Cover of Richard Speck comic book from Boneyard Press
(Courtesy of Hart D. Fisher)
By contrast, Eclipse’s true-crime series was positively tasteful, consisting of nothing but rather handsomely painted full-face portraits. Take our word for it—in terms of sheer repulsiveness, the Garbage Pail Kids were infinitely more objectionable.
Why kids (particularly little boys) should get such a kick out of all kinds of gross-out merchandise, from rubber vomit to Gummi worms, is a question we’ll leave to child psychologists (though we suspect that managing anxieties by creating games around them has something to do with it). But the notion that a three-by-five illustration of Jeffrey Dahmer’s face might cause “juvenile crime and impair ethical development” seems highly dubious, to say the least.
As it happened, a federal magistrate concurred with that opinion and ruled that Nassau County’s ban on these trading cards was unconstitutional. By that time, however, the point was somewhat moot, since Eclipse Enterprises had already gone out business.
Trading cards haven’t been the only controversial collectibles. Serial-killer enthusiasts who covet a lock of Charles Manson’s hair or an original John Wayne Gacy artwork or an autographed letter from Ted Bundy now routinely buy, sell, and swap their macabre mementos over the Internet. This practice has led at least one critic—Andy Kahan of the Mayor’s Crime Victims Assistance Office in Houston, Texas—to launch a widely publicized campaign against the trade in what he has memorably labeled “murderabilia.”
The notion that collecting crime relics is a symptom of America’s “cultural rot” is, however, simply mistaken. From seventeenth-century Englishmen (and women) who would dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of beheaded criminals, to eighteenth-century Frenchmen who treated their children to working, scale-model guillotines, to God-fearing Americans in the early twentieth century who purchased graphic postcards of Southern lynchings, there have always been people drawn to grisly souvenirs. And after all, how much difference is there between collectors of “murderabilia” and the many people who scour the flea markets for Nazi memorabilia? There’s no point in denying the fact that, for countless ordinary law-abiding folk, evil exerts a dark fascination.
Cover of Ed Gein comic book by Pat Gabriele
(Courtesy of Hart D. Fisher)
Charles Manson T-shirt collection (Courtesy of Damon Fox)
Serial-killer fashions (Courtesy of Damon Fox)
Still, the thought that serial murderers are being “glamorized” by these hobbyists is deeply offensive to many people—particularly to those whose family members have fallen victim to a psychokiller. Some years ago, relatives of some of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims sued a company called Boneyard Press of Champaign, Illinois, for publishing a Dahmer comic book. The same company also put out comics about Richard Speck and Ed Gein. Gein’s story was also told in an earlier “underground” comic, Weird Trips No. 2, which featured a memorable cover illustration of ol’ Eddie in his kitchen by artist William Stout.
While some of these comics have been attacked for being exploitative, a number of more recent graphic novels have won praise for their artistry and intelligence. One of the most highly regarded is From Hell. This eight-part saga about Jack the Ripper, illustrated by Eddie Campbell and written by Alan Moore, was the basis for the stylish 2001 film starring Johnny Depp (see Movies). Rick Geary, a brilliant comic book illustrator whose work has appeared everywhere from the National Lampoon to Rolling Stone to the New York Times Book Review, has done a series of critically acclaimed graphic novels called “A Treasury of Victorian Murder,” whose subjects include Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, and H. H. Holmes.
The Collector!
In the realm of coveted collectibles, serial-killer memorabilia doesn’t quite rank with early American coins, rare commemorative stamps, and Golden Age superhero comics. Still, there are some serious collectors out there—people who would regard an original Ed Gein autograph as more valuable than a Mickey Mantle rookie card.
One of the most prominent of these is Rick Staton, an affable Louisiana funeral director, who—like so many members of the baby boom generation—developed an early taste for the macabre from his childhood exposure to creature-feature television shows, Roger Corman horror movies, and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.
In 1990, Staton—who until that time had collected nothing more controversial than grade-B movie posters—heard that John Wayne Gacy had taken up oil painting in prison. Staton struck up a correspondence with Gacy and eventually became his art dealer, selling original Gacy paintings (mostly of clowns) to a roster of clients that included celebrity collectors like Johnny Depp, John Waters, and Iggy Pop.
Before long, Staton had also contacted other infamous killers—including Charles Manson, Richard Speck, Richard Ramirez, and Henry Lee Lucas—who were soon turning out everything from crude ballpoint doodles to oil-painted seascapes, which Staton sold through a mail-order business called Grindhouse Graphics (see Art).
Rick Staton (Photo by Arbie Goings, Jr.)
In the meantime, Staton assembled his own personal collection of serial-killer artifacts and memorabilia, which currently includes such unique items as a bird painting on canvas by Speck; Polaroid photos of Lucas and David Berkowitz; Ted Bundy’s autograph; the high school diploma of Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi; cards and letters from Jeffrey Dahmer, Edmund Kemper, and a host of other notorious killers; charcoal rubbings of Gein’s grave marker; soil from Gary Heidnik’s front yard; and many works by Gacy, including a unique painting of Michelangelo’s Pietà.
Though Staton understands that his interests are bound to raise eyebrows, he makes no bones about his hobby (so to speak). Straightforward and self-aware, he knows that monsters have always exerted a fascination for people—partly because, in confronting them, we are facing and coping with our own deepest fears and forbidden desires.
Staton and his buddy Tobias Allen (creator of the infamous Serial Killer Board Game) are the focus of Julian Hobbs’s fascinating documentary Collectors (2000), which uses their obsession with convicted sex-killer-turned-sensitive-artist Elmer Wayne Henley to explore the phenomenon of serial-killer fandom.
CAUSES
What turns a person into a serial killer? There’s no shortage of theories. Unfortunately none of them is completely convincing.
One of the most intriguing (if controversial) comes from the little-known field of paleopsychology. According to this view, our civilized brains are built on a primitive, animalistic core known as the R-complex. Deep inside every one of us are the savage instincts of our apelike ancestors. For the vast majority of people, this basic, brute nature is kept in check by our more highly evolved faculties—reason, intelligence, and logic. But for various reasons, a small fraction of people are controlled by their primitive brains. In essence, advocates of this view see serial killers as throwbacks—bloodthirsty, Stone Age savages living in the modern world.
Freudian theorists take a similar view, though they talk about the id instead of the R-complex and see serial killers not as latter-day apemen but as profoundly stunted personalities, fixated at an infantile stage of psychosexual development. Because of their traumatic upbringings, compulsive killers never progress beyond the emotional development of a two-year-old. Put a porcelain vase in a toddler’s hands and it will end up in little pieces. Serial killers act the same way. They love to destroy things. To them, a human being is just a breakable object—something to be taken apart for pleasure.
Other explanations run the gamut from the physiological (head injuries, hormonal imbalances, genetic deficiencies) to the sociological (class resentment, overpopulation, too much exposure to media violence). There are even environmental theories. One expert has proposed that serial murderers suffer from a disease caused, among other factors, by toxic pollutants.
Whatever other factors may or may not be involved, one common denominator seems to be that they all have an atrocious family background. The appalling U
pbringing of most, if not all, serial killers clearly contributes to their pathology, turning them into people so full of hate and self-loathing that sadistic murder becomes their substitute for intimacy (see Sadism). Still, even a truly dreadful upbringing doesn’t seem to be a sufficient explanation. After all, countless human beings suffer traumatic childhoods without growing up to be serial lust killers.
Ultimately, the root causes of serial murder are unknowable—as mysterious in their way as the sources of Mozart’s musicianship or Einstein’s mathematical genius. Perhaps the only possible answer is the one provided by the great American novelist Herman Melville in his masterpiece Billy Budd. Pondering the depravity of the villainous John Claggart, who sets out to destroy the innocent hero for no discernible reason, Melville concludes that Claggart’s “evil nature” was “not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living” but was “born with him and innate.”
Sometimes, in short, “elemental evil” simply takes a human form.
“Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort.”
HERMAN MELVILLE
Billy Budd
Cesare Lombroso and “Criminal Man”
A hundred years ago, an Italian physician named Cesare Lombroso invented the field of “criminal anthropology,” a forerunner of the current theory of “paleopsychology.” Lombroso believed that criminals were “atavisms”—savage, apelike beings born, by some unexplained evolutionary quirk, into the modern world. Because they were throwbacks to a prehistoric past, criminals could be identified by certain physical characteristics. They actually possessed the anatomical traits of apes—thick skulls, big jaws, high cheekbones, jutting brows, long arms, thick necks, etc.
A serial killer named Vincenz Verzeni helped convince Lombroso that his theory was valid. After strangling two women outside Rome, Verzeni disembowelled the corpses and, in one case, drank the victim’s blood. Examining the vampire killer after his arrest, Lombroso discovered that the young man—with his large jaw, bull neck, malformed ears, and low forehead—was a perfect specimen of “primitive humanity.” Before long, Lombroso was claiming that you could identify a “born criminal” purely by his physical features. Called to testify at the trial of one young suspect, Lombroso argued that the man must certainly be guilty because he had big ears, a crooked nose, a sinister look, and a tattoo.
Needless to say, Lombroso’s theory of “criminal man” has been thoroughly discredited by now—especially his notion that you can identify a murderer just by looking at him.
At least thirty young women—who once met a handsome, clean-cut young fellow named Ted Bundy, who looked nothing in the world like an ape—could have told the famous criminologist just how wrong he was.
CHARACTERISTICS
Besides the obvious ones—sick minds, sociopathic personalities, unspeakable desires, etc.—serial killers tend to share a number of characteristics. In a paper presented to the International Association of Forensic Sciences in 1984, FBI Special Agents Robert Ressler, John Douglas, and several colleagues listed the following “general characteristics” of serial sex murderers:
1. The great majority are single white males.
2. They tend to be intelligent, with IQs in the “bright normal” range.
3. In spite of their high IQs, they do poorly in school, have a hard time holding down jobs, and often work as unskilled laborers.
4. They tend to come from markedly unstable families. Typically, they are abandoned as children by their fathers and raised by domineering mothers.
5. Their families often have criminal, psychiatric, and alcoholic histories.
6. They hate their fathers. They hate their mothers.
7. They are commonly abused as children—psychologically, physically, and sexually. Sometimes the abuser is a stranger. Sometimes it is a friend. Often it is a family member.
8. Many of them end up spending time in institutions as children and have records of early psychiatric problems.
9. They have a high rate of suicide attempts.
10. They are intensely interested from an early age in voyeurism, fetishism, and sadomasochistic pornography.
For other characteristics of serial killers, see the following entries: Causes, Race and Racism, Triad, Upbringing, and Women.
Andrei Chikatilo
According to the party line, serial killers didn’t exist in the Soviet state. There was only one problem with this assertion. Even while Communist officials were declaring that serial murder was strictly “a decadent Western phenomenon,” one of the most monstrous psychopaths in the annals of crime was at large in the Russian port city of Rostov.
He was Andrei Chikatilo—a mousy-looking forty-two-year-old factory clerk, married, with children. Possessed by a monstrous blood lust, he targeted easy prey—boys, girls, defenseless young women. Usually, he would lure them away from bus stops with the promise of a ride or a meal. Leading them into a lonely stretch of woods, he would pounce like a werewolf, committing unspeakable atrocities on his victims, often while they were still alive. (Cutting out their tongues, biting off their nipples, slicing off their noses, gouging out their eyes, devouring their genitals—these were just a few of the horrors he perpetrated.) So fierce was his appetite for human blood that during one four-week span in 1984, he butchered no fewer than six young victims.
Chikatilo’s unwitting accomplice in these hideous crimes was the Soviet totalitarian system. According to Communist dogma, crime could not exist in a classless people’s republic like the USSR. Rather than admit that they were wrong, Soviet authorities covered up Chikatilo’s monstrous spree. As a result, during the “Mad Beast’s” twelve-year reign of terror, Soviet citizens didn’t even know that a serial killer was on the loose. Instead of being on their guard, they were left vulnerable to his advances.
The police finally nabbed Chikatilo in 1990. He was charged with a staggering fifty-three murders, though the true total may have been even higher. At his trial, he was kept locked inside a steel cage to protect him from his victims’ relatives. He was executed in 1994.
For a compelling dramatization of the case, we highly recommend Citizen X, a 1995 made-for-cable movie (available on video) starring Stephen Rea, Donald Sutherland, Max von Sydow, and—in a thoroughly chilling portrayal—Jeffrey DeMunn as Chikatilo.
“What I did was not for sexual pleasure. Rather it brought me some peace of mind.”
ANDREI CHIKATILO
CHILDHOOD
See Upbringing.
CIVIL SERVANTS
Government workers have never enjoyed the most glowing reputation among the general public. Just ask anyone who’s ever had to deal with a surly clerk at the information desk of the local DMV, or been called in for an IRS audit.
The public’s dim view of civil servants certainly wasn’t helped any in 1986 when postal worker Patrick Sherrill strolled into his workplace in Edmond, Oklahoma, with a pair of Colt .45 semi-automatics and proceeded to relieve some of his work-related tension by killing fourteen people and himself. As it turned out, he was just the first of several USPS workers over the next ten years to teach the world the meaning of the phrase “going postal.”
To be to fair to postal workers, theirs are not the only governmental ranks from which homicidal maniacs have sprung. In the late 1950s, a Scottish sociopath named Peter Manuel was holding down a civil service job with the City of Glasgow Gas Board. During his off hours, however, Manuel was leading a sinister secret life. A lifetime criminal with a long record of convictions for offenses ranging from burglary to rape, Manuel murdered his first victim—a seventeen-year-old girl whose body he dumped on a golf course—in January 1956. Before long, he had slaughtered a total of eight people, including two entire families who were shot in their skulls as they slept in their beds at night.
Manuel’s countryman, the
notorious Dennis Nilsen—whose crimes bore a sickening resemblance to those of Jeffrey Dahmer—also worked as a civil servant. Employed by the British Manpower Services Commission, Nilsen was a dedicated professional who helped downtrodden young men find gainful work. By night, however, he was not assisting young men but preying on them. After having sex with one of his gay pickups, Nilsen would kill the young victim, then keep the rotting corpse around his flat for “companionship.” When the decay became unbearable, Nilsen would finally dismember and dispose of the body.
Nilsen’s monstrous career—which left fifteen victims dead—began in late 1978. Just one year earlier, the crimes of another notorious serial killer came to an end. In August 1977, the gun-crazy madman known as “Son of Sam” was apprehended after the biggest manhunt in New York City history. The public responded to his arrest with two equally intense emotions—relief at his capture and amazement at his identity. Instead of a slavering monster, the great boogeyman of the disco age turned out to be a pudgy-faced nonentity named David Berkowitz, regarded by his fellow employees as a quiet, courteous nebbish.
Berkowitz’s job? He worked as a letter sorter for a post office branch in the Bronx.
Nearly thirty years later, the public had grown more accustomed to this sort of disparity between the mundane and the monstrous and was less taken aback to learn that the man charged with being the notorious BTK Strangler was a balding, bespectacled codes enforcer for the Wichita suburb of Park City. Unlike other serial-killer suspects who are often described as quiet and inoffensive, Dennis Rader could be a royal pain. In carrying out his not-so-civil duties, he would badger people over the most trivial infractions, going so far in some cases as to measure the height of the grass on neighbors’ front lawns to make sure it complied with some obscure municipal ordinance.
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 5
