The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

From Plays and Stories of Tchehov, Everyman, p. 140.

Leader dots are Chekhov’s.

If we combine these two factors – man’s violent reaction to boredom, and his sexual response to any survival problem – we have grasped the cause of the rise in sex crime. Boredom creates a sense of unreality. Man’s response to a sense of unreality is an attempt to trigger one of his deeper instincts. In a few people – especially women – a sense of unreality can lead to overeating. But in males it is more likely to trigger the urge to sex or violence – or both.

It is interesting to note that Kiirten’s sadism developed during the boredom of long periods of solitary confinement in prison, when sexual daydreams provided a kind of lifeline. We should also note how many sex killers have been tramps or wandering journeymen – for example, Vacher, Tessnow, Seefeld and Panzram. The life of a vagrant is rootless, and this undermines his sense of identity, and therefore threatens his feeling of reality. Sexual violence re-establishes the sense of reality. For a moment, it is as if some inner-compass started to work again.

This explains another puzzling development in sexual violence. The majority of sex criminals described in Krafft-Ebing are ‘degenerates’ – like Menesclou and Verzeni, men with some congenital subnormality. In the twentieth century, a large proportion of sex criminals are of average or above-average intelligence: Kiirten and Panzram are examples. Here again we confront the ‘boredom factor’; people of low intelligence are less subject to boredom than those of higher intelligence. (Under sensory deprivation in a ‘black room’ intelligent people show signs of distress before the less intelligent; dogs can last longer than either.) So those of higher intelligence have a lower ‘violence threshold’, which may manifest itself in crime. This is not to say, of course, that intelligent people are more disposed to violence than others, for other factors are involved – for example, the ability to use intelligence constructively. But it means that, in a percentage of intelligent people, intelligence contributes to instability, which may express itself in violence.

If we wish to get closer to the roots of the problem, we have to recognise that boredom is a feeling that nothing is ‘happening inside’, and that this springs from a sense of non-participation in the environment. Boredom vanishes as soon as we feel ‘involved’. But since the mid-nineteenth century, man’s opportunities for feeling actively involved in his society have diminished. The result is Marx’s ‘alienation’, and a tendency to try to overcome it by various forms of ‘revolt’. In a work as yet unpublished a modern analyst of criminal behaviour, Brian Marriner, has coined the useful term ‘reactive man’ to characterise the new type of criminal. (I am grateful to Mr Marriner for allowing me access to his typescript.) In the past, says Marriner, criminals may have burgled houses or picked pockets, but they did not feel as if they were making war on society; they were responding to deprivation as a hungry man steals apples from an orchard. The twentieth century has seen the rise of a type of criminal who is reacting against a society that he feels is somehow depriving him of the right to feel fully alive; he would like to burn down the orchard.

In a logical sense, ‘reactive man’ is behaving absurdly. It is not ‘society’ that is to blame for his alienation; it is social development. Civilisation can be defined in terms of labour-saving devices. Even a book is a labour-saving device; it stores information for easy access. Civilisation itself is a labour-saving device. But the labour-saving devices inevitably reduce individual participation. And as they improve, participation decreases. The rise of sex crime corresponded to the rise of the motor car, the aeroplane and radio. Radio – which at least demands a certain use of imagination – gave way to black and white television, then to colour television. Each advance demands less and less ‘participation’. A supermarket demands less participation than shopping in a village store or the corner grocery. The result of such non-participation is bound to be a certain increase in violence. Chekhov’s two soldiers in Serbia are reacting to non-participation.

But we can see that the trouble with Chekhov’s two officers is that they lacked imagination. If they had possessed more imagination, they might at least have settled down to reading War and Peace. Nowadays, even a soldier with a low IQ could stave off boredom with a comic book or a ‘situation comedy’ on television. In the past two centuries, man has learned to use his imagination to a truly astonishing extent. And this in itself has contributed to the crime problem. We can see that Frederick Baker had probably spent months imagining killing a child before killing Fanny Adams. In 1867, such crimes were a rarity; a century later, they had become frighteningly commonplace. In 1942, a twenty-three-year-old mechanic named Donald Fearn spent a great deal of time in an old adobe church, about fifty miles from Pueblo, Colorado. It had been one of the last strongholds of the ‘Penitentes’ religion of the local Indians; during Holy Week they had held religious ceremonies involving torture there (Indians regard the ability to bear pain as a mark of manhood), and these usually ended with a crucifixion of one of their members. Fearn had sadistic tendencies – ‘Ever since I was a young boy I have wanted to torture a beautiful young girl’ – and the thought of these torments obsessed his imagination. In April 1942, when Fearn’s wife was in hospital having a baby, he kidnapped a seventeen-year-old student nurse named Alice Porter at gunpoint, drove her out to the church, and put his appalling fantasies into practice, binding her with hot wires and whipping her. Finally, he raped and killed her. Leaving the area the following day – after throwing the body down a well – he drove off the road and became stuck in the mud; a farmer had to tow him out. It was this farmer’s description that later led to Fearn’s arrest, and to his execution in the gas chamber.

The role of the imagination can be seen even more clearly in the case of William Heirens, the eighteen-year-old Chicago sex killer who was arrested in 1946. Since the age of thirteen, Heirens had been committing burglaries: his aim was to steal women’s panties, which he wore and used for masturbation. Heirens came to associate burglary with sex to the point where he could achieve an orgasm by simply entering through a window. If he was interrupted in the course of his burglaries, he would become extremely violent. In October 1945, a nurse came in as he was burgling her apartment; he fractured her skull. When he found a woman asleep in bed during a burglary, he stabbed her in the throat. After murdering and mutilating a girl named Frances Brown in her bedroom, he scrawled on the wall: ‘For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.’ In January 1946, Heirens entered the bedroom of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, and carried her to a nearby basement were he raped her; after this he strangled her, cut up the body, and disposed of it down manholes. He was caught a few months later when police were alerted that someone had been heard breaking into an empty apartment.

It emerged at the trial that Heirens was in the grip of a sexual obsession. On one occasion, he had even put his clothes in the bathroom and thrown the key inside to make it impossible to leave the house; but the urge became so powerful that he recovered them by crawling along the gutter and getting in through a window. The judge who sentenced Heirens ordered that he should never be released.

Cases like this could be classified as ‘imaginative possession’; the sexual emotion is amplified by the imagination until it achieves a morbid intensity. In January 1947, a mutilated corpse was found on a piece of waste ground in Los Angeles; it had been cut in half at the waist, and medical examination showed that the woman had been hung upside down and tortured. She was identified as a twenty-two-year-old waitress named Elizabeth Short; she had come to Hollywood hoping to become a film star, but had only succeeded in becoming an amateur prostitute. Her friends knew her as the Black Dahlia, because she wore black clothes and black underwear. Her killer was never caught. The horror of the crime gripped the public imagination, and one result was half a dozen other ‘imitative’ crimes in Los Angeles in the same year; in one case, the killer scrawled ‘BD’ (black dahlia?) in lipstick on the victim’s breast.

Stranger still, no less than twenty-seven men confessed to the murder; all confessions were investigated and proved false. A twenty-eighth confession was made as long as nine years later. But why should anyone wish to confess to a crime he did not commit? The Freudian view, expressed by Theodore Reik in The Compulsion to Confess, is that the criminal is relieving himself and society of an unconscious feeling of guilt and hoping for the gratitude of society (p.279). But we can also sense very clearly the element of envy of the murderer’s experience, arising out of morbid fascination. Imitative crimes are indeed committed in the imagination. So here is a case in which sexual violence triggered off thirty-four parallel reactions – six murders and twenty-eight false confessions – all in an area about the size of Greater London. One may speculate how many other inhabitants of the same area experienced the same morbid fascination, but confined their imitations to the imagination. In Henri Barbusse’s novel Hell, the narrator describes the after-dinner conversation of a barrister about a man who has strangled and raped a little girl. He observes the reactions of the others: a young mother with her daughter who has got up to leave the room but cannot drag herself away, the men pretending to be indifferent and trying to hide excitement.