A new generation of serial killers might be not only more educated and skilled at avoiding apprehension, but more aware of what they are, less confused and conflicted about it, now that the term “serial killer” has been given to us and they grew up with it like TV’s Dexter did. Maybe serial killers are hiding as “happy paraphilics” in today’s permissive culture of psychiatry.
While some argue that law enforcement has become better at confronting serial homicide, others argue the opposite, that today law enforcement is underfunded, assigns low priority to cases involving inner-city “less-dead” victims and is primarily focused, especially so in the Federal sector, on the threat of terrorism.
CONCLUSION: THE POGO SYNDROME
When we ask why some children become serial killers, we are asking the wrong question. We should be asking why children don’t become serial killers more often.
Considering the way Mother Nature equipped us to evolve, I might argue most of us—at least the males—are naturally born serial killers and are “unmade,” or socialized away from our instincts, by the necessary evolutionary techno-humanitarian balance impulse. As the Big Historians say, humans are a “thinking herd of crazies.”26
The crazy part comes out in that circular self-referential process, the dark mimetic compulsion, in which emerging pathological killers, including serial killers, fantasize about and mimic not only the reality of one another’s previous murders, but the cultural and entertainment-industry fantasy treatments of that reality, reflected back at them in a wilderness of media mirrors.
Cannibal killer David Harker, who in 1998 murdered a woman, decapitated and dismembered her and cooked and ate parts of her body with pasta and cheese, was asked by a psychiatrist whether he was inspired by the fictional serial killer Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter in the film The Silence of the Lambs.
Harker replied, “People like me don’t come from films. Films come from people like me.”27
It’s the Pogo syndrome: the enemy is us. We as an organized species unleash serial killers on ourselves.
Probably the best analogy for the notion of the serial-killing historical-cultural ecology I am attempting to describe is our current crisis of self-radicalization in terrorism. Twenty years ago the notion that young Americans or even recent immigrants to New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami or Boston would choose to perpetrate mass murder in the name of an overseas non-Christian radical religious agenda would have been unthinkable. The existence of jihadi terrorist groups, the Internet, radical Islamic propaganda, foreign military intervention, alienation and marginalization at home, mental illness and the easy availability of firearms—each of these elements on their own did not create the current phenomenon of self-radicalizing terrorists plaguing Western societies. It was only when a perfect storm of these things combined with a kind of historical dark energy of synchronicity, a diabolus in cultura, that these surges hit civilized societies.
These self-radicalized, mass-killing terrorists today come from the same place that rampaging postal workers came from in the 1980s (35 people were killed in 11 post office shootings between 1983 and 1993),28 the same place the bullied 1999 Columbine massacre perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold came from.
If they were around today, Harris and Klebold, instead of bullied loser pseudo-Goths, would be bullied loser pseudo-self-radicalized Islamic converts to ISIS. They would be dressed for it too. Our rising new breed of mass-killing zombies are basically impatient wannabe serial killers, greedily trying to get it all done in one big blowout without the patience to serially kill one victim at a time.
The same with serial killers, who in a sense are self-radicalized, evolutionarily pathological social terrorists, feeding on their own personal unhappiness and traumas and on the vulnerability and marginalization of their victims in a climate that glorifies and hails them as counterculture monster celebrities and their violence and sexual assault as staples of the entertainment industry and cultural expressions of masculine prowess and strength.
Count the kids today who are lapping all that up like kittens warm milk, and twenty years later you’d better duck and cover.
From the time of Jack the Ripper to that of Jeffrey Dahmer, an enormous body of true-crime literature, theater, movies and television created a complex and vast serial-killing genre that serial killers are drawn to, and sometimes mimic and learn from. But serial killers are not the primary consumers of this genre—it would not be financially viable if only serial killers consumed this form of entertainment media. A vast population of nonhomicidal consumers like you and me testifies to the draw of these dark narratives and their meaning. They are the true tales of horror as familiar as the Brothers Grimm.
Go figure why you are reading this book all the way to the end here, but you are, and that is why I felt the compulsion to write it.
Maybe for those of us who are not killers, Plato said it all 2,350 years ago when he commented on “the pleasures mixed with pains, which we find in mournings and longings” in Greek tragic theater. It’s why people slow down by a crime scene or a roadside accident, a kind of primitive conditioning to a profanely lustful “Thank God it was not me” or a more sacredly loving “There but for the grace of God go I.”
We love and we kill with a paraphilic dichotomy of the sacrificial sacred and selfish profane; it dogs the human condition in the Western world.
There is a troubling, foretelling, mirrorlike synchronicity, the diabolus in cultura, in the rise of werewolf killers, the emerging divisions among the elites of Western European society during the Great Witch Hunt of 1450 to 1650 and the religious wars; in the chaos and dispossession of generations of humans in the industrial revolution when serial killers like Martin Dumollard and Jack the Ripper made their presence felt; in the hedonistic affluence and greed of the 1920s, the social devastation that followed in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the brutality of the war our forefathers were called upon to fight in the 1940s, and the repressed grasp at an illusion of “normalcy” in the 1950s, followed by transcendent revolutionary cultural and political transformation in the 1960s, along with a rebirth of hedonism and in its wake, in the 1970s and 1980s, a viral surge of serial murder: the golden age of serial killers.
Looking back from the second decade of the new millennium, I see trailing behind us like smoke from a burning engine the renewed greed and exponential affluence of the post–Cold War “normalcy” of the New World Order in the 1990s, the shock and awe of 9/11, the social devastation of the 2008 financial meltdown and the brutality of the new enemy that not only American fathers, but mothers too now, have been called to fight in the still-ongoing catastrophic War on Terror, that apocalyptic “clash of civilizations” prophesied by Samuel P. Huntington back in 1993.29 History really does repeat itself, but not in the way Karl Marx claimed, “first as tragedy and then as farce.” No, it repeats itself with the same thing: our failure to imagine just how bad everything is going to get and how fucking fast. About as fast as the American body politic has suddenly become precariously divisive, not only among its people but dangerously among its elites too. About as fast as we are contemplating perhaps having to incinerate the people of North Korea, perhaps by the time this book comes out.
Where and how soon do we crash-land? If history has taught us anything, things can get a lot worse than they already are. I worry about what our recent generation of warriors brought home to the children they are raising in a newly traumatized and so divided Western world today. If my World War II + 20 years hypothesis has any validity for the killing surge from 1970 to 1990, considering our recent history, we may easily be facing another viral pandemic of serial killing unless we raise our children better now.
During his murder trial in 1970, Charlie Manson said, “These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.”
Manson of course ha
d a way of taking the truth and turning it into a lie, as somebody once said. Manson didn’t help anybody to “stand up” other than to stand up as vicious cult killers. But just the same, his statement is probably the best summary of the forces behind the perfect storms of serial-killer surges, and it came from Manson, somebody who really knew about raising children to kill, not from some ivory-tower bookworm like me.
That elusive X-factor standing between us and serial killers of the future is teaching children and helping them to stand up. That’s a truth.
We must care for the children today, before they come at us tomorrow with knives.
Because the monsters are us, and we need to stop or be stopped.
AFTERWORD
“Serial Killers Need Hugs Too”
My life as an author and a historian was defined in some ways by my brief random encounter with serial killer Richard Cottingham in New York in 1979, when I was twenty-three years old. For the next twenty-five years, I continued to work in film and television, never touching on the subject of serial killers, but I kept abreast of recent developments and cases in serial homicide out of personal interest. Much changed over those years, from the coining of the term “serial killer” to the emergence of serial killers and behavioral profilers in popular culture.
In wasn’t until 1998, when I was in my early forties, that I finally tried my hand at writing a book about the history of serial homicide. Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters was published in 2004, and I followed it up with Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters in 2007. Both books focused primarily on the history from Jack the Ripper onward.
After the two books came out, I went back to school and earned a PhD in history, and after that, I figured maybe I had one more book in me about serial killers, this time a broader chronicle going back to the early beginnings, long before Jack the Ripper, and encompassing recent developments since my first book came out.
I finished writing Sons of Cain in the spring of last year, and that summer my editor Tracy Bernstein sent me her edited version of my manuscript for a final look over and approval. I had a month to review it and make last-minute revisions, and then I would be forever done with Cottingham, serial killers and all the weird and twisted connections they entailed. Having gone as far back as the Stone Age, I was satisfied that there was nowhere left for me to go. I intended this to be my last book on the history of serial killers.
But John Lennon knew what he was talking about when he wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.”1
Just as I was rereading the last pages of my manuscript, a text message dinged in from an unfamiliar number.
The sender introduced herself as Jennifer Weiss and she wanted urgently to talk to me about Richard Cottingham. I don’t know if I would have responded had it been about any other serial killer, but this was about “my guy”—Richie.
We set up a FaceTime call.
Jennifer spoke with that familiar brash Jersey-girl accent and actually was a real housewife of New Jersey, raising four children in an affluent subdivision on a golf course in Princeton. On-screen, she had dark and smoky good looks that reminded me of Demi Moore in her late thirties, but with exotic almond-shaped eyes, about which there was something hauntingly familiar.
She told me she was the biological daughter of Deedeh Goodarzi, one of the victims that Cottingham had murdered and beheaded in the hotel room and whose head was in the bag he had bumped me with on his way out. Jennifer was the infant girl Deedeh had given up for adoption nineteen months prior to her murder, the girl whose fate I had occasionally wondered about all these decades.
I was struck by her remarkable resemblance to Deedeh, whose face I had seen so many times over the last thirty-eight years among the photos of Cottingham’s victims. Of course the eyes were familiar. It was almost as if Deedeh herself had come calling on me.
Jennifer had been adopted as an infant by a couple in New Jersey who had three sons but wanted a daughter. She was four when her parents first explained to her that she had been adopted. Later, when she was an adolescent, they told her that her birth mother had been a prostitute who couldn’t keep her, but they did not know her name, the circumstances, her story or her fate.
Despite being raised in a loving and supportive family, Jennifer began to lose her way after graduating high school. She had been rebellious; there were typical teenage sprees of delinquency. She dropped out of college after her first year and ended up working as an exotic dancer until she married, settled down and had children.
When Jennifer was twenty-six she decided to make a search for her adoption records in the hope of identifying and perhaps contacting and meeting her birth mother. To her dismay, she discovered the identity and circumstances of her mother’s horrific death as one of Cottingham’s murder victims. Such is the wreckage left behind by serial killers; you never know what might float to the surface.
In the ensuing years, Jennifer was primarily focused on being a wife and mother raising four daughters, but her birth mother’s history and fate nagged at her. She eventually found Deedeh’s father and reconstructed her mother’s history from her Iranian roots (Deedeh had been mistakenly described in the media as Kuwaiti) to her arrival in the United States as a fourteen-year-old to her eventual life as a prostitute in New York, Florida, Nevada and California. Jennifer discovered from the adoption file that Deedeh had been forced to give her up for adoption by her African-American pimp and lover, who thought the baby’s skin was “not dark enough” for her to be his child.
Jennifer felt mostly rage toward Cottingham for robbing her of an opportunity to meet her birth mother. She was also haunted by the specter of her mother’s headless torso, buried in an anonymous mass grave among the more-than-one-million unwanted, abandoned or unidentified dead interred in New York City’s historic potter’s field on Hart Island, offshore of the Bronx, her mother’s severed head and hands still secreted someplace elsewhere by her murderer, where perhaps they can still be found, recovered and reunited with the rest of her remains.
It was surviving an early onset of breast cancer that galvanized Jennifer to act upon her preoccupation with her birth mother’s fate.
Incarcerated since 1980, Cottingham for decades had steadfastly refused to talk about his crimes, primarily in deference to his three children’s opinion of him, until suddenly in 2009 he was persuaded by Canadian author Nadia Fezzani to do an interview for French television on the condition that it would not be broadcast in the United States. (He was not familiar with the global reach of YouTube.)
Cottingham appeared in the documentary looking like Santa Claus, roly-poly with a huge white beard and long gray hair. He spoke with that familiar, friendly New Jersey accent and there was an underlying amiability and good-humored charm to him. It was precisely this friendly persona that had facilitated him in luring so many women to their horrific deaths at his hands.
After seeing Cottingham in the documentary on YouTube and hearing him say that he was willing to help families of his victims toward closure, Jennifer contacted him in April 2017 and introduced herself as the daughter of his victim Deedeh Goodarzi, taking him up on his offer.
Cottingham agreed to see her and she began visiting him twice a week in the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, where he has so far served 37 years of his 191-year sentence. He is never coming out. During the visits Jennifer had been urging Richie, as he tells her to call him, to describe to her in detail how and why he killed her mother and Jane Doe and what he did with their heads and hands.
Cottingham is seventy-two and in a wheelchair now, overweight and in a state of rapidly declining health, and believes he has little time left to live. Raised in a strict Catholic family and educated at Catholic schools, Cottingham is contemplating confession as a path to some degree of redemption for everything he has done. Some self-reflective psychopaths by late middle age, as their testosterone leve
ls decline, begin to shed their behavioral compulsions and obsessions, and perhaps that is why some serial killers, if they have not been identified and arrested over a long period, start to “retire” from their killing (like Dennis Rader and Gary Ridgway, for example). They remain incurably psychopaths, but either the compulsions that drove their behavior fade or they develop intellectually the will to resist them.
I suspect, in that same process, incarcerated serial killers like Cottingham may find themselves “awakening”from their compulsions, perhaps even finding a path to some rudimentary sense of remorse and regret for everything they have perpetrated, but only in an intellectual context. They will not be feeling remorse or regret; they will only have some intellectual understanding of how they should feel and behave. They will try to be that way, not because they feel they should be, but because they know it. That’s the closest we get to an incarcerated psychopath serial killer “reforming.” Cottingham might now be going through such a process. In 2010, he suddenly confessed to an earlier murder he had committed in Bergen County, New Jersey, in 1967, when he was only twenty-one years old. The victim, twenty-nine-year-old Nancy Schiava Vogel, with whom Cottingham was acquainted, had been a cold-case murder for forty-three years until he suddenly confessed.
The sight of Jennifer, who so much resembles his victim Deedeh, unnerved Cottingham after all these years. Moreover, as a former exotic dancer she exudes the same seductive persona that drew him to her mother and other victims like her, and now triggers memories of his “best of times” when he was young and free as a serial killer. Rejected by his own children, who do not visit him, the lonely and aging serial killer took to Jennifer’s prison visits.
Sons of Cain Page 41