Evil Pleasure and Evil Delight

Although not all serial killers are sex murderers, a significantly great proportion are. The very act of cutting, dismembering, binding, torturing, and/or killing is often more important to the sex murderer than the actual sex act. This somewhat differentiates a sexual murderer from a “rapist-killer” who as an afterthought murders his victim to prevent her from reporting him to the police. The psychological dynamic is entirely different, and the sexual killer is more predisposed to repeat his crimes in a serial pattern. Until the mid-eighteenth century, sex crime of any kind was virtually unknown, or at least largely unreported. One reason for this is the proposition that sex crime is a “leisure activity” requiring available time to develop and dwell on sexual fantasies and the freedom to act upon them. Prior to the industrial age the majority of people were just too busy to be fantasizing about sex. Most were desperately trying to feed themselves and survive various life-threatening dangers in the form of invading armies, bandits, revolts, and plagues. In the ancient world, the commission of serial murder was the exclusive prerogative of Roman Caesars, emperors, and barbarian nomadic chieftains who exercised absolute power over their subjects. In a sense, that kind of ancient imperial power over a human life is what a serial killer seeks today. It is difficult, however, to construct a modern criminal dynamic for the killings perpetrated by ancient despots such as Nero and Caligula. Betting was big and the carnage was sexually charged, with prostitutes plying their trade beneath the coliseum arches. But unlike sporting events today, the gladiatorial games allowed for audience participation in the form of spectator voting with the classic thumbs up/down gesture as to whether a defeated gladiator would live or die. Thus in a some senses, the games were a form of mass participatory serial murder. At noon, however, there was a special spectacle that the crowds apparently enjoyed the most—combat between prisoners condemned to death, wearing no armor and often only one of the pair armed with a dagger. There were never any survivors—the victor was disarmed and set upon by the next armed prisoner. It is said that the crowds favored this spectacle, because unlike with the gladiators, whose faces were often hidden by a helmet, the crowds could see the faces of the dying prisoners. The Roman writer Seneca observed, “In the morning they throw men to the lion and bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators.” The Romans were highly aware of the different degrees of violence and had unique terms for them. Excessive violence with a purpose, such as crucifixion or mass public executions in arenas was classified as crudelitas, and was considered to be rational and have an objective, such as to prevent rebellion or to punish criminals. But irrational violence without profit (compendium), killing for its own sake, was called feritas. This violence was attributed to unreasonable ira (rage), and Seneca in his writings linked unlimited power to unlimited luxury, which he argued was the cause of excessive ira. The spectators in Rome were pathologically engaged with the killing taking place and displayed addictive obsessions with the death. They derived a deep pleasure from the killing and a sense of power in their ability to choose life or death for the victims. There were excessively zealous inquisitors of the Catholic Church with a suspiciously high propensity for submitting women suspected of witchcraft to torture and death, but again theological imperatives of those times cloud the question of personal pathology. In later history, prior to the industrial age, Europe’s two most notorious individual sexual serial killers were aristocrats with plenty of leisure time on their hands: Marshal Gilles de Rais in fifteenth-century France and Countess Elizabeth Báthory in seventeenth-century Hungary.

Gilles de Rais was born in 1404 into an aristocratic family near Nantes and came to be one of the richest men in France. He was the personal bodyguard and close companion of Jeanne d’Arc, at whose side he fought bravely, and it was whispered that he was her secret lover. When Jeanne d’Arc was wounded by a crossbow quarrel at the siege of Paris in September 1429, it was Gilles de Rais who valiantly carried her out of the range of further projectiles. For his valor, Gilles de Rais was appointed Marshal of France by the French king Charles VII and bestowed with a coat of arms of gold lilies on a blue field.

It was precisely in this period that peasant children, mostly boys, began vanishing in the regions around Gilles de Rais’s castles. There was no mystery as to where the children were going. His servants had taken in many as pages to Gilles’s household. In the fifteenth century for a peasant boy there were only two means of escaping crushing poverty—joining the Church as a cleric or monk or going into the service of a local lord. Many parents were happy that their son caught the eye of Gilles’s henchmen. They were overjoyed to accept the offer of giving up their child as a page. The depositions given at Gilles de Rais’s trial eight years later describe a situation where beggar boys flocked to the gates of Gilles’s castle hoping to be taken in. The most attractive would be chosen and then never seen again. There was the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who had been taken into the castle to be made a page and who returned to visit his parents carrying a loaf of bread from the castle’s bakery. He glowingly described his treatment in the service of the count but after he returned to the castle he was never heard from again. When parents inquired of their missing children, they were told that they had been assigned to more distant castles belonging to Gilles or that they had happily entered the service of faraway lords who on their visits to Gilles took a liking to the lads. At one point parents were told that the English had demanded twenty-four male children as ransom for a captured French lord. It was also testified that :

“The accused exercised his lust once or twice on the children, then he killed them sometimes with his own hand or had them killed . . . sometimes they were decapitated and dismembered; sometimes he cut their throats leaving the head attached to the body; sometimes he broke their necks with a club; sometimes he cut their throats or some other parts of their neck, so that their blood flowed . . . Often he loved to gaze at the severed heads and showed them to the witness and to Etienne Corrillaut, asking them which of the heads was the most beautiful, the head severed just then or the one cut off the previous day. And he often kissed the head that pleased him the most, and took delight in it. The witness heard Gilles say that he took more pleasure in the murder of the children, and in seeing their heads and their members removed, and watching them languish, and seeing their blood flow than in knowing them carnally . . . while they were dying, he committed with them the vice of sodomy.”

In 1577 Nuremberg, German hangman Hans Schmidt wrote in his autobiography that he put Nicklaus Stüller to death because “First he shot a horse-soldier; secondly he cut open a pregnant woman alive in which was a dead child; thirdly he again cut open a pregnant woman in whom was a female child; fourthly he once more cut open a pregnant woman in whom were two male children.”

The earliest recorded episode of a fetish-driven serial sex crime crops up in April 1790 in London. A “Monster” is reported by contemporary description, having committed a series of “nameless crimes, the possibility of whose existence no legislator has ever dreamed of.” The Monster stalked well-dressed women in the streets, abused them with indecent language, and then slashed at their clothing. In some cases, he wore some kind of knife apparatus on his knees, allowing him to approach women in a crowd and slash at their clothing discreetly from below. London was as shocked and alarmed by these extraordinary and inexplicable attacks as they would be by Jack the Ripper a hundred years later. Rewards were offered for the capture of the Monster and descriptions of his activities were posted everywhere, but they varied. The attacks appeared to escalate when some women on the street were approached by a man holding a small bouquet of artificial flowers who would ask them to smell it. Those who bent over to do so would be slashed on the face with something sharp hidden in the bouquet. In August 1871, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, Fregeni, was found by her husband in a field when she failed to return home. She had been strangled and her intestines were hanging out through a deep wound in her abdomen. The next day, nineteen-year-old Maria Previtali reported that her cousin, twenty-two-year-old Vincenzo Verzeni, had dragged her out into a field of grain and attempted to strangle her. When he stood up to see if anyone was coming, she managed to talk her cousin into letting her go. Verzeni was arrested and he confessed:

“(…) I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure. It was even a pleasure only to smell female clothing. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating. I took great delight in drinking Motta’s blood. It also gave me the greatest pleasure to pull the hairpins out of the hair of my victims. I took the clothing and intestines, because of the pleasure it gave me to smell and touch them (…)”

The motives behind the extraordinary and brutal mutilation of female victims with edged-weapons remain a mystery even today. It is an act that seems to be largely perpetrated by angry heterosexual males on females or homosexual males on males—in other words, an act directed by males onto the object of their sexual desire. The formation of a serial killer is rooted to gender identification involving a boy’s ability to successfully negotiate his masculine autonomy from his mother—a challenge not faced by females. When a boy cannot achieve this autonomy or when there is no solid foundation for him from which to negotiate this autonomy, a sense of rage develops in the child, and he subsequently carries the anger into adolescence and adulthood. A serial killer’s sexual assault on a victim can take one, or both, of two forms of expression. First, there are the primary mechanisms: intercourse and oral copulation. The killer does whatever is physically necessary to ejaculate during his attack. Frequently, however, no evidence of ejaculate is visible at a crime scene. It is here that the killer engages in secondary sexual mechanisms. These are a substitution for the primary act, a type of sexually delayed gratification. The actions that the killer performs will later lead to his climax when he is in a safe place. It is not a question of safety, however, but one of control. Having committed his act, and taken his souvenirs from the victim, the killer escapes to later masturbate until his sexual energy is drained. Some killers ejaculate uncontrollably without touching their genitals as they stab or hack at their victims. It should be noted that to this day, no clear link between the cause of sexual crime and pornography has been established. Some even suggest that pornography acts as a release from sexual tensions that might otherwise lead to criminal acts. What is evident, however, is that those already predisposed to committing sexual crimes are also heavy consumers of pornography. In the FBI study of sexual killers, the highest common denominator of various childhood and adolescent factors was their consumption of pornography—81 percent.

Acknowledgements:

The Police Department;

https://www.politie.nl/mijnbuurt/politiebureaus/05/burgwallen.html and a Chief Inspector – Mr. Erik Akerboom     ©

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