Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (14 page)

Some experts associate picquerism with cultural construction of femininity, with its association with the body, bleeding, and birth, which link women with a mortality that provokes a dual reaction: anxious fear accompanied by erotic desire. If this duality slips out of control, the consequences can be horrific. Klaus Theweleit writes of dismembered murder victims:

It is as if two male compulsions were tearing at the women with equal strength. One is trying to push them away, to keep them at arm’s length (defense); the other wants to penetrate them, to have them very near. Both compulsions seem to find satisfaction in the act of killing, where the man pushes the woman far away (takes her life), and gets very close to her (penetrates her with a bullet, stabs, clubs, etc.) . . . Once she . . . is reduced to a pulp, a shapeless, bloody mass, the man can breathe a sigh of relief.
⁶⁹

As we become familiar with cases of serial murder in these pages, we shall see that this theory may have some validity to it.

WHY THE RISE OF SEXUAL HOMICIDE?

The question remains: Why did sexual homicide and serial murder arise in the nineteenth century? Some may argue that these crimes had always been with us but simply had not been recognized or reported, or were disguised as werewolf and vampire myths. Nonetheless, when one looks at the few systematic records of pre-nineteenth-century crime, such as England’s
Newgate Calendar,
there are few references to sexual murder or “monsters.”

Another theory relates the rise of sexual crime with growing population density. In experiments with rats, researchers discovered that 5 percent of the animals were dominant. When put into highly crowded conditions, this 5 percent began to behave “criminally” by raping female rats, instead of going through their usual complex and protective courting practices. The rats also began to kill and cannibalize infant rats. These studies, however, do not fully explain the phenomenon because some of the earliest serial murders were occurring in the countryside and not in the densely populated cities.

English writer Colin Wilson suggests that two factors may have contributed to the rise of sexual serial murder—the expansion of the female workforce and a certain type of pornographic literature.
⁷⁰

Wilson maintains that today every man knows that the majority of women that one encounters in the city are unavailable. However, during much of the nineteenth century, the reverse was true. Thousands of impoverished, urbanized women turned to prostitution and were all available to any man with a coin in his pocket. But by the last two decades of the century, it was discovered that women made better typists than men did, that they were excellent shop clerks, and so on. Now men were faced with a large population of gainfully employed and
unavailable
women, to which was added the Victorian-era philosophy that sex was something forbidden and prohibited. Women became taboo objects of a forbidden desire—a guaranteed formula for a volatile cocktail of confused and lethally misdirected libido.

Colin Wilson also traces the nature of pornographic literature, noting that there were fundamental shifts in theme. In the eighteenth century, pornography described sex explicitly, but freely. It was something to be indulged in sensually, like a good meal. In the nineteenth century, pornographic literature took its cue from the Marquis de Sade. It described sex as something forbidden—a taboo to be overcome only by voyeurism, illicit seduction, bondage, force, and rape. In the nineteenth century pornographic novel, the virtuous Victorian woman could enjoy sex only if she was overpowered. A common theme was the capture of traveling Victorian virgins by pirates or lustful Turks, where the women discover the pleasures of sex by being raped in a harem. Children are portrayed as sexual creatures intent on seducing the family butler. Scenes of bondage, flogging, and sex are intermixed; sex is almost always linked to pain and the loss of female virginity—often in childhood and accompanied by blood. Sold in cheap, popular, magazine-like multipart editions, in an age when print encompassed all available media, this literature had a tremendous impact on the imaginations of bored and frustrated males, no doubt among whom dwelled Jack the Ripper.

It is interesting that while so many medical, psychiatric, sexual, and philosophical terms refer to ancient Greek gods or Roman-era Latin expressions,
sadism
is entirely a modern term, taking its name from a late-eighteenth-century persona: the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). As Michel Foucault points out:

Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.
⁷¹

It should be noted that to this day, no clear link between the cause of sexual crime and pornography has been established. Some even suggest that pornography acts as a release from sexual tensions that might otherwise lead to criminal acts. What is evident, however, is that those already predisposed to committing sexual crimes are also heavy consumers of pornography. In the FBI study of sexual killers, the highest common denominator of various childhood and adolescent factors was their consumption of pornography—81 percent.
⁷²
(We will discuss this issue further in Chapter 6.)

Into the Twentieth Century

Whatever the reasons, sex crime and serial murder continued to rise at a steady rate into the twentieth century. Each decade brought with it a new twist in serial homicide.

In 1916, in a small Hungarian village during World War I, authorities arrived to search out hidden caches of gasoline. The villagers told them to look in the house of Bela Kiss, who was at the time serving in the army at the front. The man was disliked in the village and his housekeeper, whom he had fired for snooping, had gossiped earlier that she saw metal oil drums stored in his house. When police broke the seals to Kiss’s villa, they discovered seven oil drums, each containing a dead woman. They had all been strangled. The house was filled with women’s clothing and pawn tickets—Kiss had lured his victims through newspaper advertisements offering marriage agency services. When the police came to arrest Kiss, they discovered that he had been wounded and had died in a hospital. Medical records, however, revealed that the man who died was too young to be Kiss, who must have exchanged his identity disk with a dying soldier and escaped. Kiss was never captured.

Postwar Weimar, Germany, became legendary for its serial killers. Fritz Haarmann, age forty-five, was convicted of raping and murdering twenty-seven young men in Hanover between 1918 and 1924. Haarmann, who was a police agent and private investigator, lured schoolboys or drifters from the Hanover railway station back to his apartment. There he attacked his victims and killed them by chewing through their throats. Afterward he sold their flesh to local butcher shops and restaurants, claiming it was pork, while dumping their bones into the river behind his apartment. It was the finding of numerous skulls in the river that led to Haarmann’s eventual arrest.

Haarmann confessed to police:

I never intended to kill those youths. Some of the boys had come before. I wanted to protect them from myself because I knew what would happen if I had my way with them. I cried out, “Submit to me but do not let me loose control.” When I would go out of control I would bite them and suck their necks. Some of the boys at the Café Kröpcke liked to practice “terminal sex” and “breath play” (
“dämpfen” und “Luft abstellen”
—sexual asphyxiation: also know as “scarfing” or “bagging”). Sometimes we struggled for hours this way. It was sometimes difficult for me to get an erection. Lately it has happened more often. It used to worry me; “God oh God, where is it going to end?” I would throw myself with my full weight on these youths. They were worn out by the excesses and the debauchery. I would bit through their Adam’s apple and probably strangle and throttle them with my hands. I would collapse on the corpse. I would then go and make myself some strong black coffee. I would put the body on the floor and cover the face with a cloth so that he would not gaze back at me. I would open the abdomen with two cuts and empty the intestines into a bucket. I would dip a towel into the abdominal cavity and keep doing it until it had soaked up all the blood. Then I would make three cuts from the ribs towards the shoulders, grip the ribs and force them open until the bones around the shoulders broke. Then I would cut into that area. I could then extract the heart, lungs, and kidneys and chop them up and put them in my bucket. I would then sever the legs and then the arms. I would clean the flesh off the bones and put it in my waxed cloth bag. The remaining flesh went under the bed or in the cubbyhole. It would take me five or six trips to take everything out and dump it down the toilet or into the river. I would cut off the penis after I had emptied and cleaned the chest and stomach cavities. I would chop it up into lots of little pieces. I always hated doing this, but I could not help myself—my obsession was much stronger than the horror of the cutting and chopping.

I would take apart the heads last. I used a small kitchen knife to peel away the scalp and cut it up into little strips and squares. I would put the skull face down on a straw mat and wrap it in rags so that it would make less noise. I would then smash it with the blunt edge of an ax until the joins in the skull split apart. The brain went in the bucket and the bone chips into the river opposite the castle . . . I gave the clothes away or sold them.
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Haarmann was quickly tried and executed in 1925.

Peter Kürten, the “Vampire of Düsseldorf,” stabbed, strangled, and battered at least nine and maybe as many as thirty victims between 1913 and 1930. Sometimes Kürten’s victims went willingly with him to have sex, during which he would suddenly attack them with a knife. At other times, Kürten ambushed his victims, frequently children, on the streets and in parks. Kürten was executed in 1931.

While Kürten and Haarmann’s cases are both well documented because they went to trial, several other cases in Germany during the same period are more obscure. In Berlin, George Karl Grossman is believed to have killed as many as fifty people between 1913 and 1920 and sold their flesh at a hot dog stand he kept at the railway station. He apparently found his victims in the same station where he sold their remains to hungry passengers. He committed suicide, however, when he was arrested, and thus his crimes remain obscured in myth and gossip.

In Silesia meanwhile, in 1924, police found the remains of at least thirty men and women pickled in jars in the kitchens of Karl Denke’s inn. He had been serving the flesh of some of the guests at his inn to other guests. Denke kept carefully written records of various body weights of his victims. Denke also committed suicide before he could be brought to trial.

Bruno Ludke is thought to have killed as many as eighty-five women between the late 1920s and 1943, when he was arrested for strangling a woman near his home. Ludke stabbed or strangled all his victims and had sex with the corpses. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and was turned over to the Nazi SS for medical experiments; he died on April 8, 1944. Again, because the Nazis tended to suppress crime news in Germany, little detail is known about Ludke’s activities.

These serial murders in Germany had a tremendous impact on popular culture in the country. Fritz Lang’s movie
M,
with Peter Lorre in the role of a serial child murderer, touched a nerve in Germany and remains a cinema classic today.
*
Lurid paintings at the time by George Grosz and Otto Dix portrayed bloody scenes of mutilation, dismemberment, and sex murder.

Although many have suggested that the serial murders in Germany were the result of the total collapse of German society following its defeat in World War I, they overlook the fact that some of the Weimar-era serial killers began killing before the war ended, and most had sex crime records going back to long before the war. It is more likely that the postwar chaos unleashed serial killers who were already predisposed to commit their crimes. A similar situation seemed to happen in Russia in the wake of the collapse of communism—the country was plagued by serial cannibalistic sex crimes. Whether there are any links between the nature of the serial murders and the collapse of the two regimes is an open question at this time.

During the first half of the twentieth century, England and France had few serial murderers comparable in gruesome viciousness to those of Jack the Ripper or the Weimar killers. Between 1910 and 1914, George Smith in England killed three of his seven wives, while in France, Henri Desiré Landru killed eleven potential brides between 1915 and 1922. Dr. Marcel Petiot in Paris killed at least sixty-three war refugees between 1941 and 1944. All of these serial murders seemed to be profit-motivated.

Between 1943 and 1953 in London, John Christie murdered an infant and six females, including his wife, for sexual motives. Peter Manuel, a petty thief with a history of sexual crimes, began killing women after his fiancée rejected him upon discovering his criminal record. He killed nine people, including several males, in different parts of Scotland and England in 1959.

Back in the United States

Except for the cases of Jesse Pomroy and Tomas Piper, the United States reported few cases of serial sexual homicide before 1900. But in the entrepreneurial tradition of nineteenth-century America, there were many cases of profit-motivated serial homicides, such as those of the Bender Clan, who killed at least twelve travelers in Kansas in 1872–1873, and Herman Mudgett, who constructed a custom-designed “murder hotel” in Chicago during the World’s Fair and is believed to have killed at least twenty-seven victims.