The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Barbusse, like Freud, is implying that such crimes are the conscious expression of ‘monsters’ from the unconscious, and that the monsters can be found in every one of us. Such a statement will strike most of us as a partial truth that has been made untrue by gross exaggeration. (For example, if a young mother feels compelled to listen, this is surely because she feels anxiety about the safety of her own child and is trying, so to speak, to forearm herself against disaster.) But this is to overlook the real point: that man has created a civilisation for which he is not fully prepared. He could be compared to a polar bear placed in a centrally heated cage and suffering from a sense of suffocation. He is ‘safe’ but uncomfortable. Unless we understand this, we shall not be able to even begin to understand the increase in sheer sadism in so many of the crimes that have taken place since 1960. Civilisation increases our mental experience – books, television, conversation – but decreases our physical experience, our contact with nature and with necessity. Most of us have accustomed ourselves to these conditions; but there are a few who would not admit to an obscure sense of ‘something missing’. It is as if ordinary experience had become slightly dream-like and unreal. This is one of the basic conditions of civilised man.

A case cited by the Los Angeles psychiatrist Paul De River in The Sexual Criminal (p.74) underlines the point. A school guard, aged thirty-two, had lured three children to a ravine and strangled and raped them. The girls were aged seven, eight and nine. The man was married, and had an active sex life with his wife; he had even practised wife-swapping with a neighbour. But he assured De River ‘that he had never had a complete fulfilment of his sexual desires’. He was convinced that what he needed for ‘complete fulfilment’ was a narrow vagina, ‘something tight and young’. He persuaded the girls to go with him on the pretence of showing them ‘bunnies’, and led them off one by one, claiming that more than that would frighten the bunnies; then he strangled each child with a rope and committed rape – and, in two cases, sodomy. He was in a state of intense excitement and experienced ejaculation in all three cases. Afterwards he knelt by the bodies to pray for the children’s souls, and asked God to forgive him. But he admitted that, during the attacks, ‘he felt that he was very powerful and that they were but his slaves, he being the master’. The next day he felt ‘drunk with his own importance’. He fantasised about the murders as he made love to his wife and experienced deep satisfaction.

De River comments: ‘We must remember that here we are dealing with a sexual psychopath who has at last achieved his end and fulfilled his sexual desire, and in this case for the first time his sexual tension has been reduced to the normal limits.’ Yet this is to some extent contradicted by the killer’s own statement that he had obtained the greatest satisfaction from the eldest girl, who was the best developed – and therefore closest to a grown woman. This suggests that his belief that he needed a child for total satisfaction was a misinterpretation of his urge. What really gave him the satisfaction, as we have seen, was the sense of power, the feeling that ‘they were but his slaves, he being the master’. What he wanted was ego satisfaction; he was misinterpreting Ernest Becker’s desire for ‘primacy’ as sexual desire.

Now we can begin to see why the horrific Black Dahlia case inspired so many imitative crimes and confessions. It was not necessarily that these fantasists would have enjoyed such extreme sadism – in fact, none of the imitative crimes was as violent. What was attractive was the idea of total ego satisfaction, being the ‘master’. Barbusse’s males were not necessarily lusting to commit a sex murder; what they – and the mother – were responding to was the element of ego-satisfaction, of ‘primacy’.

We have seen in Chapter 1, that there is a certain amount of evidence that society, like the individuals of whom it is composed, passes through the stages of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The Victorian age was obsessed by the need for domestic security. This gave way to the next level of the hierarchy, the sexual level, and the crimes of Vacher, Pieydagnelle, Jack the Ripper, were a simple expression of frustration on this level, with the violence sharpened by frustration. This type of sex crime has never disappeared; but it has been increasingly eclipsed by sex crime in which we can sense the element of passionate ego-assertion. In 1946, Britain was shocked by the case of Neville Heath, executed for the sadistic murder of two women, Margery Gardner and Doreen Marshall. Margery Gardner was found in a hotel room in Netting Hill, her breasts almost bitten off, and lacerations of the vagina made by the stock of a riding whip. Doreen Marshall, stabbed and mutilated, was found in a gorge near Bournemouth. What emerged at the trial was that Heath was a born liar and poseur: he liked to use pseudonyms such as ‘Group Captain Rupert Brooke’, and to talk about his wealthy and aristocratic family background – all imaginary. The sadism of the murders was not simply a matter of sexual desire, but of the need for ego-assertion, a symbolic way of washing himself clean of the humiliations inherent in the life of an unsuccessful confidence man.

This same element is apparent in the case of Dr Marcel Petiot, also tried and executed in 1946. In occupied France, Petiot – who owned a house in Paris – offered to help refugees escape the Nazis. At least sixty-three people came to his house, complete with their most precious belongings and savings; none was ever seen alive again. Petiot gassed them in a specially constructed chamber, then dismembered and burned the bodies. The chamber had a specially constructed periscope through which he could watch his victims die. Petiot was a doctor of exceptional brilliance, but he was another born confidence man, and had been in trouble many times with the police. The murders were not merely a way of making money; they were an act of self-assertion, a declaration that he was not a mere confidence man but a super-criminal, a Professor Moriarty. We can trace the presence of this element of ego-assertion, the craving for self-esteem, in many of the major murder cases of the 1950s and ‘60s. In 1953, there was a nationwide manhunt in England when three nude female corpses were found in the cupboard of a flat vacated by John Reginald Halliday Christie in Notting Hill. A fourth woman – his wife – was found under the floorboards, and remains of two more women buried in the garden. It became clear at the trial that Christie was a necrophile; a woman had to be dead – or at least unconscious – before he could achieve an erection; he persuaded several of the victims to breathe in a mixture of Friar’s Balsam – for bronchitis – and coal gas to render them unconscious. This sexual problem was clearly a matter of self-confidence, yet Christie was known as an unpleasantly self-assertive man who loved to pretend to a profound medical knowledge; as a policeman during the London black-out, he had been a ‘little Hitler’, enjoying asserting his authority. The crimes were the outcome of the conflict between the craving for ‘primacy’ – the desire to be a ‘somebody’ – and his total lack of sexual self-confidence.

In January 1958, a nineteen-year-old Nebraskan youth named Charles Starkweather lost his temper with the mother of his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Fugate – who believed Caril to be pregnant – and shot her to death; he also killed Caril’s stepfather and two-year-old sister. The two then drove across the state, committing seven more murders at random, before he was captured. It emerged that Starkweather was an admirer of the late James Dean – a photograph taken after his capture has the brooding James Dean stare and the cigarette dangling out of the corner of the mouth. Hollywood took him at his word and made a film of his life in which he was represented as a teenage ‘rebel without a cause’; it conveniently glossed over the murder of the two-year-old girl and the rape and mutilation of seventeen-year-old Carol King, a college student. Starkweather was executed in 1959.

In January 1959, a truck-driver named Carrol Jackson, out for a Sunday afternoon drive with his family in East Virginia, was run off the road by a blue Chevrolet. A thin-faced man with ape-like arms forced the family – Carrol and Mildred Jackson with their two daughters, Susan, aged five, and Janet, eighteen months – to get into his boot. The Jacksons vanished. Two months later, Carrol Jackson’s body was found in a ditch; he had been shot in the skull. Janet had been thrown in underneath him and had apparently died of suffocation. Two weeks later, the bodies of Mildred and Susan were found in a shallow grave. The police investigation had come to a halt for lack of clues when they received a letter from a salesman which named a jazz musician named Melvin Rees as the killer. He quoted Rees as saying: ‘You can’t say it’s wrong to kill. Only individual standards make it right or wrong.’ When he had asked Rees point blank if he had killed the Jackson family, Rees had merely evaded the question.