by Colin Wilson
In the past, only two groups of men were in a position to behave in this way: men in authority (which includes men like Gilles de Rais whose wealth seemed to place them beyond the law) and men who regarded themselves as ‘outside society’ – bandits and outlaws. The latter were often involved in incidents of hair-raising cruelty – as can be seen, for example, in A Hangman’s Diary by the sixteenth-century Nuremberg executioner Franz Schmidt, who describes robbers disembowelling pregnant women, while others forced a wife to eat fried eggs off the corpse of her husband. In both cases – tyrants and outlaws – the brutality seems to spring from a sense of being outside or above society and the law. This feeling, as we can see, was shared by Ian Brady, Gerald Gallego and Douglas Clark. ‘I don’t march to the same drummer you do.’
What seems to have happened is that the advance of civilisation has raised the general level of comfort so that large numbers now have a security that was unknown even in the nineteenth century. The trouble is that leisure and comfort also produce boredom, a desire for sensation, which explains why an increasing number of criminals have come to behave like Caligula or Gilles de Rais, and to regard their victims as ‘throwaways’. Melvin Rees, Ian Brady, Gerald Gallego, Douglas Clark, are modern examples of what might be called the ‘Roman emperor syndrome’.
As to Clark’s strange sexual perversions, we only have to read the first general textbook on the subject – Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886 – to see that this was just as common in the nineteenth century, and that many of the perversions were even more bizarre than Clark’s. It tended to be a well-kept secret, known only to a few doctors and police officers. After the ‘swinging sixties’ had made pornography more generally available – particularly hard-core videos – it was inevitable that a small number of addicts should decide to experiment in rape and murder. For the sexual criminal, the most important step is the one that bridges the gap between fantasy and actuality. After that, rape or murder becomes a habit. Perhaps the surprising thing is that so few pornography addicts take that step.
The sexual criminal who best illustrates this descent into violence is also perhaps the most notorious of modern serial killers. Theodore Bundy developed into a Peeping Tom as a result of catching an accidental glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted upstairs window. From then on, he began to prowl the streets of Seattle at night, looking for bedroom windows to spy through. ‘He approached it almost like a project,’ according to his biographers Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, ‘throwing himself into it, literally, for years’. Then, ‘like an addiction, the need for a more powerful experience was coming over him’. He made clumsy attempts to disable women’s cars, but since these were parked in the university district, they usually found help without any difficulty. Bundy regarded this as a kind of game, a flirtation with danger; ‘but the habit grew perceptibly more insistent, just as Ted had become a bolder and bolder thief over the years’. One evening in the summer of 1973, after drinking heavily, Bundy saw a woman leaving a bar and walking up a dark side street. He found a heavy piece of wood in a vacant lot, and stalked her. ‘There was really no control at this point.’ ‘The situation is novel,’ said Bundy (speaking of himself in the third person), ‘because while he may have toyed around with fantasies before, and made several abortive attempts to act out a fantasy, it never had reached the point where actually he was confronted with harming another individual.’ Nevertheless, he got ahead of the girl and lay in wait for her, but before she reached the point where he was hiding, she stopped and went into a house. Bundy told his interviewers: ‘The revelation of the experience and the frenzied desire that seized him really seemed to usher in a new dimension to that part of him that was obsessed with violence and women.’ (Like so many other serial killers, Bundy saw himself as a dual-personality, a Jekyll and Hyde; he referred to Mr Hyde as ‘the Hunchback’.) ‘What he had done terrified him, purely terrified him. Full of remorse and remonstrating with himself for the suicidal nature of that activity’ – Bundy also recognised murder as a form of suicide – he quickly sobered up. He was horrified by the recognition that he had the capacity to do such a thing.’
Nevertheless the craving to watch girls undressing was too strong to be resisted. One night he was peering through a basement window at a girl preparing for bed when he discovered that the door had been left open. He sneaked into her room and leapt on her, but when she screamed, he fled. ‘Then he was seized with the same kind of disgust and repulsion and fear and wonder at why he was allowing himself to attempt such extraordinary violence.’ He was so upset that he gave up his voyeuristic activities for three months; but on 4 January 1974 he again crept into a basement after he had watched a girl undressing. He wrenched a metal bar from the bed frame and struck her repeatedly on the head. Then, apparently finding himself impotent, he rammed the bar into her vagina. The girl recovered after a week in a coma. It took Bundy a month to recover from the trauma of what he had done. Next time he carried his fantasy through to the end. On 31 January 1974 he entered a students’ lodging house and tried bedroom doors until he found one that was unlocked. It was that of twenty-one-year-old Lynda Ann Healy. This time he seized her by the throat and ordered her to remain silent. Then, either at knifepoint or gunpoint – it never became clear which – he forced her to dress, then bound and gagged her, and made her walk out of the house with him. He drove her out to Taylor Mountain, twenty miles from Seattle, then spent hours acting out his sexual fantasies. The interviewers asked him whether there had been any conversation with his victim. ‘There’d be some. Since this girl in front of him represented not a person, but again the image, or something desirable, the last thing we would expect him to want to do would be to personalise this person.’ Finally, he bludgeoned her to death and left the body on the mountain. Lynda Ann Healy would be the first of four girls he raped and murdered in the same place.
Perhaps the most frightening thing about Bundy’s account of himself is the description of how he descended into sex murder by a series of almost infinitesimal steps. Any normal male might experience sexual excitement at a casual glimpse of a woman taking off her clothes near a lighted window. Any normal male might return to a place where he knew he could watch a girl undressing. Any normal male might become increasingly obsessed by watching girls undress until he had turned it into a ‘project’. At what point would the normal male draw the line? Possibly at actually harming another human being – but then, Bundy also drew the line there, until his craving pushed him the inevitable step further . . .
In the months following the murder of Lynda Ann Healy, Bundy’s compulsion increased. Four more girls – Donna Gail Manson, Susan Rancourt, Roberta Parks and Brenda Ball – were abducted, raped and murdered in the same way. On 14 July 1974 he abducted two girls on the same day – Janice Ott and Denise Naslund – from Lake Sammamish Park. Both were approached by a good-looking young man with his arm in a sling, who asked for help in lifting a boat on to the luggage rack of his car. People sitting near Janice Ott heard him introduce himself as Ted, and heard her ask him to sit down and talk for a while before she went off to help him. Bundy abducted her at gunpoint, took her to an empty house, and raped her. Then he went back to the park, picked up his second victim, and took her back to the same house, raping her in front of Janice Ott. Finally he killed them both and dumped their bodies in undergrowth a few miles away.
In September 1974 Bundy moved to Salt Lake City to study law. If he wished to remain uncaught it would obviously have been sensible to stop killing girls, since if he used the same modus operandi in two places, it would be a great deal easier to track him down. (In fact, Bundy’s name already appeared on a list of police suspects – two women had named him as the possible killer – but since the list comprised 3,500 names, he was only one of many.) But he would have been unable to stop, even if he wanted to: the ‘hunchback’ was now in full control. So in Salt Lake City five more girls were abducted and raped between October 1974 a
nd January 1975. One girl escaped. Seventeen-year-old Carol DaRonch was in a supermarket complex on 8 November 1974 when a good-looking young man approached her and identified himself as a detective. He told her that her car had been broken into, and lured her into his own car – a Volkswagen – on the pretext of taking her to the police station. Then he snapped a handcuff on one of her wrists and pointed a gun at her head. The girl grabbed for the door handle and fell out of the car; the man was following her, holding an iron bar, when the headlights of an oncoming car illuminated them both; Bundy leapt into his car and drove off. Later that same evening, he abducted another seventeen-year-old, Debbie Kent, from a school concert, and murdered her.
On a Saturday night in August 1985, a policeman in a patrol car was startled when a Volkswagen pulled out from the pavement and drove off at top speed. The policeman followed and finally made the car pull over. Its driver was Ted Bundy, and handcuffs and burgling tools were found in the trunk. By now, the crime computer in Seattle had reduced the list of suspects to ten, and Bundy’s name was at number seven. When Salt Lake City police realised that Bundy was from Seattle, they made him stand in a line-up in the Hall of Justice. Carol DaRonch and two other witnesses identified him as the abductor of 8 November. On 27 December 1976 Bundy was found guilty of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to between one and fifteen years in prison.
By now police were also gathering evidence to link him with the disappearance of a twenty-three-year-old nurse, Caryn Campbell, from a holiday hotel in Colorado. In January Bundy escaped from the Colorado courthouse, but was recaptured within days. The following December he escaped again by unscrewing a light fitment, and this time succeeded in making his way to Tallahassee, Florida, where he rented a room in a student hostel. Now, with everything to lose, he was still unable to resist the compulsion to murder. On the night of 15 January 1978 he entered a student rooming house on the university campus and attacked four girls in quick succession with a wooden club. One was strangled with her tights and raped; another died on her way to hospital; the other two were to recover. An hour and a half later, still unsatisfied, he broke into another rooming house and clubbed another girl unconscious; he was disturbed by the girl’s next-door neighbour, and fled. Bundy returned to the anonymity of his student rooming house, where he was known as Chris Hagen.
A month later, on 9 February 1978, he abducted a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, Kimberley Leach, from the Lake City Junior High School; she was his youngest victim. Her body was found two months later in an abandoned shack. By this time, Bundy had been arrested – again by a policeman in a patrol car who was puzzled by his erratic driving.
At his trial in Florida, Bundy maintained his innocence, insisting that it was pure coincidence that he had been in the areas where sixteen girls had been raped and murdered. Teeth marks on the buttocks of one of his victims were demonstrated by a dental expert to be Bundy’s own, and he was found guilty and sentenced to death. (Bundy had insisted on conducting his own defence, and rejecting the plea-bargaining that might have saved his life.) Before his electrocution on 24 January 1989, he had confessed to another seven murders, bringing the total to twenty-three, and was obviously prepared to confess to more when time ran out. Police remain convinced that the total could amount to as many as forty.
Bundy differs from most serial killers in one basic respect: his childhood was apparently normal and happy. Nevertheless, his background was far from ‘normal’. Theodore Robert Bundy was an illegitimate child, born in November 1946 to a respectable and religious young secretary, Louise Cowell, in a home for unmarried mothers in Philadelphia; his mother has always refused to disclose the father’s identity. The child was left alone for several weeks before being taken to the home of his grandfather, a market gardener, and that initial period without parental affection may account for his later inability to form close relationships. His grandfather was a despotic and violent man who often beat up his wife, although he doted on the baby (who was explained to neighbours as an adopted child). When his mother decided to move to Tacoma (Washington state) when the baby was four, Ted was miserable at losing the only ‘father’ he had ever known. Louise Cowell married an ex-navy cook, John Bundy, but the child never formed any close relationship with his stepfather, finding him boring and uncultured.
As a schoolboy Bundy was an incorrigible fantasist, daydreaming of being adopted by the cowboy star Roy Rogers, and trying, at one point, to persuade his mother to allow him to be adopted by an uncle who was a professor of music. He soon became a thief and habitual liar. He also became an excellent skier, but he had stolen much of the equipment on which he learned. He experienced a basic drive to ‘be somebody’, to be famous, but a streak of self-pity, the feeling that the world was against him, prevented him from making the kind of effort that might have led to success.
Although good-looking, the young Bundy was also shy and introverted – it was not until his early twenties that he lost his virginity while sleeping off a drunken evening on a friend’s settee, when the lady of the house came and ‘raped’ him.
The ultimate key to Bundy – and probably to the majority of serial killers – is obviously his immensely powerful sex drive. From an early age he was a compulsive masturbator; he fantasised about necrophilia, and later became a devotee of hard porn. His long-term girlfriend told how he liked to tie her up with stockings before sex; but such acts could not satisfy his desire – like some legendary caliph – for sexual variety and for total control of his partner. He later admitted that he often strangled the victim during the sexual act; vaginas were stuffed with twigs and dirt and one victim was sodomised with an aerosol can.
Perhaps the most important single factor in turning Bundy into a serial killer was a relationship with a fellow student named Stephanie Brooks. Bundy fell in love with her in his late teens; she was beautiful, sophisticated and came of a wealthy family. To impress her he went to Stanford University to study Chinese; but he was lonely, emotionally immature, and his grades were poor. ‘I found myself thinking of standards of success that I didn’t seem to be living up to.’ Stephanie wearied of his immaturity and dropped him. He was shattered and deeply resentful. His brother later commented: ‘Stephanie screwed him up . . . I’d never seen him like this before.’ One consequence of the emotional upset was that Bundy returned to thieving on a regular basis; he began shoplifting and stealing for ‘thrills’. On one occasion he even stole a large potted plant from someone’s garden, and drove off with it sticking through the open roof of his car.
He formed a relationship with a young divorcee, Meg Anders, and became a full-time volunteer for the black republican candidate for governor. He also found a job working for the Crime Commission and Department of Justice Planning – other males in the office envied his confidence, charm and good looks. When Stephanie Brooks met him again seven years after dropping him, she was so impressed by the new and high-powered Ted that she agreed to marry him – they spent Christmas of 1973 together. Bundy’s object, however, was not to win her back but to get his revenge for the earlier humiliation. When, in the new year, she rang him to ask why he had not contacted her since their weekend together, he said coldly: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ and hung up on her. Then, as if his ‘revenge’ had somehow broken an inner dam and inspired him with a sense of ruthless power and confidence, he committed his first murder.
The vital clue to Bundy lies in a comment made by his friend Ann Rule, a Seattle journalist, in her book The Stranger Beside Me. She remarks that he became violently upset if he telephoned Meg Anders – his long-time girlfriend in Seattle – from Salt Lake City, and got no reply. ‘Strangely, while he was being continually unfaithful himself, he expected – demanded – that she be totally loyal to him.’ This is one of the basic characteristics of a type of person who has been labelled ‘the Right Man’ or ‘the Violent Man’.
The insight came to the science-fiction writer A.E. van Vogt in 1954, when he was preparing to write a novel a
bout a Chinese prison camp run by an authoritarian dictator figure. It struck van Vogt that what dictators seem to have in common is a total and irrational conviction of their own ‘rightness’, and of the stupidity and wrong-headedness of anyone who opposes them. It is, in fact, the ‘Roman emperor’ syndrome noted at the beginning of this chapter. All children regard themselves as the centre of the universe; but if they maintain this attitude beyond early childhood, we regard them as thoroughly obnoxious. Emperors like Caligula and Nero maintained the attitude into adulthood – because no-one had the courage to gainsay them – and their cruelties were less the result of sadism than of total self-centredness.
The ‘Roman emperor’ syndrome arises out of the natural need of all human beings for some degree of self-esteem and self-confidence. Self-confidence means the ability to stick to our own aims and beliefs in the face of opposition. It is as necessary to nursery schoolchildren as to millionaire businessmen. Once most of us have established what we regard as a comfortable degree of self-confidence – that is, adequate to our everyday needs – we turn our attention to other matters: schoolwork, making a living, etc. For various reasons, some people fail to achieve this ‘comfortable’ level, perhaps because some early trauma has permanently undermined them, perhaps because they are surrounded by people whose respect they totally fail to win. Low-dominance people are inclined to accept their rather poor self-image; high-dominance people may develop a lifelong craving for the respect of others.
