The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The case held the newspaper headlines for more than two years; yet anyone who was in America during that time (as I was) noted a kind of public apathy, a sense of déjá-vu. It seemed an oddly out-of-date sort of affair, as if it had been left over from the era of Vietnam protest a decade earlier. By the time Patty Hearst was captured, the North Vietnamese had overrun the south, and vast numbers of Vietnamese took to the sea in boats in an attempt to escape the communist regime. Within months of the communist takeover of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in April 1975, 150,000 people had fled, many in small boats that disappeared. During the next four years, thousands continued to leave, and the sheer scale of the tragedy slowly became clear. Thousands of children were sent on ahead by parents who hoped to join them later, and ended in refugee camps in South-east Asia. As the refugees flooded in, Thailand and Malaysia – the nearest non-communist countries – began turning the boats back to sea. Thai fishermen became pirates and began intercepting the boats and slaughtering the refugees; survivors told stories of rapes, mutilations, children thrown overboard. Yet the detestation of the communist regime was so great that even four years later, in 1979, another 140,000 fled. Although few of the famous names of the Vietnam protest movement – such as Norman Mailer and Jane Fonda – had the grace to admit that they had been wrong and the US government right about the intentions of the North Vietnamese, the facts spoke for themselves. By the late 1970s, most of the prominent leftist rebels of the 1960s had drifted into respectability, or at least ceased to make public statements about the ‘repressive society’ that had nurtured them.

By 1980, left-wing terrorism was diminishing in Europe and America, to be replaced to a disturbing extent by right-wing terrorism. In October 1980, a judge indicted eight right-wing terrorists for the bombing of a passenger train in 1974, when twelve people were killed; within hours, an enormous bomb had exploded at the Bologna railway station, killing seventy-nine and injuring more than 160. On 26 September 1980, a bomb in a dustbin exploded outside the Munich Oktoberfest as crowds were streaming from the exit, killing thirteen and injuring more than 200; a young neo-Nazi, who died in the blast, was believed to be responsible. It was an appalling end to the worst decade of terrorist violence in modern history.

The 1970s also set new standards of viciousness in ordinary criminal violence. The worst crimes of the 1970s were characterised by a brutality, an indifference to human life and suffering that had no parallel in the criminal records of earlier centuries.

In 1971, Juan Corona, a Mexican farmer, surpassed all previous American records for mass murder. A Japanese farmer near Yuba City, California, discovered a grave on his land; it proved to contain the corpse of a male vagrant who had been sexually violated. Further searches in the area uncovered another twenty-four bodies; one of them had in his pocket a receipt signed ‘Juan V. Corona’. Most victims were vagrants or migratory workers; the motive was apparently sexual. Corona’s brother, a known homosexual, fled back to Mexico, and Corona’s lawyers later alleged that he was the real killer. But on the evidence of a bloody machete found in Corona’s home, and a ledger containing some of the names of victims, Corona was sentenced to twenty-five consecutive life terms.

In June 1972, following a supermarket robbery in Santa Barbara, California, three members of a family named McCrary were arrested: the father, Sherman, forty-seven, his wife Carolyn, and their nineteen-year-old son Danny. Later, their daughter Ginger was arrested, together with her husband Carl Taylor. It emerged that the family had drifted across the country from Texas, leaving behind a trail of robbed grocery stores and raped shop assistants. The McCrarys had made a habit of stopping by small shops or drive-in groceries in the evening, robbing the till and, if the shop assistant was attractive, taking her along with them. She was then raped by the three men and shot. The family are believed to have committed more than twenty murders. The two womenfolk apparently made no objection, regarding these rapes as the natural ‘perks’ of males who risk their lives by robbery. Carolyn McCrary commented: ‘It may sound crazy, but I love my husband very much.’

On 8 August 1973, a caller to the Pasadena police department, Texas, explained that he had just killed a man. The police went to the home of thirty-four-year-old Dean Corll and found him lying dead in the hallway, with six bullets in his body. Seventeen-year-old Wayne Henley told them that he had murdered Corll in self-defence. Henley had brought a fifteen-year-old girl to a glue-sniffing party. They passed out, and when they woke up found themselves tied up. Henley had ‘sweet-talked’ Corll into letting him go, promising that he would rape and kill the girl while Corll, a homosexual, raped and killed another teenage boy who was present. Henley had then grabbed a gun with which Corll had been threatening him, and killed Corll.

Under interrogation, Henley admitted that he had procured boys for Corll, and that Corll had been systematically raping, torturing and murdering them. The boys were chained to a plywood board, and sometimes violated for days before being killed. Henley led the police to a boatshed in south-west Houston, and they began digging. Seventeen corpses, wrapped in plastic bags, were uncovered. Henley led the police to other sites where bodies were found; the final total seemed to be thirty-one. Boys had been disappearing from the Heights area of Houston for three years. Another youth, David Brooks, was also implicated, and he and Henley were both sentenced to life imprisonment for their part in the murders. Corll, it emerged, was a morbidly over-sensitive mother’s boy who had never really grown up – one recent photograph showed him holding a cuddly toy. Corll was clearly yet another example of Freud’s dictum that if a child had the power, it would destroy the world.

In April 1973, twenty-five-year-old Ed Kemper – six foot nine inches tall – crept into his mother’s bedroom and killed her with a hammer; the following day he killed her friend Sara Hallett. Then he drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and rang the Santa Cruz police department to confess. In custody, Kemper confessed to six horrific sex murders, all with a strong necrophiliac element. In 1963, at the age of fourteen, Kemper had murdered his grandfather and grandmother, with whom he was living, and spent five years in mental hospitals. In 1972, he picked up two female hitchhikers, threatened them with a gun, and murdered them both; he later dissected the bodies, cutting off the heads. Kemper’s usual method was to take the bodies back to his mother’s house – she worked in a hospital – and rape and dissect them there; he particularly enjoyed having sex with a headless body. The bodies were later dumped over cliffs or left in remote mountain areas. Kemper was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Another psychopathic mass killer, Herb Mullin, was operating in California at the same time as Kemper. As a teenager, Mullin had been voted by his class ‘most likely to succeed’, but by the time he was twenty-one – in 1969 – he was showing signs of mental abnormality. In October 1972, driving along a mountain highway, Mullin passed an old tramp, and stopped to ask the man to take a look at the engine; as the man bent over, Mullin killed him with a baseball bat, leaving the corpse by the roadside. Two weeks later he picked up a pretty college student, stabbed her with a hunting knife, and tore out her intestines. In November 1972 he went into a church and stabbed the priest to death. On 25 January 1973, he committed five murders in one night, killing a friend and his wife, then murdering a woman and her two children who lived in a nearby log cabin. In the Santa Cruz State Park he killed four teenage boys in a tent with a revolver. On 13 February 1973, he was driving to his parents’ home when a voice in his head told him to stop and kill an old man who was working in his front garden. A neighbour heard the shot, and rang the police, who picked up Mullin within a few blocks. At his trial, Mullin explained that he was convinced that murders averted natural disasters – such as another San Francisco earthquake. But he was found to be sane and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In May 1974, a burglar named Paul John Knowles came out of prison in Florida and flew to San Francisco to join a woman who had become his ‘pen pal’ in prison, and who had agreed to marry him. At close quarters, she found him rather frightening and, after four days, told him she had changed her mind. That night, according to Knowles’s later confession, he went on the streets of San Francisco and killed three people at random. After that, he flew back to Jacksonville, Florida, and went on a rampage of murder and rape that lasted four months and claimed nineteen lives. In Jacksonville he suffocated a woman in the course of a burglary; when two small girls, aged seven and eleven, recognised him, he forced them into his car and killed them both, leaving their bodies in a swamp. He broke into a house in Atlantic Beach and strangled a forty-nine-year-old woman, then murdered and raped a female hitchhiker and strangled another woman in front of her three-year-old son. Then, driving around the country in a stolen car, he continued to commit murders and rapes at random. In Miami, he called on his lawyer and made a tape confessing in detail to fourteen murders (as well as the three in San Francisco), then drove on again. An attractive female journalist named Sandy Fawkes met Knowles in Atlanta, and spent several days with him without suspecting that he was a mass murderer; he made no attempt to harm her. He was finally arrested after a police chase in which he took two hostages and executed them both. The day after his capture, he was killed by an FBI agent when on his way to a maximum security jail when he – allegedly – tried to grab the sheriffs gun.