The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (49 page)

In other words, so as far as sex is concerned, ‘modernity’ is only a superficial overlay; but there
is
a field in which change has been genuine and profound: that of political freedom.
We are living in the first era in which, for a large proportion of the globe, the Rights of Man have become a reality.
They have been discussed and analysed for more than two centuries; but the truth is that political freedom means very little without economic freedom; a desperately poor man is, by definition, one of the oppressed, whether he lives under democracy or dictatorship.
It is only in the second half of the twentieth century that welfare states have been able to offer the majority of their citizens some degree of security from starvation.
The result is that ‘rights’ that were once theoretical have finally become an actuality.
Every tramp knows that the police have no right to arrest him without good reason; every schoolboy knows that a schoolmaster who loses his temper and hits him runs the risk of dismissal.
It is no longer necessary to be wealthy or influential to ensure impartial treatment at the hands of the law.

The negative side of the coin – and it may be a small price to pay – is an increase in the kind of boredom and apathy that were once regarded as diseases of the rich, and in the self-pity and resentment that flourish in such fertile soil.
We have seen that the beginning of the thought process that leads to crime involves looking around for someone on whom we can
lay the blame.
In that respect there is a basic similarity between the psychology of Charles Manson and his drug-addict disciples and terrorist organisations like the Japanese Red Army faction, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Symbionese Liberation Army.
When we learn that Ian Brady shook his fist at the sky after one of his murders, that Gerald Gallego declared ‘his only desire was to kill God’, and that Leonard Lake took pride in declaring himself an atheist, we can begin to understand how the logic of resentment can lead to total rejection of ‘conscience’, as it looks for an ultimate scapegoat.

It was towards the end of the eighteenth century that political philosophers began to argue that most men are poor because the social system is unjust.
Karl Marx went a step further and declared that the poor have the
right
to seize their neighbour’s wealth, for if the neighbour was honest he would not be wealthy.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Marxism had begun to achieve a certain academic respectability.
Nowadays, there are hundreds of academics in ‘capitalist’ universities all over the world who make no secret of their Marxist affiliations.

The sexual revolution took longer to gather momentum, as we have seen, because when a society is economically deprived, sex is a secondary issue.
Once a society is affluent, sex becomes one of the major issues.
It is important to understand that the
attitude
that seems typical of sex criminals is also shared by many ‘respectable’ members of society, including its leading intellectuals.
H.G.
Wells was well known in London as a tireless adulterer who kept photographs of his mistresses on the mantelpiece; his wife was expected to accept his need for affaires.
Bertrand Russell was a lifelong seducer who was pursuing teenage students well into his seventies, when his virility began to fail.
The theologian Paul Tillich was a pornography addict who was still seducing female students in his eighth decade.
A recent biography of the Catholic artist Eric Gill reveals that he practised a lifelong promiscuity, which included incest with his sisters and daughters, as well as bestiality and a passion for adolescent girls.
In the various artistic communities that he formed, he demanded the
droit de seigneur
over all the attractive women, and became intensely jealous if they allowed themselves to be seduced by other males.
The painter Augustus John shared Gill’s enthusiasm for incest (as becomes clear from Michael Holroyd’s biography), and also his attitude of
droit de seigneur
over women in his immediate entourage.
(It may or may not be relevant that John was a mediocre artist until he dived into the sea and knocked himself unconscious on a rock; after his recovery, he became a major artist.)

How can intelligent men justify this kind of self-indulgence?
The answer is that they have no difficulty whatsoever.
Wells’s argument was that in order to evolve as a writer he needed to evolve as a human being, and that it would be impossible to evolve as a human being if he went around in a state of permanent sexual frustration.
His affaires, he claimed, filled him with creative energy and a sense of the wonder of the universe.
His wife was expected to accept this or agree to a separation; she seems to have accepted it, but lived a lonely and unsatisfying existence, dying of abdominal cancer in 1927.
(Augustus John’s wife committed suicide.)

Wells was a member of a privileged class, an intellectual elite, and he demanded sexual freedom as a right of his class.
As we have seen, the slow increase in personal liberty in the twentieth century means that the ‘privileged class’ has expanded until it includes most dominant and intelligent males.
If Melvin Rees or Ted Bundy or Leonard Lake had been called upon to present a reasoned defence of their crimes, they would all have sounded much like H.G.
Wells.
The main difference, they would have argued, is that Wells, as a famous writer, had a queue of young ladies eager to share his bed.
They, as intelligent nobodies, were forced to take a short cut.
But since they all believed that ‘only individual standards make murder right or wrong’, and that nature intended us all to be predators, they had no hesitation in risking life and liberty in the name of individual self-development.
They would also have gone on to argue, with the self-justification that never fails the Right Man, that the blame should be placed squarely on modern society, with its endless sexual stimulation – from soft-porn magazines on every newsstand to the obligatory bedroom scene in every film.
Man surely has a right to get rid of his frustrations?

There has been, so far, no sexual equivalent of Karl Marx to argue that women have no right to withhold their bodies from sexually frustrated males, and ought to be raped.
Yet this obviously describes the attitude of Rees, Bundy, Gallego, and most of the other serial killers in this volume.
Every rapist could be regarded as an advocate of the ‘propaganda of the deed’.
And the ‘elitist argument’ summarised above is sound in at least one respect: that if the level of sexual stimulation in a society continues to rise, an increasing number of highly-sexed dominant males will cross the threshold into rape.
As suggested elsewhere, ‘when there is underlying social frustration, it is the criminal who provides a measure of that tension.
If a new and horrifying type of crime occurs, a type that has never been known before, it should not be regarded as some freak occurrence, any more than the outbreak of a new disease should be dismissed as a medical oddity.’ Criminals might be compared with the rats who die first in a plague.
¹

The rise of sexual fetishism provides an interesting example of the mechanism.
The word was invented by the nineteenth-century psychologist Alfred Binet, who pointed out that if early sexual excitement is associated with some object, such as a woman’s hair or shoes, it may become ‘imprinted’, so that the same object continues to produce excitement, just as the ringing of a bell made Pavlov’s dogs salivate.
In fact, one of the earliest cases of fetishism on record dates from April 1790, when London was terrorised by a man who, in the words of the chronicler Archenholtz, committed ‘nameless crimes, the possibility of whose existence no legislator has ever dreamt of’.
These nameless crimes amounted to creeping up behind fashionably dressed women and slashing at their clothing with a sharp knife, which occasionally caused painful wounds; it was also alleged that he would hold out a nosegay to young ladies, and as they bent to sniff it, would jab them in the face with a ‘sharp pointed instrument’ hidden among the flowers.
‘The Monster’ apparently became obsessed with the pretty daughter of a tavern keeper, Anne Porter, and followed her in St James’s Park, making obscene suggestions.
On the night of 18 January 1790, when she was returning from a ball with her two sisters, he came up behind her, and she felt a blow on her right buttock.
Indoors, she discovered that she had a nine-inch knife wound which was four inches deep in the centre.
Six months later, out walking with a gentleman named Coleman, she recognised the ‘Monster’ in the street.
Coleman followed the man to a nearby house, accused him of being the attacker, and made a kind of ‘citizen’s arrest’.
The man denied being the ‘Monster’, but Anne Porter fainted when she saw him.
He proved to be a slightly built man named Renwick Williams, a maker of artificial flowers.
At his trial, Williams insisted that it was a case of mistaken identity; and offered an alibi.
The jury chose to disbelieve him, and he was sentenced to six years in prison for ‘damaging clothes’.
During the months he was attacking women, Williams created a reign of terror: rewards were offered and walls covered in posters describing his activities.
The prosecuting counsel talked of ‘a scene that is so new in the annals of humanity, a scene so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible . . .’ ‘The Monster’ clearly created a profound sense of psychological shock amongst his contemporaries, of the kind produced a century later by the Jack the Ripper murders.

A century later still, another bizarre precedent was created by the behaviour of a sexual deviate who became known in California as the Panty Bandit; he would hold up underwear shops or beauty parlours in the Los Angeles area, order a woman to remove her panties and/or tights, and then masturbate with the garment draped over his face before snatching money from the till.
Police were accustomed to dealing with nuisances who stole underwear from clotheslines or frequented laundromats in search of soiled panties, but had never encountered a man who would masturbate in front of a crowd of customers and then make off with the underwear.
In the summer of 1988, the ‘Panty Bandit’ was nominated Public Enemy Number One in California.
His activities revealed that he was at least disinclined to use his gun.
In one shop, he ordered a woman to masturbate him; she made a grab for his gun, and he punched her in the face and ran away.
On 23 October 1988 a shop assistant succeeded in notifying the police shortly after the bandit had left, and a man driving a Honda Civic was caught after a chase.
He was thirty-three-year-old Bruce Lyons, and in his car the police found a box full of stolen underwear.
Lyons was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
The severity of the sentence reflects a recognition of how easily the Panty Bandit could have progressed to rape and murder.

In the two centuries that separate Renwick Williams from Bruce Lyons, it is clear that extraordinary social changes have taken place – changes that would have been incomprehensible to Dr Johnson, but which would have been perfectly understood by his contemporary the Marquis de Sade.
Sade lived in an atmosphere of unreality, a world of dreams inside his own head.
He was one of the privileged few who could afford that indulgence.
Two centuries later, an affluent society had created conditions that could spawn potential de Sades by the thousand.

We are now also in a position to understand what has happened since the days of Renwick Williams – how, in the increased prosperity of the nineteenth century, the age of economic crime gave way slowly to the age of sex crime, and how this in turn is being displaced by an age of crimes that ‘service’ the craving for self-esteem, the will to power.
Rees, Bundy, Hooker, Lake, Heidnik, simply refused to accept that they were not Haroun A1 Raschid and could do whatever they liked.
Bundy admitted that, at any point during his crimes, he could have stopped himself if he had wanted to; he simply had no desire to stop.
He had decided that he had a
right
to kill, just as a thief decides that he has a right to steal.

But exactly how great
is
the problem of the serial killer?
In
Serial Killers: The Growing Menace,
Joel Norris estimates that in America there may be as many as five hundred at large at any given time; other estimates vary – Elliott Leyton guesses a hundred.
An altogether more balanced estimate was provided by FBI agent Gregg McCrary.
Asked about the number of serial killers, he said:

‘There were six thousand or more unsolved murders last year (1988), and the bulk of the serial killer victims will undoubtedly be somewhere in that number.
(But) the unofficial estimates of three hundred, four hundred or five hundred even, do not seem to me to be reasonable . . .
There’s less than a hundred out there – in my view less than fifty.
My
estimate is between thirty and fifty.
Working on that figure, and using as a guide our experience of many serial killers averaging ten or less victims apiece at the time of their apprehension – there will be exceptions, of course – an estimate of a few hundred serial murders per year (in the US) would probably be most accurate.’

About the success rate, he commented: ‘Again this is very difficult to calculate.
We reckon to “identify” between thirteen and fifteen serial killers each year.
By “identifying” I mean identify as
working
, not as individuals: and of those we reckon that half – seven say – will be caught and brought to trial with the help of CIAP profiling.
Now seven doesn’t tell you the full story.
Take the Bundy case, for example.
Bundy was charged with just three murders, the three he committed in Florida.
But he admitted to twenty-three, and a lot of law enforcement guys think he was good for half as many again, around thirty-four murders.
Now we profiled Bundy.
OK, he was arrested under another name for driving a stolen car, but he was identified in custody as Bundy – and executed twelve years later, still for only three murders.
But how many murders do you claim in the “success rate” – in other words, in this arrest and conviction of a man in which profiling played a part?
Was it three murders, twenty-three or thirty-four?
So “success rate” is not accountable in the most meaningful sense – i.e.
the number of
murders
cleaned up with the aid of profiling.’