magazines, comics and paperbacks for entertainment. Other than movies, radio and later TV, there wasn’t much of anything else in the way of popular narrative entertainment.
What entertained and came to obsess some boys of Ted Bundy’s and John Wayne Gacy’s generation, and their fathers at the time, was dozens of monthly pulp men’s adventure magazine titles like Argosy, Saga, True, Stag, Male, Man’s Adventure, True Adventure, Man’s Action, True Men, Man’s Story, Action for Men, See for Men, Real Men, Man’s Exploits, New Man, Men Today, Rugged Men, Man to Man, Man’s Life, Men in Conflict, Man’s Combat, Man’s Epic, Man’s Book, New Man, World of Men, All Man, Showdown for Men, Man’s Daring, Rage for Men, Rage: The Magazine for Real Men, Fury: Adventure for Men, Peril: All Man’s Magazine, Man’s Age.
Along with true-detective magazines, these men’s magazines would increasingly be cited as favorite childhood and adolescent reading by “golden age” serial killers when they had been children, adolescents and young adults. By the 1980s this literature was denounced by FBI behaviorists as “pornography for sexual sadists” and would eventually be driven off the newsstands both by the failing economics of monthly magazine publishing and by a popular social revulsion to “rape culture” imbued in that sector of mainstream media.6
From the 1940s to the 1970s, one entertainment staple for men’s adventure magazines was the salaciously exaggerated accounts of wartime Nazi rape atrocities. The magazine covers featured garish images of bound and battered women with headlines like SOFT NUDES FOR THE NAZIS’ DOKTOR HORROR; HITLER’S HIDEOUS HAREM OF AGONY; GRISLY RITES OF HITLER’S MONSTER FLESH STRIPPER; HOW THE NAZIS FED TANYA SEX DRUGS; BRIDES OF TORMENT FOR THE S.S. BEASTS; CHAINS OF AGONY FOR THE BOUND BEAUTIES OF NORWAY; HITLER’S BABOON TORTURES IN MABUTI; THE NAZI MADHOUSE ZOO OF RAVAGED WOMEN; CAGED BEAUTIES IN THE NAZI DUNGEON OF THE DAMNED; DAMNED BEAUTIES FOR THE NAZI HORROR MUSEUM; STRIPPED VIRGINS FOR THE NAZIS’ TORCH OF TORMENT; TORTURED BEAUTIES FOR THE NAZI BLOOD CULT; TORTURED BEAUTIES OF HITLER’S PRINCE OF PAIN; “SHRIEK FOR DEATH MY LITTLE ONE”; HELPLESS MAIDENS OF THE NAZIS’ TIMELESS CASTLE OF MADNESS AND HORROR; HELPLESS VIRGINS IN THE NAZIS’ HARNESS OF TERROR; SCREAMING NUDES FOR HITLER’S MINISTRY OF HELL; STRIPPED FOR THE SWASTIKA; SOFT FLESH FOR THE NAZIS’ GREATEST HORROR; SHACKLED NUDES OF THE MONSTER GENERAL; HELPLESS BEAUTIES OF THE NAZIS’ CIRCUS OF AGONY; NAZI HORROR TORTURES OF THE RESISTANCE GIRLS; CRYPT IN HELL FOR HITLER’S PASSION SLAVES.7
Even today, nearly seventy years after the war, from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, The Night Porter and Seven Beauties to the recent Inglourious Basterds and The Reader, the Nazis and their psychosexual sadistic cruelty remain a major theme in our popular culture and imagination.
Known as the “sweats” for the luridly colored cover illustrations of male torturers and female victims glistening with sweat, an effect enhanced by casein paints and acrylics used by the cover artists, these pulp magazines featured not only a gamut of Nazi and Japanese World War II atrocities, but sweaty cannibal stories based in the South Seas and Africa; Middle East harem rape scenarios; and Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War vice and torture themes.8
Parallel to the “sweats” was a genre of grotesque crime newsprint tabloids like the National Enquirer (before it turned to celebrity gossip) and titles like Midnight, Exploiter, Globe, Flash and Examiner and lurid true-detective magazines with staged bondage photos mixed in with horrific crime-scene photos and tales of sex, death and mutilation, featuring headlines like I LIKE TO SEE NUDE WOMEN LYING IN BLOOD; 39 STAB WOUNDS WAS ALL THE NAKED STRIPPER WORE; HE KILLED HER MOTHER AND THEN FORCED HER TO COMMIT UNNATURAL SEX ACTS; SEX MONSTERS! THE SLUT HITCHHIKER’S LAST RIDE TO DOOM; RAPE ME BUT DON’T KILL ME; BOUND AND GAGGED; STRIPPED AND ROPED; DUCT TAPED DAMSEL; THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF MUTILATING WOMEN; “DO IT TILL I SHOOT”; SECRETS OF THE SEX SADIST’S TORTURE CHAMBER; DEAD LITTLE GIRLS DON’T CRY; “LET’S RAPE THE GIRL NEXT DOOR”; THE KILLER LEFT HIS TEETH MARKS ON THE NAKED BARMAID; SHE’S MINE FOR THE TAKING; “SHE SAID I WASN’T MAN ENOUGH TO PLEASE HER”; DID THE SEX TEASE DRIVE HER BOYFRIEND TO BEAT HER BRAINS OUT?; IF RAPE VICTIM YELLS, KILL HER!; NUDE MODEL WAS TOO SEXY TO LIVE!; HE BATHED HIS BEAUTIES BEFORE BUTCHERING THEM; MOLESTED AND MURDERED ON A MONDAY AFTERNOON; VIVIAN WAS ALMOST DEAD WHEN THEY BURIED HER; GREEDY HOOKER+ANGRY PIMP=MURDERED PIGEON; HOW MANY MOTIVES DOES A MAN NEED TO KILL A WOMAN?; WHILE HIS BUDDY CHEERED HIM ON—THE KIDNAPPING RAPIST STRANGLED THE LAS VEGAS BEAUTY WITH HER OWN PANTYHOSE; TORTURE, SODOMY AND RAPE ORDEAL OF THE BEAUTIFUL COED ROOMMATES; MONSTROUS CRIMES IN THE HUMAN BUTCHER SHOP; HE HACKED GIRLS TO DEATH WHENE
VER HE GOT THE URGE!; RAPE IN A COFFIN; HIS KNIFE PLUNGED INTO THE YOUNG HOUSEWIFE’S BODY AGAIN AND AGAIN, THEN . . . HE TURNED CAROL INTO A HUMAN TORCH; I’LL TAKE OBSCENE PICTURES WHILE YOU’RE DYING; HE MADE ME WATCH HIM KILL GIRLS AGAIN AND AGAIN; SLAIN BLONDE WAS TRI-SEXUAL . . . TRY ANYTHING!; “RAPE TORTURE AND CHAIN THEM UP”; KILLERS WHO MADE LOVE TO THE DEAD; THE NUDE WAS VIOLATED AFTER DEATH!; NEVER SPURN A GUN-TOTING LOVER!; LUSTING NIGHTSTALKER SMASHED SUZANNA’S SKULL!; SLASHED CORPSES AND SHREDDED BRAS MARKED HIS TRAIL: SEX FREAK ON THE PROWL; FREAKY BATHING FETISH TRIGGERED A SEX SLAYING!; IT WAS HIS DUTY TO BUTCHER HER!; HE WANTS SLAVE GIRLS WAITING FOR HIM IN PARADISE; POSE IN THE NUDE OR I’LL KILL YOU; SAVAGE HOOKER KILLER; SHE SAW HER MOTHER & SISTER MUTILATED; 20-YEAR-OLD BEAUTY’S HEART HAD BEEN NAILED TO THE WALL!; MARYLAND SLEUTHS FOUND A PIN STUCK IN THE GIRL’S CHEST BUT THE REAL SHOCKER WAS THE HIDEOUS PHRASE SCRAWLED ON SHIRLEY’S BACK!; DECAPITATED FOR 14 SEXY CENTERFOLDS!; THE SOBBING GRANDMOTHER WAS SPARED NOTHING!; GO-GO DANCER SLASHED TO DEATH IN MOTEL SHOWER; HE MADE HOME HORROR MOVIES OF HIS VICTIMS: “STRIP AND START SCREAMING . . . BABY”; HIS TEETH MATCHED THE MARKS ON HER MUTILATED BREASTS; I WATCHED MY BABY BURN ALIVE; RETARDED SON MADE OWN MOM PREGNANT—THEN HELPED HER KILL “SIN BABIES”; etc., etc.
All these hundreds of magazines had one thing in common: their covers featured a photograph of a professional model posing as a bound victim (detective magazines) or a lurid painted illustration of a bound woman (men’s adventure magazines). She was inevitably scantily clad or her dress in disarray or tatters, her skirt hiked up, exposing her thighs or stockings, her breasts straining under the thin material of her torn clothing, her bronzed flesh glowing with a fine sheen of perspiration, often with chained or bound legs spread open, scratched and bruised, tied up in a torture chamber, in a basement, on the floor, on a bed, on the ground outside; tied to a chair, a table, a rack, a sacrificial pole; in a cage or suspended from a dungeon ceiling next to red-hot pokers and branding irons heating on glowing coals, turning on an iron roasting spit over a flame, lowered into a pot of boiling water to be cooked by lusty cannibals, strapped spread-eagle on surgical tables for mad Nazi scientists to probe and mutilate; her face contorted in fear and submission, sometimes gazing out from the magazine cover toward her unseen assailant, toward the male reader, as if she was the reader’s personal slave who could be possessed for the price of the magazine.9
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