The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (37 page)

This describes the typical sex criminal of the first half of the twentieth century; he craves sex as he craves bread and water.
(It shows keen insight on Musil’s part to make Moosbrugger a travelling journeyman; it has already been observed in an earlier chapter that a large number of sex killers have been tramps and vagrants.) As the last remnants of Victorianism gradually melt away, ‘it’ ceases to be visible only up to the knees; it wanders around on beaches in bikinis; underwear advertisements show it in a state of undress that hints at bedrooms; magazines like
Playboy
show it naked in seductive poses.
This is why the desire of a Moosbrugger – or Pommerencke or Poulin – finally becomes ‘unnatural’.

The new type of sex killer who began to appear in the 1960s was not driven by mere desire, but by self-assertion.
In 1973, the police of Veracruz, Mexico, finally caught a sex murderer who had been preying on courting couples since 1968.
He was thirty-one year old José Solano Marcelino, and he had made a habit of shooting the man, then raping the girl.
‘When I had the luck to find only one car, I’d sneak up on the pair inside.
I was always armed with a gun, and my face was masked by one of my wife’s stockings . . .
When I pointed the gun at them I could see, and enjoyed, the fear of death in their eyes.
I liked it so much to see the male squirm, and the woman frightened and crying, that I’d make my threats last for a long time.
When I could see that the panic was driving the couple to the brink of madness, I’d shoot the man.
Then I’d take the woman.
If she tried to give me trouble by fighting or screaming, I’d bang her over the head with the gun and tie her up.
I never wanted to have sex with an unconscious woman, and so when they fainted, I waited before I had a session with them.’ Asked why he killed the men he explained: ‘I guess I sacrificed them because I got a kick out of it, like I did out of tormenting them before I put them out of their misery.
And then later it gave an added tang to sexing their women.’

Marcelino had been arrested on suspicion of being the lover’s lane rapist in March 1969, but an emotional appeal from his lawyer, who described him as a loving husband who adored his children, had led to his release.
While the police continued to keep him under surveillance, he ceased the attacks.
In 1970, he began again, until he had killed or seriously wounded more than a dozen men.
The women were raped repeatedly, then tortured.
‘I’d prick them here and there with my knife, and squeeze and pinch to make them quiver with fear.
It made me feel good to see the women suffer, and the fear and horror in their eyes fed something in me that was sometimes even more pleasurable than having sex with them.’

Finally, he crept up on a couple who were picnicking, and hit the man – Gregorio Sanchez Luna – with a stone, then shot him dead.
After that he made the girl, Maria Josefina Martinez, strip and drag the body into the bushes.
Then, from five in the afternoon until three the following morning, he raped her and played ‘torture games’.
Finally, sated, he drove off.
After he had left, she made her way to the highway and contacted the police.
Since Marcelino had failed to wear his stocking mask – for the first time – she was able to give the police an accurate description, which they instantly recognised as the man they had held four years earlier.
He was arrested in a dawn raid, and immediately identified by his victim.
Sentenced to forty years in jail, the rapist remarked: ‘Well, if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.
But I
did
have one hell of a time for five years.’

Gerald Gallego’s attitude towards women was also sadistic and manipulative.
They were there for his pleasure and his use.
Most women quickly came to recognise this lack of give and take, and declined to co-operate – hence Gallego’s seven marriages in fourteen years.
But Charlene Gallego was masochistic and eager to be manipulated.
Her only desire was to serve her master; it was a kind of religious conversion.
If Gallego’s condition for continuing the relationship was that she should help other women to their deaths.
It only proved that her husband was thrillingly unlike other men.
Gallego’s pleasure lay in dominating, hers in being dominated.

The importance of ‘dominance’ – the ‘pecking order’ – in animal behaviour has been recognised only in fairly recent times.
It was first noticed in flocks of domestic fowl – in which dominant individuals tend to peck subordinate ones.
Only then was it slowly recognised that
all
animals, including human beings, have a ‘pecking order’, a kind of chain in which everyone is more dominant or subordinate than someone else.
In groups such as lions, gorillas or rats, dominance is usually established by aggressive encounters, but once one of the animals has won the fight, all aggression usually evaporates, and the loser shows submissive behaviour from then on.
The other challengers seem to acquire a sense of social responsibility, and he (or she) passes beyond the range of quarrels.
The same phenomenon can often be seen in politicians who have been promoted to prime minister or president; a very mediocre party hack often develops genuine leadership qualities.
This helps to explain that fundamental human craving for power, and why those who have acquired power cling to it so tightly.
Supreme power places one above the ‘rat-race’.

One of the most exciting observations about ‘dominance’ was made during the Korean war.
Attempting to understand why there had been so few escapes of American prisoners, observers discovered that the Chinese had made use of an interesting technique.
They had watched the prisoners carefully to establish which of them were ‘dominant’; then they had taken these dominant prisoners, and placed them under heavy guard.
As soon as the ‘leaders’ had been removed, the other prisoners became more or less inert, and could be left almost without guards.

The most interesting observation was that the number of ‘dominant’ prisoners was always the same: one in twenty, or five per cent.
In fact, the explorer Stanley had known about this ‘dominant five per cent’ at the turn of the century.
Bernard Shaw once asked him how many people in his party could take over the leadership if Stanley himself was ill; Stanley replied: ‘One in twenty.’ Shaw asked if that was exact or approximate; Stanley replied: ‘Exact.’

Observations of zoologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen indicated that this applies to all animal species: five per cent are ‘dominant’.
A psychologist named John Calhoun made an equally interesting observation: that when rats are overcrowded, the dominant five per cent becomes a criminal five per cent.
Overcrowded rats express their dominance in behaviour in completely uncharacteristic of rats in natural conditions: for example, in rape and cannibalism.
Some animals – like Sika deer – simply die of stress when overcrowded.
Human beings seem to have a far higher resistance to stress than any other animal; they tend to react to overcrowding – like the rats – by developing criminal behaviour.
It is significant that no serial killer has so far emerged from a socially privileged background; the majority were brought up in overcrowded slums.
The zoologist Desmond Morris remarked that cities are ‘human zoos’, and added: ‘Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from obesity, form homosexual pair-bonds, or commit murder.
Among city dwellers . . .
all these things occur.’ The conclusion to be drawn may be that the ‘crime explosion’ will continue until such time as the population explosion has been brought under control.

Overcrowded slums have always existed, and, of course, crime has always existed in overcrowded slums.
Why should they produce sadistic sex killers in the second half of the twentieth century?
The answer to this question has already emerged in earlier chapters.
In societies with a high level of poverty, theft is the commonest form of crime.
In more ‘successful’ societies, sex crime makes its appearance, as overcrowding in slums produces the ‘criminal rat’ syndrome, with the dominant five per cent expressing their dominance through rape.
In ‘affluent societies’, where a higher level of education means that all levels of society begin to glimpse the possibility of wealth and achievement, the craving for ‘upward mobility’ becomes as urgent as the craving for sexual fulfilment, and ‘self-esteem’ crime makes its appearance.
(It may or may not be significant that self-esteem murder made its appearance at a time when the pop star had become a well-established phenomenon, so that every underprivileged teenager could begin to glimpse the possibility of wealth and fame.) In the second half of the eighteenth century, thinkers like Rousseau and Tom Paine stated the fundamental principle that all men have a right to freedom; in the second half of the twentieth century, there is a powerful unstated assumption that all men have a right to fame and celebrity.

Abraham Maslow – who was the first to describe the ‘hierarchy of needs’ – also made an important observation about ‘dominance’.
He had become curious about the subject after observing the behaviour of monkeys in the Bronx zoo.
They seemed to engage in almost constant sex – something that has been observed among many animals in captivity; but what puzzled Maslow was that the sex often seemed ‘abnormal’ – males would mount other males, and sometimes females would even mount males.
It slowly dawned on him that this was because sex was a form of ‘dominance behaviour’; what was happening was that the more dominant animals were asserting themselves by mounting the less dominant animals.
(Robert Ardrey has pointed out that under natural conditions ‘sex is a sideshow in the world of animals’; it only assumes exaggerated importance in captivity – another observation that may help to explain the rise in sex crime.)

Maslow also observed that if a new monkey is added to a group of monkeys, the newcomer would often get beaten up, the attack often being led by a previously non-dominant monkey.
He noted that the previously non-dominant monkey would often behave with extreme ferocity, as if making up for its previously inferior status.
Here again we glimpse a parallel with the sadistic behaviour of many ‘self-esteem’ criminals.

Perhaps his most interesting observations concerned dominance in women.
In 1936, Maslow began a series of Kinsey-type interviews with college women – he preferred women to men as interviewees because they were capable of greater frankness; male answers tended to be distorted by self-esteem.
His findings, stated in a paper of 1939 (and another three years later) was that female sexuality is related to dominance.
The higher-dominance females went in for more promiscuity, lesbian relations, masturbation and sexual experimentation (fellatio, sodomy, etc.).

What surprised him was that he discovered that his subjects tended to fall into three groups: high dominance, medium dominance and low dominance.
A medium-dominance woman might have a high rating for sex drive, but her sexual experience was usually limited; she tended to be a ‘one-man woman’.
A low-dominance woman (and these were difficult to get into the study group) was inclined to feel that sex was strictly for child-bearing, and one low-dominance woman who was sterile refused her husband sex even though she had a high sex drive.
(It is important to note that all three groups could have a high sex drive, but that the
amount
of sex they indulged in depended on how dominant they were.) Medium-dominance women had a romantic attitude to sex; they liked to be wooed with lights and flowers and soft music, and they liked the kind of male who would be a ‘good provider’ – someone who was stable rather than exciting.
Low-dominance women seemed to feel that sex was rather disgusting.
Most of them thought that the male sexual organ was ugly, while high-dominance women thought it beautiful.

The really significant observation that emerged from the study was that the women tended to prefer males who were slightly more dominant than themselves,
but
within their own dominance group.
Low-dominance females preferred the kind of man who would admire them from a distance for years without pressing his suit.
They found medium- and high-dominance males rather frightening.
Medium-dominance women found high-dominance males frightening.
High-dominance women like the kind of man who would sweep them off their feet, and in lovemaking hurl them on a bed and take them with a certain amount of force.
One highly dominant woman spent years looking for a male who was even more dominant than herself, and failed to find him.
When finally she discovered a man of slightly superior dominance, she married him and remained faithful; but she enjoyed picking fights that would make him violent and end in virtual rape – an experience she found immensely exciting.
One high-dominance woman who could have an orgasm virtually by looking at a man admitted to not having orgasms with two lovers because they were too weak.
‘I just couldn’t give in to them.’

When writing his biography of Abraham Maslow in the early 1970s, Colin Wilson was struck by the fact that this dominance relation seems to explain many crime partnerships – for example, the Leopold and Loeb murder case (mentioned in Chapter One), in which two Chicago students from wealthy families committed various crimes – ending in murder – for ‘kicks’.
Most commentators on the case remain content with the dubious explanation that they wanted to prove that they were ‘supermen’; but the master-slave relationship between Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold makes us aware of what really happened.
Loeb’s ego – his self-esteem – was nourished by his ‘slave’; but it was not enough to express this self-esteem merely by dominating Leopold (who, in any case, wanted to be ‘used).
Like any juvenile delinquent, Loeb had to express it by ‘defying society’, committing petty crimes for pleasure rather than gain.
It was this craving to
express
his dominance through ‘defiance’ that led to the scheme to kidnap and murder a child.
Without his ‘slave’, Loeb would almost certainly never have become a killer.