Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (10 page)

For the press covering serial murder these days it is not the sheer number of snuffed-out lives that count, but their celebrity status or visible credit rating—the trade-off comes in at around one SUV in the garage for every five dead hookers in the Dumpster.

TWO
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SERIAL HOMICIDE:
Two Thousand Years of Murder from Rome to Boston

These crimes and offenses I committed solely for my evil pleasure and evil delight, to no other end or with no other intention, without anyone’s counsel and only in accordance with my imagination.
—
GILLES DE RAIS
, Confession, 1440
I made fools of them.
—
ALBERT DESALVO
, The Boston Strangler

Although not all serial killers are sex murderers, a significantly great proportion are. Historically, sexual crime can be defined as assault and/or homicide accompanying or substituting for sexual activity. The very act of cutting, dismembering, binding, torturing, and/or killing is often more important to the sex murderer than the actual sex act. This somewhat differentiates a sexual murderer from a “rapist-killer” who as an afterthought murders his victim to prevent her from reporting him to the police. The psychological dynamic is entirely different, and the sexual killer is more predisposed to repeat his crimes in a serial pattern.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, sex crime of any kind was virtually unknown, or at least largely unreported. One reason for this is the proposition that sex crime is a “leisure activity” requiring available time to develop and dwell on sexual fantasies and the freedom to act upon them. Prior to the industrial age the majority of people were just too busy to be fantasizing about sex. Most were desperately trying to feed themselves and survive various life-threatening dangers in the form of invading armies, bandits, revolts, and plagues. (This may account for the lower rate of serial murder in the nonindustrialized Third World, where the standard of living is much more tenuous for the average citizen.)

Rome—Empire of Hedonistic Killing

In the ancient world, the commission of serial murder was the exclusive prerogative of Roman Caesars, emperors, and barbarian nomadic chieftains who exercised absolute power over their subjects. In a sense, that kind of ancient imperial power over a human life is what a serial killer seeks today. It is difficult, however, to construct a modern criminal dynamic for the killings perpetrated by ancient despots such as Nero and Caligula. During an era when death circuses were attended by thousands of spectators in arenas, accusing Roman emperors of serial homicide would be like handing out traffic tickets at the Daytona Speedway.

Throughout the Roman Empire were hundreds of stadiums where systematic death was put on public display as a form of entertainment. The biggest facility, the Coliseum in Rome, held 50,000 spectators seated in various classes of tiers. There was a system of assigned seating with tickets, not much different from a stadium of today. Betting was big and the carnage was sexually charged, with prostitutes plying their trade beneath the coliseum arches. But unlike sporting events today, the gladiatorial games allowed for audience participation in the form of spectator voting with the classic thumbs up/down gesture as to whether a defeated gladiator would live or die.
*
Thus in a some senses, the games were a form of mass participatory serial murder. This is not a twentieth-century hindsight viewpoint; the Romans themselves were aware of this.
⁵¹
Athenagoras, in
Embassy
35, states that “seeing a man killed in the arena is much like killing him.” Seneca wrote, “Throwing a man to the lions is like tearing him apart with your own teeth.”
⁵²
Lactantius in
Divine Institutes
(6.20.9–14) defines the death game spectator as a
particeps
—“participant.”

The audiences were certainly obsessed with attending these death spectacles, which would last all day long, sometimes for weeks at a time. They lined up early in the morning and riots broke out when tickets were not distributed equitably, as they might today at rock concerts. In the morning the games featured either condemned prisoners exposed to attacks of wild animals or combat between trained and well-armed gladiators where the crowd could by their vote decide to save a defeated gladiator who they felt fought well or put to death one who disappointed them.

At noon, however, there was a special spectacle that the crowds apparently enjoyed the most—combat between prisoners condemned to death, wearing no armor and often only one of the pair armed with a dagger. There were never any survivors—the victor was disarmed and set upon by the next armed prisoner. It is said that the crowds favored this spectacle, because unlike with the gladiators, whose faces were often hidden by a helmet, the crowds could see the faces of the dying prisoners. The Roman writer Seneca observed, “In the morning they throw men to the lion and bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators.”
⁵³

The Romans were highly aware of the different degrees of violence and had unique terms for them. Excessive violence with a purpose, such as crucifixion or mass public executions in arenas was classified as
crudelitas,
and was considered to be rational and have an objective, such as to prevent rebellion or to punish criminals. But irrational violence without profit
(compendium),
killing for its own sake, was called
feritas.
This violence was attributed to unreasonable
ira
(rage), and Seneca in his writings linked unlimited power to unlimited luxury, which he argued was the cause of excessive
ira.
⁵⁴
Thus we can already see in the Roman era a belief that hedonistic murder is linked to an excess of leisure.

The spectators in Rome were pathologically engaged with the killing taking place and displayed addictive obsessions with the death. They derived a deep pleasure from the killing and a sense of power in their ability to choose life or death for the victims. The line between serial spectators and serial killers in the Coliseum was very thin.

Between the Roman games and Jack the Ripper, there are a few known cases of pathological serial killers. The ancient English epic
Beowulf,
believed to have been composed during the eighth century, describes a monstrous character named Grendel who for twelve years has been killing people by night and whose description is tantalizingly similar to the modern pathology of a serial killer: “crazed with evil anger”; “deprived of joys”; “He grieves not at all for his wicked deeds.”
⁵⁵

In the fifteen centuries that followed the Roman Empire, there were various murderous tyrants, chieftains, bandits, pirates, and emperors, but it is hard to distinguish their acts from political and financial gains. We know little of their personal pathologies. There were excessively zealous inquisitors of the Catholic Church with a suspiciously high propensity for submitting women suspected of witchcraft to torture and death, but again theological imperatives of those times cloud the question of personal pathology.

In later history, prior to the industrial age, Europe’s two most notorious individual sexual serial killers were aristocrats with plenty of leisure time on their hands: Marshal Gilles de Rais in fifteenth-century France and Countess Elizabeth Báthory in seventeenth-century Hungary. That those two were condemned for their crimes, despite their privilege and power, indicate the shift that society had taken since the era of the Roman games. The nature of their killing foretold of modern times to come.

 Gilles de Rais—Bluebeard, the Child Murderer

Gilles de Rais was born in 1404 into an aristocratic family near Nantes and came to be one of the richest men in France. He was the personal bodyguard and close companion of Jeanne d’Arc, at whose side he fought bravely, and it was whispered that he was her secret lover. When Jeanne d’Arc was wounded by a crossbow quarrel at the siege of Paris in September 1429, it was Gilles de Rais who valiantly carried her out of the range of further projectiles. For his valor, Gilles de Rais was appointed Marshal of France by the French king Charles VII and bestowed with a coat of arms of gold lilies on a blue field.

In 1432, at age twenty-eight, Gilles de Rais was ensconced back at his castles in Machecoul and Tiffauges south of Nantes. While Jeanne d’Arc was betrayed and burned at the stake, Gilles’s service to France had made him enormously wealthy. His annual income surpassed 2.5 million francs a year and his capital was 4.5 million, making him among the richest people in Europe at the time. This figure does not include his holdings of art objects, books, furnishings, and tapestries. In his history of Gilles, George Bataille writes:

He rode preceded by a royal escort, accompanied by an “ecclesiastical assembly.” A herald of arms, two hundred men, and trumpeters announced him; the canons in chapel, a kind of bishop, cantors, and the children in his music school made up his retinue on horseback, glittering with the richest ornaments. Gilles de Rais wanted to be dazzling, to the point of ruinous expenditure. In providing for the necessities that his delirium commanded, he liquidated an immense fortune without thinking. Some sort of dementia was at the heart of his propensity to spend money; he underwrote great theatrical performances accompanied by gifts of food and drink. He was compelled to fascinate people at all costs, but he lacked what a criminal quite often lacks on this order of things; this makes him recognize, in his confession, his excessive display of what necessarily should have remained hidden:
his crimes . . .
⁵⁶

It was precisely in this period that peasant children, mostly boys, began vanishing in the regions around Gilles de Rais’s castles. There was no mystery as to where the children were going. His servants had taken in many as pages to Gilles’s household. In the fifteenth century for a peasant boy there were only two means of escaping crushing poverty—joining the Church as a cleric or monk or going into the service of a local lord. Many parents were happy that their son caught the eye of Gilles’s henchmen. They were overjoyed to accept the offer of giving up their child as a page. The depositions given at Gilles de Rais’s trial eight years later describe a situation where beggar boys flocked to the gates of Gilles’s castle hoping to be taken in. The most attractive would be chosen and then never seen again. There was the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who had been taken into the castle to be made a page and who returned to visit his parents carrying a loaf of bread from the castle’s bakery. He glowingly described his treatment in the service of the count but after he returned to the castle he was never heard from again. When parents inquired of their missing children, they were told that they had been assigned to more distant castles belonging to Gilles or that they had happily entered the service of faraway lords who on their visits to Gilles took a liking to the lads. At one point parents were told that the English had demanded twenty-four male children as ransom for a captured French lord.

Other children were simply snatched up by Gilles’s passing entourage while they were tending cattle in the fields, walking in the streets on their way to church or on an errand for their parents or employers. One boy regularly delivered bread to the castle—until one day he simply did not return from a delivery. Another was left at home to care for his younger siblings. When his parents returned he had vanished. Witnesses would later testify that although the entire region was now gripped in a mass fear for its children and that there were even rumors that “they ate children” at Gilles de Rais’s castle in Machecoul, nobody dared to raise a voice of suspicion or complaint against the great lord. In the archives of France are still preserved a series of witness depositions, some of them corroborated by several additional witnesses, describing the disappearance of at least thirty-seven children:
⁵⁷

The witnesses declare that it was public and common knowledge that children were put to death in the said castle.
⁵⁸

Certain neighbors of his had told Barbe and his wife that they ought to watch over their child, who was at risk of being snatched and they were very frightened about him; in fact, the witness had even been at Saint-Jean-d’Angély, and someone asked him where he was from, and when he replied that he was from Machecoul, that person marveled [was shocked], telling him that they ate little children there. [In Old French:
sur ce, l’on lui avait dit, en se merveillant, qu’on y mangeoit les petis enffants.
]
⁵⁹