Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  Diabolus in cultura.

  Following the war, forensic psychiatrists began routinely reporting among the characteristics of sexual murderers and serial killers their obsession with Nazis, concentration camp atrocities and photos of the naked, emaciated dead bodies their GI fathers had encountered when the death camps were liberated.55

  When they arrested William Heirens, the “Lipstick Killer”—the first of the “golden age” serial killers—along with that stolen copy of Psychopathia Sexualis, police also found a scrapbook of Nazi officials. Ian Brady, who with his female partner, Myra Hindley, raped and murdered five victims between the ages of ten and seventeen from 1963 to 1965, was fixated on accounts and images of Nazi crimes. The necrophilic, grave-robbing Ed “Psycho” Gein murdered at least two women from 1954 to 1957 and made furniture of human bones and skin, including a chair upholstered in female breast skin with a visible nipple. He also rolled about in the grass under a full moon, his naked body clad in a female “skin suit” with breasts. He later confessed that he had gotten his ideas from images of Nazi and Japanese atrocities and tales of Pacific cannibalism and shrunken heads as portrayed in pulp adventure and true-detective magazines. (Life magazine published a series of photos of the squalid interior of Gein’s house, cluttered with stacks of true-detective and adventure pulp magazines.)56

  Thirty-year-old lonely mama’s boy, TV repairman and amateur photographer Harvey Glatman was obsessed with true-detective magazine cover photos featuring bound women. Having already served time for kidnapping and raping a woman when he was eighteen, Glatman learned not to leave surviving witnesses. In 1957 in Los Angeles he began contacting models through their agencies or classifieds pretending to be a detective-magazine photographer. Glatman later described to police what happened when he successfully lured nineteen-year-old Judith Ann Dull to his apartment “photo studio” for what he claimed was a modeling assignment: “I told her that I wanted to take pictures that would be suitable for illustrations for mystery stories or detective magazine stories of that type, and that this would require me to tie her hands and feet and put a gag in her mouth and she was agreeable to this, and I did tie her hands and feet and put a gag in her mouth and I took a number of pictures.”

  Once she was bound and pinned in a pose matching his magazine-cover fantasy, he “stepped into it” and raped and murdered her, photographing the process along the way, creating his own set of custom-made true-detective magazine images to satisfy his obsession.57 Glatman photographed, raped and murdered three women this way before a fourth victim escaped and alerted police. Glatman is also suspected in a fourth homicide committed earlier in Colorado, the victim of which was identified only in 2009 through DNA testing.58 Glatman is among the earliest of the many serial killers who would later record their murders on film, audiotape or videotape in order to relive them again and again.

  From 1957 to 1959, the Nietzsche-steeped, pill-popping jazz musician Melvin “Sex Beast” Rees forayed from a cinder-block shack in the woods papered in sadistic pornographic images to force cars off Virginia and Maryland country roads, dragging away the female passengers, whom he would rape, torture and kill. He killed nine victims. In one case, after kidnapping a mother and her daughter and raping and killing them, he wrote in his personal journal, “Now the daughter and mother are all mine.”59

  John Joubert, the “Nebraska Boy Snatcher,” who murdered three young boys from 1982 to 1983, stated that when he was eleven or twelve he had seen true-detective magazines in the local grocery store and become aroused by the depiction of bound women on the covers. He began acquiring these magazines and masturbating to the images, eventually superimposing the fantasy of bound young boys over the images of the women. While a facilitator, detective magazines or porn on its own does not make people into serial killers. Joubert stated that when he was six or seven, at least six years before he saw his first detective magazine, he fantasized about strangling and eating his babysitter. He could not recall whether these images brought on the masturbation or the masturbation brought on the fantasies.60

  Serial killer Dennis Rader, the “BTK Killer,” in his recent interviews with forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland, described to her his adolescent obsession with illustrations of bound women. Rader said, “I was soon addicted to them and was always looking for ‘strung-up’ models in distress.”

  Rader described fantasizing about attacking women: “she became a ‘True Detective Horror Magazine’ hit and fantasy. Her bedroom appeared to be in the center east. I was planning on tying her up on the bed, either half naked or totally. Then I would either strangle her or suffocate her. Her hands would be bound in front and tied to her neck— like a True Detective Magazine model I had seen. I used to fantasize about women on the cover, showing terror in their eyes, bound hands up near her neck, a man with a threatening knife overhead.”

  Rader said, “I quit buying detective magazines when they dropped the B/D women from the covers. I still read books about serial killers if they related to the style I was into. I always cut photos out of ads from places like Dillard’s and J. C. Penney’s.”61

  So some serial killers are as easily inspired by J. C. Penney catalogs as by sadistic imagery and literature.

  Or by the Bible.

  In 1959 German lust killer Heinrich Pommerenke committed four mutilation murders after watching the movie The Ten Commandments. John Haigh, the British “Acid Bath Killer,” was raised in an ultra-Christian cult known as the Plymouth Brethren, and while suffering from religious nightmares, he loved to quote and debate passages from scripture between his murders. A serial killer in Glasgow known as “Bible John” would quote scripture as he murdered women he lured from dance halls. In 1911 an unidentified serial killer who slaughtered a family of five in Texas left behind a note at the scene quoting Psalm 9:5: “When He maketh the Inquisition for Blood, He forgetteth not the cry of the humble.”

  John Wayne Gacy, as he raped and strangled his male teen victims, reportedly recited Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .”

  Albert Fish, who described his cannibal murder of Grace Budd as an act of “Holy Communion,” would frequently quote Jeremiah 19:9:

  And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.

  The Pentecostal-raised necrophile serial killer Earle Nelson quoted from a well-thumbed Bible he carried as he murdered twenty-two landladies and raped them postmortem. Nelson’s favorite passage was from the book of Revelation:

  So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a gold cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.62

  Misogynistic literature, myths and religious tracts and illustrations existed long before even Heinrich Kramer’s 1486 Malleus Maleficarum accused women of sexual liaisons with the Devil. Pulp magazines alone, no more than the war alone, or pornography or the Bible alone, made the serial-killer epidemic. The “sweats” were a mirror of things already infecting society. The proliferation of lurid images of bound, victimized women began creeping onto the covers of mainstream detective magazines in America back in the 1920s and 1930s, soon after women had gained the vote, entered the male domain of the factory floor during World War I and partied elbow to elbow in speakeasies.

  The misogynistic fear of independently mobile and unsupervised women was the s
ame fear and anger reflected in the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, in the Victorian rape pornography on the eve of Jack the Ripper and in the increased targeting of young, single servant girls and prostitutes in the nineteenth century described in previous chapters. Combine the Great Depression that destroyed hundreds of thousands of families, the horrors of the most murderous war in history, the Cold War fear of nuclear annihilation in the 1950s, the destruction of thriving minority communities in urban “renewal,” the breakdown of traditional old-world patriarchal values in the 1960s, America’s first defeat in a war (in Vietnam) and a growing mass of the dispossessed class of the “less-dead” to victimize, and you have certain children who “turned” like infected zombies into serial killers as they approached their late twenties in the 1970s to the 1990s.

  While indeed these magazines and images did not “make” serial killers, they did reflect a collective misogynistic cultural imperative which normalized the fantasy of abducting, raping, torturing and killing women. The widespread availability of these magazines was a touchstone to a dark, reptilian fantasy subculture, the foundation to a serial-killing ecology. These totems facilitated and shaped the fantasies of a very small minority (a few thousand) of dangerously damaged males who felt compelled to act them out under the pressures of a variety of disruptive and traumatic historical and social forces along with their own personal experiences.

  Economic ruin in the 1930s and total war in the 1940s crippled a generation of fathers and together sowed the seeds for a popular adventure-detective magazine rape culture of pathological, vengeful and highly misogynistic aggression that matured to plague our society in very real ways by the 1960s: the diabolus in cultura behind the serial-killer epidemic.

  As necrophile serial killer Edmund Kemper summed it all up, “I am an American and I killed Americans. I am a human being, and I killed human beings; and I did it in my society.”

  Or to paraphrase that famous quote from Pogo: we have met the serial killer and he is us.

  CONCLUSION

  Pogo Syndrome: Thinking Herds of Crazies in the Twilight of the Golden Age of Serial Killers

  People like me don’t come from films. Films come from people like me.

  —CANNIBAL DAVID HARKER, 1998

  These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them.

  —CHARLIE MANSON

  In a 2011 article in Slate magazine entitled “Blood Loss: The Decline of the Serial Killer,” Christopher Beam quoted historical true-crime author Harold Schechter as saying, “It does seem the golden age of serial murderers is probably past.”1 What Schechter meant tongue in cheek is that there is no longer a wide-eyed, “breaking news” fascination with serial killers today, in the way there once was in the 1980s and 1990s. While in the past there was intense news coverage of cases of serial murder like Jack the Ripper and the surges in early-twentieth-century America, each case was reported as an individual and rare aberration of multiple murder. There was no unifying concept of “serial killers” as a unique, identifiable phenomenon. Today, while serial killers, especially fictional, are still a staple in popular entertainment, we are less impressed by or concerned about actual serial killers. As Eric Hickey concludes, “Between 2000 and 2014 serial killers have emerged more slowly and quietly. In fact, over the past 15 years there has been a dearth of headline-grabbing killers like the Dahmers, Gacys, Kempers, Raders . . . Many serial killers have emerged in recent years who receive little media attention. Part of the reason is that most of the new cases do not carry the social drama, social class, or high body counts to be of serious public interest.”2

  These are strange times, these first two decades of the twenty-first century. The 2000s perhaps are as different and transformational from the 1990s as the 1960s were from the 1950s. There is no doubt that 9/11 was an epoch-changing reboot of our state of the union in the same way Pearl Harbor was in 1941 and the JFK assassination in 1963. Our 1980s visceral collective fear of serial killers and child abductors has been supplanted by a new fear of terrorists since 9/11.

  Serial killers always were, and still are today, a statistically rare phenomenon. And then on top of that, overall homicide rates in the US, which have always underpinned serial murder, have plummeted dramatically from a historic high of 24,760 homicides in 1993 down to a record low of 13,472 by 2014.3

  By 2014 the raw statistics indeed looked promising and optimistic until that twenty-year decline in the national murder rate turned the other way in 2015, rising to 15,6964 (adjusted to 15,181 subsequently). The FBI’s preliminary Uniform Crime Report (UCR) for 2016, released in September 2017, indicates 16,459 murders, an 8.4 percent increase nationally over 2015. The most dramatic surge in murder was in cities with over a million inhabitants, where murders soared 20.3 percent.5

  The party might be over.

  Yet despite the recent surge, we need to believe that the murder rate will never return to the extraordinary 1993 level, if the technohumanitarian balance hypothesis (chapter two) is correct. We can hope. Hope that the world makes sense and must as a rule of natural law become progressively less violent, albeit in surges and waves, and that this twenty-year-long decrease in murders has swept away many serial killers with it into the trash bin of human history. Hope is perhaps that one new natural survival instinct that humans have been uniquely endowed with to transcend all the necessities of the primitive survivalist four Fs. That as a “thinking herd of crazies” species that dominates the earth, we must become a gentler species if we are to survive: because there is no enemy left threatening our existence, other than us.

  There are other signs of a decline in serial murder. A recent study identified “only” 63 serial-killer apprehensions in the US from 1997 to 2007, although these 63 serial murderers were responsible for a yearly average of 75 victims over that ten-year span—hardly the “thousands” some claimed, but still an unsettling number of victims. (Of these 63 serial killers, 19 had been killing unimpeded for more than 10 years and 8 for more than 15 years before being apprehended.)6

  The Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database also indicates that there has been a significant drop in the number of new serial killers appearing in the 2000s, from the 614 in the 1990s down to 337 in the 2000s, and currently 93 so far in the 2010s.7 If somehow this new era represents the end of a “golden age” of serial killers, then few will lament it.

  Eric Hickey has a different take from his sets of serial-killer data. While an all-time high of 234 serial-killer cases reported in his database occurred in the 34 years between 1970 and 2004, a total of 270 new cases emerged in just the recent 14 years between 2000 and 2014. Hickey states, “We have more cases of serial killers in fourteen years than we did in the previous twenty-five years [1975–2000].”8

  Hickey believes that this rise in his statistical data is accounted for by our new definition of the term “serial killer,” following the San Antonio Symposium of 2005, as anyone who kills two or more victims in separate events for any reason. But at the same time, Hickey emphasizes that “What we do know for certain is that the modern-day serial killer as portrayed in the media had declined significantly.”9

  Hickey has also identified another declining serial-murder statistic: the average number of victims. From 1970 to 1980, the average hovered around 10 to 13 victims per serial killer. Today the number has declined significantly to 3 to 4 victims on average, and there have not been any recent cases in the United States of “big-number” serial killers of the scale of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy or Gary Ridgway.10

  The frequency of serial killers will always vary depending upon how we define them. If we define as serial killers the “werewolves” and gynocidal functionaries who raped, tortured and killed women accused of witchcraft, then we had more serial killers in 1450–1650 than we have today. Thousands of Nazi paramilitary murderers, who criminally killed millions of victims during the Holocaust in separate events with cooling-off per
iods in between, would mean we had more serial killers and victims in the 1940s than in the 1980s, according to the new FBI definition. Serial killers were, are and will be what we define them to be, under the prerogatives of history, politics, society, psychology, criminology, commerce, public order, power and natural evolution, which are constantly changing and shifting beneath our feet, like tectonic plates that sometimes catch on one another in that elusive historic synchronicity, and release earthquakelike shock waves in the form of serial-killing surges in their many forms.

  Even if the emergence of new serial-killer cases appears to be slowing down, murders by “relationship unknown” perpetrators combined with “murder by stranger” have steadily continued to creep up. They were just over 50 percent at the height of the murder rate in the 1990s. That number increased to 58 percent by 2015. This is disconcerting, although one should not overemphasize the significance of the “relationship unknown” segment, as it indicates only that police have not conclusively determined the relationship between the victim and perpetrator—not that the perpetrator was necessarily a stranger to the victim.11 (It was misinterpretation of the “relationship unknown” statistic that contributed to the “serial-killer epidemic” panic in the 1980s and the exaggerated claims of thousands of serial-murder victims a year.12)

  Nonetheless, at least some of the homicides in the “relationship unknown” category can be linked to currently unidentified serial killers on the loose, like the “Long Island Serial Killer” LISK (also known as the “Gilgo Beach Killer” or the “Craigslist Ripper”) suspected in as many as thirteen recent murders; the “Bone Collector” linked to eleven female victims found buried together in West Mesa, New Mexico; the “Seven Bridges Road Killer” in North Carolina linked to the murder of eleven African-American prostitutes; the “Jeff Davis 8 Killer” in Jennings, Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, suspected in eight murders; the “Daytona Beach Killer” in Florida with four murders; the “February 9 Killer,” who has killed at least two women in Salt Lake City on the same date in different years; and the “Eastbound Strangler Foot-Fetish Killer” near Atlantic City, who left his four strangled female victims carefully posed facing east, stripped of their shoes and socks, and who some suspect might be the same person as the Long Island serial killer. At this writing, there is a cluster of women reported missing and found murdered in the small town of Lumberton, North Carolina, that could be the work of a local serial killer.