Colin Wilson - A Plague of Murder: The Rise and Rise of Serial Killing in the Modern Age

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Copyright 1995 by Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson
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First Diversion Books edition August 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68230-009-1

A Casebook of Murder
A Criminal History of Mankind
The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
Mysteries
Order of Assassins
Strange Powers
The Occult
The Outsider
Written in Blood

Action brings relief: the key to the serial killer?Ted BundyLife being what it is, one dreams of revengeHuman irrationalitySex and incest in nineteenth-century WhitechapelCasanova the realistEarly erotica: The School of Venus, Dom Bugger and Fanny HillRichardsons PamelaThe Marquis de SadeThe importance of forbiddennessSadistic obsession with bloodPieydagnelleThe Ripper murdersTolstoys Kreutzer SonataThe sexual illusionSheldrake and morphogenetic fields

What is a serial killer?Anna ZwanzigerThe Ratcliffe Highway murdersLacenaireZolas human beastPossession to the point of destructionThe case of Thomas PiperJesse Pomeroy, Louis MenesclouTheodore DurrantNeil CreamJoseph VacherLudwig Tessnow

Bela Kiss, the Hungarian BluebeardJeanne Weber, the Ogress of the Goutte dOrGeorg GrossmannFritz Haarmann of HanoverKarl DenkePeter Krten, the Dsseldorf sadist

H. H. HolmesJohann HochBelle GunnessWas Belle murdered?The Axeman of New Orleans

Earle Nelson, the dark stranglerAlbert FishCarl PanzramThe Cleveland Torso Killer

Paul OgorzovBruno LdkeGordon Frederick CumminsNeville HeathFernandez and Beck, the Lonely Hearts killers

Reginald ChristiePeter ManuelWerner Boost, the doubles killerHeinrich PommerenckeHarvey GlatmanEd Gein the necrophileCharles StarkweatherMelvin Rees

The motiveless murder of Hazel WoodardSartres HerostratusRobert Smith: I wanted to get knownMaslows hierarchy of needsReligious messiahsThe Moors murder caseMaslow and dominanceSigward ThurnemanHardrup and Nielsen: murder by hypnosisThe Thames nude murdersThe Boston StranglerStaniak, the Red SpiderJohn Collins, the Ypsilanti killerThe case of Jerry BrudosRichard SpeckThe Manson case

Dean CorllThe Ted Bundy caseThe Right ManSon of SamThe Zodiac murdersPaul John KnowlesJohn GacyThe Hillside Stranglers: Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo BuonoSex crime is not about sex but about powerThe murder of the Ohta familyHerb MullinEd KemperThe Yorkshire Ripper

The FBI psychological profiling unitThe murder of Julie WittmeyerRobert HansenJohn Duffy, the Railway RapistDavid CanterThierry Paulin, the Paris PhantomErskine, the Stockwell stranglerHenry Lee LucasDennis NilsenThe Atlanta murdersLeonard LakeGerald GallegoRamirez, the Night StalkerThe Green River KillerJeffrey DahmerAndrei ChikatiloArthur ShawcrossAileen WurnosBeverley Allitt

When Jack the Ripper killed five prostitutes in the East End of London in 1888, he became instantly the worlds most infamous, and also its best-known murderer. He was not the worlds most prolific killer, nor the first to mutilate his victims. Frances Gilles de Rais murdered and mutilated more than fifty children. Hungarys Countess Elizabeth Bathory murdered an unknown number of servant girlsthe number certainly ran into dozensto take baths in their blood, and is known to have bitten chunks out of their flesh. But the enduring fascination of the Ripper lay in the mystery of his identity, and in his obvious desire to shock, to spit into the face of society. He was also, as we shall see, one of the first examples of what we now call a sex killer, and therefore, of what is now labelled a serial killer.

A Plague of Murder could be about all those who have killed large numbers of peoplein which case, it would have to include the Nazis, and Mafia contract killers, and insane gunmen who go on a rampage and shoot anyone who crosses their path, and terrorists who blow up public buildings. But it is not, because serial killers are different.

The term serial killer was invented in 1978 by FBI agent Robert Ressler to describe obsessive repeat killers like Jack the Ripper. Before that, they were called mass murderers, an ambiguous phrase, since it included criminals like the Frenchman Landru Bluebeard who murdered women for their money. Ressler coined the new term because of the increasing number of American multiple sex killerslike Albert DeSalvo, Ted Bundy, Dean Corll, John Gacy and Henry Lee Lucaswhose crimes had achieved worldwide notoriety. Since then, cases like that of the Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer and the Russian Andrei Chikatilo have made it clear that he was right: there is a fundamental difference between serial killers and other types of murderer.

What drives a man to become a serial killer? One answeras we shall see in this bookis that their self-esteem is often so low that killing is a way of asserting that they exist. In some cases, the killing has no sexual component. Donald Harvey, an American nursing orderly, was sentenced in 1987 for murdering twenty-four people, mostly elderly hospital patients. It emerged later that Harvey had been sexually abused by two adults since he was a child and warned that his mother would be harmed unless he kept silent. Years as a passive object of lust led to the total destruction of his self-esteem; killing hospital patients was his way of asserting that he was a doer, a mover, not a nonentity.

In most cases of serial murder there is an element of this kind of self-assertion. Many such killers are naturally dominantmembers of what zoologists call the dominant 5 per centbut find themselves in a situation in which they feel passive and impotent. Psychologically speaking, such killers can differ as radically as the American Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to 360 murders that were basically motivated by sex, and the British nurse Beverley Allitt, who killed children in hospital out of some strange sense of inadequacy.

The same inadequacy can be seen in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, who drugged and murdered males he lured back to his Milwaukee apartment, and the Russian Andrei Chikatilo, whose sexual impotence vanished only when he was inflicting multiple stab wounds on his victims.

The desire to inflict pain is an element that links many serial killers. This sadism may or may not have been present early in their lives but could have developed as a result of sexual obsession. Here we encounter one of the strangest and most difficult psychological mysteries connected with the serial killer. Many men, from Casanova and the anonymous Victorian who wrote My Secret Life to H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, have experienced a desire to sleep with every attractive woman they see; the urge seems to be as uncomplicated as an anglers desire to catch a fish. Yet in others this urge can get out of control and turn into the need to inflict pain and humiliation. One of the most horrific examples of the sadistic rape syndrome was Donald Pee Wee Gaskins. He was imprisoned for murdering nine people, thought to be business acquaintances with whom he had quarrelled. Later it was revealed that he was probably the worst serial killer of this century; he killed consistently and regularly over a number of years, the result of an abnormal and overdeveloped sexual urge. In 1991 he went to the electric chair having confessed to killing over 120 victims.

Gaskins explained that he acted when a boiling rage, like hot lead, welled up from somewhere deep inside. Other serial killers acted only when drunk, or under the influence of drugs. One man, Steve Wilson, killed two prostitutes in a motel in Los Angeles in 1944, cutting them up in the manner of the original Ripper. He told the psychiatrist that he had strong sadistic tendencies which only emerged when he was drunkhis first wife had left him because he liked to creep up on her when she was naked and cut her buttocks with a razor; he would then apologize and kiss the wounds. Wilson was executed in the San Quentin gas chamber in September 1946.