In America in 1926, Earle Nelson – who had spent some time in an asylum – travelled around the northern United States and Canada on a rampage of sex murder, killing twenty-two women. Nelson would go to houses with a To Let’ notice in the window and, if the landlady was alone, strangle and rape her. Newspapers dubbed him the ‘Gorilla murderer’, and the trail of violated landladies continued to make headlines until he was caught in Canada. Nelson was hanged in 1927. There can be no doubt that this kind of sensational publicity helped to make everyone more conscious of sex crime, and therefore increased the number of such crimes. In England, on the other hand, the press still observed a rule of gentlemanly restraint. In 1921, a chauffeur named Thomas Allaway answered the advertisement of thirty-one-year-old Irene Wilkins, who wanted a job as a cook; he met her by car at Bournemouth, knocked her unconscious, and attempted rape (which he did not complete). Traced through witnesses who had seen the car, he was tried for her murder and hanged. But although the judge mentioned that Allaway had lured Irene to Bournemouth ‘for an immoral purpose’, the rape motive was played down. This approach may help to explain why sex crime remained rare in England until the Second World War.
In 1922, the Allaway trial was eclipsed by the enormous publicity given to the trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters. The two were lovers, and Bywaters had stabbed Edith’s husband to death. Mrs Thompson was accused of inciting the murder, but the evidence was slender; nevertheless, she was also sentenced to death and hanged. The case leaves the impression that she was sentenced as much for adultery as for incitement to murder. In America, the parallel case of the 1920s involved the murder of Albert Snyder by Judd Gray, the lover of Snyder’s wife Ruth. Snyder was beaten unconscious with a sashweight, then strangled with picture wire. The police tricked Ruth Snyder into confessing by claiming that Gray had admitted the killing. When she was electrocuted in Sing Sing in 1928, a reporter succeeded in photographing the moment of death with a camera strapped to his leg; the grim picture was syndicated all over the world, and was felt to underline the moral that ‘the wages of sin is death’.
But real sex crime continued to increase, and the major cases displayed an increasingly strange element of perversion. In 1932, a Hungarian company director, Sylvestre Matushka, was tried for causing two train crashes and attempting to cause a third. In August 1931 the Vienna express was derailed near Berlin by an explosion, and sixteen passengers were injured; in September, the Budapest-Vienna express was derailed by an explosion and twenty-two people were killed, some literally blown to pieces. Matushka admitted that the thought of trains crashing caused him intense sexual excitement, and that he experienced orgasm when it actually happened. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he escaped and reappeared during the Korean War in 1953 as the head of a unit for blowing up trains.
In New York in 1928, a kindly-looking old man named Albert Fish persuaded the Budd family to allow him to take their ten-year-old daughter Grace to a party; she was never seen again. Six years later, Fish wrote Mrs Budd a letter describing how he had strangled Grace and eaten parts of her body in a stew. The police were able to trace him through the letter, and it became clear that Fish was what Freud called a ‘polymorphous pervert’ whose sexual oddities including eating excrement and driving needles into his scrotum and leaving them there to rust. The screams of children gave him pleasure, and during the course of a lifetime as a house painter, he had tortured and killed large numbers. Even the idea of his own electrocution excited him; he told police that it would be ‘the supreme thrill of my life’. (Peter Kurten had said he hoped to hear the sound of his own blood running into the basket after beheading.
In Germany in 1936 – the year of Fish’s trial – a sixty-three-year-old travelling watchmaker named Adolf Seefeld also admitted to having spent a lifetime murdering children – in this case, all male. Seefeld killed by persuading them to drink a poisonous concoction made of herbs, and the children – a dozen – were found in an attitude of repose, with no sign of sexual assault. By the time Seefeld was caught, Hitler was chancellor, and he recognised the role of publicity in causing imitative crimes. Seefeld was tried with a minimum of fuss and quickly executed.
In Cleveland, Ohio, a killer who became known as ‘the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run’ murdered a dozen men and women – mostly tramps and derelicts – between 1935 and 1938, and left the bodies in a small pile of dismembered pieces. The heads were usually missing, and in one case two bodies were found mixed up together. The ‘mad butcher’ was never caught.
The world record for sex murder is still held by a German, Bruno Liidke, who confessed to eighty-five murders between 1927 (when he was eighteen) and 1944, when he was caught. In 1936, Liidke had been arrested for a sexual assault and castrated on the orders of Himmler; but it made no difference to his sexual appetite. Again, because the case took place under the Hitler regime, details are lacking, but we know that Llidke was used by the Nazis as a guinea pig in experiments, and died of an injection.
Let us pause to ask the question: what do such crimes indicate about the nature of the society in which they take place? It is tempting to see the crimes of Kurten, Matushka, Ludke, Seefeld, as a reflection of the violence of Nazi Germany. That would be a mistake; all were born in the ‘sunset world’ of pre-1914 Europe, and all committed murders long before Hitler came to power. In any case, periods of violence do not necessarily spawn crimes of violence. Violence is a reflection of social tension, and this actually diminishes in times of upheaval and chaos – such as wars – because chaos is at least not conducive to boredom.
There is usually an evolutionary explanation for violence, and it is this factor that we need to look for. In the animal world, one of the most vicious of all creatures is the shrew, a tiny, mouse-like animal that weighs only a fifth of an ounce. It will kill far larger creatures than itself – like mice – and will eat its own kind. The explanation lies in its size. With a surface area so large in proportion to its volume, the shrew loses its heat almost immediately to the surrounding air; consequently, it has to eat continuously to stay alive. The shrew has to be savage, or it would not have survived.
Man’s surface area is so much smaller in proportion to his weight that he can at least forget food for several hours after every meal. But during his few million years on the surface of this planet, the climate has been wildly variable, with long ice ages, so survival has been far from easy. One response to this challenge has been intense sexual activity; when faced with a threat to survival, he experiences the urge to copulate; this is his equivalent of the shrew’s non-stop eating.
But we have seen that his chief mechanism for survival was the development of a formidable apparatus that allows him to concentrate upon specific problems: a kind of mental microscope. He hurls himself at problems with the same violence that the shrew hurls itself on food. Patience was never one of man’s chief virtues. When problems arise that threaten his survival, he experiences an intense desire to solve them instantly.
All this explains why man is at once the most creative and the most murderous of creatures. The story of his triumphs cannot be separated from the story of his crimes because they spring from the same source: that specialised instrument for problem-solving. When the novelist Turgenev witnessed the last hours of the murderer J. B. Troppmann, he experienced deep sympathy. Rightly so: Troppmann’s downfall arose from his ability at problem-solving, and with a different approach he might have become a famous novelist or scientist.
Because of this ‘specialised instrument’, man suffers from boredom more than any other creature. Most animals dislike boredom, but man is tormented by it Chekhov expresses the problem in a play called The Wood Demon:
‘You’ve never tasted real boredom, my dear fellow. When I was a volunteer in Serbia, there I experienced the real thing! Hot, stuffy, dirty, head simply splitting after a drinking bout… Once I remember sitting in a dirty little shed… Captain Kashkinazi was there too… Every subject of conversation was long exhausted, no place to go to, nothing to do, no desire to drink – just sickening, you see, sickening to the point of putting one’s head in a noose! We sat in frenzied silence, gazing at one another… He gazes at me, I at him, he at me, I at him… We gaze and don’t know why we’re doing it… An hour passes, you know, then another hour, and still we keep on gazing. Suddenly he jumps up for no reason, draws his sabre and goes for me… Hey presto!… I, of course, instantly draw my sabre – for he’ll kill me! – and it started: chic-chac, chic-chac, chic-chac… with the greatest difficulty we were at last separated. I got off all right, but to this very day Captain Kashkinazi walks about with a scar on his face. See how desperately bored one can get!’