The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

What made the Victorians incapable of understanding a crime like this was their rigid and inflexible idea of ‘normality’. Even a man as intelligent as John Stuart Mill believed it ought to be possible to reason madmen out of their delusions; he felt that the delusions were consciously held beliefs – like the notion that the earth is flat. He was incapable of understanding the inner turmoil of a schizophrenic. In the same way, the average Victorian believed that the attraction of men for women and vice versa was a law of nature, like hunger and thirst and protection of offspring. So a man who felt sexual desires for members of his own sex must be wilfully perverse; he had chosen to be wicked, like a burglar or murderer. Lesbianism was not a crime under Victorian law because they held a fixed idea of the ‘normality’ of women; women were therefore incapable of anything as perverse as sexual desire for their own sex.

In short, the Victorians were crude realists in all matters pertaining to psychology – it was all part of their obsession with domesticity and security. Life had to be sane and predictable. As a result they failed to grasp that all experience is fifty per cent ‘mental’. (And this explains why even intelligent Victorians found the philosophy of Kant – which is based on this recognition – so difficult to understand.) In fact, experience varies greatly from day to day because of the varying amount we ‘put into it’. I may do the same thing – say, take the identical walk – on two successive days, and feel bored and irritable one day, wide-awake and receptive the next; in which case, the scenery will strike me as self-evidently dreary one day, and delightful the next. Experience has to be chewed and swallowed and digested, just like food.

Lonely, frustrated men like Frederick Baker have a poor stomach for real experience, which they have learned to mistrust; it usually gives them indigestion. But in the nineteenth century, European man had stumbled upon the pleasures of the imagination. Poets and novelists used it to create an extraordinarily rich fantasy world, and fifteen-bob-a-week clerks used it to taste the pleasures of being a ‘toff and having ten thousand a year. But for a bored depressive like Baker, it could also be dangerous. As he fantasises about women, he discovers that the sexual emotion can be sharply intensified by adding a dash of cruelty – say, tying her up and gagging her. As his imagination becomes accustomed to sexual aggression, he adds further refinements. Eventually, by Pavlovian conditioning, he associates sexual pleasure with the idea of violence – in Baker’s case, apparently, decapitation and dismemberment. And one day, as his imagination again begins to flag, he begins to toy with the breathtaking idea of turning the fantasy into reality…

It is interesting to note how often this kind of extreme violence is associated with the sex crimes of this period. Four years after the murder of Fanny Adams, a young man named Eusebius Pieydagnelle gave himself up to the police in his native village of Vinuville, confessing to seven murders involving stabbing and mutilation. Since childhood he had lived opposite a butcher’s shop and had become fascinated by the sight and smell of blood. He persuaded his parents to apprentice him to the butcher, a M. Cristobal, and enjoyed drinking blood and wounding the cattle. His father decided that he ought to have a more respectable profession and apprenticed him to a lawyer; Pieydagnelle plunged into depression. One day he crept into a room where a girl was sleeping, intending rape; then he noticed a kitchen knife, and felt a compulsion to stab her. He achieved orgasm at the sight of the blood, and went on to commit six more murders – his final victim being his ex-employer Cristobal.

In Italy in the same year – 1871 – the twenty-three-year-old Vincenz Verzeni committed two sex murders – of a fourteen-year-old girl and a twenty-eight-year-old married woman. Both were attacked in the fields and strangled; then the intestines and genitals were torn out. He was arrested after trying to strangle his cousin, a girl of nineteen, who succeeded in persuading him to let her go. Verzeni admitted that he began to experience sexual pleasure as soon as he began to choke a woman; in three earlier attempts he had achieved orgasm while pressing the throat, and allowed the victim to live.

In 1874, a fourteen-year-old youth named Jesse Pomeroy received an exceptionally savage sentence for the murder of two children – solitary confinement for the rest of his life. (In fact, he spent fifty-eight years in prison, dying in 1932.) Pomeroy was a tall, gangling boy with a hare lip, and one of his eyes was completely white. At the age of twelve, he had already been arrested for attacking two boys – he stripped both and flogged them with a rope end. He spent two years in a reformatory, and was out again in 1874. In March of that year, a ten-year-old girl named Katie Curran vanished from the area near Pomeroy’s home in Boston. The following month, a four-year-old boy was found dead with thirty-one knife wounds. The police searched Jesse Pomeroy’s house and found a knife with blood on it; a further search revealed the body of Katie Curran buried in the cellar. Pomeroy admitted that he derived pleasure from torturing children. His crimes aroused the same kind of widespread horror as those of Jack the Ripper in London the following decade and – like the Ripper murders – were the subject of much exaggeration. An account in Boston Murders, edited by John Makris (New York, 1948) says he committed twenty-seven murders. Knife, Rope and Chair by Guy Logan (London, 1930) mentions more than a dozen. There were acrimonious discussions about whether Pomeroy was insane, or merely subject to ‘blood lust’. Yet at the time it occurred to no one that the crimes were sexual.

In April 1880, a four-year-old girl named Louise Dreux disappeared in the Crenelle quarter of Paris. The following day, neighbours complained to the police about an unpleasant black smoke pouring from the chimney of a retarded twenty-year-old youth named Louis Menesclou, who lived on the top floor of the same building as the Dreux family. They entered his room and looked in the stove; a child’s head and entrails were burning there. In Menesclou’s pockets they found both the child’s forearms. Menesclou admitted killing her, and sleeping with the body under his mattress overnight. He indignantly denied raping the girl, but became embarrassed when asked why the genitals were missing. A poem found in a notebook began ‘I saw her, I took her’, and talked about ‘the joy of an instant’. Menesclou was executed. The similarities to the Frederick Baker case are striking.

It was the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 that made the world suddenly aware of the emergence of a new type of crime. We have already noted that they were not generally recognised as sex crimes – there was still a tendency to regard the killer simply as a homicidal maniac. (Zola based a novel, The Human Beast, on the murders, and the title summarises the contemporary attitude to the Ripper: he was a human being with the appetites of a tiger.) But from the fact that the victims were prostitutes, and that the killer left them naked from the waist down, it was impossible not to realise instinctively that some form of twisted sexuality was involved. The murders caused such a sense of outrage because there was an obscure feeling that the killer had somehow ‘broken the rules’ – as we might feel if terrorists started bombing schools.

For the Ripper himself, the sense of outrage he caused was an obvious motivation; in the two letters that are generally accepted as genuine, he gloats over the murders, and heads one of the letters ‘From Hell’. The idea of this ‘human beast’ prowling the streets made everyone shudder; he wanted to make everyone shudder. In fact, he was probably a shy, repressed, sensitive little man – like Richard Speck, the killer of eight nurses in Chicago in 1966, or the Boston Strangler, or the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe – for whom this slashing and stabbing was an orgasmic release from his usual sense of inferiority and ‘ambivalence’.

It is a reasonable assumption that Jack the Ripper would have lost his legendary status if he had been caught and tried. The ‘French Ripper’, Joseph Vacher, was caught and executed; so that although his crimes were very similar to those of Jack the Ripper, he never achieved anything like the same notoriety. Vacher, born in 1869, was given to fits of sudden violence. But what emerged at his trial in 1897 was that he was another self-pitying, oversensitive ‘outsider’, whose crimes were partly motivated by resentment towards a world that he felt had treated him badly. He blamed all his troubles on being bitten by a mad dog at the age of eight, but this seems to have been merely an excuse. At one point he became devoutly religious and entered a monastery; but he was thrown out for making sexual advances to other novices. In the army, during his national service, he was so upset when his promotion to corporal failed to materialise that he tried to cut his throat. Discharged on medical grounds, he proposed to a young girl, and when she refused him, tried to kill her and himself. He only wounded her, and a bullet that entered his own right ear made him deaf and paralysed the facial muscles on that side. He was committed to an asylum, and discharged as cured in April 1894. It was at this point that he became a tramp, and began to commit sex murders. On 20 May 1894, he encountered a twenty-year-old girl, Eugenie Delhomme, near Besancon, and throttled her unconscious. He then cut her throat, severed the right breast, and trampled on her belly; after this, he had intercourse with the body. , She was the first of eleven victims, five of them boys. Most of these were disembowelled, and, in many cases, he removed the genitals. On 4 August 1897, he attacked a woman gathering pinecones in the Bois des Pelleries; she proved to be stronger than he expected, and her shouts brought her husband and children, who overpowered Vacher. He was taken to a local inn, where he played his accordion until the police arrived, and realised that he was the black-bearded tramp who was suspected of being the ‘Ripper of the south-east’. But witnesses failed to identify him, and he was only sentenced to three months for indecent assault. In prison, he wrote to his judges, confessing to the series of mutilation murders of the past three years. In spite of his insistence that he was insane, a panel of doctors judged him to be of sound mind, and he was executed in December 1898. Vacher’s trial might have excited more attention had not the Dreyfus trial been taking place at the same time.