Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  In his classic memoir of fighting with the Marines in the Pacific, With the Old Breed, E. B. Sledge writes:

  It was a brutal, ghastly ritual the likes of which have occurred since ancient times on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed a profound mutual hatred. It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with that particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese. It wasn’t simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.

  While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a Marine near me. He wasn’t in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn’t dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn’t move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath.

  The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar [a combat knife] on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.38

  This is what the Last Good War was like for dad and grandpa. How do you come back the same from something like that?

  At one point in his memoir, Sledge describes how he himself was on the brink of extracting a gold tooth from a Japanese corpse, when another GI admonished him and talked him out of it. While we can be comforted by the knowledge that most of our men in that war were somewhere between Sledge and the GI admonishing him, this is what the Greatest Generation had to witness and endure just the same.

  The harvesting of Japanese body parts as necrophilic trophies and totems became so acute that in January 1944 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a high-level directive to all theater commanders in the Pacific, ordering them to adopt measures to prevent US soldiers from collecting and curing Japanese body parts as trophies and importing them into the United States.39 US Customs inspectors were mobilized to confiscate both Japanese trophy weapons and human body parts from homeward- bound GIs. The way we are asked by customs today whether we are bringing home any tobacco or alcohol, returning personnel from the Pacific were routinely asked if they were bringing home with them any human body parts.

  American poet Winfield Townley Scott was working as the book editor for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island in January 1944 when a GI recently returned from the Pacific showed up at the newspaper’s office with a Japanese skull. He recalled how everyone stopped what they were doing and rushed down to see and touch the gruesome war trophy. Scott must have had a particularly acute sense of the macabre—he was among the first literary critics to appreciate the works of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, whom he extolled in several essays and articles—but that day he was horrified by the conduct of his fellow Americans as they gathered around a human skull, cracking jokes and heaping ritual abuse on it. It inspired Scott to later write his shocking 1962 poem “The US Sailor with the Japanese Skull,” in which he meticulously describes the beheading of the dead Japanese soldier, the skinning, scalping, boiling, cleaning, curing, polishing and shellacking of his skull.40

  Japanese war-trophy skulls are now showing up all over the United States as their original possessors die and family members seem inclined to dispose of them in horror or ignorance or both. Since as early as 1983, forensic experts have been warning that these skulls will be turning up in forensic labs throughout the country “as a generation was passing and that such materials were being discarded or redistributed to others.”41

  These skulls are now literally floating up in American lakes. One was recently pulled out of Lake Travis in Texas, having been carefully tied to a rock with fishing line in an attempt to “exorcise” it from somebody’s possession. Police at first suspected a Mexican narco-cult homicide until the skull was identified by forensic anthropologists as a war-trophy Japanese skull. Another was found in a lake in Illinois. The skull had been spray-painted gold, and police feared they had a cult killing on their hands until it was identified as a World War II trophy skull. It was eventually traced to the teenage grandson of a veteran. He found the item among forgotten family possessions, spray-painted it gold, tied a bandanna around it and kept it as a decoration in his bedroom until he suddenly became frightened of it and dumped it into the lake.

  A recent article in the American Institute of Forensic Science’s journal described a spate of skulls turning up in forensic labs across the nation:

  funeral director received the skull from the former wife of a deceased U.S. Navy veteran; reported to the police by the widow of a veteran who had them since his WWII service; found among the belongings of a deceased U.S. Army veteran and was turned over to police by a grandson; reported by a veteran’s son who was told by his now deceased father that he had buried a trophy skull from WWII in their yard about 40 years previously; family members of a deceased WWII veteran discovered the skull among his possessions and turned it over to local law enforcement; discovered in a locked shed during a drug and gun raid by a northern California sheriff; found inside a wooden crate by a relative of a recently deceased U.S. veteran while cleaning out the individual’s house; remains reportedly appeared in a box on an individual’s front porch and were turned over to authorities; received them from a retired WWII U.S. Navy veteran residing in California; encountered by hikers off a trail in a Pennsylvania State Forest, [etc., etc.]42

  In Holden, Maine, local collectors had been reselling to each other a female Japanese trophy skull originally acquired in an estate sale, until one of the collectors finally contacted Japanese authorities who arranged for its repatriation to Japan.43

  In the meantime, police in Colorado seized a decorated Japanese trophy skull they found in a trunk during a drug raid. It had been a family heirloom since the great-grandfather had brought it home from Guadalcanal, where he had fought with the Marines. It had been signed by him and other soldiers in his unit and the family knew it by its nickname, “Oscar.” The family sued for the skull’s return but it was turned over to the Japanese government for burial despite the family’s protests.44

  In 2010, Derrick Shaftoe in Phoenix, Arizona, found twenty Japanese skulls among his grandfather’s possessions after he passed away. The grandfather had smuggled them home in a footlocker after serving with the 3rd Marine Division in the Pacific on Bougainville, Guam, and Iwo Jima. Shaftoe had no idea his grandfather had the grisly trophies stored in his attic, and said he vividly remembers finding the skulls, because “my wife heard me screaming from all the way in the front yard.”45

  These finds are now so frequent that there are standard protocols by which trophy skulls are repatriated to the Japanese government.46 Forensic anthropologists working in the 1980s on the repatriation of Japanese war remains on the battlefields of the Mariana Islands reported that an extraordinary 60 percent of the dead were missing their heads.47

  In his study of human war trophies (which includes a look at the collection of skull and bone trophies during the American Civil War and the Vietnam War), Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, Simon Harrison describes case after case of American veterans keeping enemy skulls in their bedrooms or living rooms to the dismay of their wives and families, to the point that they sometimes led to divorce. (Harrison even reports a case of a World War II veteran still serving in the Marines who brought his Japanese war skull with him on a tour of duty in Vietnam.) Ha
rrison notes that during the American Civil War, soldiers sometimes sent home to their fiancées pieces of enemy bones or skulls, as did soldiers in World War II and the Vietnam War. Such necrophilic “love gifting” can be anthropologically linked to primitive warrior-hunters bringing home game to their women, or head trophies symbolic of victory in a war of survival. It could even go deeper, in that “four-Fs” triune brain of ours, perhaps to those cannibal times when dead enemy warriors were not only a threat prevented but a source of a coming celebratory feast as well.

  In Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of Health and Medicine on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in File Cabinet 24, the museum stores human skulls confiscated by the military from soldiers during the Vietnam War. Some are decorated with graffiti and doodles including a peace sign and marijuana pipe. One skull (Inventory No. 1987.3017.23) is painted in Day-Glo colors and a fat black candle is melted into place at its top. There are drill marks in the skull indicating it was used as a hanging skull-candle. Another skull (No. 1987.3017.09) bears the inscriptions “Stay High Stay Alive” and “Viet Nam que loco.”48

  Professor Lawrence Miller recently reported, “Eating one’s enemy to assimilate his strength and power, or the taking of body parts as trophies, has characterized victorious warriors in every age; as recently as September 2010, US Army soldiers were charged with keeping leg bones, finger bones, and teeth from slain Afghanis.”49

  Our GI ancestors were steeped in some seriously dark, savage territory during World War II—over a million of them, if we include both Europe and the Pacific—and now in 1945 the million were coming home, some of them in a state of trauma and shock and repressed in sullen silence, unable to speak about the unspeakable. They were coming home to collectively raise a new generation of American sons—both literally and metaphorically. From traumatized fathers raising sons at home to the nation’s “fathers” in corporate boardrooms, Congress and the White House, from Eisenhower and JFK and all the way to George H. W. Bush, the World War II–veteran generation of males would shape and lead America and its sons of Cain through its diabolus in cultura well into the 1990s.

  THE WORLD WAR II PATERNAL-TRAUMA-INDUCED SERIAL-KILLER EPIDEMIC HYPOTHESIS

  I found on record no World War II combat veteran who returned home to become a serial killer. The reality of death in war probably preempted any “fantasy” veterans may have nurtured previously as civilians. It was their sons and grandsons who became the serial killers in the 1960s to 1990s.

  Accounts of “golden age” serial killers rarely detail the biographies of the fathers (when they were around) but sometimes they do briefly touch on them. In his biography of the necrophile serial killer Arthur Shawcross, who killed two children and twelve women and was born in 1945, Jack Olsen describes the father, Roy Shawcross, as a corporal serving with the First Marine Division at Guadalcanal, where he barely survived being buried alive under tons of coral sand after being hit by a Japanese shell. His buddy next to him suffocated to death. Dug out by fellow Marines, Roy later ended up lost in the jungle, separated from the US forces for four months, surviving on abandoned, maggot-ridden Japanese rations. He earned four battle stars but was never the same when he returned home from the war.50 His son Arthur would later falsely claim he was transformed into a serial killer by atrocities he perpetrated while serving in combat in Vietnam. It turned out Shawcross had served at a supply depot and never saw any combat of the kind he fantasized about.

  Necrophile serial killer Edmund Kemper was born in 1948 and murdered his grandparents when he was fifteen, later telling police he “just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma.” He was released after a brief incarceration in a psychiatric facility and went on to kill, behead and have sex with the corpses of six college-aged women, his mother and her friend. His biographer Margaret Cheney writes, “His father E. E. Kemper, Jr., had served in Europe during World War II in a Special Forces unit, which his son recalled as having included suicide missions.” Cheney quotes Kemper’s mother as telling her son, “The war never ceased. Upon his return he tried college under the G.I. Bill, couldn’t get back into studying, argued like a staff sergeant with the instructors, dropped out . . .”51 The family broke apart when Edmund was a child.

  In her study of serial killer Dennis Rader, the “BTK Killer,” born in 1945, Katherine Ramsland quotes him as saying briefly, “My dad, William Elvin Rader, a Marine, was still in the Pacific when I was born, on Midway Island.”52

  “Golden age” serial killers Douglas Clark, Herbert Mullin, Carl Eugene Watts and Chris Wilder reportedly had fathers in the military during World War II. Mostly, however, the biographies of the fathers of serial killers are not detailed to any great extent.

  Derrick Shaftoe, who found the twenty skulls in his grandfather’s attic, is not a serial killer, but he described his childhood memories of his grandfather. He said that after returning from the war his grandfather became a Lutheran minister and primary school teacher. He remembered his grandfather as a kind, quiet man who rarely talked about the war and was friendly to everybody.

  But he had a dark side.

  When Derrick was ten, he invited his grandfather to talk about his wartime experiences to his fourth-grade class. He recalled, “My teacher asked him if he ever missed home during the war. So he started telling us about this time on Bougainville he had to bulldoze a hundred Japanese corpses into a mass grave and then incinerate them for health reasons. He talked about sitting there in the jungle, reading love letters from my grandmother, by the light of the burning bodies. It was genuinely the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Then he mentioned something about a giant lizard and the story went completely off the rails.”53

  My “war trauma” hypothesis invites an ambitious undergraduate or graduate student to collect and analyze the military histories of the fathers and grandfathers of “golden age” serial killers.

  I suspect that the veteran fathers bringing up the sons in the 1940s and 1950s who became serial killers were not only traumatized by the war more than we realize, but also by the social catastrophe of the Great Depression that preceded it. The Depression destroyed a generation of male breadwinners and devastated families for decades to follow. No doubt some of the fathers of “golden age” serial killers never went overseas into combat, or did not even serve in the military. But they all lived through the Dirty Thirties, which broke the pride and spine of that generation of men and their families.

  Not all veterans returned from the war disturbed and traumatized, but many more than we acknowledge did indeed come home alienated and damaged and in no state to raise healthy and productive sons. This hidden surge of war-traumatized fathers, either in unbearably conflicted relationships with their children or emotionally and physically withdrawn or unavailable to them, spawned that surge of serial-killing sons. There were enough degraded men after the Great Depression and those few of the most traumatized from the more than a million who saw combat, to afterwards have easily fathered the 2,065 “golden age” serial killers from the 1950s to the 1990s. The numbers are not wildly out of proportion.

  The FBI’s Sexual Homicide study of the “golden age” serial killers from that generation of sons revealed that only 57 percent of serial killers had both parents at birth, and 47 percent had their father leave before age twelve. A mother as the dominant parent was reported in 66 percent of the cases, and a negative relationship with the father or male parental figure was reported by 72 percent of the convicted sex killers. The FBI study also indicated that 50 percent of the offenders had parents with criminal pasts and 53 percent came from families with psychiatric histories.54

  My hypothesis is that a broken generation of men either raised or abandoned a dysfunctional generation of boys who would emerge as epidemic serial killers—the sons of Cain.

  KILLING FOR CULTURE

  Popular culture that emerged in the wake of the Great Depression and the
war had a part to play as well. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that from the 1940s to the 1970s, a large segment of mainstream popular entertainment focused on the abduction, restraint, torture and rape of women. That too inspired, or as the FBI would say, facilitated, a generation of budding serial killers and the fantasies that kept them up at night.

  As the 1950s dawned, the sick sons of the sick fathers, along with some of the men who never went to war but remained home and fantasized about it, began to stir in the chemistry of their puberty. They fingered their knives and knotted ropes as they browsed the semen-sticky pages of their drugstore pulp magazines, with thousands of bound and prostrate women subjected to fantasy rape and torture. In this cultural ecology of repetitive visual cuing and masturbatory conditioning of their angry fantasies of revenge, they were in a state of mimetic compulsion, humming like a tuning fork, in harmony with the world of disorder and chaos that began descending on them by the mid-1960s. All deeply held values and authority were thrown open to question, presidents were caught lying, and old-school propriety and decency went out the window. The boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between love and lust, between good and evil, were smashed and scrambled in total hedonistic social breakdown, a perfect storm of repressed madness infecting an already sick and seeping wound, a fever in which these incipient dark fantasies were increasingly coming to reality in secret pulp-adventure dungeons of their own making. And because these misogynistic rape-and-torture magazines were sold next to Better Homes and Gardens and Toy Train Hobbyist, the message was, a desire to rape and torture is as mainstream as a desire to garden or collect toy trains.