PARAPHILIA: DEVIANCY AND THE SERIAL KILLER

Article BY Nichols Peacock - Art by Chuck Hodi

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Primary serial killers herein:

• Albert Fish
• Ted Bundy
• Ed Gein

In this disquisition about paraphilias the incidence of them in serial killers will be considered as, unsurprisingly, given that most serial murders are sexually motivated, paraphilias are prevalent. Of course they occur in law abiding members of society, but we don’t hear about that, we hear about the lurid ways of the rampant monsters, are intrigued by their strange sexual behaviour, thinking it integral to their desire to strike down innocents.

Paraphilia: para = beside; philia = friendship/love, both roots being Greek. The term was coined in the 1920s by Wilhelm Stekel, an Austrian psychologist who became one of Freud’s earliest acolytes; later, John William Money, a psychologist and “sexologist”, elaborated it as "a sexuoerotic embellishment of, or alternative to the official, ideological norm", a definition that may seem abstruse to many. If one were to narrow it down, paraphilia could simply be described as “abnormal sexual practices” with a connotation of untowardness, perversion, even taboo, but that is a very difficult concept to crystallise given the protean nature of sexual mores. The term and concept was embraced by the professions of medicine, psychology and behavioural science and has thus become hugely elaborated on.

One of the earliest widely recognised proponents of the study of paraphilias was the Austrian-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (14th August 1840 – 22nd December 1902) whose seminal work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) employed the term "cerebral neuroses" and he listed them thus:

• paradoxia — sexual desire at the wrong time of life
• anesthesia — insufficient sexual desire
• hyperesthesia — excessive sexual desire
• paraesthesia — aberrant sexual desire (e.g., homosexuality, sexual fetishism, sadism, masochism, and pedophilia)

A fundamental tenet of this was that sex for reasons distinct from procreation was sexual perversion, something quite alien to our sensibilities. It shouldn’t therefore be surprising to us that sexual adventurousness before our current enlightenment was, in some realms, perilous, deemed madness and criminality, and has perhaps been considered akin to witchcraft in certain cultures at some point in history. Different cultures to this day burn witches and execute homosexuals, whose legal protection in Britain is just over half a century old. It requires little imagination to conceive that in the Dark Ages deviants then – but not now – were subjected to hideous persecution. But that notion needs to be qualified because it is one that, certainly applying to the masses, did not necessarily cover those of nobility, whose aberrant and sometimes murderous proclivities were not subject to the laws they ordained; it is fair to say that those who were critical of those in power risked their lives way back then and in some parts of the world still do. The bottom rungs of society had always paid dearly for sins, be they real or fictitious, while the tyrants debauched. Two examples of noble monsters we can consider as in this context are, firstly: the Hungarian noble Elizabeth Bathory (The Blood Countess 1560-1614), who it is purported killed many young women and girls, and engaged in torture, cannibalism, mutilation and various forms of sexual abuse, and of course blood bathing, but was never executed, merely sent to her bedroom. Secondly: Giles de Rais (1404-1440) who was an occultist Breton knight who sodomized and murdered many children and was executed, after eight years of his widely known or suspected crimes. Their heinous activities were kept secret by their coteries as much as possible, though inevitably became known in the respective communities they preyed on, when too many people had disappeared and the trail led their way, and when their supporters could no longer deflect suspicion, or perhaps the bloody madness became such that there had to be confrontation despite the challenges of overthrowing tyrannical power structures, as public anger was brought to the boil. It is perhaps when madness fully takes hold that the way is paved for change.

The injustices and discrepancies of class have always been; what we don’t know about the duplicitousness of those overseers of society in the face of their ostensible respectability we can only imagine. A great example of this amnesty for deviancy is the “Arch Duke” of perversity the Marquis de Sade (2nd June 1740 – 2nd December 1814), although, it must be stated that he favoured the promulgation of his sordid ways. His behaviour and writings formed the basis of what we now call sadism, though he cannot be credited with inventing such behaviour, just accounting for it; for sadism simply means the love of cruelty - especially for sexual gratification – and that must be as old as the hills. It was conflated with another eponym (the source of which we will address later) to form sadomasochism, a term familiar to many in our time who may well be ignorant of the origins and practices.

The Marquis de Sade was born into high Provençale nobility, which was considered a particularly arrogant creed in France. His childhood was unhappy, the mother abandoning the family when he was about five; his father, a diplomat, was a disgrace because he was a bisexual. Given the ructions in the family it is unsurprising that he was an unruly child, so much so that his behaviour resulted in his being sent to live with his uncle, a high ranking abbe’, and he resided here for the next five years in a forbidding castle-like chateau with a dungeon, and here he was apprised of the vices of men of the cloth. The obscene liberties of his uncle were of course in contravention of his position of propriety, of piousness, temperance and chastity: he is reported to have had a mistress and that he may have extended his sexual attentions to her daughter. Exposure to this as a child who had presumably been inculcated in the inherent moral authority of the church, it can be fairly posited, had the effect on him of learning that the church was of a glaringly dubious nature, the hypocrisies laid bare; as a corollary of that, authority itself would be open to question, hence the misanthropy was spawned in the child.

Aged fourteen he went to a Jesuit boarding school where it should be assumed that he would have been subjected to severe flagellation, often before others it is said; aged seventeen he went into military service and the putatively harsh barracks lifestyle. So it seems he was equipped by this stage in the primordial philosophy he would espouse in his works: he had learnt of the corruption, the cruelty of fellow men, of their vices, and come to reject the righteous credo of those in power.

Despite his innately elevated status, he wasn’t entirely immune from prosecution, being imprisoned for blasphemy, and despite his ability to intimidate and pay off prostitutes he had abused egregiously - they having little credibility in respect of a noble - he was imprisoned for his crimes upon them also. By his later years, his vices having consumed his soul, he was incarcerated within an asylum irrespective of the location, and it could be said – perhaps glibly - that the mad live in the asylums of their minds be they confined or free to roam. As a noble, in his cells, he could very comfortably furnish where he began to write his obscene works, the most notable being Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom and, 120 Days of Sodom – his abominable opus.

That, his most admired and reviled work was written in thirty seven days in 1785 while he was imprisoned in the Bastille. The premise is that four wealthy middle aged libertines of high status journey to a medieval castle with a caravan comprising a harem of 46, including many young victims-to-be (the young children of the libertines are herein); there are cooks, and studs or, “cockmongers” (selected for their penis size); there are four female brothel keepers whose anecdotes of their licentious careers are critical to the tale; there are four old women selected for their ugliness. Quite simply, the libertines engage in all manner of wanton sexual activities and abuses many of which are very peculiar and paraphilic – that is the core of this story; the rampant priapic perverts are also captivated by the accounts of the brothel keepers who reel off spurious incidents of the most obscure and explicit variety and are inspired to act out improvised vices. Eventually, at the end of their four month ordeal, many of the victims are slaughtered – but, in keeping with the sheer abject perversity and cynicism of the author, one of the abused is recruited and becomes a libertine, as plausible as that seems!

At the beginning of 120 Days of Sodom, as the deviant orgy runs amok, untrammelled and wanton, there is intermittently interwoven strange philosophical treatises angled about the significance and meaning of the repulsive deeds, the morality juxtaposed with natural laws as they apply to mankind, all in the convocation completely insensate and unrepentant, which makes for a most extraordinary comparison to modern pornography which limits discourse to the bare minimum and abjures moral relativity. The “impure tale” then departs somewhat from prose and becomes more concerned with simply detailing all the vile and arcane sexual scenarios the author can conjure in what seems an utterly distempered mind, and it becomes a catalogue of perverted madness, ever more desperately depraved such that it seems to anyone who has managed to fully read it that de Sade is beginning to unravel. Many have never got past the first few pages, which is fully understandable, as it is clear from very early on that a very sick mind is at work here, and it seems almost that the author seeks to sicken those of a sensitive disposition so that they eschew it, while inviting others to accede to his corrupt philosophy. It is as if this author wants to bring mankind down to a stricken level, a lascivious pandemonium such that Hieronymus Bosch might depict, and here is his manifesto for it.

Though de Sade is considered of some literary importance, I see in him great immaturity embedded with extreme arrogance, someone hugely emboldened in his mordacious projects by his extraordinary status and it should be clear that it was privilege that allowed him to behave this way, for the “eccentric” have this latitude whereas the lower ranking “mad” get silenced early on! This anarchic pervert’s problems with the world began early and metastasised until he became jaundiced to the point of no return. In this way he is similar to many of the serial killers.

Despite the utter absurdity and obscenity of de Sade, he does have his acolytes, some academic patrons: there are the translators of his work; there are the Sadian scholars/authorities – one notable commentator on de Sade was Simone de Beauvoir, a French existentialist philosopher who wrote an essay titled Must We Burn de Sade - this author did by the way - which defended 120 Days of Sodom as a valuable insight into the darkest recesses of human endeavour. That is true, but there is a sheer banality to madness and this perverted madness, twinned with erudition, deserves considerable suspicion in respect of its ostensible merits.

As far as de Sade features as a figure in the annals of paraphilia, he is a quite an astonishing authority; the endorsement of 120 Days of Sodom came foremost from Dr Iwan Bloch a Berlin Psychiatrist, who in 1904 was the first publisher of it. He proposed it as a manual of sexual deviancies - from the horse’s mouth – and there is certainly no better source than this consummate energumen. This book he suggested was of "scientific importance...to doctors, jurists, and anthropologists."

Having considered one eponym of the portmanteau “sadomasochism”, we must consider the twin, the primogenitor of masochism, though we will skirt over it because the life and writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (27th January 1836 – 9th March 1895) are not really that interesting, certainly not when compared to de Sade, whose distorted thoughts have far greater resonance in the context of the serial killers we will alight on when the time comes.

Sacher-Masoch was an Austrian writer and thinker, noted for the part-completed collection of short stories, The Legacy of Cain, of which Venus in Furs (think Lou Reed), a novella, is the best known effort. He is just so far removed from de Sade: de Sade was concerned with the denigration of humanity, of degradation, cruelty and abuse, whereas Sacher-Masoch was purportedly a utopian, a humanist engaged in acts of philanthropy. Here was a man who concerned himself with the emancipation of women, who tried to protect of the rights of Jews while anti-Semitism was festering away, heading to the grim pogrom Hitler ushered in under his tutelage.

The importance of Sacher-Masoch it seems stems largely from that term “sadomasochism”, otherwise he is of relatively little renown in medical diagnostics. It was Kraft-Ebbing who invented the term that advertised him. Sacher-Masoch did contract his lover Fanny Pistor into a relationship which involved her treating him like a slave, though it seems highly unlikely that this involved gratuitous abuse, more likely it was the role-play he sought – otherwise we would have heard much more about it. The only thing the two really seem to have in common is their residence in asylums, although it is not clear whether Sacher-Masoch was confined as was de Sade.

To distinguish Sadism and Masochism we should really consider them as antagonistic: whereas Sadism involves the subjecting of another to cruelty – whether to oneself is not known here - Masochism certainly involves the subjection of oneself to cruelty or abuse; and so one might imagine the clichéd sadomasochistic relationship involving one on a leash and on all fours, while the other leads and the dominance of the sadist over the masochist is made abundantly clear. In that sense there is symmetry of purpose. But we must also consider that they are symbiotic, yet it may well be symbiotic in an inimical way, if that makes sense, which to normative people it doesn’t.

It would be remiss to omit the maunderings of Freud on sadomasochism, Freud who did like to promote his views on most things topical in psychology. It should be no surprise that he considered this disorder to stem from aberrant sexual development in childhood. The only other noteworthy analysis from him for the purposes herein are his observations that many sadomasochists are “switchable”, hence they can adopt the sadistic or masochistic role; other than that, Freud stated that there was “primary” and “secondary” masochism; that “primary” masochism involves a need for a complete sense of rejection from the counterpart, involving humiliation through infidelity, be it feigned or real; in “secondary”, the rejection is less abject, the relationship more casual. Being neither a sadomasochist nor a psychologist, I cannot say I appreciate the nuances of this distinction. It does seem rather vague though!

There should be some consideration of how the understanding of paraphilia has evolved up to now before the nature of serial killers is considered in respect of their aberrant tendencies.

Just as superstitions (e.g. witchcraft) have been diminished through the progress of understanding and compassion has grown through the ages, so have the prejudices surrounding unorthodox sexual practices. Whether this is due to the advancement of study or it is the other way around is unknowable. The notable exception is that the age of consent has risen in most countries and child pornography has become widely outlawed, although, it wasn’t necessarily considered abnormal or illegal to engage in activities abominated now due to age - only recently have the rights of children to be protected from the sexual predations of adults been enshrined.

In 1981, the American Journal of Psychiatry described paraphilia as "recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors generally involving:

• Non-human objects
• The suffering or humiliation of oneself or one's partner
• Children
• Non-consenting persons

This would certainly cover what de Sade espoused but not all of it by any stretch.

Now it is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a psychiatric reference of diagnoses that is the primary source of classification of paraphilias, of which there are many.
The definition of paraphilia here has gone through many revisions: prior to DSM, paraphilia was considered as "psychopathic personality with pathologic sexuality"; then DSM I (1952) stipulated ‘Sexual Deviation’ as, a “personality disorder of sociopathic subtype”; now we have the DSM 5 draft (due May 2013) in which, paraphilias are, ipso facto, non-psychiatric conditions: the critical distinction here is the impairment of an individual’s state of wellbeing in relation to engagement in paraphilias. It should therefore be surmised that, despite the objective indecency or absurdity of one’s behaviour, as long as it is consensual and discreet, it is of no interest to medicine, or academia, as a pathological notion.

With the increase in number of specified paraphilias in the DSM, with the revisions, came the relaxation of the criteria, homosexuality – once at the top of the list in DSM I - removed by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM in 1973. Homosexuality has only been made legal nationwide in America since 2003, other countries retain the death penalty, such as Iran, incarceration is rife in many Muslim/third world nations.

To list all of the recognised paraphilias here is unhelpful because they encompass almost any imaginable abnormal sexual practice, and it is highly likely that if one can imagine a new method of sexual gratification variant to those recognised, it could be added to the list. To give some idea of the scope, abasiophilia involves sex with people with impaired mobility while zoosadism involves inflicting pain on or, seeing animals in pain – there are dozens in between those letters and the list surely grows. The DSM manual on paraphilias it can be said, by some stretch of the imagination, is the antithesis of the Kama Sutra.
The significance of the cultural shift towards tolerance of paraphilias can be clearly evinced by the existence of certain clubs and venues where sadomasochism (S&M) is engaged in with abandon, not only that, but other derivatives of S&M such as BDSM, the acronym combines bondage and discipline (B&D or B/D), dominance and submission (D&S or D/s), and sadism and masochism . These are usually referred to as fetish clubs or bars and they have been around since the early eighties. These practises are still considered bizarre at the least and even iniquitous in western society and so there is a certain sense of secrecy surrounding the attendance and membership of the events. There is now a considerable underground scene and industry that produces the extraordinary clothing and accessories/implements. One of the most prominent fetish institutions, if not the most, is Torture Garden, which is based in London in different venues and also goes on tour far and wide and draws people from around the globe. Though I have not been, I have second hand insight into the nightly revelry; I am told that it is like a debauched Venetian carnival of almost nightmarish lurid fantasy; it is not the more extreme imaginings of de Sade, actually quite vanilla as far as sadomasochism is concerned, all of which is consensual (yes there are codes of conduct), not an orgy as such, more a meeting ground for people who are interested in ad lib sex and this is fairly clear given that nudity is common. It is said that the night lurches more and more into the surreal and that one feels they are in another world where social mores are extinct and inhibitions are abandoned. There seems no limit to the extraordinariness, absurdness, to the outfits, and it should be understood that there are often features of them which are employed for the purposes of the theme. There are pieces of equipment about the place, mainly for the tying and whipping of the willing and I am told that there is a transparent coffin in which one can climb and await the groping hands of the attendees and venture the risk, or more likely the hope, that the most intimate regions will be explored by strangers. By the end of the great debauch, the place smells of PVC and sex. Almost all the participants return home to sleep off their excesses and marvel at the experience, somewhat the better for it when they return to their myriad jobs, many in all manner of unlikely sectors: teachers, lawyers, doctors, accountants etc, all with their secrets their colleagues wouldn’t dream of. There are others who go to after parties and reprise the night and pile debauchery upon debauchery.

Moving on to accounts of serial killers, it is time to address a serious issue with the substance of what you will read here and elsewhere, something no doubt considered by many who read of them, that is, the veracity of “facts” available. I cannot possibly comment on the truth within the bible except to say, that, as an atheist, much of it sounds apocryphal – though there are some who take it literally. This suspicion of the truth must be axiomatic for all those who were not witness, must be applicable to all the old tales, the more so the older they are. It cannot possibly be cynical to imagine that histories are either wholly fabricated or at least grossly adulterated as they are passed down – that said, we don’t have conclusive proof either way. With the accounts of serial killers the problem of lack of fidelity is that of the origin of the information and how it has become made available, but also, there is the consideration that serial killers are almost invariably untrustworthy, having had to confabulate egregiously throughout their murderous careers. I am certainly troubled by the notion that the lurid family history of a serial killer from 160 years ago, for example, is not only different depending on the resource, but can, in most cases, not possibly be substantiated. Who can prove that the father of H.H. Holmes was a violent alcoholic! Is there a record of this? If so I would like to see it and think this information more than speculation from who-knows-what source.

Despite the misgivings outlined above, it is unhelpful to question every historical detail as being potentially false even if only to imply that it might be slightly so, otherwise nothing can be assumed, and nothing can be advanced. On the one hand 600 year old accounts of murderous knights are justifiably seriously open to question, especially when there were purportedly queries about the facts at the time. On the other hand, of those more recent serial killers, it simply has to be assumed that there must be at least some truth to the records and what is more, even if one queries particulars, it must be considered that those of a depraved nature are highly likely to have been subjected to abuses like those speculated and engaged in likewise behaviour. No one is going to dispute that serial killers do, on the whole, have very disturbed upbringings.

Three Serial Killers

There is no person whose putatively practiced deviancy quite captures the imagination as Albert (Hamilton) Fish (May 19th, 1870 – January 16th, 1936), though that is not to say he is the worst, but perhaps the best documented madman-murder-pervert of unfathomable depravity consummated. Of the details of his origins I have nothing to add to what is well known from available sources: born Hamilton Fish in Washington D.C., to an elderly father (75) and a much younger mother (32), ostensibly a respectable family, but mental illness within was reported as rife, including fanatical religiosity within an uncle. Like de Sade, he spent time as a child in a brutal institution, an orphanage, where sexual abuse was almost certain to have occurred - he said as much: “I saw so many boys whipped, it took root in my head”, "I was there till I was nearly nine, and that's where I got started wrong. We were unmercifully whipped. I saw boys doing many things they should not have done." It is said that he learnt to enjoy it and was sexually aroused by the sadistic treatment, becoming erect during beatings before others, for which he was ridiculed. This was almost certainly his inculcation into a world of pain and sex, the acorn that grew into the distorted oak. It is recorded that after his release he kept company with a telegraph boy with whom he engaged in many sordid adventures involving bodily waste and fluids – urophilia, coprophilia and who knows what else? It would be reasonable to assume that by his late teens or early twenties he would have gained the confidence to advance his career in leaps and bounds and had the wherewithal to engage in debaucheries in a much more successful manner, seeking consensual partners and predating children, those of low social class being the least missed and thus the easiest to procure. Given the far higher poverty then, the lack of social services and the infancy of the Missing Persons bureau, abductions should have been far easier in those overcrowded slums of the cities such as New York, Chicago and Washington thus child murderers had freer rein and it should be assumed that there were others than Fish at work. Whether there were more child murdering monsters then, given the opportunities, is hard to say as so many missing people are never found, their demise never known – whether crime in general was higher then, given the poverty, is highly questionable.

He is recorded to have frequented gymnasiums for underprivileged children and been shooed from them when his indecencies were noticed and his perverted intentions became clear.

His early adult career as a sexual predator and murder of children and perhaps adults is rather sketchy. Details point to a man whose derangement of pleasure had escalated in ways commensurate with the culmination of his final gruesome deeds. A male prostitute perhaps, in New York, possibly elsewhere? It is said he travelled to Europe to visit brothels where he engaged in all manner of activities, no doubt in keeping with, and more explorative of, those he discovered with his childhood confederate. If so, it is remotely possible that he came to know about the ways of the Marquis de Sade, although it is just as easy to assume that he was an unwitting follower and practitioner of his philosophy, perhaps someone de Sade would have revered or maybe even reviled.

Albert Fish was soon to become the epitome of paraphilia; though he was married, worked as a painter and decorator and maintained an outwardly normal family life fathering six children - which he claimed were not abused. He attested to have engaged in numerous kidnappings, rapes and murders of children – “I have had a child in every state” he stated, though the timeframe is unknown. It would be prudent to suggest that this had begun in his twenties, although, his nature intimates boastful confabulation and one cannot proffer any facts about his crimes other than those the police confirmed.

It seems from what is recorded that it was towards, or in his middle age, that his mind unravelled and gave way to the most criminal and depraved tendencies he alluded to. His behaviour had led to his incarceration for petty crimes such as vagrancy and larceny: he was jailed for short periods thus, for acts pertaining to molestation and the writing of obscene letters, replying to adverts from lovelorn women in which he proposed they engage in sadomasochistic orgies with children (quite likely their own), and if there is a paraphilia for this it is probably an equivalent of telephone scatalogia. He was psychiatrically evaluated and found to be disturbed but sane, which seems remiss given his downfall, though I can imagine that people were less inclined to believe obscenity of his species, were more inclined to abnegate such ungodliness and consider some abstraction or dementia the root. It is towards the end of his life that he is considered as manifesting as the monster we associate with his picture in custody, that of a feeble looking old man whose ghoulishness is attributed and magnified with the contemplation of his crimes.

That aged Fish had been arrested subsequent to a long manhunt after the disappearance of Grace Budd. He had called by the Budd’s house on 25 May 1928, under the name of Frank Howard in response to an advert placed by her older brother Edward Budd who sought work, and here he took a shine to the young girl, discounting the eighteen year old brother who it is assumed he wanted to abduct, but probably considered an unassailable prey, so instead he alighted on Grace. On a separate visit, maintaining the fictitious offer of work for Edward, he took the girl, with parental consent, to a non-existent party he said was being thrown by a relative. Thence he took her to a property in Westchester he had planned for his diabolical crime and here he killed and butchered her and took away the meat.

It was the well-known letter he wrote six years later to Mrs Budd in which he detailed the crime which resulted in his capture, a gesture of such unbelievable sadistic revelry that many unfamiliar with it would struggle to believe its authenticity; that letter details everything of the fate of the girl including the consumption of her in a near recipe of cannibalism.

Before his trial he was psychiatrically evaluated. At his trial psychiatrists testified that Albert Fish’s sexual interests included anilingus, cannibalism, coprophagia, cunnilingus, exhibitionism, fellatio, flagellation, infibulation, masochism, pedophilia and sadism. But this didn’t account for his proclivities and this in part is due to the lack of terms to describe what he engaged in and possibly the sheer disbelief of those professionals who listened to him describe them. Of those less medically discreet things he did it is claimed that he would insert a rose into his urethra and admire himself in the mirror. It is also understood that he would eat raw meat on full moon nights and feed it to his children. It is also fairly well attested that he would recruit children – including his own - to paddle his buttocks and that he also flogged himself for hours on end. His 17 year old stepdaughter Mary Nichols stood as witness at his trial recounting her knowledge of peculiar games his children had been made to play which involved masochism and child molestation. Of his children’s perspective I can find no testaments, though it can be fairly assumed that their anonymity was sacrosanct and that they had disowned him. It must be plausible though that there are descendants and that they are reluctant to admit to their provenance, be they aware or oblivious.

Given the comprehensive dissection of this deranged man in the trial, in which his extraordinary perverted activities were presented, it seems strange that the insanity plea failed. It was indicated that his obscene acts were not ipso facto those of an insane person, that they were actually within the realms of normality. This was surely implausible, yet, that the death sentence was sought overruled the arguments otherwise, and Albert was destined to meet his maker in the electric chair – a fate he remarked on, “It will be the supreme thrill of my life, the only thing I haven’t tried”.

To those rationally doubting the extraordinary history of Albert Fish, thinking his claims to be the ravings of mad and or senile person, that no one could possibly as deranged as his actions suggested, it is worth remembering that he was x-rayed and found to be harbouring 29 needles in his abdomen about the genitals and perineum. That fact makes his boastful claims seem all the more plausible and also adds weight to the hypothesis that serial killers have done many things they will not reveal.

As much as the nature of Albert Fish is deemed demented, it does need to be considered that he was a religious man – in his own way. He was a catholic who it seems became obsessed by the imagery in the bible pertaining to sacrifice and cannibalism and it is thought that he believed that to eat human flesh brought him closer to god. There is some speak of cannibalism in the bible such as: "And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat." -- Leviticus 26:29. "Who pluck off their skin from off them, and their flesh from off their bones; Who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron." -- Micah 3:2-3. This cannot be concluded without mention of transubstantiation and that Albert Fish may have believed himself to be gaining benediction from acts of human flesh eating and blood drinking. Though it must be said that he is thought to have considered the acts of murder and dismemberment with his “implements of hell” as somehow being sacrificial, expiating him from his earlier crimes or his inherent criminality in the eyes of God.

In conclusion, Albert Fish was the consummate Sadian figure; there was simply none or very little limit to what he would consider if he felt he could execute it – he claimed that inserting needles into his testicles was just too painful! Albert Fish was the omni-paraphiliac whose deranged ways were limited by practicalities and the limitation of his imagination. That is not to say he didn’t have his preferences, but he certainly liked to experiment. As for the paraphilia of gaining sexual gratification from being executed – electrocuted here – I cannot find the apposite term, though I can imagine there might be one. In whatever recess of hell Albert resides in, one might imagine that he is disporting quite fairly and perhaps is in his element. It seems paradoxical to think that some people aspire to go to hell, but if there is such a person, it is Albert Fish.
With that grim individual out the way, it is time to move onto another: Theodore Robert Bundy.

Ted Bundy is so very different from Albert Fish. Ted was a consistent hunter of young women, raping them, savagely molesting them and what he did to kill them is not known but it can be comfortably assumed that he enjoyed inflicting suffering. It is assumed that after he’d killed them he engaged in necrophilia.

Ted Bundy (November 24th 1946 – January 24th 1989) is believed to have come from a rather strange background, unsurprisingly; he was born out of wedlock, and who the father was is a mystery, though the possibility that it was his grandfather has been raised. He was born at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers which is no respectable provenance. Mother and son then moved into the home of his grandparents whom he was led to believe were his parents, that his mother was his sister, and, as already intimated, the grandfather may well have been his parent. It is suggested that he was a very unpleasant character, an alcoholic (something that is very common in the history of serial killers, and, both Stalin and Hitler had violent alcoholic fathers), who abused his children and, other creatures - neighbour’s pets. When they moved to Washington State to stay with cousins his mother married Culpepper Bundy, a hospital cook, and Ted was adopted and became a Bundy. How this fits in with the discovery that he was illegitimate is unclear, since that discovery was purportedly made after his adoption and re-designation although, I have also read that one of his cousins told him before the marriage, and that this was done out of spite.
Ted said that he became interested in pornography early on, was a peeping tom; that he would trawl through the litter in his purlieu for porn magazines which it is proposed were read in such great quantities that they could be found thus. What he said - and denied - was that he became fascinated by the pulp, lurid crime, magazines, some real, others fantastical, which featured images of women imperilled by maniacs such as he became, women bound and gagged in vaguely alluring configurations too garish to be plausible or disturbing to the average reader, but to him it can be surmised that this material was highly instructive in his nascent murderous psychopathy. When he first killed is unknown though it is suspected that he started when he abducted eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr of Tacoma in 1961 when he was 14. That was circumstantial as were many deaths he was suspected of and it must be said that it seems that during the 70s and 80s in America, many women – and men – went missing. He was a petty criminal, a compulsive thief and quite likely already a compulsive liar.

He went to university, University of Puget Sound, then University of Washington, and, after a stint as an assistant to Chairman of Washington State Republican party, the University of Utah. The generally accepted killings might have started in 1971, but his credibility was always suspected.

Of his relationships with women whom he did not kill – he never killed anyone he knew – that with Stephanie Brooks is the only one worth covering here. It is of interest as it is hypothesised that she, through her rejection of him, somehow turned the killer in him on. That has been considered in light of the fact that the numerous victims bore a resemblance to her, at least in that they had, on the whole, darkish centre parted straight hair. He said that he just went for the pretty ones and that no connection existed.

In 1971 Bundy spent some time working for Seattle's Suicide Hotline crisis centre which seems to fit in well with the notion that he took great enjoyment from hearing women in distress, and it was here that he met Anne Rule who would be his biographer. Bundy’s first documented killing was in 1974 when he was 27, the disappearance when he was 14 notwithstanding, conclusive evidence scant and testimony always suspect. The most common account of the beginning of his killing is that it was on January 4th 1974 when, after a final conversation with Stephanie Brooks, in which he terminated the relationship, thereby exacting revenge for her original rejection, he embarked on the savage beating and molestation of a UW student named Joni Lenz who just survived with brain damage. Thereafter he killed for the first documented time a month later and on roughly monthly basis a girl would disappear in and around Washington State, mostly from university towns.

Bundy’s methodology is well known and has been rendered into film and fiction. The methods he used when he wasn’t merely bursting into girl’s bedrooms involved quite clever deception involving props: the most famous of his was to wear a fake plaster cast and solicit help from a passing student who would see that he had dropped his books or was struggling with something or other and off the two would go to his infamous yellow VW Beetle where he would whack her with a tyre iron and take her to location for his hideous pleasures.

What made Bundy so successful in his career was his objectively good looks and charming manner, features which, along with his intellect, were to favour him hugely in his escaping suspicion.

His paraphilic tendencies were not particularly well documented but it is said that he was obsessed with hair; that he bound and gagged and humiliated his prey in utterly sadistic fashion can be assumed; that he was a necrophile is well recorded; that he engaged in biastophilia is technically certain – biastophilia means deriving sexual gratification from rape and this seems completely paradoxical since it is akin to saying that one get sexual gratification from sex, but stolen sex is not, ipso facto, a manifestation of abnormal psychology, simply a means to an end. What other paraphilias Ted Bundy can be attributed with is hard to say since his repertoire with the poor young women is unknown. I have read that he would keep the heads of them and make their dead faces up; I can imagine that he did many peculiar things that behavioural science would like to know about but never will since he took his secrets with him and nothing much of the victims apart from their bones and the odd ligature could indicate anything conclusive.

Bundy was undoubtedly a disciplined man, planning his murders meticulously, well equipped and it might be said that he was in some ways professional, at least in the sense that he got away with brazen assaults. He killed anywhere between 30 and 130 women according to him, those 30 he confessed to were confirmed but that isn’t necessarily entire proof they were his, since there were many murderers of women who were active before and at the time and he may have got confused about exactly where he put their remains, their names unknown to him – perhaps there were places used for body disposal by various murderers as places of convenience. It was young women that he wanted, 26 being the oldest of his recorded victims. As for the other hundred, well, that was something he alluded to, but again, he wasn’t considered credible

Given that Bundy managed to break out of custody twice, it would be fair to admit that he was quite an extraordinary man, being erudite and seemingly in charge of his horrendous predilections; capable of keeping his cool despite his crimes. After his second escape – one that required considerable preparation – he travelled to the other end of America to Florida where he killed two more students in the Chi Omega slayings, leaving another two seriously wounded, then concluded his murderousness by killing 12 year old Kimberley Diane Leach whose partially mummified remains were found seven weeks later by a farm shed.
If one was to try and understand what made Bundy seek out innocent young women – mainly just girls – one must take a cynical stance, seeing things from his point of view; he once called himself "..the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet." If you can do that, and I feel it would take a fellow man to do it, then you can perhaps say that he was threatened by the youth and beauty of his prey. That must in some way resonate with many men who are naturally compelled to seek out partners; the process of trying to find a mate or at least to acquire female acolytes for emotional and sexual purposes is what young men do and they are wont to prove their own status in the milieu by gaining the best looking or “fittest” they can. It is hugely enriching to one’s self esteem to be admired by attractive women, the younger the better – within reason. I see in Bundy a man who coveted the aesthetic perfection in young women as well as their immaculateness, feeling imperilled by his sense of low social status and the redundancy of his appeal with age. It brings to mind the all too common phenomenon of the 30 year old stale youth seeking to reprise the old youth by procuring an 18 or 19 year old irrespective of the impracticalities therein. It is immaturity on the part of the man. It could be described as ephebophilia which is a preference for partners 15-19 years old, which must surely be something much more prevalent in males. It is really the two sorrows; that of not making the grade with the objectively attractive ideal so promulgated in the media, and the notion that you are no longer attractive to the desirable youngster, now shut out of that club. That causes a certain degree of indignation which normal people cope with without pursuing lost causes, when rejected, they just accept their lot and have the morality to demur.

To Ted Bundy, being rejected it seems could only be remedied by erasing the source of the torment and having his rapine way with it, coming into possession through that power over it and finally, exterminating it and making a chattel of the body or parts of it. I think that was the only way he could resolve any such anguish experienced, but of his other possible needs requited from the murders I cannot speculate much on the significance of his actions to him.

Ted Bundy got what he deserved, but after many years on death row. His pitiful excuses for his crimes were mostly predicated on the role of hardcore pornography as a driver, that the devil made him do it. And he did have his supporters; ironically, it was a whole coterie of young women who were his followers, women who were perhaps oblivious to what he would quite likely have done to them, and, just perhaps, there were some less intelligent fans who regarded the notion of being “favoured” by him as some kind of compliment. There was also a Dr James Dobson, an evangelical Christian author, psychologist and founder of Focus on the Family, which promotes traditional family values, someone fervently anti-pornography.

Bundy fried at 7:16 a.m. Eastern time on January 24th, 1989, to much jubilation. To conclude the analysis of Ted Bundy, we should briefly consider what the professionals had to say about him: he was variously diagnosed as having bi-polar disorder, dissociative identity disorder and antisocial personality disorder. I think many a reader may seek further understanding of his mental condition than that offered in those three designations, perhaps like me, finding the latter somewhat trite. Bundy was a sexual psychopath!

Bundy out of the way, we will consider the final perpetrator of ghoulish extremity, Ed Gein.

When I intimated that Albert Fish was the most deranged and demented in the canon, I think some qualification is required; in respect of the exploits of Ed Gein, whose legacy as a sexual deviant of the most bizarre kind has to be considered as significant competition to the worst. What makes Ed Gein so resonant in humanity – more so those who know the details, and much much more so those who lived in the vicinity and knew him – is very hard to describe. Ghoulishness is the obvious term, one I have expended, but what other term can we alight on to define his deeds? Macabre for sure, but they were just so alien to the sensibilities of western society that I don’t think that, to this day, a suitable adjective, one discerning him from others, has been created. He has had such a profound impact on the film and fiction representation of ghouls and psychopaths, one little challenged, and yet, his existence is still more extraordinary than any writer could envisage.

Ed Gein (August 27th, 1906 – July 26th, 1984) was another child raised in a disturbed family and what should we expect with serial killers – except that Jeffery Dahmer wasn’t from a notably abnormal one. Born in La Crosse Wisconsin, to a religiously maniacal mother (Lutheran), and an alcoholic father; he grew up on a farm in Plainsfield in that same state. His mother Augusta despised the father George who it is surmised represented to her the evils of mankind, those of liquor and vice, though the marriage was sealed due to her religious convictions abominating divorce. This part of America was (perhaps is) certainly a rather bleak place of interminable plains subjected to the extremes of winter which can be below minus 20C and in summer 40C is not uncommon, but what is pertinent is the isolation at the time and that may still be the case. It that is an area was populated primarily by Germans, Swedes and Norwegians.

Gein was so annexed to his mother as a child that he only left the farmstead to go to school and was not allowed friends around and not allowed to meet them. Her fanatical religiosity led her to believe and preach to her two sons that all women (herself excluded) were prostitutes, that the world was inherently immoral, and of course that drinking was evil. Ed and his brother Henry were read extracts from the bible daily, especially those of the Old Testament dealing with retribution for sinful living. She would physically abuse both boys fearing they were destined to become like their father. It is therefore unsurprising that this peculiar upbringing manifested in Ed as shyness and awkwardness at school and that this led to his bullying. He was reportedly an effete individual with some effeminate mannerisms and a predilection for introspection with occasional bursts of laughter apropos of nothing anyone else knew of.

After the father died in 1940 Ed and his brother worked around the farmstead, on other farmsteads, and on odd jobs in the town and were considered reliable and honest. Ed frequently babysat for neighbours and it is said that he enjoyed the company of children more than adults, engaging readily on their level. There has never been any evidence that he abused these charges or any children at all.

The next event considered important in Ed’s life was the death of his brother whom was found slightly battered and singed after attempting to extinguish a fire on the farm. The coroner found no evidence of foul play though it has been suggested that Ed was the cause of his death and that this was a culmination of animosity between the two over Henry’s rejection of their mother’s views, which Ed strenuously upheld.
Ed carried on with his life as a labourer at home and abroad in the town and seemed a harmless individual to those who knew him, though his strangeness was not unnoticed, as innocent as it seemed. It was the death of his mother on December 29th 1945 which is deemed the trigger for his ultimately utterly aberrant behaviour. Ed had both adored and feared her but was too weak a character to know anything other than her instruction, and so when she went, he was totally bereft of the influence and direction he had become so inured with. He unravelled monumentally, giving into interests which he most probably cultivated before her death, but may well have taken on thereafter; his interests were of a grisly variety, comprising acts of headhunting and cannibalism in the far east, as was accounted in certain magazines, and his interests may well have alighted on the macabre activities in the concentration camps of Germany where it has been rumoured that bodies were rendered into items of furniture: bones composed into chairs, the femurs used as legs, other bones used in many configurations to form these despicable items of amusement for the depraved overseers. There were fairly widespread reports of items made of human skin such as lamp shades and to imagine that other things unrecorded were produced – wallets for example – is wholly reasonable.

It seems that the incubation period for Gein’s murderous ways took around twelve years, though it has been posited that he killed before, though no proof exists. In 1957 Bernice Worden, the proprietor of a town hardware store, went missing and there was substantial evidence that Gein was responsible, this being that he was seen in the shop and perhaps there had by then amounted a considerable suspicion of him due to his weird ways. When police investigators arrived at the Gein farm they found a madman’s lair: Bernice, minus head, hung upside down in a connecting shed, gutted and dressed out like a deer. On further investigation more body parts were found, those of Mary Hogan, a local barmaid, these in the proximity of the headless corpse, myriad parts in the freezer. But it was what they found in recesses of the property that astounded and shocked them most, things so much like that which the death-cult magazines would have portrayed or at least offered inspiration for: it was those items of furniture and clothing made of bones, skulls and skin; it was the dried noses and vulvae; the bowls made from human skulls; the face masks; the belt made from nipples. Most disturbing perhaps was the “mammary vest” which he wore to render himself female in a transvestite fashion - that was most likely a ritual – that must have been a condition quite new to science back then. He supposedly cavorted about in his gruesome suit and availed himself with his other accoutrements and trinkets.

It is well known that he was a grave robber who kept track of the funerals of middle aged women not unlike his mother in appearance (one presumes), then went to disinter them for the body parts, or raw materials for his workshop-cum-tailors. He is said to have begun his nocturnal cadaver raids in 1947. There is no exact body count for Ed’s crimes except to say that he murdered two. There may have been others, certainly possible given that people had disappeared in the area, two male hunters for example. Those bodies he stole are thought to have numbered around ten though due to the lack of complete skeletons the number of corpses and victims is not possible to confirm but it would be prudent to suggest that at least twelve bodies ended up in his hands, under his knife, butchered and dissembled for the parts he desired. He tanned the skin and most likely the other parts he kept and he froze organs. What he derived from this orgy of dissection, preservation, collection and utilization is unfathomable to the average person. It would therefore be easy to assume he had lost his mind and given into a demented strain of purpose. But there was something quite pathological about him which jars with the more desirable notion that he was oblivious due to insanity. The deftness of his work at manufacturing the items from skin and bone adds to the sense of ghoulishness; the notion that he somehow wanted to be his mother and attempted this by making a costume from the skin of the deceased is one of the most peculiar that has ever been recorded.

I have certainly toiled with the motivations of Ed Gein and found myself lost in an abyss of the preternatural having abandoned the more apposite ideals prevalent in serial killers. It is truly the work of a mindset so divorced from normality that we are compelled to consider elements beyond human nature.

The paraphilias that can potentially be attributed to Ed Gein are numerous but not complete. We can start with necrophilia or necrophilism or necrolagnia or necrocoitus or necro-chlesis or, finally, thanatophilia. All of which concern some kind of sexual gratification from the dead – though which sex, what age etc etc, is not clear. But Ed Gein said that he never did have sex with the corpses because he said they smelt too bad. So perhaps he intended to but was deterred. It is not as if necrophilia is undocumented: there are many accounts of people, almost exclusively men, who have had sexual intercourse with corpses, be they fresh or dug up or, in their death throes, a term called “warm necrophilia”. He could be called a necromaniac though as someone who kept and preserved dead bodies. Added to the necrophilia, in whatever variety he practised it, is the transvestism, which is as old as the Bible, according to it. It can be called autogynephilia which sounds like a paraphilia although it not clearly so as those mentioned in the DSM, not that it can’t be – that dressing as a woman, or perhaps a man, seems quite inconclusively an act of sexual motive.

It could be said that Ed Gein was really a transgender operator, trying his best to become a woman by incorporating female skin and body parts - vulvas – unto his body, not managing to achieve any consummate conversion but perhaps desperately wishing to, reaching a sufficient approximation.

It seems to me that Ed’s reading of the practices of more arcane cultures had taken route in him and manifested as convictions. If that is so, then we have to consider the other practitioners of necrophilia and allied practices. It should suffice to give example of the Hindu sect of the Aghoris who, to this day, live in graveyards and engage in rituals involving bones, and are reputed to drink urine from skulls, engage in necrophilia and, partake in cannibalism. This is the cult of the Aghora.

Ed Gein then was a follower of many backward cults and cultures and so it could be said that he merely did what he read. Other than that it is too much for most to make any sense of his actions.
He was spared execution, found to be insane (quite rightly) and condemned to an asylum till his death from natural causes as an old man. His legacy is amongst the most prominent in the field of serial killers; the jokes about him called Geiners still go around. He is the inspiration for Norman Bates and Jame Gumb and of course Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There isn’t really another serial killer who is of such influence in film and fiction.

That is the end of the disquisition. There are many other serial killers worthy of examination but to do so in the context of paraphilias would be to duplicate most of what has already been said in respect of the chosen three.