Some of the men were even earning a bounty from every “witch” they raped, tortured and put to death, like the notorious self-appointed English “Witch Finder General” Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s. When an average daily working wage was 6 pence, Hopkins was billing English villages anywhere from 6 to 25 pounds for “cleansing” them of witches.12 Just in one day in Chelmsford in July 1645, Hopkins condemned 29 people to death for witchcraft. In some places, 40 to 50 people at a time were being put to death in mass executions. Hopkins went so overboard that eventually there was a parliamentary inquiry into his activities and he was forced out of business. (Myth claims he himself was accused as a witch and hanged, but apparently, he died peacefully in retirement.)13
In the same way ancient Rome was a circus of cruelty and death, the Renaissance was an Indy 500 for the serial rape, mutilation, torture and killing of women; for the settling of scores by jealous neighbors or rejected suitors; for property seizure; for killing competition and rivals; and for pursuing sadistic pleasures.
We may never know exactly how many women were murdered this way, but whether it was 40 thousand or 100 thousand or even the unlikely figure of 9 million, we know one thing: every single victim, male or female, who was tortured and put to death for witchcraft was an innocent victim. It was an epidemic of serial killing of women, incubated in a culture of judicial rape and torture sanctioned by Church and state. I see no better definition of it than as an example of a mass sexual-serial-killing mimetic compulsion.
THE DECLINE AND WANING OF SERIAL KILLERS, 1650–1800
The early serial-killer surge in the form of werewolves seems to fade from the historical record after 1650, along with a gradual decline in witch-hunting. If we accept the notion that the root of the paranoia was in the division of ruling elites, then it is interesting to note that the catastrophic, world-war-like Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants that polarized European civilization came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and precisely afterward, the witchcraft and werewolf trials began to decline.*
The treaty did not necessarily unify the elites, but it gave “immunity” to religious dissent by declaring that a prince could choose which religion would be practiced in his territory without being threatened with invasion as a heretic by neighbors of a rival religion. With that notion of a prince’s territorial sovereignty, the treaty created a new, modern state system, in which we currently live and which we describe today as the “Westphalian system.” Elites would now be leading the masses to kill one another over issues other than religion: dynastic succession, colonial conquest and, later, political ideology. We had to wait until 9/11 for our civilization to be engulfed again in a religious world war.
Accounts of serial killers in the form of bandits and pirates, female poisoners and cannibal clans continue to appear in the record throughout the 1700s, but the common sexual serial killer vanishes into obscurity along with the witches and the werewolves until late in the nineteenth century.
Why there were few (if any) sexual-serial-killer cases during this period in Europe or North America is a question that needs further research, but I would hypothesize that it had everything to do with the decline of the witch-hunting “enforcement” industry that had swept up serial killers into their net as “werewolves.” Once the witch-hunting ended, so did the prosecution of serial lycanthropes.
As for the serial-killer torturers employed by the Church and state, once their license to rape, torture, and kill was suspended, like modern-day war criminals, they retired home to take their places as loved grandfathers and upstanding pillars of their community who never raped and killed again, at least not without permission from Church and state.
With the Church no longer in the witch-hunt business, it’s not surprising to find fewer serial murders on record between 1650 and 1800. There was no organized police system to take reports of crime perpetrated against commoners, who made up the majority of the populace and presumably victims. In that era if you were a victim of a crime, or a family member of a victim, it was up to you to investigate the crime, gather and present evidence before a magistrate or grand jury, get an indictment, and pay for an arrest warrant to be issued, then pay a sheriff or constable to arrest the suspect, rent a jail, and pay a jailer to hold your suspect until trial, and then at your own expense deliver the prisoner to court and present your case before a judge and jury. Only if you managed to get a guilty verdict would the state then intervene by punishing the convicted with an execution of the court sentence. It was DIY justice 99 percent of the way.
There were no police departments or prosecutors in the sense we have today, except for the policing and prosecution of offenses against the state, the Church, or the aristocracy and elite interests. “Police” focused on issues like tax evasion, poaching and squatting. Killers, serial or otherwise, were no doubt unceremoniously lynched by the family of the victim or by the community without referring the case to the judicial system.
Between 1650 and 1800, reports of serial killers seem to be restricted to cases of bandits, pirates, predatory highwaymen and female poisoners, all of whom had endangered public order and property, freedom of movement or commerce and industry. But “ordinary” sexual serial killers, who like today were targeting predominantly marginalized “less-dead” subjects like peasants, vagrants, prostitutes and the destitute, did not come to the attention of state policing as long as their crimes did not threaten the elites or public order.
It was only with industrialization, when a large middle class emerged and began to share urban space in close proximity to masses of the poor and marginalized, that state authority turned its attention to crime, including serial murder, among all segments of the population and responded by establishing a complex administrative system that began to police crimes against “ordinary” people. Its purpose was not to bring justice to the poor, but to prevent violence from spilling over from the lower class (referred to often back then as the “dangerous class”) into the lives of the middle and upper classes. To this day, critics accuse law enforcement and public authority of putting a low priority on the murders of prostitutes, the impoverished or homeless and other marginalized, “less-dead” victims on the basis of their social class and/or their race, with the two often inseparable.
There is also the issue of the public reporting of incidents of serial killing if they occurred, and the survival of those records if they existed. The hand-printed pamphlets that reported on lycanthrope prosecutions were rare and scarce. Newsprint media and journalism began to flourish only in the early nineteenth century, with the rise of common literacy, efficient steam-powered mass-printing technology and the new availability of cheap paper on which to print news and distribute it at a cost affordable for the newly literate masses yearning to be entertained by news of blood and murder. (It’s a common maxim in the news media to this day: “If it bleeds, it leads.”)
The weekly “penny dreadful” true-crime newssheet made its appearance in the 1830s and at its low price ushered in a new public hunger for popular accounts of crime that had previously been restricted to tales told orally, staged in Greek or Elizabethan theater or printed in limited-edition pamphlets or books which only a few could afford. This was the beginning of mass media and the genre of true crime and punishment.
We probably had per capita as many serial killers during those centuries as we have today, but acting without any obvious motive, they were as difficult to detect and apprehend back then as they are today. Serial killers were locally hunted down and killed or lynched, or their killings were attributed to wolves or bears or to lingering beliefs in supernatural monsters.
If cases of serial murder did reach the court system, the documents and transcripts could have easily been lost to history after being destroyed in any one of the dozens of civil insurrections or military conflagrations that engulfed Europe for centuries (or even in routine archival housekeeping).
As the scientific age of reason—the Enlightenment—began to take hold of Western civilization in the 1700s, the supernatural serial-killing monster as defined by the Church was supplanted by the secular serial-killer deviant as defined by the emerging science of forensic psychiatry, in parallel with the growth of the judicial-policing branch of the modern bureaucratic administrative state. By the 1800s, the supernatural werewolf- and witch-hunters like de Lancre and Kramer would be entirely supplanted by secular psychiatrists and criminologists like Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and Lacassagne.
SEVEN
The Rippers Before Jack: The Rise of Modern Serial Killers in Europe, 1800–1887
No man, however quickly he may pray, could get through his rosary, or say ten Hail Marys in the time it took me to cut open her breast and the rest of her body. I cut up this person as a butcher does a sheep . . .
—CONFESSION OF SERIAL KILLER ANDREAS BICHEL, 1808
It was even a pleasure only to smell female clothing. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating.
—CONFESSION OF SERIAL KILLER VINCENZO VERZENI, 1871
The broken promises of the Renaissance era were eclipsed by the Enlightenment of the 1700s, which was defined by philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau, who inspired radical new ideas of natural human rights to equality, personal liberty, democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of scientific inquiry from Church “superstition” and the pursuit of happiness for all classes and races (depending upon colonial imperatives and the profit margins of the African slave trade).
Before the 1800s it had been primarily the Church which defined the nature of evil, vice, perversion and madness. By the mid-1800s it was increasingly defined by the “soul healers”: psychiatrists (“psych,” from the ancient Greek for “soul,” and “iatry,” “medical treatment”). In this process of secularization and criminalization of monsters, the authority of state prosecution along with the authority of psychiatry would take center stage as serial crimes began to be prosecuted in secular courts and increasingly reported in popular print media.
From 1650 to about 1815, Europe lurched through the Dynastic Wars, the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars. When peace came to Europe after 1815, industrialization was well under way; feudal subjects had transformed into national citizens and moved from the countryside into the crowded cities, while fragmented local feudal rule was replaced by the centralized administrative state and its newly formed police and judicial bureaucracies.
In the wake of that transformation, serial killers began to reappear on the historical-event horizon, not as monsters, but as criminals caught in the net of this new system of law enforcement. From this point on, these monsters would start taking the familiar shape of the serial killer, even though we did not call them that.
Serial Necrophile François Bertrand, the “Vampire of Montparnasse,” Paris, 1850
It was not a case of serial murder but this case of serial “vampirism,” as necrophilia was called at the time, that became a watershed in the emergence of modern forensic psychiatry and its new role in policing and justice. The Bertrand case galvanized the world of criminology and gave future forensic psychiatry a language and a conceptual context that would later figure in the psychiatric assessments of sexual serial killers.
Between July 1848 and March 1849, cemeteries in Paris were plagued by fifteen nocturnal disinterments of both female and male corpses, the females subjected to gross mutilation and, allegedly, necrophagia (eating of decayed corpse flesh) and varied sexual acts. As we so often see with the victims of lust serial killers, the female corpses were cut open, or “ripped,” longitudinally along the torso and abdomen and their intestines extracted. Sometimes the heart and liver had been removed as well, and it was alleged at his trial that the perpetrator bit and chewed on some of the moldy cadavers.1
In some cases the corpses’ mouths were “split to the ear” in Joker-like “smiley” faces (like in the infamous Black Dahlia case of the 1940s in Los Angeles) and the thighs of the female victims were slashed or their limbs entirely dismembered.2 In his account of the case, French cultural historian Michel Foucault stated that the perpetrator would “cut them up with his bayonet, pull out the intestines and organs, and then spread them around, hanging them from the crosses and Cypress branches in a huge garland . . . there was evidence that the corpses, which were all, moreover, in a very advanced state of decomposition, had been sexually violated.”3
The press dubbed the perpetrator the “Vampire of Montparnasse.” Eventually a French army sergeant, François Bertrand, was arrested. At his military court-martial, the gallery was filled with journalists, forensic practitioners, psychiatrists and other academics from around the world. The British medical journal The Lancet covered the trial, explaining to readers the paradoxical moniker “vampire” left over from the days of witches and werewolves:
This disgusting case recalls at once that form of mental aberration which reigned so extensively about a century and a half ago in the north of Europe and known under the name of vampirism. It will be recollected that vampires were suffering under a sort of nocturnal delirium which was often extended to the waking hours during which they believed that certain dead persons were rising from their graves to come and draw their blood hence arose a desire for revenge and burial places were disgracefully desecrated. Bertrand’s case seems the very reverse of this; for we here see, not the dead rising to torment the living, but a man disturbing the peace of cemeteries in the most horrible manner imaginable.4
After his arrest, Bertrand was examined by Dr. Charles-Jacob Marchal de Calvi, a physician and psychiatrist of great repute to this day.5 In the age of Darwinian criminology soon to be formalized by Cesare Lombroso, Marchal expected the “vampire” to be a low-class, brutish, simian, cavemanlike “born criminal.” Instead he was surprised by Bertrand’s delicate, “civilized” features and intelligence.
Marchal agreed to testify in Bertrand’s defense, arguing that the accused suffered from an “irresistible compulsion,” which in the terminology of the era was called monomania, defined as a singular, pathological preoccupation or obsession in an otherwise sound mind. The term “monomania” is comparable to today’s descriptions of compulsive behavioral disorders, neuroses, paraphilias, psychopathy, sociopathy and other behavioral personality disorders that are not accompanied by delusions or hallucinations.6
Marchal argued that Bertrand’s monomania was so irresistible an impulse that it temporarily diminished his capacity to discern right from wrong, the basic requirement for a formal insanity plea.7 This was only six years after the precedent-setting insanity plea in the McNaughton case (see chapter five).
Dr. Marchal’s argument that Bertrand’s “irresistible impulse” was equivalent to legal insanity was a radical departure from the principles of the McNaughton rule, as it would be again in 1955 to 1984 when the same argument was revived by American attorneys in the defense of serial killers. American lawyers argued in what became known as the volition defense that their serial-killing clients were “unable to conform their conduct to the law” as a result of an “irresistible compulsion” which was equivalent to legal insanity.8 A Reagan-era Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act that restricted the volition defense after John Hinckley Jr. was successfully acquitted by reason of insanity for his “inability to resist” the impulse to try to assassinate Ronald Reagan while under the spell of his obsession with actress Jodie Foster and the character she played in Taxi Driver.9
The evidence against Bertrand, along with his confession, was ironclad. At issue in the trial was not even whether he was suffering from a mental disorder—nobody disputed that—but the nature and form of his disorder. Immediately after the trial followed a torrent of forensic and psychiatric literature in which leading French psychiatrists argued whether Bertrand’s disorder was “erotic” (sexual) or “destructive” (sa
distic-homicidal) or both; and if both, then which was “dominant,” the erotic or destructive, and did it amount to legal insanity?10
Sexual attraction to the dead, or necrophilia, has many clinical, legal and cultural dimensions. It runs the spectrum from harmless romantic fantasy to homicidal compulsion, from Sleeping Beauty and Twilight romantic pseudonecrophilia to Ed Gein, Psycho, serial-killing necrophilia.
The current forensic authority on necrophilia is Dr. Anil Aggrawal. He categorizes necrophilia into ten progressively more severe classes:
necrophilic role-players, who engage in sex with willing partners who “play dead”;
romantic necrophiles, who cannot bear separation from their loved ones who passed away and might mummify or keep their corpses;
necrophilic fantasizers, who engage in sex in proximity with the dead, in a funeral parlor or a cemetery;
tactile necrophiles, who are excited by touching or fondling corpses;
fetishistic necrophiles, who harvest and collect body parts, sometimes wearing them as amulets or jewelry, including the collection of enemy body parts (ears, skulls) as totems by soldiers in war (see chapter fourteen on the collection of Japanese body parts by GIs in the Pacific during World War II);
necromutilimaniacs, who focus on mutilating and destroying corpses;
opportunistic necrophiles, who do not necessarily fantasize about engaging in sex with corpses, but do so just the same if the opportunity arises;
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