The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence Read Free

girl in Vauxhall Gardens, and having intercourse with the child, standing in front of a mirror, ‘holding her like a baby, her hands round my neck, she whining that I was hurting her . . .’ He adds: ‘I longed to hurt her, to make her cry with the pain my tool caused her, I would have made her bleed if I could.’ The same attitude emerges again and again in his descriptions of intercourse: ‘In the next instant . . .I was up the howling little bitch.’ ‘Her cry of pain gave me pleasure, and fetched me.’
    My Secret Life affords an important insight into the mind of the Marquis de Sade.The normal reader finds it difficult to understand how sexual gratification can be associated with pain and violence: with the gouging out of eyes or the mutilation of genitals.‘Walter’ was no sadist, yet his craving for women was basically a desire to violate them.Sade had always enjoyed flogging and being flogged.Incarcerated in a damp cell, with only his imagination to keep him company, the daydreams of flogging and violation turned into daydreams of murder, torture and mutilation.The human imagination has this curious power to amplify our desires.Yet it is important to note that, even when released from prison, de Sade made no attempt to put these fantasies into practice.He had already exhausted them by writing them down.In the same way, ‘Walter’s’ sadism never developed beyond a desire to cause pain in the act of penetration, because he had an endless supply of women with whom he could act out his fantasies.The essence of sadism lies in frustration.As William Blake put it: ‘He who desires but acts not breeds a pestilence.’
    Most of ‘Walter’s’ early encounters with teenage whores took place in the 1840s, when the streets were full of starving women and children for whom five shillings meant the difference between life and death.By the 1880s all this had begun to change.The Public Health Act and the Artisans’ Dwellings Act of 1875 had made an attempt to grapple with disease and poverty.When H.G.Wells came to London as a student in 1884, his cousin Isobel – whom he later married – worked as a retoucher of photographs in Regent Street, and many of his fellow students were women.The typewriter had been invented in the 1860s, and businessmen soon discovered that women made better typists than men.Drapers’ shops were now full of women counter assistants.All of which meant that – although there were still plenty of prostitutes on the streets – there was now a whole new class of ‘unavailable’ women to excite the concupiscence of men like ‘Walter’.The result was that, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, rape of adult women became far more common, and sex crime – in our modern sense of the word – made its appearance.In 1867, a clerk named Frederick Baker lured a little girl named Fanny Adams away from her companions in Alton, Hampshire, and literally tore her to pieces.In 1871, a French butcher named Eusebius Pieydagnelle killed six young women with a knife, experiencing orgasm as he stabbed them.(He has a claim to be the first serial killer.) In Italy in the same year, Vincent Verzeni was charged with a number of sex crimes including two murders – he experienced orgasm in the act of strangulation.In Boston, USA, in 1873, a bell-ringer named Thomas Piper murdered and raped three women, then lured a five-year-old girl into the belfry and battered her to death with a cricket bat; he was interrupted before the assault could be completed, and hanged in 1876.In 1874, a fourteen-year-old sadist named Jesse Pomeroy was charged with the sex murders of a boy and a girl in Boston and sentenced to life imprisonment.In 1880, twenty-year-old Louis Menesclou lured a five-year-old girl into his room in Paris and killed her, keeping the body under his mattress overnight; when he tried to burn her entrails he was betrayed by the black smoke.He wrote in his notebook: ‘I saw her, I took