The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (2 page)

If we wish to trace it to its beginnings, it could be argued that the age of the sex crime begins in the year 1791, with the publication of a novel called
Justine
, or
The Misfortunes of Virtue
, by Alphonse Donatien de Sade.
The Marquis de Sade is the patron saint of pornography and sex crime.
Contrary to the general impression, Sade never killed anyone; his most reprehensible exploit was making small cuts in a prostitute’s skin and pouring hot wax into them.
For a number of similar misdemeanours, he was thrown into prison at the age of thirty-seven, and stayed there for thirteen years, until the time of the French Revolution.
For a man of Sade’s imperious temperament, prison must have been unimaginable torment.
For three years he was plunged into transports of despair and self-pity.
Then he began to recover and to direct his hatred and resentment into literary channels.
Resentment mingled with frustrated eroticism to produce works of almost insane cruelty.
His favourite fantasy was of some virtuous, innocent girl who falls into the hands of a wicked libertine and is flogged, raped and tortured.
His most characteristic work is a huge novel called
The 120 Days of Sodom,
a long sexual daydream about four libertines – including a bishop and a Lord Chief Justice – who retire to a château and set out to indulge every possible kind of sexual perversion.
Brothel madames tell stories about their most debauched clients, stimulating the libertines to rape, flog and torture a small band of young men and women who have been procured for their pleasure.
Yet, oddly enough, Sade is never pornographic in the modern sense of the word; there are no gloating descriptions of sexual acts.
His real desire is to scream defiance at the Church and State; he loves to show judges abusing their authority, and monks and nuns engaged in debauchery and corrupting children.
His descriptions of torture are anything but sexually stimulating; even devotees of pornography find them repetitive and nauseating.

Sade was far more than a mere advocate of torture and murder; he regarded himself as the first truly honest philosopher in the history of human thought.
The so-called ‘great philosophers’ he regarded as liars and lackeys.
All animals, he says, seek pleasure as the greatest good; the body was obviously made for pleasure, expecially sexual pleasure.
Then why do we not spend our lives seeking pleasure?
Because it would not suit our rulers.
They try to persuade us that unselfishness, hard work and self-sacrifice are virtues, and that there is a God in heaven who will judge us for our misdeeds.
This is untrue; there is no God, and if we were not such slaves, we would throw off our shackles and devote our lives to the pursuit of ecstasy.
Would this not lead us into doing harm to others?
Of course it would, says Sade.
Why not?
Animals devour one another; that is the law of Nature.
The only truly honest attitude to human existence is one of total selfishness
.
The truly courageous man chooses crime rather than virtue, for he knows that virtue was invented by our rulers to keep us in subjugation.
Kings and popes know better; they spend their lives in every kind of debauchery . . .

Sade was released from prison in 1789, and for a time scraped a living as a playwright.
(He was never, even in his youth, a rich man, and the fierce underlying resentment of his works owes a great deal to poverty.) Then he was arrested again for publishing filthy books, and spent the rest of his life in an asylum, where he died in 1816.
His works began to enjoy a certain vogue in England, and his obsession with ‘the forbidden’ gave rise to the first truly pornographic novels of the 1820s: works whose purpose was not to denounce the Church and the legal profession, but merely to serve as an aid to masturbation – what one French writer called ‘books that one reads with one hand’.
It is significant that many of these early pornographic works are about the seduction of children and schoolgirls.
In the Victorian age, prostitutes were cheap; in fact, few working-class girls would have turned down the offer of five shillings – a week’s wages – in exchange for half an hour in a rented room.
In the circumstances, rape of adult women would have been superfluous; this is why most sex crimes were committed against children – children were still ‘forbidden’.

There was one Victorian gentleman who devoted his whole life to the pursuit of sexual pleasure, and whose career may be regarded as highly instructive in the present context.
In his anonymous autobiography,
My Secret Life,
he simply calls himself Walter, and his identity remains a mystery.
He describes how his sexual education began at the age of twelve, when he lifted his baby sister’s nightdress.
In his mid-teens he succeeded in pushing a servant girl on the bed and taking her virginity.
From then on, Walter devoted his life to sex.
He spent hours of every day peering through cracks in bedroom doors, watching servant girls undress or using the chamberpot.
With his cousin Fred he spent days in a basement which had a grating through which he could peer up the skirts of women who walked overhead.

What emerges most clearly from his eleven-volume autobiography – published at his own expense in the 1890s – is that his craving for sex was not a desire to give and receive mutual satisfaction, but an expression of the
will to power
.
In the second volume he describes picking up a middle-aged woman and a ten-year-old girl in Vauxhall Gardens, and having intercourse with the child, standing in front of a mirror, ‘holding her like a baby, her hands round my neck, she whining that I was hurting her . . .’ He adds: ‘I longed to hurt her, to make her cry with the pain my tool caused her, I would have made her bleed if I could.’ The same attitude emerges again and again in his descriptions of intercourse: ‘In the next instant . . .
I was up the howling little bitch.’ ‘Her cry of pain gave me pleasure, and fetched me.’

My Secret Life
affords an important insight into the mind of the Marquis de Sade.
The normal reader finds it difficult to understand how sexual gratification can be associated with pain and violence: with the gouging out of eyes or the mutilation of genitals.
‘Walter’ was no sadist, yet his craving for women was basically a desire to violate them.
Sade had always enjoyed flogging and being flogged.
Incarcerated in a damp cell, with only his imagination to keep him company, the daydreams of flogging and violation turned into daydreams of murder, torture and mutilation.
The human imagination has this curious power to
amplify
our desires.
Yet it is important to note that, even when released from prison, de Sade made no attempt to put these fantasies into practice.
He had already exhausted them by writing them down.
In the same way, ‘Walter’s’ sadism never developed beyond a desire to cause pain in the act of penetration, because he had an endless supply of women with whom he could act out his fantasies.
The essence of sadism lies in frustration.
As William Blake put it: ‘He who desires but acts not breeds a pestilence.’

Most of ‘Walter’s’ early encounters with teenage whores took place in the 1840s, when the streets were full of starving women and children for whom five shillings meant the difference between life and death.
By the 1880s all this had begun to change.
The Public Health Act and the Artisans’ Dwellings Act of 1875 had made an attempt to grapple with disease and poverty.
When H.G.
Wells came to London as a student in 1884, his cousin Isobel – whom he later married – worked as a retoucher of photographs in Regent Street, and many of his fellow students were women.
The typewriter had been invented in the 1860s, and businessmen soon discovered that women made better typists than men.
Drapers’ shops were now full of women counter assistants.
All of which meant that – although there were still plenty of prostitutes on the streets – there was now a whole new class of ‘unavailable’ women to excite the concupiscence of men like ‘Walter’.
The result was that, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, rape of adult women became far more common, and sex crime – in our modern sense of the word – made its appearance.
In 1867, a clerk named Frederick Baker lured a little girl named Fanny Adams away from her companions in Alton, Hampshire, and literally tore her to pieces.
In 1871, a French butcher named Eusebius Pieydagnelle killed six young women with a knife, experiencing orgasm as he stabbed them.
(He has a claim to be the first serial killer.) In Italy in the same year, Vincent Verzeni was charged with a number of sex crimes including two murders – he experienced orgasm in the act of strangulation.
In Boston, USA, in 1873, a bell-ringer named Thomas Piper murdered and raped three women, then lured a five-year-old girl into the belfry and battered her to death with a cricket bat; he was interrupted before the assault could be completed, and hanged in 1876.
In 1874, a fourteen-year-old sadist named Jesse Pomeroy was charged with the sex murders of a boy and a girl in Boston and sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 1880, twenty-year-old Louis Menesclou lured a five-year-old girl into his room in Paris and killed her, keeping the body under his mattress overnight; when he tried to burn her entrails he was betrayed by the black smoke.
He wrote in his notebook: ‘I saw her, I took her.’

Crimes like these were regarded as the solitary aberrations of madmen, and scarcely came to the attention of the general public.
The crimes of an American mass murderer named Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Henry Howard Holmes, should be noted as an exception.
Holmes began as a confidence trickster, and in the late 1880s he built himself a large house in a Chicago suburb that would become known as ‘Murder Castle’.
When Holmes was arrested in 1894 for involvement in a swindle, police soon came to suspect that he was responsible for the murder of an associate named Pitezel, and three of Pitezel’s children.
Further investigation revealed that Holmes had murdered a number of ex-mistresses, as well as women who had declined to become his mistress.
Moreover, as Holmes himself confessed, killing had finally become an addiction which, he believed, had turned him into a monster.
The total number of his murders is believed to be twenty-seven, and they qualify him as America’s first serial killer.
He was hanged in 1896.

It was the crimes of Jack the Ripper though – which will be further discussed in the next chapter – that achieved worldwide notoriety and made the police aware that they were confronted by a new type of problem: a killer who struck
at random.
The murders took place in the Whitechapel area of London between 31 August 1888 and 9 November 1888.
The first victim, a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, was found in the early hours of the morning with her throat cut; in the mortuary, it was discovered that she had also been disembowelled.
The next victim, another prostitute named Annie Chapman, was found spreadeagled in the backyard of a slum dwelling, also disembowelled; the contents of her pockets had been laid around her in a curiously ritualistic manner – a characteristic that has been found to be typical of many ‘serial killers’.
The two murders produced nationwide shock and outrage – nothing of the sort had been known before – and this was increased when, on the morning of 30 September 1888, the killer committed two murders in one night.
A letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, boasting of the ‘double event’, was sent to the Central News Agency within hours of the murders.
When the biggest police operation in London’s history failed to catch the murderer, there was unprecedented public hysteria.
As if in response to the sensation he was causing, the Ripper’s next murder was the most gruesome so far.
A twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly was killed and disembowelled in her room; the mutilations that followed must have taken several hours.
Then the murders ceased – the most widely held theories being that the killer had committed suicide or was confined in a mental home.
From the point of view of the general public, the most alarming thing about the murders was that the killer seemed to be able to strike with impunity, and that the police seemed to be completely helpless.

The French police found themselves confronting the same frustrations in the mid-1890s when a travelling killer who became known as ‘the Disemboweller of the south-east’ raped and mutilated eleven victims, including three boys.
(It is interesting to observe that many sex criminals have been tramps or wandering journeymen; it is as if the lack of domestic security produced an exaggerated and unnatural form of the sex needs.) He was finally caught – after three years – when he attacked a powerfully-built peasant woman, whose husband and children heard her screams.
He proved to be twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Vacher, an ex-soldier who had spent some time in an asylum after attempting suicide.
The lesson of the case was that Vacher had been able to kill with impunity for three years, although his description – a tramp with a suppurating right eye and paralysed cheek – had been circulated to every policeman in south-east France.

The failure was doubly humiliating because France was now celebrated throughout the civilised world as the home of scientific crime detection.
As early as 1814, the great doctor Mathieu Orfila had written the first treatise on poisons, revealing how they could be detected in the body; but for many years, other branches of crime detection had remained crude and inefficient.
Throughout the nineteenth century, police had been pursuing more or less hit-or-miss methods of detecting criminals, relying on informers and policemen who knew the underworld.
The chief virtue of a detective was simply immense patience – the ability, for example, to look through half the hotel registers in Paris in search of the name of a wanted man.
All that changed in 1883 when a young clerk named Alphonse Bertillon invented a new method of identifying criminals by taking a whole series of measurements – of their heads, arms, legs, etc.
These were then classified under the head measurements, and it became possible for the police to check within minutes whether a man arrested for some minor offence was a wanted murderer or footpad.
‘Bertillonage’ was soon in use in every major city in the world.
The science of identification also achieved a new precision.
In 1889, a doctor named Alexandre Lacassagne solved a particularly baffling murder when he identified an unknown corpse by removing all the flesh from the bones and revealing that the man had suffered from a tubercular infection of the right leg which had deformed his knee.
Once the corpse had been identified, it was relatively simple to trace the murderers, a couple named Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard.