The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (48 page)

The grimmest piece of evidence was a filing cabinet full of videotapes.
The police slipped one of these – labelled ‘M Ladies, Kathy/Brenda’ – into the recorder, and found themselves looking at a frightened girl handcuffed to a chair, with a young Chinese – Charles Ng – holding a knife beside her.
Then a large, balding man with a beard enters the frame, takes off the handcuffs, shackles her ankles, and orders her to undress.
She does so reluctantly, hesitating before removing her knickers.
The bearded man tells her: ‘You’ll wash for us, clean for us, fuck for us.’ After this, she is made to go into the shower with the Chinese.
A later scene showed her strapped naked to a bed, while the bearded man tells her that her boyfriend Mike is dead.

Two five-hundred-page journals – in Lake’s handwriting – left no doubt what had been happening.
His fantasy was to have women as sex slaves, but he was willing to go a great deal further than Cameron Hooker or Gary Heidnik.
One couple – Brenda O’Connor, her boyfriend Lonnie Bond, and their two-year-old baby – had been invited to the house for dinner; the man and baby had been killed, and Brenda O’Connor had been handcuffed in the chair, while Ng cut off her clothes.
On the video she asks: ‘Why do you guys do this?’, and he tells her: ‘We don’t like you.
Do you want me to put it in writing?’ ‘Don’t cut my bra off.’ ‘Nothing is yours now.’ ‘Give my baby back to me.
I’ll do anything you want.’ ‘You’re going to do anything we want anyway.’ Lake’s journal commented: ‘The perfect woman is totally controlled.
A woman who does exactly what she is told to do and nothing else.
There is no sexual problem with a submissive woman.
There are no frustrations – only pleasure and contentment.’

Other videos showed the girls being raped and murdered; there were also snapshots of dead bodies, and bags of human bones that seemed to have been boiled.

By now police had dug up four bodies from a trench at the back of the house, two of them blacks.
Ng had been seen driving to the ranch with two black men, yet was known to hate blacks and Hispanics.
He had also taken various transients to work at the ‘ranch’; now it began to look as if some of them may never have left.
Another person who had disappeared was Lake’s younger brother Donald, who had failed to return after a visit to his brother in an earlier ‘survivalist compound’ in Humboldt County.
Two months before Lake’s arrest, a San Francisco couple, Harvey and Deborah Dubs, together with their sixteen-month-old son, had vanished from their San Francisco apartment, and the detective who had looked into their disappearance had been told that a young Chinese-looking man had been seen moving out their furniture; by coincidence, the same officer was now working on the Lake case . . .

Ng was now one of the most wanted men in America, but had not been seen since his disappearance.
A few days later, a San Francisco gun dealer who had been repairing an automatic pistol belonging to Ng notified the police that Ng had telephoned him from Chicago asking if he could send him the gun by post.
When the gun dealer had explained that it would be illegal to send handguns across state lines, Ng had cursed him and hung up.

On Saturday 6 July 1985, five weeks after Lake’s capture, a security guard in a department store in Calgary, Alberta, saw a young Chinese slipping food under his jacket.
When challenged, the thief drew a pistol, and as they grappled he fired, wounding the guard in the hand.
The man ran away at top speed, but was intercepted by other guards.
It became obvious that he had some training in Japanese martial arts, but he was eventually overpowered.
Identification documents revealed that he was Charles Ng.
A Canadian court sentenced Ng to four and a half years in prison for armed robbery, but resisted the demand that he should then be extradited to California, on the grounds that California still had a death penalty.

FBI agents looking into Ng’s background learned that he was the son of a wealthy Hong Kong family.
Born in 1961, Ng had been educated at a private school in north Yorkshire, from which he had been expelled for theft.
Although Ng was never short of money, he was a lifelong kleptomaniac.
He had lived for a while in Preston, Lancashire, then his parents sent him to San Francisco to complete his education.
At the age of eighteen, Ng had been involved in a hit-and-run accident, and to escape a jail sentence, joined the marines.
At Kaneoke Air Base on Oahu in Hawaii, he was arrested for thefts of weapons amounting to more than eleven thousand dollars.
He escaped and made his way back to San Francisco, where he met Lake, and became his close companion; they were later arrested on burglary charges in Mendocino County, where Ng was identified as an army deserter.
Convicted on the Hawaii arms theft charges, he spent some time in the Federal Prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
When paroled, he found a job as a warehouseman in San Francisco, and took an apartment there.
He spent much of his time at Lake’s ‘ranch’ at Wisleyville.
Comments by Ng’s attorney made it clear that Ng liked to think of himself as an anti-social ‘outsider’; he boasted of placing cyanide in the salt cellars at the Hawaii air base, dropping heat tabs into mail boxes, and of ‘assassinating’ a man in California.

FBI agents flew to Calgary to question him.
Ng’s story was that he knew about Lake’s murders, but had taken no part in them.
Ng described how Lake had killed car dealer Paul Cosner, whose car he was driving when arrested, and also how Lake had killed two employees of a removal company, one of whom was burnt to death.

Leonard Lake, born in 1946 in San Francisco, had an even more disturbing history.
He had been in the marines in Vietnam, but had been discharged as having psychiatric problems.
Joel Norris’s investigation into Lake’s background revealed a classic picture of a child rejected by both parents at an early age, and raised by his grandmother, a strict disciplinarian.
Both his father and mother came from a family of alcoholics.
The grandfather, also an alcoholic, was a violent type who subjected the child to a kind of military discipline.
His younger brother Donald, his mother’s favourite, was an epileptic who had experienced a serious head injury; he practised sadistic cruelty to animals and tried to rape both his sisters.
Lake protected the sisters ‘in return for sexual favours’ – from an early age he had displayed sexual obsession that seems to characterise the serial killer.
He took nude photographs of his sisters and cousins, and later became a maker of pornographic movies starring his wife.
His fantasies were of the same type as Cameron Hooker’s – total domination over women.

Lake shared another characteristic of so many serial killers: he lived in a world of fantasy – boasting, for example, of daring exploits in Vietnam when, in fact, he had never seen combat.
Like so many Right Men, he was skilful in hiding his abnormality, teaching grade school, working as a volunteer fire-fighter, and donating time to a company that provided free insulation in old people’s homes.
Like the boy-killer John Gacy, he seemed an exemplary citizen; but his outlook was deeply pessimistic.
He believed that World War Three would break out at any moment, and this is why he had built the bunker – stocked with food – at the ranch.
Like other ‘survivalists’, he often dressed in combat fatigues, and talked of living off the land.
Once out of the marines, his behaviour had become increasingly odd.
In his original ‘survivalist compound’ in Mother Lode, Humboldt County, the police found maps of the area with crosses marking ‘buried treasure’ – almost certainly bodies.
It was there that he had murdered his best friend from the marines, Charles Gunnar, and assumed his identity.
After being forced to flee from the earlier compound because of burglary charges, he had moved to Wisleyville.
A marriage to a girl called Cricket Balazs had broken up, but she had continued to act as a fence for stolen credit cards and other items.
Lake seems to have loved her – at least he said so in a last note scrawled as he was dying – but he nevertheless clung to the paranoid notion that women were responsible for all his problems.

In his journal, Lake describes himself ‘with death in my pocket and fantasy in my soul’.
He daydreamed of a more heroic and violent era – Vikings and Norse sagas – and of having chained girls as sex slaves (the ‘cells’ in his bunker were built for them).
According to Norris, the later journals show increasing disillusionment.
‘His dreams of success had eluded him; he admitted to himself that his boasts about heroic deeds in Vietnam were all delusions, and the increasing number of victims he was burying in the trench behind his bunker only added to his unhappiness.
By the time he was arrested in San Francisco, Lake had reached the final stage of the serial murderer syndrome: he realised that he had come to a dead end with nothing but his own misery to show for it.’

What has happened, we can see, is that Lake has gone one step beyond most Right Men: instead of merely fantasising about being a lone ‘outsider’, an outcast from a materialistic society, he translated his fantasies into reality, acting with a casual ruthlessness that is rarely seen even among serial killers, murdering men – even babies – so that he could lay his hands on women and turn them into sex slaves.
But when fantasy is brought into contact with reality, it is bound to melt away.
Our sense of our own humanity depends on feeling ourselves to be members of society, on having at least a few close relations with other human beings.
To kill men – one of them his own brother and another his best friend – and rape and torture women, was bound to cause a sense of revolt in the part of him that still had a capacity for human warmth.
He was systematically raping his own humanity.
The published extracts from the tapes suggest that Lake and Ng were still sufficiently human to be aware of this.
(For example, they tell Kathy Allen – who had gone there looking for her boyfriend Mike Carrol – that they intend to keep her prisoner for a month then let her go; but since she was their prisoner, they had no practical reason to try and spare her feelings.)

What Leonard Lake did was to act out the fantasies of the Marquis de Sade – who, as we have seen, might be regarded as the patron saint of serial killers.
What he proved was the basic incompatibility between these fantasies and our human nature.
Even hangmen have to feel that they are useful members of society.
Even Nazi torturers had to tell themselves that they were serving a cause.
To behave like Haroun Al Raschid or Ivan the Terrible is to commit mental suicide.
If Lake had chosen to bluff it out in the San Francisco police station, sticking to his story that he was Robin Stapley, he might well have walked out a free man.
Yet his journals reveal that he had ceased to be a free man many months before.
The time to end a meaningless existence had arrived, and Lake became his own executioner.

Eight

Into the Future

THE QUESTION REMAINS
; why is it that serial killers have appeared at this particular point in history?
One psychiatrist, discussing Leonard Lake – who was born in 1946, the same year as Ted Bundy – suggests that an unusual number of males were born in the year after the war and that, statistically speaking, a proportion of them were bound to become killers.
Others have pointed out that many serial killers have been sexually abused in childhood, and suggested that an increase in the sexual abuse of children has led to the rise of the serial killer.
In
Compulsive Killers
(1986) Elliot Leyton has produced a ‘social’ theory of serial killers.
He points out that the fifteenth-century multiple murderer Gilles de Rais – who raped and killed at least fifty children in his château at Machecoul – lived in an era when the established order in France was striving to reassert itself against the assaults of peasants and merchants.
Gilles was obsessed by the excesses of Tiberius and Caligula, and strove to emulate their lifestyles.
His crimes, Leyton suggests, were a personalised expression of this aggressive attitude of his class – his victims were all children of peasants.
In our own time, he suggests, serial killers have been members of the working class or lower middle class, struggling with a sense of alienation and frustration.
For them, murder is a form of class assertion.

There is certainly some truth in this notion; so far there have been no upper-class – or even upper-middle-class – serial killers.
The reason for this may be the one suggested in Chapter Seven: that serial murder may be a human expression of the ‘overcrowded rat syndrome’, and that upper- and middle-class children are unlikely to suffer from overcrowding.

The overcrowded rat theory suggests that the reasons for the appearance of serial murder are primarily social, and this tends to be confirmed by the study of sex crime.
As we have seen, sex crime – in our modern sense of the word – was virtually unknown in the eighteenth century; it made its appearance in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was undoubtedly linked to ‘Victorian’ attitudes towards sex; that is, to the fact that sex was unmentionable in respectable society, and therefore ‘forbidden’.

To understand the crimes of killers like Bundy, Gallego and Lake, we also have to recognise that, in another respect, human attitudes towards sex have hardly changed in many thousands of years.
From the
Iliad
to the
Morte D’Arthur
, the image of woman has been much the same: the archetypal heroine is gentle, modest, decorous, virtuous and free from vanity.
While sexually desirable, she is uninterested in sex, and only grants it to the male who has proved himself ‘worthy’ of her.
As far as most males are concerned, she is essentially ‘forbidden’.
If she shows preference for one of her many wooers, the others experience agonising jealousy because their goddess has rejected them.
Helen’s elopement with Paris, like Queen Guinevere’s infidelity with Lancelot, seems doubly shocking because we feel her to be the embodiment of all the female virtues.

The twentieth century has seen a gradual ‘emancipation’ of our attitudes towards sex.
From Wells’s
Ann Veronica
, through
Ulysses
and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, to Huxley’s
Brave New World
, modern writers have assured us that perfectly nice girls can enjoy copulation and even commit adultery.
We nowadays accept that when a girl refers to her ‘boyfriend’, she usually means the man she sleeps with, and that a girl who has had many lovers is not necessarily a harlot.
Yet while the conscious mind has adjusted to this new state of affairs, our instincts continued to harbour the old ‘forbidden’ female archetype, modest, gentle and virtuous.
So in spite of enormous changes in our sexual attitudes, modern man’s reaction to a pretty girl is in most respects exactly like that of the troubadours or the knights of the Round Table: she is an unknown country, a sovereign state, that he would love to be allowed to explore.
Brave New World
remains mildly titillating because its apparently ‘nice’ young ladies discuss the men they have slept with openly without any sense of guilt.
We feel the same sense of shock that we would experience if Jane Austen’s heroines talked openly about their adulteries.