The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (31 page)

Five days later, on 8 June, he waited near the station at Rastatt.
An eighteen-year-old secretary, Rita Walterspacher, came out of the station and turned down a deserted road.
As Pommerencke moved swiftly towards her, the girl sensed that she was about to be attacked, and ran away screaming.
A woman on the train saw the running girl, and noted that the man who was pursuing her was tall, young and wore a grey suit.
As she watched, he flung his arms round the girl and pulled her into some woods at the side of the road.
The woman assumed that they were a courting couple playing games, and forgot about it until she heard on the radio of the disappearance of a young girl near Rastatt.
Rita Walterspacher’s body was found concealed under a pile of branches.
She had been strangled, and her clothing torn off her.
Her purse was missing from her handbag – Pommerencke made a habit of taking any money he found on his victims.

To the police investigating the case, it was obvious that the murderer was a man in the grip of such sexual frenzy that he would pursue a screaming girl in full view of a train, and drag her into the woods.
The similarity in method in all four rape murders convinced them that all were committed by the same man, and that he would go on killing until he was caught.
By the time Rita Walterspacher’s body was discovered later that day, the rapist was already in custody in the Hornberg police station, having made the absurd mistake of leaving his briefcase containing the sawn-off rifle in a tailor’s shop . . .

Like William Heirens, Pommerencke was not cut out to be a serial killer; his crimes produced a powerful inner conflict, deep feelings of guilt.
Commissioner Gut, head of the Freiburg murder squad, had speculated that the murderer of Hilda Konther and Karin Walde was a Jekyll and Hyde personality.
And Pommerencke admitted after his arrest: ‘Everything I did was cruel and bestial.
From the bottom of my heart I would like to undo all this.’ His incredibly careless act of leaving a gun in a tailor’s shop may be interpreted as his own attempt to undo it all.
On 22 October 1960 he received a life sentence with hard labour.

The foregoing cases underline a point of fundamental importance for the understanding of the criminal personality: that by definition,
all
criminals are self-divided.
The criminal is one who decides to take what he wants from society by force or stealth.
In the act of doing this, he has become an ‘outsider’ – that is, he has placed himself outside society, ‘beyond the pale’.
But he has no desire to remain outside society; that would amount to psychological suicide.
In 1961, two American psychologists, Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, began a programme to study criminals in St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington DC.
Both were liberals who believed that criminals were really ‘victims of society’, people with ‘deep psychologic problems’.
The conclusions they reached dismayed them both.
In their book
The Criminal Personality
, they admit that they have found that the chief characteristics of the criminal are weakness, vanity and self-delusion.
‘The greatest fear of these criminals was that others would see some weakness in them and they reacted very angrily to being “put down”.’ That is to say, the urge to self-esteem – to be liked and respected by others – was paramount in them.
Men who distinguish themselves in the public eye, from creative geniuses to famous sportsmen, are doing something of which everyone can approve.
As the criminal commits a crime, he knows that he is doing something which, if discovered, will turn him into an outcast.
So there is a basic conflict between his criminality and his craving to be admired.
(In this respect, the Mafia forms an exceptionally interesting subject of sociological study, in its attempt to transform the criminal into an accepted member of society, a ‘man of respect’.) A part of him dreams of taking the ‘social route’ to self-esteem, becoming respected and famous.
Another part is in a hurry and is in favour of taking short-cuts.
(Every crime is in essence a short-cut.) Robert Poulin, William Heirens and Heinrich Pommerencke developed an exceptionally powerful sex-drive at an early age, when normal fulfilment seemed only a remote possibility.
Since most young people are notoriously amoral – a child is more concerned with his own needs than other people’s – they found it easy to drift into sex crime.
As the personality matures, there is a subconscious recognition that this conflicts with the urge to self-esteem, the desire to be ‘recognised’.
Jekyll becomes increasingly resentful of the Hyde who is obstructing his evolution.
It is arguable that, in Poulin’s case, this led to the decision to commit suicide, and, in the case of Heirens and Pommerencke, to the act of carelessness that led to arrest.

We have seen that specific patterns of crime can be identified with specific periods.
You would not expect a sadistic sex murder to be committed in, say, 1810 – not because men were less corrupt and degenerate in 1810, but because sexual sadism had not yet emerged in the field of criminal activity.
Similarly, the crime of self-esteem seems to be a phenomenon that emerges in the 1960s.
It is hard to imagine a murderer of the 1940s saying, like Robert Smith: ‘I wanted to become known, to get myself a name.’

Crime – particularly murder – produces the feeling of being ‘beyond the pale’.
Case after case demonstrates that the ‘self-esteem killer’ copes with this problem in a manner reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade: by telling himself that, in the war against society, he is in the right and society is in the wrong.
This explains why such killers often keep journals.
If possible, he finds himself an accomplice – or, in the case of the Manson clan, a group of accomplices – who share his antisocial outlook.
If he lacks accomplices, he may choose the rather more dangerous course of taking a ‘normal’ acquaintance into his confidence.
In this way, Dr Jekyll can be propitiated by a kind of intellectual sleight of hand: if a ‘normal’ person knows about his crimes, then they cannot be truly abnormal, and he himself cannot be ‘outside society’.

One of the most characteristic of such cases occurred in America in the late 1950s; although it involved sex crime, the self-esteem element is so obtrusive that the case may be regarded as a kind of watershed or turning point.

On Sunday, 11 January 1959 an old blue Chevrolet forced another car off a lonely country road in Virginia, and a tall, thin young man with staring eyes advanced on it waving a revolver.
He ordered the Jackson family – consisting of Carrol Jackson, his wife Mildred, and their two children, Susan, age five, and a baby, Janet – into the boot of his car, and sped off.
Carrol Jackson was later found dead in a ditch; underneath him lay Janet, who had also been shot.
Two months later, the bodies of Mildred Jackson and Susan were uncovered in Maryland; Mildred Jackson had been strangled with a stocking and Susan battered to death.

Two years earlier, in June 1957, a man with staring eyes had approached a courting couple in a car – an army sergeant and a woman named Margaret Harold – and asked for a lift.
On the way he pulled out a gun and demanded money; when Margaret Harold said: ‘Don’t give it to him’, he shot her in the back of the head.
The sergeant flung open the door and ran.
When police found the car, they also found the body of Margaret Harold lying across the front seat without her dress; a police spokesman described the killer as ‘a sexual degenerate’.
Near the scene of the crime the police discovered a deserted shack full of pornographic pictures.

Five months after the murders of the Jackson family, in May 1959, the police received an anonymous tip-off that the murderer was a jazz musician named Melvin Rees; but police were unable to trace Rees.
Early the following year, a salesman named Glenn Moser went to the police, acknowledged that he was the author of the anonymous tip-off, and told them that he now had the suspect’s address: Melvin Rees was working in a music shop in Memphis, Arkansas.
Rees was arrested there, and soon after he was identified by the army sergeant as the man who had shot Margaret Harold.
A search of the home of Rees’s parents uncovered the revolver with which Carrol Jackson had been shot, and a diary describing the abduction of the Jacksons and their murder.
‘Caught on a lonely road . . .Drove to a select area and killed the husband and baby.
Now the mother and daughter were all mine.’ He described forcing Mildred Jackson to perform oral sex, and then raping her repeatedly; the child was also apparently raped.
(Full details have never been released.) He concluded: ‘I was her master.’ The diary also described the sex murders of four more girls in Maryland.
Rees was executed in 1961.

Violent sex murders were common enough by the late 1950s.
What makes this one unique for its period was Rees’s ‘Sadeian’ attitude of self-justification.
On the night before the Jackson killings, Rees had been on a ‘benzedrine kick’, and in the course of a rambling argument had told Moser: ‘You can’t say it’s wrong to kill.
Only individual standards make it right or wrong.’ He had also explained that he wanted to experience everything: love, hate, life, death . . .When, after the murders, Moser asked him outright whether he was the killer, Rees disdained to lie; he simply refused to answer, leaving Moser to draw the self-evident conclusion.
Rees was an ‘intellectual’ who, like Moors murderer Ian Brady in the following decade, made the decision to rape and kill on the grounds that ‘everything is lawful’.
He may therefore be regarded as one of the first examples of the curious modern phenomenon, the ‘high IQ killer’.
His sexual fantasies involved sadism (Mildred Jackson’s death had been long and agonising) and power.
In that sense, his crimes anticipate those of the serial killer who was to emerge two decades later.

Unfortunately we know nothing of Rees’s background, or what turned him into a serial killer.
Yet on the basis of other cases, we can state with a fair degree of confidence that parental affection was lacking in childhood, and that he was a lonely introverted child who was not much liked by his schoolmates.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a case of a serial killer of whom this is not true.

Rees and Glatman are early examples of the ‘power-motivated’ criminal, a category that would become so familiar in the 1980s.
Germany’s version of the Cameron Hooker case came to public attention in May 1984.
On 3 May a nineteen-year-old girl named Beate Koch was walking along a country road near the village of Pillnach – not far from Regensburg – when she was attacked by a man who dragged her into the nearest house – his own.
She recognised him as a member of the academic community from the University of Regensburg, Dr Ulrich Kochwald, whose field was sexual research.
Kochwald was an odd-looking man – six feet four inches tall and very thin, with protruding eyes that were magnified by pebble glasses; the top of his head was bald, but thin blond hair descended from the back and sides to his shoulders.
Having threatened to kill her if she didn’t stop struggling, Kochwald tore off her clothes, raped her, and beat her with a rope.
Then he handcuffed her and forced her down to the basement, where she was surprised to discover that she was not the only prisoner.
Another handcuffed girl was confined there – also naked – hanging from a hook in the ceiling.
This was twenty-four-year-old Sabine Pauli; she was one of Kochwald’s students, and had been flattered when he invited her to lunch one day.
After lunch, he had attacked her, raped her, and taken her to the basement, where she had been ever since.
Kochwald beat her regularly and treated her as a ‘sex slave’.
Since her family lived far away, no-one had yet noticed her disappearance.

That night, Beate Koch succeeded in escaping.
The two women were close enough together for Beate to lift herself by locking her legs around her companion, and jerking the handcuffs clear of the hook in the ceiling.
Sabine urged her not to bother about releasing her, but to leave as quickly as possible.
Beate staggered home through the dark, and arrived there covered in mud and scratches.
Her parents had notified the police of her disappearance, and a local sergeant had already obtained search warrants for various houses along the road between the villages.
Within a short time the sergeant was knocking on Dr Kochwald’s door; when Kochwald opened it, the sergeant informed him that he was under arrest, and handcuffed him to a radiator.
Then he hurried down to the basement, and freed Sabine Pauli, who was covered with bruises and cigarette burns.

Newspaper publicity caused another of Kochwald’s victims to come forward.
Her name was Susanne Wagner, and she had lived with Kochwald for some time after the break-up of his marriage.
But they had quarrelled a great deal, and on 4 June 1981 she had announced that she was leaving him.
Kochwald’s reaction was to handcuff her, tear off her clothes, and drag her to the basement, where he had hung her from a hook in the ceiling, then beat her with a rope.
He had terrorised her and kept her prisoner for the next year.
Sometimes she was handcuffed to the kitchen stove, sometimes to the radiator in Kochwald’s bedroom.
Later, when he was certain that she was too terrified to try to escape – he told her he would hunt her down and kill her – he even allowed her to go around without handcuffs.
He kept her naked, hoping that this would deter her from showing herself in public.
On 24 May 1982 she managed to slip her handcuffs by greasing her wrists with soap, and escaped through a window.
A passing motorist took her to hospital, but Susanne was so afraid of Kochwald that she had told no-one of her year in captivity.

On 22 May 1986 Ulrich Kochwald was sentenced to five and a half years in jail for kidnapping.

As in the case of Melvin Rees, we know nothing of the psychological background that turned Kochwald into a sadist.
But other cases in this chapter would suggest that this unnattractive man – noted at the university for the dullness of his lectures – had been an unattractive and lonely child, with a tendency to fantasise.
The latter is confirmed by Susanne Wagner, to whom he had confided that he had always dreamed of keeping several women as sex slaves, and that he had once enquired into the possibility of becoming a Mohammedan – so that he could have four wives – but had discovered that in Germany bigamy is illegal, even for Moslems.