The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

A search of the home of Rees’s parents left no doubt that he was the killer. The police discovered the revolver with which Carrol Jackson had been shot, and a kind of diary containing an account of the murders. ‘Caught on a lonely road… Drove to a selected spot and killed the husband and baby. Now the mother and daughter were all mine.’ He described taking them to an empty building, and forcing Mildred Jackson to commit a sex act, probably fellatio. ‘Now I was her master…’. After raping both, Rees killed them.

Rees was arrested at a music shop in Arkansas, where he was working. Like other sex killers already mentioned, he was an itinerant, never staying long in the same place. His friends found it hard to believe that this mild, quietly-spoken, intelligent man could be the murderer of the Jacksons, but investigation also tied Rees to five more sex murders. He was executed in 1961.

The case may be regarded as a turning point in twentieth-century crime. Other criminals – such as Ravachol and Prado – argued that they had a right to kill; but no one had ever used this kind of logic as an excuse for sexual self-indulgence. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov states that he has a right to kill an old pawnbrokress in order to rescue himself from poverty and be able to lead a fruitful life. Rees was arguing, in effect, that sexual desire blocks self-fulfilment as much as poverty, and that he had a right to commit sex crimes to release his tension and restore a sense of reality. The argument is similar to that of Harry Lime in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, who looks down from the top of the big wheel in a Vienna amusement park and asks whether the life of any one of those black dots on the ground is really worth twenty thousand pounds. Once this step of the argument – the ‘depersonalisation’ of human beings – has been granted, it is possible to justify anything from cannibalism to genocide.

The problem here, we can see, is that Rees is intelligent, and that he is using his intelligence to justify an act – violation – of which every normal male is potentially capable. What has happened could be compared to the situation in the nineteenth century, when the spread of education made it possible for every working man to read Voltaire and August Comte, and rehearse all the standard arguments to prove that religion is a delusion. Whatever our view of religion, it is obvious that this kind of shallow scepticism did as much harm as good. With Melvin Rees we come upon a parallel phenomenon: the man who is intelligent enough to argue that crime is merely a matter of law, and that law is another name for social oppression. A few years later, Ian Brady was using the same argument to justify the sex murder of children; Charles Manson used it to justify the killing of ‘pigs’ like Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas; John Frazier used it to justify the killing of the Ohta family on the grounds that they were too rich; San Francisco’s ‘Zebra killers’ used it to justify the killing of whites at random, on the grounds that all whites are the enemies of all blacks.

The 1960s, then, are a watershed in modern crime: the decade in which certain social bonds rotted and finally came apart. It is, undoubtedly, a matter of social bonds. There are many poor areas in industrial cities that ought to have a high crime rate, yet which have, in fact, a very low one. People who have lived in such areas can speak of the concern of neighbours for one another: how, if someone is ill or has an accident, neighbours will take it in turns to do the cooking, wash the clothes, feed the children and send them to school. Such areas obviously differ from the heterogeneous slums in large cities where the poor merely happen to have congregated because they have nowhere else to go. In such slums, most people hardly know the family next door, and the children only know one another because they attend the same school or play in the same street; they follow the lead of their parents, and regard the neighbours with indifference or hostility. Such areas may not even be slums. In modern Los Angeles there is an unprecedentedly high murder rate among Mexican teenagers. In Mexico there has always been a remarkable degree of social stability, even in the worst slums. Transplanted to a ‘better’ environment, there is nevertheless a sense of boredom and alienation, no feeling of ‘belonging’; so a crude territorial urge replaces the old social bonds, and the result is violent hostility to anyone from the next street.

The problem is illustrated by a case that took place in Wimbledon in 1969. The dozen boys who battered to death a man they believed to be a homosexual were not embittered slum dwellers; they lived in an architectural showpiece called the Alton Estate, a huge block of glass and concrete flats set on pillars and surrounded by parkland. But the planners had failed to take account of the psychological effect of transferring working-class families from London slums to this strange, impersonal place in the middle of nowhere. The ringleader of the gang, Geoffrey Hammond, was not a hardened juvenile delinquent; he had been a choirboy, had been in the St John’s Ambulance and Royal Marine Cadets, and had appeared in life-saving demonstrations in the children’s television programme Blue Peter. On 29 September 1969, Hammond led his gang in a hunt for ‘queers’; they had been damaging cars belonging to ‘pooves’, but now their victims parked farther away. They waited by a subway tunnel and ambushed a twenty-eight-year-old clerk named Michael de Gruchy; Hammond shouted ‘Charge!’ and the boys battered de Gruchy to death with palings. The basic problem was boredom and a sense of rootlessness; picking on ‘queers’ was their own way of seeking out adventure. (‘Charge!’)

The same problem – as already noted – is found on many large estates and in blocks of flats: vandalism, mugging, burglary. And an American experiment has shown that when the flat-dwellers are housed in bungalows with individual gardens, the crime rate falls dramatically. The problem is ‘territorial’.

Once the social bonds have been loosened, violence seems to become a natural outlet for frustration or boredom. And it is at this point that ‘magical thinking’ finally comes into its own and provides an ‘intellectual’ justification for the violence. Werner Boost, a German sex murderer who made a habit of attacking courting couples and raping the women, told police indignantly that he became furious at the immorality of couples having sex in cars, and that: ‘These sex horrors are the curse of Germany.’ Heinrich Pommerencke, a twenty-three-year-old who had committed twenty rapes and ten rape murders, explained after his capture that he had committed his first murder after seeing a film called The Ten Commandments and deciding that women are the cause of all the world’s troubles; he then attacked and raped an eighteen-year-old girl in a park, cutting her throat. Patrick Byrne, who raped and decapitated a girl in the Birmingham YWCA hostel in 1959, explained that he was trying to get his revenge on women for causing his sexual tension. Rudolf Pleil, the German rapist who committed suicide in his cell in 1958, liked to describe himself as lder beste Todmachery (‘the best death-maker’ – he killed fifty women). ‘Every man has his passion,’ he remarked. ‘Some prefer whist. I prefer killing people’ – the implication being that murder was an honourable occupation in which a man might feel proud of his excellence. Yet his suicide seems to be a tacit admission that he was not willing to submit his logic to the mercy of a jury.

It is important to note that ‘magical thinking’ usually applies to only one department of a man’s life; in most ways he may be perfectly normal and logical – as we have seen in the case of so many Right Men who strike their friends and colleagues as perfectly reasonable. In the early 1950s, a ‘mad bomber’ terrorised New York; bombs exploded in Grand Central Station, Radio City Music Hall, Macy’s department store and several other public places; fortunately, no one was killed, although a few were injured. The police tracked down the bomber when he wrote a letter denouncing the Edison Company for causing his tuberculosis; a check of company records revealed that a man named George Metesky had been knocked down by an escape of hot gas in 1931, and had been unsuccessful in his claim for a disability pension. Metesky proved to be a fifty-four-year-old bachelor who lived with his elder sisters, attended church every Sunday, and dressed meticulously in double-breasted suits. He never struck anyone as remotely insane; and, apart from this single streak of paranoid resentment, he was apparently quite normal. Metesky was confined in a mental home.