A Criminal History of Mankind (98 page)

The same problem - as already noted - is found on many large estates and in blocks of flats: vandalism, mugging, burglary. And an American experiment has shown that when the flat-dwellers are housed in bungalows with individual gardens, the crime rate falls dramatically. The problem is ‘territorial’.

Once the social bonds have been loosened, violence seems to become a natural outlet for frustration or boredom. And it is at this point that ‘magical thinking’ finally comes into its own and provides an ‘intellectual’ justification for the violence. Werner Boost, a German sex murderer who made a habit of attacking courting couples and raping the women, told police indignantly that he became furious at the immorality of couples having sex in cars, and that: ‘These sex horrors are the curse of Germany.’ Heinrich Pommerencke, a twenty-three-year-old who had committed twenty rapes and ten rape murders, explained after his capture that he had committed his first murder after seeing a film called
The Ten Commandments
and deciding that women are the cause of all the world’s troubles; he then attacked and raped an eighteen-year-old girl in a park, cutting her throat. Patrick Byrne, who raped and decapitated a girl in the Birmingham YWCA hostel in 1959, explained that he was trying to get his revenge on women for causing his sexual tension. Rudolf Pleil, the German rapist who committed suicide in his cell in 1958, liked to describe himself as
lder beste Todmachery
(‘the best death-maker’ - he killed fifty women). ‘Every man has his passion,’ he remarked. ‘Some prefer whist. I prefer killing people’ - the implication being that murder was an honourable occupation in which a man might feel proud of his excellence. Yet his suicide seems to be a tacit admission that he was not willing to submit his logic to the mercy of a jury.

It is important to note that ‘magical thinking’ usually applies to only one department of a man’s life; in most ways he may be perfectly normal and logical - as we have seen in the case of so many Right Men who strike their friends and colleagues as perfectly reasonable. In the early 1950s, a ‘mad bomber’ terrorised New York; bombs exploded in Grand Central Station, Radio City Music Hall, Macy’s department store and several other public places; fortunately, no one was killed, although a few were injured. The police tracked down the bomber when he wrote a letter denouncing the Edison Company for causing his tuberculosis; a check of company records revealed that a man named George Metesky had been knocked down by an escape of hot gas in 1931, and had been unsuccessful in his claim for a disability pension. Metesky proved to be a fifty-four-year-old bachelor who lived with his elder sisters, attended church every Sunday, and dressed meticulously in double-breasted suits. He never struck anyone as remotely insane; and, apart from this single streak of paranoid resentment, he was apparently quite normal. Metesky was confined in a mental home.

The same point emerges in the case of Richard Speck, the multiple sex-killer. When police were summoned to a nurses’ hostel in Jeffrey Manor, Chicago, on 14 July 1966, they were convinced that an insane monster was at large. The mutilated corpse of a girl lay on a downstairs couch; upstairs, there were seven more dead women, all naked, all slashed and stabbed. But there was a survivor of the massacre, a nurse named Corazon Amurao, who described how she had opened the door to a pockmarked man who smelt strongly of drink, and who threatened her with a gun. He had tied up the nine nurses, then taken them one by one, into the next room. Miss Amurao had hidden under the bed, and the killer had overlooked her. When she described a tattoo on the man’s arm, with the words ‘born to raise hell’, the police were able to identify him as a sailor who had applied for a job at a local seamen’s union; his name was Richard Speck. Two days later, after his name had been released on television, Speck attempted suicide in a hotel room and the tattoo was recognised by the doctor who tended his slashed wrists.

In spite of a pockmarked face, Speck proved to be a quiet, shy man who gave an impression of gentleness. (One man who met him in Chicago described him to me as a ‘charmer’.) A few weeks before the murders, he had been taken into hospital for an appendectomy, and one of the nurses had gone on dates with him; she described him as kindly and considerate, but said that he seemed to be full of smouldering resentment about his divorced wife. The only nurse who had been raped - Gloria Davy (who was found downstairs) - bore a strong resemblance to Speck’s wife; Corazon Amurao, who had watched Speck raping her, described how he had said: ‘Would you mind putting your legs round my back’ - evidence of consideration for a woman he was to murder a few minutes later.

Again and again we encounter this apparent anomaly in criminals. Myra Hindley loved animals. Geoffrey Hammond’s father said of him: ‘He loves children. He’s a sentimental boy.’ And in the case of Hammond, we can see that one streak of paranoid resentment - about homosexuals - was enough to lead to violence. It is the ‘decision to be out of control’ in a particular area. But we can also see that this ‘decision’ to express resentment as violence depends to some extent on social background, and whether it was kindly and co-operative or hostile and alienated. Richard Speck’s home background had been insecure and he became a drifter. Myra Hindley spent her childhood between two homes because - she believed - her parents preferred her sister. Ian Brady was illegitimate and he was farmed out to another ‘parent’. Charles Manson’s mother became pregnant at fifteen, and went to prison shortly after Manson was born. And so insecure social bonds prevent a capacity for love and affection from being channelled into stable relationships, and the resentment lies dormant, like a volcano, waiting to be detonated into violence by stress.

Albert DeSalvo, the ‘Boston Strangler’, provides a particularly clear example of this ‘balance of forces’. Between June 1962 and January 1964, DeSalvo committed thirteen sex murders in the Boston area; then he stopped killing and contented himself with fondling and rape. He was finally identified as the Strangler only because he chose to confess.

The first four murders were of elderly women, aged between fifty five and seventy-five. DeSalvo, a powerfully built man with a plausible manner and a certain charm, would knock on the door of an apartment and explain that he had been sent to do some work -  the ceiling, check the windows for leaks, etc. If the women seemed doubtful, he would turn away politely, saying ‘I don’t want to bother you’, and they would usually let him in. When the woman’s back was turned, DeSalvo would place his muscular arm round her throat and tighten it until she was unconscious; intercourse usually followed, then the victim was strangled with a belt or some article of clothing. The victim was then left in a deliberately ‘obscene’ position - perhaps with legs spread apart, wearing stockings and suspender belt, and with a brush handle inserted in the vagina; in one case he tied the victim’s ankles to chairs and placed her with the genitals facing the door, so that this would be the first thing that anyone would see on entering the room.

After the killing of the elderly women, there was a lull of four months; the next set of victims were young and attractive girls. The psychiatrist Dr James Brussell propounded the remarkable theory that the killer was actually ‘progressing’ through murder to greater maturity. The early murders expressed resentment of his mother; then he ‘got it out of his system’ and turned to attractive girls.

Soon after Christmas 1952, a young student, Patricia Bissette, allowed him into her apartment when he said he was her roommate’s boyfriend, and talked to him trustfully as he drank coffee. He strangled and raped her. But - as he later admitted - he felt so ashamed that she had ‘treated him like a man’ (i.e. like a human being) that he carefully covered the body over before leaving.

In January 1964, DeSalvo talked himself into the apartment of nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan and ordered her into the bedroom. She pleaded with him, but he hit her and tore off her clothes. After raping her, he bit her all over, then strangled her; then he sat on her chest and masturbated on her face. He explained to the dead girl: ‘I can’t help doing it...’ But this was his last murder. Like Patricia Bissette, Mary had made him feel like a human being, and the result was a revulsion from killing.

DeSalvo continued raping; he was sexually insatiable, capable of several orgasms one after another. But the method had changed. He would talk himself into a woman’s home, and engage her in casual conversation. At a certain point, he would pull out a knife, force her into the bedroom, and tie her up. He would then kiss and fondle her, taking his time, and usually end with rape. After this he would apologise and leave. If the woman was too distressed, he would omit the rape. DeSalvo claimed to have raped two hundred women between January and October 1964. A description by one of his victims reminded the police of a curious series of sexual offences in 1960, when a man talked his way into women’s apartments by asking if they would like to work as a model; he would then take their measurements with tape, but without any attempt at sexual assault. Some of the women complained when his promises of modelling work failed to materialise: DeSalvo was identified as the ‘measuring man’ and sentenced to two years in jail for assault. The rapist sounded like the measuring man. DeSalvo was arrested and sent to the Bridgewater State Hospital. It was there that he confessed to being the Boston Strangler, and at first no one believed him. Eventually, the exactitude of his descriptions convinced the police that he was telling the truth. In 1973, DeSalvo was mysteriously stabbed to death in his cell, presumably by a fellow prisoner.

Here we have an unusual case of a sex killer whose crimes display paranoid resentment of women, but who slowly outgrows his ‘magical thinking’ as realism gradually breaks through. Finally, it becomes clear that he craves human relationships as much as sexual satisfaction. The resentment has been finally replaced by a desire to be understood. But, by DeSalvo’s own account, it took some two thousand rapes to reach this point.

Psychiatric examination revealed that DeSalvo’s childhood had been traumatic; his father was a brute who beat his wife and children - on one occasion he broke his wife’s fingers one by one. His mother made no attempt to protect the children. There was an overpowering atmosphere of sexuality in the home; his father would bring home prostitutes and have sex in front of the children, and DeSalvo himself had incestuous relations with his sisters. In the circumstances, it seems inevitable that the resentment would eventually express itself as sexual violence.

It became clear in the 1960s that a generalised social resentment - a hatred of authority - was becoming more pronounced than at any time since the anarchist outrages of the 1880s. After the Second World War there had been a period of social calm - based on relief at seeing the end of fascism. In England it was presided over by a socialist government, but this swing to socialism was not a sign of social unrest - merely of a desire for change after five years of war, and in fact, the national temper was conservative. And this conservatism inevitably caused a reaction in the generation then growing up. The American sociologist David Reisman wrote in 1956 an essay called
‘The Found Generation
’ in which he pointed out that most American students of the new generation possessed the ‘organisation mentality’ to a terrifying degree; that their aims were a wife, a home, a car, and a good job with some large (and therefore ‘safe’) organisation. Such young people, he said, would never drop atom bombs or start world wars. Reisman’s famous book
The Lonely Crowd
argued that the American mentality was slowly changing from ‘inner-directed’ (i.e. self-reliant) to ‘other-directed’ - conformist. William H. Whyte’s book
The Organisation Man
made a similar point. Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s seemed to confirm that what the post-war world wanted most was freedom from social upheaval.

By the second half of the 1950s, a new generation was already expressing its distaste for this stability. In England, the ‘Angry Young Men’ - named after John Osborne’s play
Look Back in Anger
- directed their abuse at the ‘establishment’ - the church, the government, the royal family. In America, the ‘Beat Generation’ - led by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg - turned their backs on society in favour of the ‘hippie’ culture; but the emphasis was still on the iniquity of the establishment. In France, the followers of Sartre called themselves Maoists and called for a communist revolution. In Germany, still numbed by the defeat of 1945, there was as yet no sign of a new literary generation, but the spirit of dissatisfaction was growing.

The revolt against ‘stability’ received one of its clearest expressions in the manifestos of a group that called itself Situationist International, founded by Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. They argued that the establishment has learned to control the people by turning life into a kind of continuous entertainment - the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. Computers, television and all the other ‘mod-cons’ were designed to keep people passive and cow-like. The answer should be ‘subversion’ in every department of modern life, in schools, universities, factories. Anything that adds to the convenience of modern life should be regarded as a target for attack.

Another increasingly powerful influence on this rebel generation was Herbert Marcuse, a German Jewish sociologist with strong Marxist leanings who emigrated to America after the Nazis came to power. He seems to have detested American society very nearly as much as Hitler’s Germany, finding it too obsessed with success, conformity, standardisation. As early as 1941 he was expressing deep misgivings about technological society and the tendency of technology to deprive man of his freedom. In 1951, his book
Eros and Civilisation
took its starting point from Freud’s argument that civilisation always seems to involve repression of man’s natural instincts. And in 1964,
One Dimensional Man
began with the proposition: ‘A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilisation, a token of technical progress.’ At the back of Marcuse’s mind lies a vague, misty concept of some ideal ‘unrepressive society’, a Rousseau-ish dream in which everyone can do as he likes. His hatred of ‘repression’ became steadily more vitriolic until, in
An Essay on Liberation
(1969), it explodes into a fountain of bilious rage; the rebels of the new generation are advised to cultivate the ‘methodical use of obscenity’, to refer to President X and Governor Y as ‘pig X’ and ‘pig Y’, and to address them as mother-fuckers because they have ‘perpetrated the unspeakable Oedipal crime’, to take drug trips to escape the ‘ego shaped by the established society’ and to seize every opportunity for social sabotage. Marcuse was basically an old-fashioned anarchist; but his denunciation of the unsatisfactoriness of modern life aroused an echo in all young people who found modern life frustrating and boring.