Serial Murder and Sexual Repression

At the age of 13, William Heirens received the following advice from his mother: "All sex is dirty. If you touch anyone, you get a disease." The year was 1941, the place, Chicago. Plenty of kids had heard the same warning. But in the mind of William Heirens, the words became part of a dark and complex fabric.

On the evening of June 3, 1945, Josephine Ross started from a sound sleep to find a stranger rummaging through her apartment. Before Ross could scream, Heirens emerged from the dark and attacked. He cut her throat, then began stabbing viciously at her body. After Ross lay bloody and lifeless on the floor, Heirens stayed in the apartment. He wandered through the quiet rooms in a daze, masturbating over and over.

The killer instantly became a demon of terror in the Chicago news. After the next murder--another single woman--the police found a message written on the victim's wall. Using her lipstick as a crude marker, Heirens had scrawled: "For Heaven's sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself."

The police caught Heirens, but not before he had kidnapped, killed and dismembered one final victim: a six-year-old girl.

Time magazine labeled the case the "crime story of the century." Even seasoned detectives took a deep breath at details too lurid to be recounted by the papers. Strangest of all, perhaps, Heirens hailed from a "nice" family in a respectable neighborhood. How had he grown into this bizarre aberration, a figure from the darkest of nightmares?

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Halfa century later, only one facet of Heirens' story has changed: Heirens now ranks as the harbinger of an epidemic of serial sex-killers. The stats tell a chilling story: With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. accounts for 74 percent of all known serial killers. Europe has a paltry 19 percent. Even discounting better reporting here, we are the preeminent nation of random murders. Worse, the number of serial murderers emerging here has been growing explosively since 1950. Sociologists talk of a rising tide of serial killers, from 35 to as many as 500 in our midst, trolling for victims night after night.

Detectives, criminologists and psychologists have spent careers trying to fathom what makes the likes of William Heirens tick. [See Terrors of the Twisted, page 149.] Joel Norris, an eminent psychologist who specializes in serial killers, breaks the killing cycle into stages.

First comes the aura phase, as the killer recedes from reality and slips into a twilight world. A long-nurtured and sexually charged homicidal fantasy takes hold, colors heighten, time slows and even skin becomes more sensitive. The fantasy replays itself for hours, days, weeks. Inevitably it turns into an irresistible compulsion.

Next, the trolling begins. Hunting for a victim--stalking, lurking, driving sometimes for hours on end. Having locked on to a target, the killer begins the wooing phase, a subtle seduction that forms the prelude to sudden capture. It can be a polite Ted Bundy feigning a broken arm or a stranger offering candy. One way or another, the victim falls under the stalker's power.

And the killing starts. The murders take as many forms as there are fantasies, but they always involve a ritual reenactment of the killer's most deeply held secret, the vision that drove him through the walls of reality--torture chambers, hangings, shootings, slashings, beatings, poisonous injections.

But the killing cycle doesn't end with death. To relive their crimes in private, many serial killers keep souvenirs--anything from underwear (as with William Heirens) to the body parts stowed by Jeffrey Dahmer. This is known as the totem phase. Yet totems never equal the real thing. And like a junkie coming off a high, the murderer sinks into a profound depression--and the need to kill begins again.

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For all the insight of criminologists, their analyses tend to leave one fundamental question unanswered: Why does the U.S., of all countries, breed sexually violent murderers like mice in a laboratory?

In search of an answer, I went to the pros. My first stop was the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. The BSU, which specializes in the psychopathology of violence, entered the popular imagination when Hannibal Lecter began terrifying moviegoers. Its fame and earned respect, however, predate The Silence of the Lambs. Almost two decades ago, FBI agents decided that their best hope in stopping the killer onslaught lay in compiling every piece of data about these netherworld lives--profiling, in forensic argot. (continued on page 147) Serial Murder (continued from page 78) The BSU agents interviewed hundreds of killers, their families and surviving victims. They read police files, collated and computerized the gore and analyzed every killer with an eye for common personality traits. The BSU can now take a few crime-scene details--the way a victim was tortured, or how the killer cleaned up after himself--and roughly predict a perpetrator's race, age, income and sexual history, even the condition of his car and how fast he drives.

Special Agent Roy Hazelwood has been studying serial rapists and killers at the FBI since well before the BSU came into existence. A clean-shaven, spry Texan who keeps a Bible standing on his desk, Hazelwood probably ranks as the world's leading authority on a deviant group of killers known as sexual sadists--22 of whom, he told me, killed 187 people, more than "your big names like Bundy and Gacy."

Hazelwood and I met in the claustrophobic privacy of his underground office at the BSU, 50 feet below the rural grounds of the FBI's Quantico, Virginia compound. As muffled gunshots from an indoor range thudded in the background, Hazelwood laid out some of the horrors he contemplates for a living.

To illustrate his tales, he opened stacks of file drawers crammed with photos, drawings and journals, revealing a burnscarred woman in tears, a dismembered torso, details about the effects of injecting caustic substances into human beings, drawings of bound and naked women covered with bleeding wounds. A shelf of suspiciously unmarked videotapes filled a wall behind him.

One of Hazelwood's subjects tortured a prostitute for 43 days before allowing his victim to die. Another killer calmly explained to his victims: "First I'm going to torture you in the most horrible and painful manner I can think of. Then I'm going to abuse you sexually in the most degrading way I possibly can think of. Then I'll kill you in the slowest and most painful way I can conceive." After a pause, the killer asked, "Do you have any questions?"

Before going to the BSU, I had considered brutal murder familiar turf. During the Eighties I worked as an assistant D.A. in Manhattan. I spent one year prosecuting cases against the dangerously mentally ill. We put away hackers and even killers who ate body parts. I had just published Death Benefit, a book delving into the life and crimes of a female killer whose last victim was pushed off a cliff at Big Sur. But Hazelwood's criminals were in a league of their own--in comparison, shy Chicago boy William Heirens seems a rank beginner.

Hazelwood moved excitedly around the room, pulling out arcane pieces of evidence: "Read this. It's a slave contract. The woman's been brainwashed into selling herself to a sadist for one dollar. This here's a collection of detective magazines--see how the guy has a fascination with hanging. And this drawing? The woman's tied up and she's thinking, Am I going to die?" He then added pensively, "These people are the crème de la crème, the ultimate challenge to society and law enforcement."

Hazelwood knew each perpetrator intimately, thanks largely to the fact that most sexual sadists are recorders. The macabre library of videos, Polaroids, drawings, letters, scripts and diaries, he explained, wasn't a collection of on-site the police reports and photos. These were the murderers' souvenirs, their totems.

After an hour or so, I went to the heart of the matter and asked what forces might mold someone into a sexually vicious killer. Hazelwood's sudden loss of humor made me feel as if I had uttered a law-enforcement faux pas.

"We're not interested in causes, and we're not interested in cures," he answered. "We're interested in identification, apprehension, incarceration and prosecution. I'm interested in what I can learn from them or from their wives or girlfriends that can help me more quickly identify them. Let somebody else figure out why."

In all, the BSU experts left me less than satisfied. Hazelwood's cases remained burned into my memory, but the FBI agenda--"identification, apprehension, incarceration and prosecution"--gave him and his colleagues little incentive to look into my central question: why the proliferation of American serial killers?

For the next few weeks I plowed through books and articles. I called more experts, people I had known while prosecuting cases in New York. Gradually, some answers emerged. In the killers' profiles I began to see the outlines of a social portrait--one that could account for why America has fostered a greater number of sexually homicidal citizens than any other nation in the world.

Most killers come from an entirely different milieu than the young, black and Hispanic burglars, robbers and dope dealers who populate criminal courts around the country. The vast majority of serial killers are middle- to lower-class white males. (If a suspect is black, one FBI veteran told me, he or she probably was raised in a white environment.) They range in age from their mid-20s to mid-30s. The great majority have low self-esteem. In fact, many multiple murderers end up committing suicide well before they are tracked down.

Serial killing also turns out to be an immensely sexual process. This seemed obvious enough in retrospect, yet I had never heard the connection made explicitly. To a one, these men nurture a sexually charged, homicidal fantasy for years before emerging with their first killing. The fantasy usually ends with a victim's death, but it takes years before a killer can overcome his inhibitions and fully enact his private horror. Killers thus begin with petty crimes, only flirting with their deepest sexual impulses. Eventually, however, the fantasy becomes so compelling that it overtakes all inhibition. Yet, when they're not murdering in a hallucinatory daze, these murderers appear as anything but raving lunatics. Most hold down a steady job, own a car and keep up a surface appearance of normalcy--the very traits that lure unsuspecting victims. A large number of killers are even married, leading the darkest of double lives. They seem to bear out Hannah Arendt's immortal observation about the banality of evil. "Some of the worst killers are pillars of the community," Hazelwood had told me. "One was a churchman, another worked as a high-level executive for a Midwest chain. One guy was an ex-cop."

In psychiatric parlance, most serial killers are sociopaths, individuals devoid of empathy for their victims. The bodies they leave behind--maimed, beaten, destroyed--are just a means to enact their fantasies, inspiring no more sympathy in their minds than a Kewpie doll.

But why do these sexually violent fantasies arise? One telling clue--the why rather than the who--seems to be childhood abuse, often sexual abuse. It ranges from Mrs. Heirens' admonition that "Sex is dirty" to brutal beatings. But like the obsessive fantasy life, it always turns up, hidden in killers' hearts like a scarlet "A" for abuse.

One serial killer, Joseph Kallinger, cut off the penis of a young victim. A psychiatrist discovered that Kallinger was mercilessly misused as a child by an adoptive mother. To punish the boy for stealing, she forced Joseph to hold his hand over an open flame without crying. When young Joseph returned from the hospital after a hernia operation, his adoptive mother told him, "The doctor fixed your little bird." Kallinger confessed that the moment he killed his own 14-year-old son--his last victim--he achieved orgasm.

William Heirens was a few years younger than the norm, but the rest of the profile fits him to a tee. His sexually repressive family life seemed in part responsible for Heirens' troubled sexuality. When he was in his teens, Heirens was making out with a girlfriend. Suddenly and inexplicably, he burst into tears. Then he vomited. It wasn't long before he was breaking into women's apartments and masturbating into their underwear. Meanwhile, his fantasy life grew increasingly bizarre: Heirens secretly cross-dressed and masturbated to a collection of Nazi photos. It seemed almost inevitable that Heirens would move on to killing.

The connection between sexual identity distorted in youth and serial murder turns up again and again. Charles Manson, Ottis E. Toole and Henry Lee Lucas all were forced to attend their first days of school dressed as little girls. Gerard Schaefer was an ex-police officer who kidnapped, raped and dismembered a series of young women. He was described by psychologist Joel Norris as "a man who was abused by and afraid of women, a hyperreligious individual who belonged to a cultlike Christian sect in which a strict, literal adherence to the Bible was the major precept."

Torn between deep-seated fears and simultaneous resentments of their own sexuality, it is hardly surprising that these killers can gratify their sexual needs only in "safe" circumstances. Norris is convinced that because serial killers "themselves are afraid of the sex they want to engage in, they have sex with their victims only after they are bound, unconscious or dead. Most lust killers can't confront the act of sex with a live, functioning person." A dead body, obviously, poses no threats. Even Ted Bundy--a handsome, intelligent onetime law student who carried on liaisons with women and wrote a rape crisis manual--committed necrophilia.

Sexual repression--itself just one more form of childhood abuse--seems also to contribute to the immense anger that boils inside many serial murderers. Robert Ressler, one of the BSU's founders, studied the psyches of socalled organized killers, those who carefully plan and enact their murders. He found that "most if not all of the organized killers have tremendous anger toward women, often expressed in the belief that a certain female is not 'woman enough' to 'turn him on."'

Hazelwood's sadists also killed out of anger--but with a deviously peculiar logic. According to Hazelwood, sadists believe that all women are "sluts and bitches" who deserve torture. They kidnap ostensibly nice women, then force them to perform all manner of unspeakable acts. Once the sadist sees these women comply with his deviant demands, he recognizes that this "nice" girl is no less a whore than all other women. Thus she, too, deserves to die.

But with the sadist--as opposed to other types of serial killers--power becomes paramount. One of Hazelwood's sadists wrote the telling lines: "The wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence of sadism. One essential impulse: to have complete mastery over another person, to make him/her a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her God. The most important radical aim is to make her suffer since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her." Having freed himself from thralldom to the women or men he despises, the killer achieves what is for him the ultimate turn-on.

Whether sadistic, organized or disorganized, serial killing comes down to sex and power. Male heterosexual killers attack females; male homosexual killers--like John Wayne Gacy, Jr.--attack males. One of the few documented female serial killers, the prostitute Aileen Wuornos, attacked her male clients. In every case, murder serves as the ultimate form of sexual revenge. And in every killer's mind, power, anger, repression, frustration, killing and sex are inextricably bound.

This bloody mixture lies at the heart of most serial killers' long-nurtured fantasies--and it mirrors something pervasive in American society. After all, in a sense, we raised these killers.

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It is practically axiomatic that the white American middle class nurses a double standard about sex. Sex is used to sell beer, cars and movies. But frank acceptance of active, healthy sexual relationships remains taboo. Parents continue to inculcate their children with notions of "nice" girls who don't pursue sex, and "sluts" who seek it out. Holding true to our puritan heritage, Americans learn that even healthy sexual fantasies are "dirty thoughts" best kept to themselves. Rather than permit the sale of condoms at high schools or their advertisement on television, parents tolerate almost 1 million pregnant teens every year. To this repressive sensibility, pregnancy serves as fitting punishment for illicit sex. While American men desire the tempting bodies on TV and billboards, society simultaneously condemns such urges as morally bad. Given such an irreconcilable double standard, it seems inevitable that many should come to resent (and in extreme cases, despise) the stimulating women or men who are blamed for their downfall. In subtler forms, this moral tension may express itself as sexual harassment; in the worst instances, it becomes a sexually sadistic need to seek revenge on "sluts and whores."

Yet, for reasons one can only speculate about, American criminologists and psychiatrists seem to ignore the connection between sexual repression and serial murder. The only direct reference to this nexus that I could find appeared in a British text on serial murder by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman. Examining the causes of the "age of the sex crime" in America, the two scholars contend that one source is "the 19th century attitude to sex, the kind of prudery that made Victorian housewives conceal table legs with a tablecloth in case the mere thought of legs would cause young ladies to blush."

The connection between repression and murder has long been expressed in popular culture. Witness Norman Bates, the killer in Hitchcock's Psycho, who was modeled after serial murderer Ed Gein. (Gein also inspired Thomas Harris' Buffalo Bill character in The Silence of the Lambs. The real Gein makes fictional depictions seem tepid. Gein made lampshades and wastebaskets from human skin, ate out of human skulls, wore a belt of human nipples and made mobiles out of noses, lips and labia). Hitchcock's Bates carried on an internal dialogue between himself and his dead mother, who castigated him for his lust. Periodically, Norman's sexual conflict exploded into stabbing murders of attractive women who wandered into the Bates Motel.

Norman Bates may simplify how the American sexual zeitgeist plays into the killer mentality. But this puritanical attitude has continued to characterize vast segments of white, conservative, middleclass culture--the very culture that produces the Jeffrey Dahmers and David Berkowitzes. Still, why the sudden explosion in the number of killers? Prudery has been around for centuries, and sex killings have a long and well-documented history. Gilles de Rais and Jack the Ripper, infamous sex murderers, came from societies where premarital sex was considered truly damning to the reputation of decent women. These criminals, however, made the history books primarily because they were so rare.

Even lesser-known villains of the day created reigns of terror. In April 1790, Renwick Williams took to sneaking up behind well-to-do young women in London and slashing at their clothes with a knife. The worst injuries amounted to stab wounds, yet he threw the city into a state of terror. Posters offering rewards for Williams' capture were splashed over the city walls. At Williams' trial, the prosecution referred to the crime spree as "a scene that is so new in the annals of humanity, a scene so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible."

Measured by today's standards, Jack the Ripper ranks as a garden-variety killer for having disemboweled seven prostitutes. Renwick Williams is merely a petty offender. Indeed, 20th century America's sex predators have grown so numerous that each new killing spree barely raises eyebrows beyond the community at risk. Who, for example, has heard of Gerald Gallego, Jr., a Sacramento man who kidnapped pairs of young women and kept them as sex slaves in a makeshift hideaway before murdering them? Or Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, who abducted young women and recorded long torture sessions before dispatching them? Or Christopher Wilder, Robert Joseph Long, Carlton Gary, Gerald Stano or any of the other Americans who account for thousands upon thousands of slayings? These killers simply fade into the American crowd.

Even in other modern nations where repression lingers, serial killers remain comparatively rare. Latin America fostered history's most prolific murderer, Pedro Alonzo Lopez, who killed more than 300 people in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru during the Seventies and Eighties. But he was an aberration. Taken together, other countries come nowhere near to producing the number of killers found in the U.S.

One explanation for this disparity again turns on American values. Victorian England and modern Latin America may both be sexually repressive, but they do not operate under the uniquely American sexual double standard.

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Of course, the ultimate cause of serial homicide cannot be attributed solely to any one factor, including conflicting American sexual mores. Even sexual libertines know that civilized society depends on a modicum of repression just to keep the social contract intact.

But other reasons for the national bloodbath suggest themselves readily enough. And here the serial-killer phenomenon turns the criminal spotlight from the black ghetto to white suburbia. The American killers' breeding ground is a lonely landscape of malls, single-family houses and apartment dwellers who maintain an almost paranoid insistence on privacy. American suburbia has evolved into a place through which people ride in the isolation of their cars and return to sit, docile, in front of television sets. Day to day, we encounter strangers more often than neighbors. The communal life of the European extended family, or a Latin American town, ensures that abusive parents or troubled children will be noticed. But in America, children can be subjected to the worst physical and psychological abuse from disturbed parents--who are themselves products of repression and frustration--and remain hidden until it is far too late. By the time one of these tortured individuals emerges into the world, he or she is an explosion waiting to be triggered.

American mainstream society, which demands tremendous social conformity, allows killers a ready camouflage. European men sit around tables discussing their private angst and anomie; their American counterparts keep subversive thoughts to themselves and stick to the weather and the sports page. In a real sense, Americans teach their killers to wear a mask of normalcy. And as BSU agents will tell you, a serial killer's continuing success largely depends on an ability to look like an average Joe. Repressed personalities who spout party lines fit right in.

Meanwhile, serial killers revel in the power they exercise not only over victims but also over authority figures such as the police. Denis Woychuk, a New York attorney who specializes in representing the mentally ill, told me this is a game killers have learned from popular culture. He notes that a number of serial killers he had studied adopted Olivet North haircuts after North's public appearances: "They knew North was in the military, and that was cool," Woychuk said. "They knew he had broken the law, and that was cool. And they knew he had gotten away with it, and that was the coolest. By taunting the police, they show that they're smarter than everybody else. And North was getting the babes, the money and the glory."

Perhaps most important among social factors may be America's long-standing celebration of lawless violence. Witness television censorship standards. A ten-year-old can watch someone being shot through the head almost any hour of the day, but he can't see a naked woman or man, other than on pay TV. For our official norm of entertainment, we have chosen brute force over good sex.

In such a culture, who should be surprised to find sexually repressed conformists acting out pent-up violent fantasies? Small wonder, too, that most killers come from poor backgrounds, adding a financial sense of worthlessness to their anger. In all respects, they know they have failed to live up to the wealthy, macho American ideal.

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Unanswered questions, of course, haunt anyone who tries to understand the serial-killer phenomenon. Are nonwhite cultures less conformist and less sexually repressed, or are blacks and Hispanics more readily suspected and nabbed after their first crime? Can potential killers be identified and helped with early intervention? Is some genetic predisposition at work, waiting to be triggered by a confluence of social forces?

Psychiatrists have started looking for clues to the serial-killer personality, in the physical configuration of the brain itself. Epileptic seizures, hormonal imbalances, head injuries and even diet may contribute. But with the shocking disproportion of serial killings in the U.S., it takes an act of will to deny the enormous role that culture plays in turning the American dream into a nightmare.

Science must advance another few great leaps before we can repair a malformed brain. But our sexual and social mores--hangovers from the Victorian age--can be more readily recast.

Until the next sexual revolution, then, Roy Hazelwood and his BSU colleagues will keep tracking killers from their underground lab, and middle America will surely keep churning out demonic souvenirs for their files.

Most Sadists Who Kill Repeatedly Were Victims of Childhood Abuse

"'Some of the worst killers are pillars of the community. One was a churchman, another was an ex-cop."'