One evening, after heavy drinking, he saw a woman leave a bar and experienced a compulsion to follow her. He found a heavy piece of wood, and stalked her for several blocks. He managed to get ahead of her and wait in a dark corner. But she arrived at her front door and went in before she reached him.
The need to attack a woman became stronger. On another evening, he walked up behind a woman who was fumbling for her keys, and struck her on the head with a piece of wood. When she screamed, he ran away.
He followed one woman home regularly and watched her undressing. One evening, he got into the house through the basement and attacked her in bed; when she screamed, he fled.
He began to feel that there was another ‘being’ inside him, which he referred to as the ‘entity’, the ‘disordered self or the ‘malignant being’.
Bundy described the first murder. He found a front door open and wandered around the house after dark. Lynda Healy, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Washington, was strangled into unconsciousness, and taken to a remote place where she was raped. At this point, Bundy realised that he would have to kill her because he couldn’t let her go. Asked by the interviewer whether there was any conversation, Bundy replied: ‘Since this girl… represented not a person, but… the image, or something desirable, the last thing we would expect him to want to do would be to personalise this person.’ The victims were merely depersonalised females.
After this, the need to rape became an obsession that allowed him no peace. According to Bundy’s account, on the day the two girls were abducted separately from Lake Sammanish, the first girl was kept tied up in his room until he brought the second one back, and so witnessed the rape of Denise Naslund. He had become a man possessed by a need that absorbed his whole life. He is a terrifying example of a type of killer that has only existed since Jack the Ripper.
The total number of Bundy’s murders is unknown; police suspect that it could be in excess of those committed by Dean Corll or John Gacy. But in any case, Gacy no longer holds the American murder record; by 1980, unknown men known as the Freeway Killers had murdered forty-four teenage male hitchhikers, dumping their sexually abused bodies around California’s highways. (In 1981, William Bonin confessed to twenty-one of the murders and was sentenced for ten of them; three other men were charged with him, one of whom committed suicide in prison.)
The most obvious point to emerge from this survey of crime since 1945 is that, as the figures have continued to rise, the nature of the crimes themselves has become steadily more horrific. It is as if some basic inhibition in human beings is finally beginning to break down. Like the Ik, many criminals seem to have lost all capacity for fellow feeling. But the Ik had an excuse: starvation and the disruption of their traditional life. The worst criminals of the past twenty years have been the product of a comfortable welfare society.
As the nature of the crimes becomes more brutal, they cease to produce a shock effect on society. In 1913, the murder of Mary Phagan made headlines all over America; today it is doubtful if it would achieve more than local coverage. The following three items were collected from newspapers over the New Year period of 1983. In Manchester, a youth of fifteen was sentenced to life imprisonment for a sexual attack on his music teacher and stabbing her fifteen times. In San Francisco, two men were arrested and charged with kidnapping a three-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy, and keeping them as ‘sex slaves’ in a van for almost a year; when arrested, one of the men was in bed with the girl, both naked from the waist down. In Bolton, Lancashire, a seventy-eight-year-old woman was mugged by three children, aged six, eight and nine, and left bleeding on the ground. Three weeks before that, her eighty-one-year-old brother, partially blind, was attacked by an intruder in his home and had to spend two weeks in hospital recovering from his injuries. The woman commented: ‘I feel very bitter and angry. I don’t know what is happening these days.’
After this survey of the criminal history of mankind, we are at least in a slightly better position to answer that question.
THE SENSE OF REALITY
In 1750, a traveller in Haworth, Yorkshire, was puzzled to see men jumping out of the windows of a public house and scrambling frantically over walls. The reason, he discovered, was that someone had seen the parson coming with his whip. The vicar of Haworth (where the Brontës would live a few years later) was the Rev. William Grimshaw, a man who spread terror throughout the district. When the church service had started and the congregation were singing hymns, he used to slip out to the village and use his whip to drive any truants to the church.
In this permissive age, we find it difficult to imagine just how powerful was the religious and moral code of a few centuries ago. Men like Grimshaw were by no means uncommon, for Sabbath breaking was regarded as the most shocking of sins. A prison chaplain remarked that men sentenced to death often began their confession with Sabbath breaking before they went on to robbery or murder. When Dr Johnson visited the death bed of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, he made him swear never to paint on Sunday. Even humming a merry tune on Sunday was regarded as scandalous. As Gordon Rattray Taylor has shown in The Angel Makers (chapter 2), many people attended church four times a day, even on weekdays. Sermons sold better than novels – Sterne said he made more money from his volumes of sermons than from Tristram Shandy.
If we can grasp the sheer rigidity of the religious observances of our ancestors – of their total acceptance, for example, of the idea of damnation, and that God was watching them every moment of the day – we can begin to understand why the disappearance of this outlook has caused such moral chaos. A cultural historian would probably date the decline from the rise of the novel. This was the equivalent of taking a hot bath instead of a cold shower; it was the beginning of a slide into self-indulgence. We have seen how the rise of the novel was accompanied by the rise of pornography, and how Victorian pornography laid more emphasis on the perverse and the forbidden. The Victorians were so fascinated by the ‘forbidden’ because most people still clung to the religious outlook of Parson Grimshaw and his flock. We have also seen how this ‘morality of prohibition’ gave rise to sex crime, and how this has finally become the most characteristic crime of the twentieth century. Dr Johnson would have characterised the whole process as, quite simply, the rise of self-indulgence.
What has happened is clear. Man created civilisation for his own protection. But civilisation, as Freud pointed out, involves one considerable drawback: frustration. A man who is economically deprived naturally covets his neighbour’s wealth. A man who is sexually deprived lusts after his neighbour’s daughters. To deal with these inclinations, society has had to set up a system of laws and moral prohibitions. While these remain strong, society remains healthy. When they disintegrate, civilisation begins to show signs of breakdown.
It was towards the end of the eighteenth century that political philosophers began to break down the economic prohibitions. They argued that, if most men are poor, this is because the social system is unjust. Karl Marx dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. The economically deprived have a right to seize their neighbour’s wealth, for the neighbour would not be wealthy if he were honest.
The sexual revolution took longer to gather momentum – largely because, while a society is economically deprived, sex remains a secondary issue. Once a society is affluent, sex becomes the major issue. Our society has a very high level of sexual stimulation. The result is that most healthy males would like to undress every girl they pass in the street. There has been no sexual equivalent of Karl Marx to argue that women have no right to withhold their bodies from sexually deprived males, and ought to be raped. Yet every rape could be regarded as ‘propaganda of the deed’ for this point of view. The sex killer Melvin Rees came close to putting it into words when he said: ‘You can’t say it’s wrong to kill. Only individual standards make it right or wrong.’ So did Patrick Byrne, the YWCA killer, when he explained that he was trying to get his revenge on women for causing him sexual tension.
We can see, then, that sex crime is basically a form of ‘magical thinking’. The ‘decision to be out of control’ may be purely emotional, as in the case of Paul Knowles, who goes on a murder rampage because his girlfriend has jilted him, or it may be a ‘logical’ decision, as in the case of Ted Bundy, who decides to satisfy his sexual desires through rape and risk the consequences; in either case, the criminal feels he has a right to make such a decision, and that if society disagrees, then society is trying to deprive him of his rights. The same analysis applies increasingly to crime in general. The individual concentrates on his frustration and resentment, and feels that his robbery or burglary is a legitimate way of expressing his sense of social grievance. If society doesn’t like it, then it should take notice and treat him better…