Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting

by Poole, W. Scott

  FBI agent Robert Ressler did more than any other public figure to invest the serial murderer with traits the uneasy public would fear the most. Ressler organized a decade-long study of serial murder in the 1970s, and in October of 1983, helped put together an FBI-hosted press conference that announced his findings. At this conference, Bureau officials declared a firm link between serial murder and sexual sadism. For reasons not at all obvious, alternative sexuality had to be a part of the serial killer’s profile. The definition of a serial killer, Ressler argued, could not include any murders or series of murders that took place because of “greed, a fight, jealousy or family disputes.”

  The Justice Department’s highly restrictive definition excluded all but a very tiny percentage of homicides in the United States. The 1983 news conference, however, had the effect of generating a panic over an alleged epidemic of serial murder. Roger Depue, head of the FBI’s behavioral science unit, promised that the FBI would give closer attention to open and unsolved cases. He noted that 28 percent of the nation’s 20,000 murder cases went unsolved each year, and that the percentage was rising. Depue at least implicitly suggested that these unsolved cases were the work of serial killers. Media sources immediately began to suggest that serial killers were responsible for 4,000 murders every year.26

  In the wake of skewed reporting, wildly inflated statistics began to appear everywhere. Newsweek and Life magazines speculated about “hundreds” of serial killers at large. At least one novelistic account of an FBI training session had a Bureau official make the absurd claim that the typical middle-class American has “about a 37 percent chance” of crossing paths with a serial killer. In truth, the small number of Americans who did become the victims of serial killers came from groups marginalized by American society, including sex workers, drug users, and the homeless. The typical middle-class American had about as much chance of being in an airplane crash over the ocean, surviving it, and then being killed by sharks as falling into the hands of a Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy.27

  Panic over serial murders created an appetite for stories about their adventures, making “true crime” authors like Ann Rule immensely popular. Rule had written on mass murderers since working for True Detective Magazine in the late ’60s. During most of the 1970s she wrote pieces on brutal murder for a number of unlikely venues, including Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, and even Good Housekeeping. Her 1980 book The Stranger Beside Me detailed the crimes of Ted Bundy, a prolific serial murderer who beat and strangled at least thirty-five women between 1974 and 1978. Rule continued to write accounts of serial murder as public interest crested in the late 1980s and literally hundreds of imitators put out their own chilling accounts of serial murder.28

  These narratives gave America a new creature to fear. Images of the serial killer in true crime, television police procedurals, films, and even official police accounts invariably used the term monster to describe the killer’s activities. In her book Lust Killer, Rule notes that “convoluted medicalese” might seek to explain the psychological underpinnings of serial murder but that to “the man on the street,” they are “always a monster.” Robert Ressler has portrayed himself again and again as a “monster hunter,” writing books with titles like Whoever Fights Monsters and I Have Lived in the Monster.29

  While asserting the inherent monstrosity of the mass murderer, almost all popular images simultaneously used the language of sickness and psychosis, tracing the emergence of the murderous impulse to childhood trauma or oedipal confusion. Ann Rule, so insistent that we see the serial murderer as “always a monster,” finds in Ted Bundy’s unstable childhood the seed of his crimes. Two books on Ted Bundy, one by Stephen G. Michaud and the other by Hugh Aynesworth, share a similar contradictory stance. On the one hand, they assert that Bundy had an inner madness that he hid with “a mask of sanity.” On the other hand, they take issue with a Florida attorney who had argued that it is too common for our culture to think of the criminal as a “hunchback, cross-eyed little monster slithering through the dark” rather than a human being. Michaud and Aynesworth disagreed, writing that “the slithering hunchback” did live inside of Bundy, uncontrollable and irredeemable.30

  Serial killers in popular culture appear as both evil monsters and insane maniacs who have suffered childhood trauma. This obviously represents two warring discourses united in the same terrifying figure. Insanity suggests a severe mental disability, one that could perhaps receive and respond to various therapies. A monster is, however, beyond the ken of human experience. Monsters cannot be treated and rehabilitated, only destroyed.

  The term monster seems remarkably imprecise if we want a word to describe people like Gein, Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, and other well-known criminals. After all, the monsters Americans have encountered include sea serpents bubbling out of the ocean, Bela Lugosi in eveningwear, Lon Chaney Jr. in yak hair makeup as the wolf man, and goblin-like extraterrestrials in flying saucers. The term has been elastic enough to include all sorts of phenomena beyond the normal range of expectations and experiences. The friendly sea serpent would seem to have little to do with Ed Gein happily sewing his skin suit by firelight on a wintry Wisconsin night.31

  The serial murderer, sick psycho and malevolent beast, is very much like these earlier monsters in one very significant way. Mass murderers as “monsters” takes us back to Judith Halberstam’s argument that the monster is a meaning machine. The monster absorbs meaning out of its historical context and, in turn, invests that context with meaning. In the case of the serial murderer, we have a new sort of creature that owes its existence to the struggle to define the cultural direction of America in the wake of revolutionary social change.

  The definition of the serial killer as “sexual deviant” offered a new cultural image on monstrosity, a powerful tool for emerging forces in politics and society that sought to counter the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and the emerging struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Combining a discourse of madness and monstrous evil made the serial killer into a powerful symbolic construction of all that had gone wrong since Woodstock. A “sick” and “degraded” society produced monsters.32

  Sex and the Single Serial Killer

  In the 1984 presidential race, Ronald Reagan made an assertion of allegedly traditional moral values central to his campaign. Reagan declared that “promiscuity” had become “stylish” and transformed a “sacred expression of love” into something “casual and cheap.” This claim went hand in hand with Reagan’s rhetorical war on poor single women (he coined the term “welfare queen”) and his opposition to abortion. His supporters in the Christian Right, represented by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Falwell, asserted that America had gone into social and political decline because of the gains of the social protest movements of the 1960s.33

  Descriptions of the serial killer phenomenon reflect this deeply conservative representation of America’s plight. Ann Rule, for example, suggested that the seed of Bundy’s sexual murders had been planted in the unstable environment created by his unwed mother who moved frequently and pretended to be his older sister (allegedly to be more attractive to sexual partners). This alleged connection between a “sexually promiscuous society” and the serial killer persisted. By the 1990s even dating guides hinted at a connection between being sexually active and serial murder. The enormously popular 1995 dating and relationship guide for women entitled The Rules not only argued for a neotraditional relationship in which “the man must take charge,” but told young women to “never get into a car with a man you meet at a party; you might end up in his trunk.”34

  The FBI profile of the serial killer as sexual sadist invited conservative commentators to connect the dots between the dangers of sexual revolution and the brutalities of wanton murder. A 1984 article in the New York Times reported that “many officials” believed that an increase in serial murders had some link with “sweeping changes in attitudes regarding sexuality that have occurred over the past twenty years.” A 19
84 article in Omni described the possible profile of a serial killer as “homosexuals who kill their anonymous partners after sex.”35

  Conservative commentator Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post went even further. Achenbach saw the serial murderer as a kind of divine judgment, “the price we pay for slavish devotion to individualism, mobility, the right to buy smut, the right to ignore one’s neighbors even when they seem weird.” Achenbach’s latter comment is especially revealing. While suggesting that Americans needed a more communitarian spirit, he implies that the primary reason one might want to pay attention to the neighbors is to keep tabs on their weirdness. Increasingly, this weirdness would be read in sexualized terms.36

  Two events in the 1990s seemingly sealed the connection in the popular mind between alternative sexualities and the murdering maniac. Jonathan Demme’s brilliant 1991 film Silence of the Lambs and the real-world horrors of Jeffrey Dahmer both seemed to underscore the conservative claim that deviant sexuality threatened family values and American lives. In representations of Dahmer, and in both the novel and the film versions of The Silence of the Lambs, alternative sexualities are presented as a kind of gateway drug to serial murder.37

  The discovery of the carnage wreaked by Jeffery Dahmer in the summer of 1991 riveted the nation. Dahmer’s neighbors frequently heard the sounds of buzzsaws, loud thumps, and occasional screams coming from his apartment. The police had, by accident, come close to discovering Dahmer’s crimes earlier than they eventually did. In May of 1991 two women found a drugged, dazed fourteen-year-old boy wandering the street who had escaped from Dahmer’s apartment of horrors. Dahmer managed to convince police that the boy was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend. The officers on the scene allowed him to take the boy back to his apartment.38

  In July, another of Dahmer’s intended victims escaped and this time brought police back to the apartment. Police arrested Dahmer after finding a human head in the refrigerator, chemical vats with human organs, and the beginnings of an altar made out of human skulls in his bedroom. Gein, who had died in prison in 1984, seemed back from the grave.

  Dahmer’s atrocities became fodder for the culture wars. Law enforcement officials in Milwaukee assumed a link between Dahmer’s homosexuality and his monstrous murders. Jeffrey Jentzen, the medical examiner for Milwaukee County, termed the murders “homosexual overkill.” The two police officers that came close to arresting Dahmer in the late spring of 1991 made a series of homophobic comments when reporting the incident, joking with the dispatcher that they had reunited the “lovers.” Both officers were fired for the incident soon after Dahmer’s arrest. They successfully appealed their termination and even received back pay. One of the officers, John Balcerzak, later became president of the Milwaukee Police Association.39

  The perception of a link between homosexuality as a “deviant” lifestyle and violence is common in the literature on serial murder. The image of the “gay serial killer” appears in both tabloid journalism and in true crime literature. In 1951 a popular exploitation paperback entitled Terror in the Streets described the “homosexual prowler” as “the sex deviated version of what we call the ‘wolf.’” More contemporary accounts of serial murder indulge in the same kind of monster making. Dennis McDougal’s book on California serial killer Randy Kraft asserted that heterosexual murderers have little interest in “torture or dismemberment,” whereas the homosexual killers can barely discern the difference between gay sex and violence. The discovery of young male corpses, McDougal claimed, “could generally be traced back to a lover whose anger or ecstasy—or both—got out of hand.” Even gay victims of serial killers, or victims portrayed as gay in media sources, are demonized and dismissed. Anne Schwartz, the wife of a Milwaukee police officer, wrote in her book about Dahmer that the murderer’s “victims facilitated him in some way.” She further insisted that “their life-styles and unnecessary risk-taking contributed to their deaths.”40

  In retrospect, 1991 seems the year of the cannibal. The day before Valentine’s Day, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs introduced audiences to Hannibal Lecter, a sophisticated psychiatrist with a taste for art, classical music, and human flesh. Lecter becomes a strange kind of Van Helsing figure, instructing FBI ingénue Clarice Starling (Jodi Foster) in the method and lore of serial killers. Starling uses this secret knowledge to track and kill “Buffalo Bill,” a deviant serial killer who murders young women in an effort to sew together, like Ed Gein, a “skin suit.”

  The Silence of the Lambs, despite its garish subject matter, showed strong conservative instincts. Buffalo Bill is portrayed as seeking a new, transgender identity, and his crimes are motivated by a sexual deviancy that can find release only through violent means. He clearly has no sexual interest in the women he kidnaps and kills, but rather wants to leave behind his male identity by taking their skin and creating his gruesome skin suit. One scene, designed to create unease about abnormal sexuality, has Bill camping it up in drag queen fashion. Buffalo Bill represented more “homosexual overkill.”41

  The film and literature of the serial killer clearly exhibited conservative anxieties over the increasing plasticity of sexual identity in America. While authors and film producers infrequently had overt political intent, their efforts to pitch their products to the broad mainstream resulted in a demonizing of alternative sexual identities. In the “gay murderer” and the “sexual maniac,” themes of evil and mental sickness came together in a single figure.

  By the early 1990s conservatives had come to use the languages of mental sickness and of moral depravity as a single language, suggesting that frightening deviant forces posed both an internal and external threat. In a book entitled Body Count, Reagan advisor and “virtue czar” William Bennett described America’s inner cities as suffering primarily from “moral poverty.” Meanwhile, conservative scholar James Q. Wilson combined savage monster imagery with the language of mental sickness. African American men in inner city environments, he wrote, had become “feral, presocial human beings.” These ideas had a public policy component in the restoration of the death penalty in a number of states and a prison population that grew by 130 percent between 1980 and 1990.42

  The Silence of the Lambs, like most sophisticated works of art, contained more than a simple political message. The film’s denouement does not give us the straightforward destruction of the monster. Instead, we learn in the conclusion that Hannibal Lecter has managed to outwit his captors and make good his escape. This raises questions about whether or not Starling and the FBI’s quest for one monster has only served to unleash a more vicious one to walk the earth.

  The Silence of the Lambs offered mainstream audiences a stylized version of the popular, youth-oriented slasher genre. The maniac killers of the earlier slashers provided a way for a generation of screenwriters and directors to comment on America’s family values, both as an ideology and a reality. The slasher became one of the most subversive American film genres. Previous horror films had used the monstrous to picture the marginalized. Increasingly, horror imagined normalcy as the truly monstrous.43

  An examination of the history of the slasher film reveals the changed nature of the monster in America and its role as a creature that unleashed anarchic impulses on the American landscape. In many respects utterly apolitical, the slasher film’s celebration of excess, dark humor, and complex portrayals of gender made it a subversive art form in an increasingly conservative America.

  Slasher Dreams

  The story of Psycho borrowed from the Ed Gein narrative the theme of oedipal fixation and the archetypal terror of cadavers being kept and preserved rather than properly buried or destroyed. Unprepared audiences in 1960 were deeply shaken by the story and its psychosexual meanings. Hitchcock, however, left out the most gruesome aspects of the Gein story.

  Director Tobe Hooper’s 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre went to those dark places with a howling, power-tool-wielding vengeance. Jim Van Bebber, a director heavily influenced by Chainsaw, re
membered that, prior to 1974, horror had tried to frighten audiences by “jumping out from behind the door.” The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was different. “This thing was coming out in fucking clown paint, blood-spattered, with homicide on its brain”44

  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre followed five countercultural teenagers making their way across Texas. A brother and sister, Nancy and Franklin Hardesty, have family roots in the region of rural Texas where the group is traveling and convince the others to leave the main road in search of their grandfather’s old homestead. What they find is the terrifying Sawyer family, a psychotic, all-male family of murderers and cannibals who had once been workers in a local slaughterhouse. Leatherface, the youngest son, lives in a preverbal, infantile state, his face covered in a mask of human skin, his chainsaw the screaming embodiment of the family’s madness and violence.45

  Hooper describes the origins of Chainsaw as both an outgrowth of the verbal transmission of American horror tales and a reflection of the times. Hooper recalled in an interview that Wisconsin relatives had terrified him as a child with tales of Ed Gein, as well as other stories of psychotic maniacs. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had been an attempt to tap into the weirdness and “dysfunction” of American families, exacerbated by the generational split of the 1960s, the emerging culture wars, and the consequent struggles over the nature of the family.46