By José Ángel Conde
“The legends of werewolves were probably started because of serial killers,” I said. “Vampires, too, they’re men who hunt and kill other men, and that sounds like a serial killer to me. They didn’t have psychology back then, so they just made up some crazy monster to explain it away.”
In this brief dialogue from I am not a serial killer, the first novel in Dan Wells' John Cleaver saga, young Cleaver sums up the consensus of most experts on the link between the werewolf myth and the figure of the serial killer. However, the lycanthrope is far from being a “crazy monster”, as it is one of the most complex and decisive icons of universal culture, shared by numerous peoples and traditions. Likewise, although the existence of werewolves has been denied by scientific progress, the fact is that, outside legends and folklore, we find enough examples of killers with wolfish traits or idiosyncrasies throughout history to establish a category of their own, which we could call “serial werewolves”. In this article we will try to define their main characteristics and at the same time make a tour of the most famous cases of these “real” werewolves in history. But first we must turn to mythology, anthropology and psychiatry to understand how such an ancestral symbol as that of the lycanthrope comes to be paired with a criminal concept such as that of the serial killer.
The origin of the werewolf goes back to the night of prehistoric times, if we look at the Paleolithic cave paintings that show human-animal hybrids. Most tribal cultures have always considered the wolf as one of their totemic animals, prized for its hunting skills, strength and cunning. Being a nocturnal creature in contact with darkness, it will also be endowed with an important supernatural dimension as a guardian of the access to the afterlife, a belief that in its evolution will give rise to cinecephalic deities such as the Egyptian Anubis or the Aramaic Ammon, as well as mythical creatures such as the Hellenic Can Cerberus. In ancient times the distance between man and animal was very short, as pointed out by the anthropological theory of “perspectivism” of the Brazilian Viveiros de Castro, according to which animals possess a properly human spirit hidden in their “clothing” or physical animal body, only visible to members of their own species or to certain border beings such as shamans. Thus, shamans believe themselves capable of performing therianthropy or theriomorphism, the metamorphosis from human to animal, through different ecstatic rituals in which they reach altered states of consciousness through the use of ointments, psychotropic substances or entheogenic plants. The most representative case of this shamanic transformism is that of the Amerindian Nahual, a polysemic word that is usually translated as “occult” and that refers both to a sorcerer and to an animal alter ego or tutelary spirit, the spiritual double that would take possession of the physical body through metamorphosis.
Already in the Bronze Age and well into the Middle Ages, this same search for identification with the wolf as well as with other animals of power will be at the basis of the Indo-European male secret warrior brotherhoods, known under the common term of Männerbünde, which find their parallel in other latitudes, such as America (within the Mexica culture and the Navajo and Pawnee Indians) or Africa (societies of “panther men” and “leopard men”, especially active in colonial times, but of which there is pictorial evidence in Çatal Hüyük, Anatolia, dated around 6000 BC). The symbolism of the wolf in the military sphere will be a constant throughout history, from the Spartan wolfs of the agogé subjected to the initiation of the Krypteia, through the nomadic peoples of Central Asia (Scythians, Parthians, Tartars), to the present day, where it has been widely used by paramilitary groups and extreme right, such as the Nazi Werwolf or the Turkish Grey Wolves. Among the ancient Indo-Europeans in particular, the appearance of the Männerbünde dates back to the Indo-Iranian period and manifests itself especially among the Balkan, Slavic, Nordic and Germanic peoples, even after the era of the great migrations, as in the case of the famous Berserker (still found among the Byzantium Varangian Guard) and the Ulfhéðnar. For many of these peoples the wolf was also a symbol of the fugitive, so it is likely that these groups were formed by marginal elements, especially young men who were assimilated by the brotherhood and integrated into the martial context after undergoing a ritual initiation. Many of these rituals were based on the imitation of the behavior and appearance of the animal and can be understood as a revival of shamanism, since they handle concepts such as the Fylgja, an animal spirit associated with the person throughout his life and which refers to the Nahual, including its ability to change shape. The external transformation was achieved by wearing the skin of the chosen animal (hence the nomenclature berserker or “warriors in bear's clothing” and úlfhéðnar or “men in wolf's skin”), which symbolically enabled the warrior to stop being a human and adopt the qualities of a predator. A ferocity and savagery that respected neither ethics nor human customs was then released, after entering into a self-induced ecstatic trance, the furor heroicus, odinic Wut or berserk fury. This voluntary “possession” was amplified by the ingestion of narcotic and exciting substances, which made the subject become so suggestible that he acquired an enormous strength, endurance and cruelty that turned him into a perfect murderer. It is very possible that this “rage” is related to the amok syndrome (Malay word meaning “fury”, popularized by Rudyard Kipling), defined by the psychiatrist Joseph Westermeyer in 1972, which consists of an explosion of wild rage, of undetermined causes, pushing the affected person to indiscriminate violence against living beings and everything in his path until he is exhausted and suffers a process of amnesia after the attack. Apart from this syndrome, from here we can also deduce manifestations more typical of the clinical phenomenon known as lycanthropy, to which we must also add the permissiveness towards cannibalism, behaviors that will contribute to the spread of the belief in werewolves.
In the context of urbanization and Classical antiquity we find not warrior clans, but entire peoples that in one way or another incorporate the lupine idiosyncrasy among their beliefs and way of life and even call themselves or are called “wolves” by others (always taking into account the etymological chaos that the different evolution of archaic languages entails). Thus the first literary mention of werewolves appears around 430 B.C., in the fourth book of the Histories of the Greek Herodotus, where he records the Scythian stories about the Baltic people of the Neuros or Neuri, possible antecedents of Sami shamanism. Around the same time, Ctesias speaks in his Indica of the race of the “cinocephalous” or “dog-headed”, located in India by himself and other authors such as Megasthenes and even Marco Polo. The Dacians and Getas from the Carpathians, for their part, had Zalmoxis as their main god, whose name Diogenes Laertius translates as “bearskin”, which is the representation of the animal warrior with psychopomp qualities and his corresponding cohort of “wolf-soldiers” worshippers. And we cannot forget the mountainous Arcadia, the legendary land of the god Pan, where the great founding myth of lycanthropy takes place: that of the Arcadian king Lycaon. There are several versions of this story, the most famous being those of Plato, Ovid and Pausanias, but all agree that Lycaon worshipped the Zeus of Mount Lyceus by practicing cannibalism in a ritual banquet where the body of a sacrificed human was devoured, and that for this the god himself punished the king by turning him into a werewolf. Although there has been much speculation about the historical veracity of these practices among the Arcadians, anthropophagy is noted here as the mythical cause of lycanthropy, as well as leading to the erroneous consideration of the name Lycaon as the etymological origin of the term, which actually comes from the Greek word lykánthropos, composed of lykos, “wolf”, and anthrōpos, “man”. Be that as it may, the existence of such similar beliefs in such different peoples confirms the endurance of a common tradition around the communion with a primordial god or “Great Hunter”, which allows the regression of its worshippers to an atavistic state of animality. Even Greece and Rome will maintain this corpus in certain religious practices and cults, from the cult of the “wolf gods” Soranus, Hecate, Dionysus Zagreo or Apollo Lykeios, through the Luperca, mother wolf that suckles Romulus and Remus, and the Roman Lupercalia festival, to the decisive mysteries of the Bacchantes who, dressed in animal skins, went into the woods to unite with the dark god through orgies where erotic debauchery mixed with dances and omophagia or ingestion of raw meat, thus marking a more than likely line of continuity with the same pagan cult that is at the base of medieval European witchcraft. Omophagia and ritual lycanthropy also survive in the Middle Ages in certain forms of pre-Islamic animism such as that of the Moroccan order of the Isawiyya. However, the Greeks and Romans themselves will end up considering such practices as an atavism typical of savages and barbaric and backward peoples, and this is how the belief in werewolves begins to acquire negative connotations.
With the spread of Christianity in the Middle Ages, the wolf came to be considered as an incarnation of evil, since it was a very feared animal, especially in rural areas, where successive famines led it to decimate livestock and even attack man. Thus, lycanthropy acquired satanic connotations and was directly associated with witchcraft, and punished accordingly. Warlocks and witches were transformed after a pact with the Devil, applying determined ointments and taking certain alkaloid substances with hallucinogenic properties or performing specific rituals such as drinking water from the footprint of a wolf, although there was also mention of curses, such as the one that fell on the seventh consecutive male child in spanish Galicia and Portugal, those born on the night of December 24 or the illegitimate children. The werewolf is thus incorporated into the realms of superstition, legend and folklore, but we must bear in mind that it was perceived as a very real creature by the population of that time. Although a pagan substratum of veneration of the wolf persists in some communities, in general it will be regarded as a demonic creature comparable to beings such as the vampire, with which it will experience a particular symbiosis in the popular perception, especially in the Slavic sphere with beings such as the Wurdulac. The werewolf will acquire different names and attributes depending on the region: veykolakas (“skinned wolf”) in ancient Greece; versipellis (“turned skin”) in ancient Rome; “werewolf” or werwolf in the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon world; loup garou in France; lupo mannaro in Italy; lob omen in Portugal; hombre lobo in Spain and lobishome in spanish Galicia; lobisón or lobizón in most of Latin America; volkolak (“skinned wolf”) in Russia; wukodlak in the Balkans; al-qutrub in the Arab world.... In latitudes where wolves are not abundant, the hybrid being will result from more vernacular animals: “tiger men” in India; ‘leopard men’, ‘lion men’, ‘hyena men’ and jackal ‘men’ in Africa; fox men and vixen women in China and Japan....
Lycanthropy is not only an ancient mythical curse, but also a very real disorder that may explain the behavior of many serial killers throughout history. There are other diseases that have contributed to the werewolf legend, among which we can include rabies, with its symptoms of aggressiveness, insomnia or hallucinations, and hypertrichosis or abnormal hair growth, of which illustrious characters such as the Canary Islander Petrus Gonsalvus (1537-1618) or the Mexican Julia Pastrana (1834-1860) are examples. However, neither of them results in the development of any homicidal impulse. More complex is the case of porphyria, a group of genetic diseases consisting of an enzyme disorder that affects the production of hemoglobin, generating in principle physical alterations that have to do with skin pigmentation and photosensitivity, but which in some cases present deformities such as pointed and reddened teeth, hair growth and ulcers, or deformation of the limbs and spine. In its most acute phase, porphyria can cause hallucinations, disorientation, aggressiveness, suicidal ideas, obsessive-compulsive symptoms or psychotic outbreaks, a varied picture that in certain less enlightened times there is no difficulty in imagining it as comparable to the behavior of a werewolf.
The malady of lycanthropy, meanwhile, has been well documented since ancient times, but its nature and symptoms vary depending on the era and culture. The first known mention is that of Marcellus or Marcellus Sidetes, a physicist of the late second century AD, in his De Lycanthropia (Περὶ Λυκανθρώπου), where he refers to it as a disease that attacked men at the beginning of the year making them violent, so that at night they withdrew to cemeteries and fields to behave there as if they were dogs or wolves. After Saint Augustine explains it as a product of suggestion, the Byzantine physician Paul of Egina or Paulus Aegineta, around 650 A.D., takes up Sidetes' definition again, but associating lycanthropy with melancholy and excess of black bile, so that we are already close to the consideration of mental illness. This “melancholic lycanthropy” (Lupina melancholia), depression or madness that degenerates into savagery and feral violence, also known as “lycanthomania” or lupinam insanian (“wolfish madness”), will also be referred to by numerous later scholars, from the Persian Avicenna, who will call it Cucubuth, to the British physiologist Robert Burton, who describes it in his celebrated Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). It is very likely that this vision influences the benign figure of the “chivalrous werewolf”, condemned for love, typical of some early medieval romances such as Bisclavret or Guillaume de Palerme. The Inquisition will take up lycanthropy in many of its courts and records, but in the sense of physical transformation of supernatural causes, without taking into account any kind of mental dimension, although the Malleus Maleficarum (1486), its main doctrinal book, maintains a certain ambiguity in this regard, shared by the famous A sermon on were-wolves, delivered by the Strasbourg priest Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg in 1508. Until well into the Renaissance, this superstitious conception coexisted with the rational and scientific vision of authors such as the Englishman Reginald Scot, who appealed to the medical tradition to expose it as a clinical disease in his book The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), while Giovanni Battista della Porta, in his Magia naturalis (1558), and the Dutch physician Johann Weyer, author of De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563) and considered one of the fathers of modern psychiatry, attributed it to the pharmacological action of certain drugs.
With the advent of modern psychiatry in the 19th century, and with the physical existence of werewolves now ruled out by science, progress was made towards the consideration of lycanthropy as a psychic disorder. Between 1852 and 1854 one of the first and scarce known examples of clinical criminal lycanthropy was recorded in spanish Galicia, that of Manuel Blanco Romasanta, already judged as a mentally ill person. As a bridge between folkloric tradition and scientific rationality, the contribution of the Anglican priest Sabine Baring-Gould, author of a major work on the werewolf myth, The Book of Were-Wolves (The Book of Were-Wolves, being an account of a terrible superstition, 1865), with which he unknowingly anticipates the later dialectic between the concepts of psychopathy and psychosis, always bearing in mind that psychiatry was not yet able to discern that neither one nor the other necessarily lead someone to become a murderer. The reverend concludes that lycanthropy is a form of “delusional” or “melancholic” madness, characterized by “innate cruelty”, a total indifference of the murderer towards his victims, with sexual humiliation and objectification included (as would be typical of a psychopath). Its determining feature would be the loss of contact with reality on the part of the affected person, through depersonalization and hallucinations provoked by very diverse causes (drugs, fevers, manic episodes), to the point of believing to be a wild animal that enjoys torture, destruction and cannibalism (something more typical of a psychotic). Although this behavior can be related to the “delirious melancholy” of which the ancients spoke, there is no doubt that Baring-Gould is also advocating mental illnesses such as depersonalization-derealization disorder, in which one feels one's own body as strange and even deformed, or dissociative disorder, better known as split personality or multiple personality.
Throughout the last century, lycanthropy will be codified for diagnosis within the lists of mental pathologies handled by specialists in medical science, the most famous being the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the controversial American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5 in its latest version of 2013), giving rise to the concept of “clinical lycanthropy”, as opposed to that of “mythical lycanthropy”, which will be dealt with by anthropology. There will be no lack of authors who consider it a paraphilia or sexual pathology (today it is already accepted that many paraphilias can be sublimated without the need to commit crimes against humanity), no doubt influenced by the repercussion of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexualis (1886), such as Joseph Paul de River, Ernest Jones, Robert Eisler or the parapsychologist Nandor Fodor, who also explores the function of the lycanthropic archetype in the world of dreams and the subconscious. Two field studies will be decisive for the medical demarcation of lycanthropy: “Lycanthropy revisited” (1975) by psychiatrists Frida G. Surawicz and Richard Banta and “A case of lycanthropy” (1977) by Harvey Rosenstock and Kenneth Vincent. In them already appears some cases influenced by the use of LSD and others with necrophiliac tendencies very reminiscent of the “melancholics” of antiquity. P. E. Keck, for his part, will establish the diagnostic criteria for the disease in his article Lycanthropy: alive and well in the twentieth century (1988). Finally, we cannot forget the essays by the controversial psychologist Richard Noll, Bizarre diseases of the mind (1990) and Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons (1992), where he compiles numerous cases in which split personality and schizophrenia abound, draws up a list of common symptoms and concludes that lycanthropy would rather be a manifestation of the monomania known as “zoanthropy”.
It is currently concluded that clinical lycanthropy is a variant of zoanthropy or therianthropy, a rare syndrome in which the patient believes he/she is capable of transforming into an animal. Most experts agree that it falls within the broad spectrum of psychotic depersonalization disorders and coenesthesiopathies, appearing as a symptom in conditions such as schizophrenia, mood disorders, bipolar disorder, hysteria, dementia or psychomotor epilepsy, without forgetting neurological conditions or organic brain syndrome, sometimes aggravated by hallucinogenic drug use and the consumption of toxic and narcotic drugs. In relation to the latter, many doctors consider the increase in the consumption of MDMA or ecstasy and the action of new synthetic substances, such as the so-called “cannibal drug”, whose scientific name is methylenedioxypyrovalerone or MDPV, to be the causes of a certain current upturn in the number of cases. Clinical lycanthropy has to do then with a process of estrangement, including hallucinations and delusions, which affects the personality, making the affected person believe that he/she has adopted the identity and form of an animal, also developing bestial behaviors contrary to those commonly considered as belonging to humans, among them often omophagous tendencies, but also cannibalistic or necrophagous ones. With these conclusions, although it does not have to be a determining condition for their actions, we can imagine this disorder as being associated with the behavior and modus operandi of many serial killers.
In the 20th century, the werewolf became a pop icon that lasts to this day, becoming part of the gallery of monsters of the emerging horror genre, promoted, above all, by literature and cinema. It seemed that science had taken werewolves out of history for good, until the combined advances of psychology and forensic psychiatry led to the takeoff of criminology. The study of criminal behavior allows going beyond the Victorian paraphilias of Psychopathia sexualis and confirms that within the human species there are individuals capable of developing extreme, savage and grotesque murderous behaviors that in other times would have been inadmissible and considered alien to humanity, being therefore attributed to animals, diabolical beings or fantastic and supernatural entities, such as the lycanthrope. In addition, the causes of these homicidal tendencies and the procedures of the murderers are already established, and a terminology to classify them is also developed. Although more weighty elements are available for the critical revision and total demystification of the figure of the werewolf, this will not lose its powerful symbolic dimension, since the advent of the human predator will acquire certain mythical connotations for a large number of rather heterodox theories that consider it a manifestation of the repressed, of the inner beast that lingers buried in the psyche since the night of time. The decisive concept in this context will be that of the “serial killer”.
Even before the term was coined, the Austrian historian Robert Eisler was one of the first authors to establish a link between this type of killer and werewolves in his book Man into wolf: an anthropological interpretation of sadism, masochism, and lycanthropy (1951), a transcription of a conference on sadism and anthropology held in 1948 at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. A survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, Eisler perhaps intends to find the roots of the irrational violence he had suffered by expounding a pseudo-scientific anthropological theory that harks back to the darkness of the Paleolithic and that, paradoxically, suffers from eugenicist overtones more characteristic of supremacism. However, it is nonetheless a fascinating story, which serves as a reference point for that symbolic current that insists on searching for traces of the werewolf in the labyrinths of the human mind. According to Eisler, both the lycanthropes and the sadism and cannibalism of serial killers can be explained by the survival of an atavism that arose in primitive human beings when they changed their original vegetarian diet for a carnivorous diet, between 50,000-30,000 BC, during the last glaciation in the Mousterian period. The prehistoric “lycanthropes” would live in the Nordic areas of extreme cold, where vegetation was scarce and the only food was animal meat, if not human flesh in times of famine. They would protect themselves from the cold with animal skins, which would give them a wolfish appearance, and, upon migrating to the warmer areas of the south, they would end up exterminating the vegetarian communities that populated them. The carnivorous or predatory DNA would be incorporated into the rest of the atavisms that persist in our brain today, according to the defenders of the theory of the triune brain, as a kind of primitive state of latent sadistic childhood that would fully emerge in some individuals, those who have not been “socialized” appropriately. In this way, nature would make us all be born as serial killers and civilization would turn us into “social beings”, except for those who fail to overcome the atavistic phase of development due to various factors (trauma, psychopathies, abuse, biochemical causes). Despite the arbitrary, fictional and reactionary nature of its formulation, current experts such as the Canadian Peter Vronsky, author of the best sellers Serial killers: the method and madness of monsters (2004) and Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age to the Present (2018), continue to collect the theories of Eisler: “Serial killers are not made: they are unmade.”
This conception would be refuted, for example, by the fascinating phenomenon of “feral children”, real cases of children raised by animals, especially wolves, such as those of the “Hessian wolf-child” (the oldest documented, found in 1344), the cinematic Victor de Aveyron (1799), Vicente Cau Cau (1948), Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, the Spanish “Hijo de los lobos” (“Son of wolves”) (1965) or the most recent by John Ssabunnya (1991), raised by monkeys in Uganda. Although it is true that some cases are debatable, none of these subjects have become murderers after their traumatic reintegration into human society, beyond presenting understandable problems of psychological and behavioral adaptation. Romanticisms aside, the existence of "wild children" is a complex issue, which in the case of wolves many experts explain by the maternal instinct of wolves to protect creatures that are helpless and do not pose a threat to their babies, because it is well known that the wolf instead avoids adult humans. On the other hand, although it is true that man has been a hunter for at least 40,000 years and that this has deeply marked his social organization and his conception of the world at that time, leading him to imitate the qualities of natural predators such as the wolf, in the long run, most humans, who do not have adequate training to do so, experience a clear aversion to murdering someone of their own species, which translates into shocks and responses such as vasovagal syncope in the presence of blood or death. As the German philologist Walter Burkert expresses in Homo Necans (Latin for “man who kills”, 1972) this repulsion precedes even civilization and is determined by an inherent human desire to seek peace and tranquility, so, in cases where war was necessary to guarantee them, groups of selected human hunters were initiated to develop the necessary capacity for aggression and violence, such as the warrior brotherhoods already mentioned, more than a possible antecedent of the soldiers. So the matter becomes even more complicated, because we would no longer speak of an “animal instinct”, but of an “animality” sought, voluntary and not innate, for the purpose of defense or aggression, turning war into one more factor to consider.
Another influential and decisive vision on the relationship between werewolves and serial killers will be that of Robert E. L. Masters and Eduard Lea, Perverse crimes in history: evolving concepts of sadism, lust-murder, and necrophilia, from ancient to modern times (1963), a history of sexual violence in which phenomena such as vampirism or werewolves are explained in light of the concept of "necrosadism", sexual paraphilia related to necrophilia and characterized by the obtaining of erotic pleasure through the mutilation of corpses and other acts or fantasies related to death. To this end, a series of real cases are documented, ranging from the famous Bathory or Gilles de Rais to others that are more unknown, but equally atrocious, such as that of a man who was found in his house sleeping next to his mother's body in Paris, in 1890, whom he had raped and eviscerated through her vagina after she died. The importance of a very human homicidal inclination in which sex, violence and death are mixed is already beginning to be confirmed: the aspect of sadism, which contributes to further refute the supposed “animal” component of homicidal impulses in serial killers. It would later be confirmed that, unlike animals, which kill for food or for other reasons related to pure survival, what motivates the serial killer is selfishness and narcissism, which are satisfied with the sensation of power that has on its victims, which explains the cruelty, pleasure and joy, even reaching sexual excitement through murder, something that is not found in any other animal species. Beliefs as superstitious as those of the lunar influence in the commission of murders would also be out of consideration, more than refuted by police and hospital statistics, which do not record a special increase in crimes on full moon nights. And rather than “lycanthropic melancholy” we should speak of “murderous fury”, perhaps like that which berserkers could present, but no longer focused on warrior activity. Science also denies the concept of a “born killer,” so the picture is much more complex and there are still no fixed conclusions about the true causes of the existence of serial killers.
In the 70s and 80s, the great boom of serial killers occurred in the United States, with which the term began to become fashionable thanks, above all, to the work of the criminologist and profiler Robert K. Ressler and his colleagues at the Behavior Analysis Unit of the FBI (BSU), which since 1976, with the case of David Berkowitz, “the Son of Sam”, began to interview this type of criminals. The results of these interviews will be published in 1988 in Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, a capital book for the science of criminal profiling. It seemed that the wave of medieval werewolves had its correspondence in a new wave of turn-of-the-century “human predators,” but now with the difference of better knowing the true nature of their perpetrators. Current criminology and psychiatry usually deal with two concepts that always present difficulties when it comes to locating and separating them, but which should be well known: on the one hand, psychotics, individuals who have lost contact with reality, depersonalization not exempt from hallucinations that leads to murder without feeling responsible for their actions, forgetting them even after having committed them; and, on the other, psychopaths, perfectly aware of their criminal acts, with which they obtain some type of satisfaction or gratification, emotional, physical or both, and even follow a ritual to materialize them. These two categories correspond well with those established by the FBI itself regarding the modus operandi of serial killers: the organized killer, who is usually associated with the psychopathic murderer, characterized by the meticulous planning of his murders, in relation to the choice and monitoring of their victims, disposal of the corpses, ritualization of the procedures or collection of trophies and sometimes having a high IQ; and the disorganized killer, whose features are more assimilated to those of the psychotic murderer, someone with a mental disorder who chooses his victims at random and murders more as a result of an uncontrollable impulse, quickly and brutally, being careless when it comes to hide clues and often presenting poor intelligence.
At this point, what relationship could there be between werewolves and current serial killers? The press and literature continue to use the pseudonym “werewolf” to describe many serial killers (the cases of Michael Lupo, “the Wolf Man of London”, or Mikhail Popov, “the Werewolf of Siberia”, to name only two examples), recovering what was already popularly done in past times, perhaps because, despite the revelations of criminology, we still do not want to accept the brutality of these murderers. However, many of these killers do not present properly "wolf" characteristics, but are nicknamed that way due to the sensationalism of a large part of the press, eager to exploit the most emotional components of society by exciting their primary fears, at the same time as the most retrograde because it promotes a Manichaeism that affirms the existence of “human predators” ignoring any scientific consideration. The profile of a supposed “serial werewolf” would be much more heterogeneous than it might seem. In principle, the most obvious thing would be to classify him as a psychotic, convinced of being a werewolf, suffering therefore from the therianthropic disorder of lycanthropy, manifested through hallucinations, and responding to the pattern of a disorganized killer by attacking his victims impulsively, tearing them apart or devouring them partially or completely, which would present a propensity for cannibalism (based on the data collected and the statements of the murderers themselves, profiles such as Fritz Haarman would fit here). But we would also have psychopaths, organized killers who do not suffer from delusions and who either blame the werewolf myth for their crimes (especially from the 15th to 17th centuries, such as Peter Stumpp or Jean Grenier, but also more recently), or who consciously adopt wolf paraphernalia and even define themselves as “werewolves” (Romasanta, Jack Owen Spillman III).
The werewolf is, therefore, a figure that has many connections with that of the serial killer, in diverse and very broad senses (mythical, symbolic, historical, scientific, pathological, ideological or procedural, to name only the main ones), we believe that enough to propose a separate category of murderers. With all of the above, we conclude that it is possible to speak of “serial werewolves”, which could be defined as those serial killers, mostly men, who are characterized by responding to three non-closed typologies, since in many cases they are interchangeable. or are presented simultaneously. From them, to a greater or lesser extent, we can understand the list of real werewolves that makes up the second part of this essay:
• functional werewolves: killers considered werewolves because they have a modus operandi similar to that of the wolf.
• symbolic werewolves: murderers who identify themselves with this animal, either for ritual purposes that are linked to shamanism, the vestiges of paganism, magic or witchcraft, or with the simple intention of justifying the atrocity of their crimes or for pure mythomaniac fetishism.
• pathological werewolves: killers affected by the complex mental illness of lycanthropy or disorders related to it, such as porphyria.
In the 15th century, the first documented cases of "werewolf" murderers began to appear, especially in continental Europe, where in fact an authentic lycanthropic "epidemic" occurred that ran parallel to the widespread witch hunt of the time and which It also extends well into the 17th century. The inquisitorial policy that Pope Innocent VIII authorized in 1484 with the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, would crystallize with the publication in 1486 of the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”) by the German Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, the disastrous text that will serve as manual for inquisitors and which ratifies the connection of lycanthropy with witchcraft and black magic, explaining the transformation by the diabolical pact or by the use of potions and ointments analogous to those attributed to witches for use in covens. The figure of the werewolf is thus confirmed as a scapegoat for the most brutal crimes, something that has been happening for centuries, with the exception that, if before it was the communities that suffered from them that take charge, now it will be the ecclesiastical and state apparatus who will organize the investigation and punishment in the name of his particular and tragic religious crusade. Furthermore, while hardly anything is known about the previous crimes, the scrupulous work of the inquisitorial records will allow a large part of these cases of alleged werewolves to be preserved, since accusations and trials seem to multiply in these times, although much less than in the case of witches; there is quite a consensus that around 300 people were tried for lycanthropy between 1450 and 1650. The motivations for the witch hunt (undoubtedly feminicide and mass genocide) are complex and beyond the scope of this article, but the truth is that, as with other witchcraft convictions, the majority of convicted “werewolves” come from rural areas and belong to the peasant class, although elements from the aristocracy will not be spared if we take into account flagrant serial killers such as Gilles de Rais. However, it should also be noted that not all those accused of lycanthropy can be properly considered serial killers, because in the same bag were included, expropriatory motivations aside, simple crop or livestock thieves, mentally ill people, characters such as feral children already mentioned, “wolf hunters” or communities with pagan embers such as the Italian benandanti. The “wolf hunters” and “wolf masters” (meneurs de loups or “wolf charmers” in France, lobero in spanish, peeiro dos lobos in spanish Galicia, pare llop in Catalonia or llobero in Asturias) were popular in France and northern Spain from the time of Charlemagne, who in the year 813 established a body of officials dedicated to the control of wolf populations, but little by little his ability to train these animals led to them being linked to witchcraft, as happened to the Catalan Pere Torrent or Pere Cufí in 1619 and the Asturian Ana María García in 1648. The benandanti (“good walkers”), judged between the 16th and 17th centuries, were a type of sect from the Italian region of Friuli that, at certain times of the year, practiced a type of shamanic therianthropy to combat witches and demons that stalked the crops. These cults, with Slavic and Germanic reminiscences, point to a possible survival of the Männerbünde, and would explain cases such as that of the so-called “Livonian Werewolf”, a region of the Baltic Sea where in 1691 the Inquisition prosecuted the elderly Thiess or Theiss of Kaltenbrun as a warlock and he confesses to being a member of a brotherhood of warriors who became werewolves to fulfill the divine design of ridding the world of the hosts of the Evil One.
The lycanthropic epidemic reached special virulence in France during the 16th and 17th centuries. The Gallic region had a very high population of real wolves, so much so that it threatened the stability of its territory, as demonstrated by very specific events. Decisive among them will be a series of very harsh winters that occurred in the 15th century, between 1419 and 1450, the well-known L'Hiver du loup, “Winter of the Wolf”, during which wolf attacks became constant, reaching even to the city of Paris, where the Seine River froze and the walls deteriorated due to the passage of time and lack of care, thus favoring the raids of herds of these animals. After the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) the country was devastated and misery pushed the French to expand into the forests, taking over a large part of the natural resources and decreasing, for example, the populations of deer and wild boar that are natural prey of canis lupus, an ecological disaster that led the wolf to attack human beings as the only option for its survival, which under normal conditions would not occur if it were not through training (think of the “wolf hunters”). Especially harsh was the winter of 1450, where the mythical wolf Cortaud, so called because he was missing part of his tail, led a pack that established its lair near Notre Dame and killed more than forty people in the streets of Paris. In the 16th century, wolves caused so much havoc that Francis I decided to create in 1520 a special body to combat them: Les Lieutenants de Louveterie (“Wolfcatcher Lieutenants”), whom Henry IV in turn forced to join all the landowners, organizing numerous raids that will reduce their number. Although we will still have tragic examples of attacks on humans in the 18th century, such as that of the strange “Beast of Gévaudan” that would inspire the film Brotherhhod of the Wolf (Le pacte des loups, 2001), causing more than one hundred deaths in three years (always according to the chroniclers of the time). In this context, it is not surprising that the myth of the werewolf was prevalent in late medieval and modern France, nor that collective hysteria ends up fusing man and animal in an amalgam that does not make it easy to identify the true culprits of most of the deaths.
But human murderers occurred, history testifies to that. The first documented case of “serial werewolves” could have been that of Michel Verdun or Verdung, Pierre Bourgot and Philibert Montot, “Poligny Werewolves”, tried in Besançon in 1521. Verdun/Verdung was arrested after being wounded by a traveler whom he attacked in Poligny and who thought he was a wolf. Later he confessed under torture that he and Pierre Bourgot had made a pact with the Devil and that they transformed themselves into werewolves using the well-known ointments, forming a satanic society that met on sabbats and which also included Philibert Montot. Bourgot's subsequent confession was more specific and reported that they had perpetrated several murders together, including a woman who they later dismembered and the man who came out to defend her, but it seems that they had a predilection for children, much easier prey. Thus, they murdered several girls of different ages, the youngest being four years old, some of whom they devoured completely or partially, or drank their blood. Bourgot claimed that human flesh was the most delicious he had ever tasted. He even went so far as to relate that he and his companions copulated with wolves and that they felt the same pleasure as with human ones. He also gave details about his transformations: the growth of hair, the appearance of claws and the state of prostration he fell into when returning to his human form. The three men were burned.
As will be seen, Poligny's case will be quite archetypal and representative of those that will come later. There is no doubt that the love of these murderers for infanticide will contribute to the figure of the wolf becoming one of the favorite villains in children's stories. This tendency is logically explained by the greater vulnerability and defenselessness of children, but as it is an inclination shared by real wolves, which always experience reluctance and fear when attacking adults, the fusion between man and wolf in the collective imagination of a superstitious and illiterate society was little less than inevitable.
The murder of children and cannibalism would also be practices shared by Gilles Garnier, “the Werewolf of Dole”, known as “the Hermit of Saint Bonnot” for his long beard and for living isolated with his wife Apolline in a hut in the forest. Garnier terrorized the town of Dole for several months in 1573, claiming the lives of two boys and two girls. He bit and scratched her alleged first victim, a girl between ten and twelve years old, and then ate the flesh of her arms and thighs, of which he took a part of her so that her wife could also eat it. The same members of the body were subjected to anthropophagy with a ten-year-old boy whom Garnier strangled, also devouring a large part of the stomach and completely tearing off one of his legs with his teeth. He did not devour his other two victims because he was discovered in the attempt, being captured when he had just killed a boy of twelve to thirteen years old and later being condemned to the stake in 1574. Garnier was perfectly aware of his actions and was convinced that he transformed into a wolf, although for the people who captured him in the middle of the homicide, his form was very human.
The count of murderers skyrockets in the following years, although many confessions will be the object of social pressure, because no evidence of the crimes will be found, as is precisely the case with several werewolf women: Claudia Gaillard, “the Werewolf Burgundy”, Thievenne Paget or Arline de Barioux, “the Werewolf of Auvergne”. The year 1598 will be especially lavish in condemnations. The beggar Jacques Roulet or Rollet was tried in Angers after being found covered in blood and traces of human flesh near the brutally mutilated corpse of a fifteen-year-old teenager. Roulet declared, as usual, that he attended the sabbaths and transformed himself into a werewolf by applying an ointment and that, together with his cousin Julien, he had attacked and murdered more children and adults, but managed to escape execution after appealing to the Parliament of Paris and was sentenced to two years of confinement in a mental asylum. The “Werewolf of Châlons” or “Tailor-Demon of Châlons” will be sentenced in Paris as the murderer of an undetermined number of children, some of whose bones filled a barrel found in his tailor shop. His identity is not preserved because most of the judicial records were burned due to the harshness of their content, but thanks to contemporary sources it is known that he lured children to his store with tricks, where he killed them and then ate them. Very famous was the case of the “Werewolves of Saint Claude”, where an entire family of werewolves was condemned: the Gandillon family (Pierre, Georges, Pernette and Antoinette). The Gandillons appealed from the first moment to the everlasting alibi of covens and metamorphoses to justify their crimes. The members of the clan were arrested after the young Pernette attacked two children and slit the throat of one of them with the same knife with which he defended himself against her, being cut up by the town's inhabitants. Immediately afterwards, his brother Pierre was accused of witchcraft, and he confessed that he and his family attacked and devoured animals and human beings alike, among other acts of magic and sorcery. In prison, before being hanged and burned, it is said that they behaved as if they were real wolves, howling and walking on all fours. The trial will elevate the judge and demonologist Henri Boguet, probably the greatest “hunter” of werewolves in history and thanks to whom we have written testimony of many of them (although not always credible, of course), recorded in his book Discours des Sorciers (1610), but also the cruelty of his methods, especially with children.
The most famous French werewolf will be, without a doubt, Jean Grenier, of whom abundant documentation is also preserved. To begin with, his case has numerous witnesses, including one of his victims, Marguerite Poirier or Poitier, a thirteen-year-old girl whom Grenier used to accompany while carrying his flock of sheep and who managed to survive one of his attacks by hitting her with his crook. Grenier was a wanderer of about thirteen years old, the son of a farmer from Saint-Antoine de Pizon, in the French region of the Landes de Gascogne, who had left his home and had since wandered around the region, living off begging and temporary herding. The young man liked to brag to girls like Marguerite, frightening them with his satanic stories, in which he narrated how a man sent by the Devil dressed him in a wolf skin that transformed him into this animal and that he then dedicated himself to devouring animals and children, stating that the flesh of the latter was the most delicious (as can be seen, it is an opinion shared by almost all cannibals). Most witnesses speak of his wild appearance, his gray eyes, his curly reddish hair, his pointed nails and his enormous canine teeth protruding from his mouth (symptoms of porphyria?). However, the collective suggestion only affects Marguerite, the only one who claims to have seen him transformed into a wolf. After the attack on the girl, he was arrested and did not hesitate to declare himself the author of the disappearances of girls that were taking place in the Saint-Sever area, with justice deciding to transfer him to Bordeaux to be tried there in 1603. Grenier's own confessions are extensive and detailed. He was supposedly a werewolf from the age of ten or eleven, when his neighbor Duthillaire, who was also captured, introduced him to a mysterious black man to whom he gave different names (Lord of the Forest, M. de la Forest, Pierre Labourant), figure that coincides with the demonic entity that usually presides over the Sabbat and “who signed me with his nail, and then gave to me and Duthillaire a salve and a wolf-skin. From that time have I run about the country as a wolf.” he declared. Details about his murders and attacks were later confirmed by investigators and people involved, including a devoured baby whose remains he shared with a wolf, a girl he tore and bit until he ate her while tending his sheep in Saint-Antoine de Pizon, a girl which he devoured in the town of Grilland and numerous attacks on girls. Grenier also accused his father of being a werewolf and of having accompanied him in many of his crimes, but neither he nor his stepmother were found guilty of anything, rather their appearances in court served to further confirm the guilt of the young murderer. At first, he is sentenced to death by hanging and burning, but the subsequent appeal causes a change in the sentence that will mark a before and after in the appreciation of cases of lycanthropy. The defense used the testimonies of several doctors to commute the death sentence, demonstrating the mental insanity of the accused, but in a manner consistent with the beliefs of the time, following which demonology and theology would occupy the same place that psychiatry grants today to psychopathy or psychosis. In this way, the judges concluded that werewolves were people who believed they became wolves because the Devil possessed them to make them believe so, so they were not aware of their actions and therefore were not responsible for them. This refuted the legal doctrine on werewolves that Judge Jean Bodin established in the treatise De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), the French equivalent of the Malleus Maleficarum, where the Devil's responsibility was not denied, but it was concluded that the werewolf, as a man, retained his conscience and responsibility. The conclusions of the Bordeaux parliament, therefore, are quite close to the modern conception of the allegation or declaration of insanity, always keeping in mind that they were issued from the perspective of their time, and also taking into account the youth of the subject and his legal situation of helplessness, all factors that finally led to him being sentenced to life imprisonment in a monastery in Bordeaux on September 6, 1603. The impact of the case made Grenier receive several important visits there, especially that of the implacable inquisitor Pierre de Lancre, scourge of witchcraft in the Basque Country, to whom he contributed new confessions collected in his Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (1612), some of them sprinkled with a strange and macabre lyricism to which Lancre undoubtedly contributed a lot of his own. Thus, he came to affirm that he believed that his parents kicked him out of the house because his stepmother had seen him “vomiting dogs' paws and hands of small children.” “He also confessed to me, in a very simple way, that he still felt like eating the flesh of little boys, and that he found that of little girls especially delicious. I asked him if he would eat it if he had not been forbidden to do so and he answered me honestly that yes, he would, and even more so the flesh of girls than that of boys, because it was more tender”. He would die shortly after, at twenty years of age. The case of Jean Grenier marks the beginning of the end of the werewolf epidemic because his sentence proves that the courts are already beginning to consider lycanthropy more as a mental illness than as a diabolical curse, advocating forensic science.
“Serial werewolves” are a phenomenon practically exclusive to continental Europe and the truth is that, outside of France, there are more legends and superstitious stories than documented murderers, since many of the stories are not even mentioned specific names. In fact, most alleged real lycanthropes will be more involved in cattle theft and mutilation or in attacks without serious consequences than in homicide. However, there are some specific cases of quite renown.
There is hardly any news of serial killers related to lycanthropy in the territory of the British Isles, although gangs of murderers and cannibals (real and supposed) did abound, but without any animal transformation, especially in Scotland, such as famous Sawney Beane and his family. A powerful reason for this lack is the scarcity of wolves, decimated by the different Anglo-Saxon kings until their near extinction at the end of the 15th century (somewhat later in Ireland and Scotland), with the invaluable help, of course, of the island nature of the territory, which undoubtedly makes it easier to locate and exterminate them. Sabine Baring-Gould states that “the popular mind in Great Britain had lost the idea of connecting change of form with cannibalism. A man guilty of the crimes committed by the Angus brigand, or the carle of Perth, would have been regarded as a were-wolf in France or Germany, and would have been tried for Lycanthropy.”. Rather these murderers were considered savages, but not as men turned into animals.
Nor does Scandinavia present too many examples, despite being the great matrix of European mythology around the wolf: in the Nordic sagas there are many men who transform into wolves and we even have a lycanthropic murderer in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf: the sceadugenga ("shadow walker”) Grendel. Things change in Switzerland and Germany, where witchcraft in all its aspects was widely persecuted. In the Swiss region there are some examples of female werewolves declared or accused of being such, such as Guyetta Bugnon, who in 1580 confessed to having eaten two children in the coven, or the trio formed by Michée Bauloz, Jeanne de la Pierre and Suzanne Prevost, also blamed for infanticide and cannibalism.
Germany provides one of the most popular serial werewolves, Peter/Peeter Stubbe (also known as Stübbe, Stumpf, Stump or Stumpp), “the Werewolf of Cologne” or "the Werewolf of Bedburg", whose lurid story was circulated in printed pamphlets and was even translated into several languages. A Protestant farmer, Stubbe confessed that in his youth he had made a pact with the Devil to be able to commit crimes without being discovered, to which he provided him with a magical sash or belt that transformed him into a wolf every time he put it on him. In this way he would have committed some eighteen murders without being discovered during a period of at least twenty-five years in the municipality of Bedburg, not only children, but people of all ages and sexes. This is, therefore, the typical serial killer with a double life, who appears to be integrated into the community in which he lives while he perpetrates his murders in a systematic and camouflaged manner, not at all a disorganized killer. Lycanthropy acts here as the supernatural alibi typical of the time. Stubbe's crimes were especially cruel, including rape, mutilation, and cannibalism; He ripped two pregnant young women's fetuses from their wombs and then devoured their hearts. Apparently, he was a widower and had a daughter, Stubbe Bell, with whom he practiced incest and who was an accomplice in some of his murders along with his friend Katherine Trompin. Bell gave him a son who would also end up copulating with her and who in the end was not free from the homicidal fury of his father: after having raised him and given him an education, when he was yet a boy, Stubbe killed him and ate his brains. Arrested by neighboring hunters, Stubbe was sentenced to death and executed on October 31, 1589 in Bedburg, Here the story becomes quite complicated and several interpretations appear about the nature and origin of the character. It seems that our murderer's name would actually be Abal Griswold, Abil Griswold, Griswold Ubel or just Griswold; Stubbe would be an appellation or nickname coined as a result of the circumstances of his capture: stumpf, in German, is a Germanic term that is equivalent to "stump" or "stump", something that has been severed or cut, as was the left paw of the supposed wolf that Stubbe had become when his captors attacked him. This detail allowed him to be arrested because the farmer appeared shortly after with his left hand amputated, if we pay attention to the statements of those involved in his arrest. His end was no less cruel than his crimes. With his body tied to a wheel, the skin was torn from his bones in ten different places with red-hot tongs, his arms and legs were broken with a wooden axe, his head was torn off, and his skeleton was burned, same day that his daughter Bell and her friend also died at the stake. Stubbe's head was later nailed to a pike in Bedburg Square. The execution was attended by important personalities of the aristocracy of the region, something of course unusual at the time when it was about sentenced people belonging to the common people, which has given rise to some historians to affirm that both the conviction and the exemplary execution were a political assassination promoted by the ruling Catholic nobility in Bedburg Castle to punish the Protestants of the region, since Stubbe/Griswold had fought in the ranks of the latter before his final defeat in 1587. Thus, the true circumstances of this case do not seem entirely clear and allow us to get a small idea of some of the complex interests that underlay the witch hunt.
In the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, werewolves continued to appear long after 1650, the end of the French werewolf epidemic, but most of them were quite dubious, such as the two witches executed in Lüttich in 1610 for murdering children in wolf form, cited by the Brothers Grimm in their collection Deutsche Sagen (1816).
For its part, in Italy werewolf folklore abounds but murderers are scarce and the news about them are not very clear, such as that of the Werewolf of Pavia cited by the German physiologist Jobus Fincelius in his Mirabilibus, who around 1541 attacked people at open field, dismembering and mutilating them. When he was arrested, he confessed that his wolf skin grew into his body during the transformation and the judges then decided to cut off his arms and legs to prove it, thus ending his life before being able to prove his guilt. Also, the Neapolitan physicist Donato Antonio Altomare, a student of the subject of lycanthropic melancholy, testifies to having seen in Naples, along with a large crowd, a necrophilic werewolf carrying a leg of a corpse that he had unearthed. In Spain and Portugal, for their part, there are no concrete and reliable records of cases of lycanthropy, other than in oral tradition and literature.
The fame of werewolf regions that Livonia, Lithuania and even Constantinople and other regions of Eastern Europe have is recorded by authors such as the Swede Olaus Magnus or the Germans Jobus Fincelius and Sebastian Münster. In Livonia specifically, 18 trials for lycanthropy are documented with 31 convicted between 1527 and 1725, one of the most famous being that of the young Libbe Matz, in 1696, accused of leading a gang of eleven murderous werewolves in Vastemoisa. In Greece and the Balkans, regions of deep-rooted paganism, werewolves are mixed and confused with vampires, another category in which a large number of serial killers can also be included; They have a strong presence in legends and popular tales, but not in the field of real homicides.
It can be said that the werewolf hunt ends when the witch hunt stops. We have seen that the cases of Jean Grenier or Jacques Roulet had begun to bring together critical and expert voices who not only doubted the diabolical origin of lycanthropy, but also the very existence of werewolves, already pointing out the possibility that the supposed shapeshiftings were the product of a delirium or any other form of deception of the senses, beginning to consider the possibility of mental pathology (do not forget that a line of thought so obvious to us could constitute a serious reason for heresy at that time). The truth is that the records begin to decrease from 1650, just after the end of the devastating Thirty Years' War in 1648, which precisely confronted Catholics and Protestants, so we must add the political factor to that of scientific progress. In the 18th century werewolves practically “disappeared” and so did serial killers, so that, if we follow the official records well into the 19th century, we could only consider bands of homicidal bandits or especially bloody pirates as such. The industrialization of society and urbanization weakened much of the superstitions and collective hysteria about the wolf and other creatures that existed in the rural environment. But, at the same time, circumstances such as the appearance of the press, literacy and the improvement of police methods, together with the decisive psychological factors of urban alienation and anonymity, will also contribute to spreading the figure of the serial killer who, once his fully human nature is accepted, will not be free of lycanthropic traits, paraphernalia or symptomatology in specific, but very significant cases.
The crime for which Antoine Léger was convicted in 1824 seems to largely respond to the scheme. Léger abhorred human contact, so he abandoned civilization and retired to live as a hermit in the forests of the French region of Essone, where he strangled the twelve-year-old girl Aimée Constance Debully, devoured parts of her body, including her heart, and then practiced necrophilia with his corpse. During the trial in Versailles, the murderer declared that he had been possessed by an “evil spirit” and his lawyer relied on the reason of the insanity that his “savage” way of life had caused him, which did not save him from the guillotine. Although no diagnosis of lycanthropy was made explicit, the truth is that the circumstances of the crime resurrected old ghosts of the French collective unconscious, and Léger ended up being baptized “le Loup-garou de Cerny” (“the Werewolf of Cerny”).
Similar circumstances surround the murders of Giorgio Orsolano, “the Hyena of San Giorgio”, who would become part of Italian folklore as a kind of “bogeyman”, the first declared serial killer in Italy. Orsolano was a repeat rapist who, after leaving prison in 1831 and pretending to have rehabilitated himself by starting a family in the town of San Giorgio Canovese, murdered and raped three girls, confessing to having also dismembered their bodies, although only the remains of one were found. The disappearances were initially attributed to the region's wolves and after the sentencing it was even said that Orsolano sold the meat of his victims as sausages in his butcher shop. Hanged in 1835, his body was analyzed at the University of Turin in search of causes for his murderous behavior, following the principles of obsolete criminal anthropology, and a plaster cast of his head was made that is still on display in the Museum of Human Anatomy Luigi Rolando.
Sabine Baring-Gould collects the story, it is not known to what extent apocryphal or real, of the Werewolf of Galicia, captured in 1849. It refers to a beggar named Swiatek who survived with his family as best he could the terrible famine in the village of Polomyja, in Austrian Galicia, present-day Poland. He was a highly appreciated person in the area, whose humble inhabitants welcomed and helped on many occasions, so it caused great shock to discover that he was responsible for the disappearances of children that were taking place and that were attributed to hungry wolves, thus organizing numerous raids. Swiatek was discovered by the suspicious village innkeeper, who entered his cabin looking for stolen food and surprised him by hiding the head of a young girl of about fifteen years old in her clothes; the remaining parts of his body, some raw and others more or less cooked, appeared in different places in the house: his legs and thighs in a jar, his heart and entrails in a box, and much of his blood in a bowl. During the hearing in Dąbków neither the beggar nor his family agreed on the exact number of his victims, but based on the evidence found, especially children's clothing, there could be fourteen of different sexes. Swiatek confessed that his taste for anthropophagy had begun when he found the charred corpse of a tavern owner after the fire in his establishment and the hunger awakened by the smell and sight of the burned flesh was so great that he could not resist it, so he ended up eating part of the corpse. Since then, he had gained noticeably and suspiciously weight as a result of his copious cannibal feasts. The fury of the population at the events was so great that, without a doubt, if he had not hanged himself on the bars of his cell, the murderer would have died at the hands of the villagers.
But the most paradigmatic case of a modern werewolf killer, considered in fact the first known diagnosis of clinical lycanthropy ratified by a civil jury, not an inquisitorial one, is that of the Spanish Manuel Blanco Romasanta, “the Werewolf of Allariz”. In the north of Spain, especially in Galicia, legends and beliefs linked to werewolves have always abounded, but this rich popular heritage has not been matched by the existence of specific murderers that are related to the profile that interests us, the which are scarce and their news very confusing, unlike what happens with cases of witchcraft itself. Until the appearance of Romasanta, who stands as the incarnation of the ancestral myth of the lobishome, the Galician werewolf, a figure that some authors associate with that of the saudador or saludador, a type of rural healer or shaman, because it was believed that one and another used to coincide in the seventh male child of a family composed only of men, a number that already predestined him to be born with certain magical or supernatural qualities, among which lycanthropy could manifest. Romasanta, born in Esgos (Orense) in 1809, was a peddler who traveled through the towns in the Sierra de San Mamede area, and who, before becoming a widower at the age of 21 in 1834, many already believed to be a suspect in two deaths: those of a servant in Castilla and that of another seller, Manuel Ferreiro. In 1844, the Court of First Instance of Ponferrada, León, requested his appearance as a suspect in the murder of sheriff Vicente Fernández, in charge of seizing his store for non-payment, but when he did not appear, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for rebellion. Romasanta flees to Galicia and hides in the Ourense area of Rebordechau, where he combines work as a day laborer at the home of Andrés Blanco, an old acquaintance of his family, with the street sale of contraband merchandise at festivals and markets. Our “werewolf” gains the appreciation of the local people, who nickname him “El Canicha” (“the Poodle”), and finds a new and twisted source of income by seducing women older than him, single mothers, widows or separated who, due to their situation of need, were especially vulnerable. Romasanta promised them employment and accommodation in the homes of wealthy families outside Galicia, using his contacts with the people of the region, taking their possessions as a deposit while the women reached their destination. With this system he manages to first attract Manuela García Blanco and her daughter Petronila; he had previously taken Manuela as a partner in his sales business and it will be from her family and environment that the rest of his victims will come from: his sisters, Benita and Josefa, along with their respective children, Francisco and José; and Romasanta's own co-mother, Antonia Rúa Carneiro, with her daughters Peregrina and Francisca. For a long time, the peddler manages to hide their disappearances by stating that they have all managed to prosper in their new destinations, but, as their stories become increasingly contradictory and not very credible, the family's suspicions will be confirmed when the neighbors claim to have seen “El Canicha” selling some of the belongings of the disappeared in the markets. Faced with growing rumors, Romasanta flees again and is found in the Toledo town of Nombela, where he works as a reaper under the false name of Antonio Gómez. Transferred to the Orense court of Verín in August 1852, he confessed to having not only murdered the women of the García Blanco family and their children, but also several other people for thirteen years, sometimes alone, other times accompanied by two other Valencian men, Genaro and Antonio, with whom he had in common being under the influence of a family curse that turned them into wolves and drove them to murder and devour the flesh of their victims.
There is no trace of anybody (nor will there be one) when the process begins in October of the same year in Allariz, where the doctors' report, concluding that the accused is perfectly aware of his actions and that the lycanthropic curse is pure invention, together with the evidence of the clothing and Romasanta's confession, they will be enough to sentence him to the garrote on April 6, 1853 as the author of nine murders. Then the mysterious figure of Mr. Philips, a professor in electro-biology (the name by which hypnosis was known then), enters the scene to make a decisive turn in the history of criminology. For many, he is the French doctor Joseph-Pierre Durand de Gros (1826-1900), an utopian socialist who had traveled to several countries during his exile from the France of Napoleon III and who would be one of the main promoters of braidism or the use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes. The truth is that this Mr. Philips, interested in the story of Romasanta, sends a letter to the Spanish Ministry of Grace and Justice in which he states that lycanthropy is a mental illness that can be induced and cured through hypnosis and offers to perform a demonstration. The government of Isabel II recognizes the scientific interest of the statement and asks the Court of A Coruña to consider it in the trial, even suspending the execution of the prisoner if the case arises. After several appeals and sentences, the royal pardon achieved the commutation of the death penalty sentence to life imprisonment, for which Romasanta entered the prison of A Coruña on May 17, 1854, finally dying, according to the most recent investigations, on September 14, 1863 in the Ceuta prison due to stomach cancer.
The subsequent discovery of two identification certificates of the murderer, one of baptism, in which she appears as a woman with the given name of Manuela, and another of Christian confirmation at the age of fifteen, where he is already named Manuel, also allows speculation about a possible case of hermaphroditism or some type of hormonal imbalance that would explain his feminine features and swollen breasts, peculiarities corroborated during medical examinations. Thus, we must add the repression of his sexual ambiguity, something far from being tolerated by 19th century morality, as a possible aggravating factor for his mental disorder. However, the nature of his clinical lycanthropy, which allowed him to escape the death penalty, remains debatable. Romasanta is far from the “disorganized killer” scheme that would be expected in someone possessed by an uncontrollable murderous frenzy, since he plans with coldness and time the framework that precedes the disappearances, without forgetting that economic motive has an important weight in them and the absolute lack of repentance and emotion when confessing their crimes. More than a dissociative disorder, what seems to be a clear case of an organized psychopathic killer, whose recourse to the alibi of the wolf curse, with the consequent legal conclusion of mental illness, is nothing more than a sample of his lucidity, aware of the power of suggestion that the figure of the werewolf still retained in the society of his time. In fact, the figure of Romasanta will serve to reinforce another popular Spanish legend, that of the “Sacamantecas” (“Fat extractor”) or “home do unto” in Galicia, since a rumor spread among the population that he extracted the body fat of his victims to sell it in Portugal. Another proof that at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution there was still a powerful dialectic between superstition and science, tradition and progress.
As all these cases demonstrate, the myth of the werewolf continues to be rooted above all in the rural environment and its connection with the reality of serial killers will fade over time as urbanization and scientific progress advance. Until the turn-of-the-century hysteria caused by the crimes of Jack the Ripper, in the heart of the British Empire, ousts the legend in favor of its human, all too human reverse.
From the 20th century to the present day, there are no longer so many cases of serial killers with clinical lycanthropy, if we have to consider that this disorder is what was behind the metamorphoses declared in the past, both by the murderers themselves and by courts and witnesses. And, of course, public opinion stops appealing to causes other than those of insanity or psychopathy to explain the murders, no matter how much the nickname "wolf" or "werewolf", as well as that of "vampire", continues to be used by the media, due to its impact and evocative power or as a synonym for “monster”, to name some of the most famous criminals of the contemporary age.
The Mark of the Wolfman
There are still serial killers who may present some of the traits that we consider lycanthropic, if we look at the animal savagery of their acts or the mental evocation of animal metamorphosis, but it would be too fine a line to want to include within our “serial werewolves” typology any disorganized murderer, necrophile, cannibal, subjects with dissociative disorder, possessed by fury or who murders in the forests, as some authors do with characters such as Martin Dumollard, François Bertrand, Joseph Vacher, Albert Fish or even Andréi Chikatilo.
Without dwelling too much on his already well-known criminal career, we can find aspects worthy of mention in one of the most famous murderers of the 20th century: Fritz Haarmann, “the Butcher of Hanover”. Between 1918 and 1924 Haarmann murdered about twenty-eight young men, officially, because he himself confessed to having killed at least fifty. Helped by the male prostitute Hans Grans, he dismembered the corpses, ate part of them and what was left or sold it in his butcher shop in the form of steaks, sausages and other pieces of meat, or threw it into the canal. What makes him a functional “werewolf” with vampiric impulses is that, where others use knives, guns, axes or even hammers (not at all wolfish), Haarmann finds it stimulating to use his teeth. In his confessions he states that, when it came time to kill, he abandoned himself to a wild frenzy that led him to bite and chew the throats of his victims, with such intensity that he sometimes separated their heads from the body. He also commented that he reached orgasm with the taste of blood.
An amalgam of impulsive savagery and fetishism present the crimes of the mysterious Harry Gordon, baptized as “the Werewolf of San Francisco” in view of the circumstances of the last two he committed. Years before, in 1931, this murderer of women had killed 11-year-old Virginia Brooks and 17-year-old Louise Tuber in San Diego, both raped, strangled, mutilated and then hung from a tree with a sailor's knot. His real name was Wilhelm/William Johnston, a huge, strong blonde sailor of Danish origin, who in 1933 also murdered his own wife, Beverly, in their home in New York, but this time changing his modus operandi to what would make him famous, thus revealing the profile of a psychopath: to his terrible sexual violence he adds a series of cuts made post-mortem with a blade in various parts of the body, both on the face and on the thorax and limbs, exposing a large part of the internal organs, which are even allowed to be extracted and manipulated. These cuts always consciously imitate the traces that the claws of a wild animal would leave, and that is what will earn him the nickname “werewolf”. Johnston flees to San Francisco, where he changes his name to Harry Gordon and kills two prostitutes, found in hotel rooms five years apart and with the same knife marks, as well as some variants: Betty Coffin in 1935, with duct tape over her mouth and one of her breasts torn off; and Irene McCarthy in 1940, this time with a belt tight around her throat, cigarette burns and numerous marks from blows. When the police locate the sailor to question him as a suspect, Johnston/Gordon breaks down and immediately confesses. In 1934 he may also have murdered Louise Jefferson, who was found mutilated and strangled at the foot of the Golden Gate, and Ruby Allen. He finally died in the gas chamber on September 5, 1941. Little else is known about this criminal, so the concrete meaning of the cuts he made and his possible symbolic intention remain unclear.
Underworld or the postmodern lycanthropic cult
If during the late medieval lycanthropic hysteria it was society and power that stigmatized murderers as werewolves, what is symptomatic of recent times is the appearance of the reverse process, by which the murderer appropriates the symbology of the lycanthrope a priori, making it part of their modus operandi, in what we could call “postmodern werewolves”, increasingly rare, but with very distinct characteristics, especially in the last decades of the century. And, of course, the myth of the werewolf takes root this time also in the American continent, where before it had been seen more as a positive symbol, especially among indigenous peoples. At a time when there is a true “golden age” of serial killers, it was inevitable that the increase in their number would also mean that they would appear in the most varied typologies and with the most peculiar features. The declared lycanthropes now fall more within the profile of “necrosadists”, that is, they find pleasure in all the aspects that surround death. Its field of action moves from the countryside to cities and suburbs and its victims are no longer limited to children, but rather they prey on the wide range of options offered by globalized societies. Faced with the public, they maintain the “mask of sanity” described by psychiatrist Hervey Milton Cleckley in his 1941 book of the same name: they are no longer monsters on the outside, but on the inside. These “symbolic werewolves” are usually mystifiers who unite mythomania with monomania, worrying about collecting and projecting the symbology and paraphernalia related to the myth, but now they no longer focus on superstition or legends from folklore, but rather the idiosyncrasy that they handle is filtered by the vision that pop culture has codified through cinema, literature and comics. Their intentions are varied: fetishism, narcissism, psychological tactics, an alibi for mental illness... However, we must not underestimate the influence of certain aspects of occultism on some of these criminals, whose behaviors sometimes coincide with those of certain cults, and this is always a thorny issue for criminological analysis given the panorama of neo-inquisitorial collective hysteria that was reinstated by the media propaganda of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s. For those interested, we have examples of this esoteric praxis of psychic/physical metamorphosis in Austin Osman Spare’s rituals of the atavism, in the Mystere Lycanthropique in Michael Bertiaux’s Cult of the Black Serpent or in the magical Nikolas Schreck’s Werewolf Order, as well as in certain manifestations of voodoo and other African-American religions.
One of the most controversial lycanthropic tropes is that of murders committed following the routine of the lunar phases, which is always problematic and controversial for criminology due to its dubious scientific value. However, it is true that it sometimes reveals a ritual procedure common to many murderers, such as the Monster of Florence, who murdered mostly during the new moon cycle, or the one we are going to concern ourselves with here: Francis Leroy, “the Full Moon Killer”. His bizarre criminal fame begins with a series of home invasions that occurred in the French town of Bergerac, in the Dordogne region, starting in December 1978. The assailant, tall and thin, always breaks in hooded and masked (sometimes with masks, others with stockings or balaclavas, even on one occasion with an old man's mask), with a waterproof poncho and armed with a souped-up rifle that he ties with a rope to his body. In these attacks, attention is drawn to the strange behavior of the assailant, who unnecessarily prolongs his incursions talking about incoherent things with the hostages in a strange Spanish accent (which is why a possible affiliation with the terrorist group ETA is initially suspected), to the point that he is often surprised by other members of the families who enter later or by neighbors, having to flee hastily. Some even confront him, such as retired admiral Jacques Bodhuin, who even manages to remove his mask and see part of his face. Nor does it seem that his motive is robbery, because he keeps small amounts of money and objects of little value, so his erratic attitude earns him the nickname "the Madman of Bergerac", the same title of a novel by George Simenon. belonging to his detective Maigret series. Whatever might be picturesque about this peculiar criminal is giving way to terror, because his assaults continue sporadically for several years and become increasingly violent, going from intimidation to aggression, rape and inevitably murder, which comes on January 24, 1984, in the person of Jacques Royer, stabbed seven times when he tried to stop him after carrying out his ninth assault. The gendarmerie organizes raids and arrests several suspects, but the most solid clue comes curiously when the investigations confirm that the crimes have occurred on full moon nights. This fact leads to focusing surveillance on Francis Leroy, the owner of a horse farm in Périgueux who turns out to be “the Full Moon Killer”, guilty of several assaults and the murder of the young Christiane on June 29, 1961 in the city of Saintes, a full moon night. Christiane was strangled and savagely mutilated and beaten in her bedroom, with bite marks and scratches made from four fingers of her right hand. Leroy is arrested because in his locker at the Saintes Agricultural School there is a transistor that he had stolen from one of the houses. The murderer confesses and in 1962 he is sentenced to twenty years in prison, being released on parole in 1973. Leroy seems reintegrated, because he lives with his partner in Périgueux, where he is a very popular and active member of the community, but most of the evidence points to his guilt, the most decisive being the strange scratches found on the body of Christiane, his first victim. The revealing detail is that the “Full Moon Killer” is missing two phalanges of the little finger of his right hand, an injury that the young Gaëlle, one of his last victims, noticed during the last attack in 1984. The police decided to arrest him on January 30 of the same year and then the evidence accumulates, although he refuses to admit his guilt: in his wallet they find the credit card of one of the assaulted people, he is positively identified by Jacques Bodhuin and, finally, the same model of rifle that he carried in the attacks is found on his farm. Francis Leroy was born on December 24, 1940, a date that has already been said to be linked to the werewolf curse, the son of a prisoner of war and a possessive mother. In his youth, he wandered around until at the age of 22 he decided to enter the Saintes High School of Agriculture, where he met the young Christiane and began to harass and blackmail her until he finally murdered her. When he was released from prison in 1973, he returned to live with his parents on the Périgueux farm, where his relationship with his mother became increasingly tense and suffocating, to the point of questioning and preventing their partner relationships. Leroy takes refuge in the world of the occult and the paranormal, developing a belief in hidden forces that dominate the world, an argument that he will use to justify his actions and that psychiatrists dismiss as a quibbling, concluding that his personality is narcissistic and violent, that of a person who finds pleasure in exercising dominance over others. However, the defense replaces the argument of "occult forces" with that of the lunar influence on his hormones to try to prove Leroy's alleged lack of responsibility in his crimes, going so far as to perform medical tests that are not very conclusive. In the trial that begins on June 19, 1989 in Périgueux, after five years of investigation, the absurdity of the lunar alibi becomes evident, especially after the crazy statements of biology professor and parapsychology expert Rémy Chauvin. Francis Leroy, who remains impassive throughout the process and barely elaborates on his statements, is sentenced to the maximum penalty: life imprisonment with a security period of 20 years. Twenty years later he is released and currently lives in Bergerac, thus repeating his life cycle.
Jack Owen Spillman III is an example of a ritualistic killer fully aware of his desire to kill. A butcher by profession, in 1995 he was arrested for the double homicide of Rita, a forty-eight-year-old woman, and her fourteen-year-old daughter Amanda, who were found in their home in Douglas County, Washington, in a wild but studied crime scene. The body of her mother appeared in one of her rooms with thirty-one stab wounds, her genital area removed and placed over her mouth and her breasts torn off and placed in another room, near the body of her daughter. She had also been stabbed, beaten and raped, showing a baseball bat inserted into her vagina. They were both lying face up on their beds, with their legs open in the same peculiar position. The police immediately arrested Spillman as the main suspect because he had several charges of burglary and had been seen in the area, discovering that he had been harassing the young Amanda for some time and that he had a ski mask with the young woman's blood on the part from his mouth, probably from having drunk it. The butcher ended up confessing and revealed that he had killed a third person: a missing girl that he had buried in the same position as his last two victims and whom he claims to have raped several times after she was dead. Especially interesting are the strange psychological characteristics of Spillman that came to light later, when the police interrogated his cellmate, especially because they were made in relative privacy and not used at trial, in which he showed no remorse and pleaded guilty of all three murders. Our killer was convinced he was a werewolf who felt the need to stalk and hunt his “prey.” His mythomania does not end here, because to carry out this desire he had spent time studying the techniques of the most famous serial killers, even bragging about wanting to become the most famous in the United States. The cellmate stressed the intensity with which Spillman recreated his fantasies and that on one occasion he even cut his arm with a blade to drink his own blood. Spillman thus shows an explosive profile that combines narcissism, psychopathy, ritualism, copycat effect, necrosadism and quite possibly a personality disorder, although he was not diagnosed with clinical lycanthropy or similar conditions during the process that sentenced him to life imprisonment.
The lycanthropic mythomania of the Canadian Jeremy Allan Steinke is not exactly directly related to crime, but rather responds to an aesthetic affiliation and a vision of the world that does not have to have anything homicidal, but rather shows a quite artistic and creative character, moral prejudices aside. Precisely the instrumentalization of these prejudices after his crime allows us to include it as another sad episode within the disastrous Satanic Panic and consider its two executors as authentic postmodern murderers, firstly due to the nihilistic nature of their actions and secondly because of the feedback and paranoia effect, typical of the simulacrum society, that their lifestyles produced on public opinion. Jeremy Steinke is known as the accomplice of his partner, the teenager Jasmine Richardson, in the Richardson family murders, perpetrated in April 2006 in Medicine Hat, a city in the Canadian province of Alberta, when he was 23 years old and she was only 12. Steinke stabbed Jasmine's parents, Marc Richardson, 42, and his wife Debra, 48, to death, and she did the same with her brother Jacob, 8, whom her boyfriend finished off by slitting his throat. When asked at the trial why they had done it, Jasmine declared “I loved him so much. I thought that it would bring us closer together” and that they also killed the little boy because she thought it was very cruel to leave him alone without his parents. It is more of a crime of passion that the two young men had been planning for a long time because Jasmine's parents had prevented her from seeing Steinke again, claiming that they did not like his appearance or condition and that he was a bad influence on their daughter. The couple belonged to the Gothic subculture, one of the media's favorite groups to be used as a scapegoat for the most depraved and criminal behavior, in many cases with tragic consequences, as happened with the surreal conviction of the West Memphis Three. Although in this case the murderers were not motivated by their aesthetic inclinations and hobbies when committing their crimes, the media once again acted as a kind of modern inquisition, the same media that in recent years have given an increasingly predominant role to crime journalism in their news, seeking at the same time morbidity and social engineering, but without worrying about analyzing the social dimensions of the problems, in the context of North American social Darwinism that encourages differences and pressure on individuals by establishing differences between “winners” and “losers”. A phenomenon that the film Natural Born Killers (1994) portrays very well, which fascinated our two young killers to the point that Steinke considered it “the best love story of all time”, assuring his friends that Jasmine and he should do the same with his parents, but without sparing the little brother. The crime thus becomes a spectacle, a perverse multi-layered intertextual exercise very characteristic of consumer society. Focusing now on the personality of Jeremy Steinke, the media gave greater importance to the fact that he was Gothic than to his social status and personal circumstances: a young man physically abused by his alcoholic father and his later stepfathers, suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) that develop into attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that has to be treated with medication and antidepressants, who suffered school abuse to the point of having to drop out of school, with very low self-esteem and living with her mother, Jacqueline May, in a trailer park. The Gothic universe was nothing more than a refuge and a relief that allowed him a form of personal expression at the same time that it generated a certain feeling of belonging to a community, which is interesting to dwell on because Steinke takes from it a very specific tendency and minority that helps us to verify the evolution of the myth of the werewolf today. While his girlfriend Jasmine was a practitioner of the Wicca religion, he is linked to certain groups of fans of the werewolf figure, known under different names, including “Lycans” or, more recently, “Teen Wolves”, who carry fangs, claws, special contact lenses and similar attributes, and in some cases they show inclinations close to those of the Otherkin (neologism coming from the mixture of the English words "other" and "kind"), a group of people who do not consider themselves human or they claim to be half human, an extreme case being that of the young Sarah Rodriguez/Wolfie Blackheart, who in 2010 decapitated a stray dog, cooked its head in the style of a taxidermist and posted a photo of the result on the social network MySpace. It seems that Steinke also took too far the principles of an otherwise harmless urban tribe, arising from the success of the Underworld film saga, which speaks of ancient brotherhoods of werewolves or “lycans”. If we say that he went a step further, it is not because of the murder itself, which has nothing lycanthropic about it, but because of many of the eccentricities to which he indulged long before it, according to his own statements and those of his friends and acquaintances, of which it is difficult to discern which are true and which are due to simple youthful posturing or the desire to provoke. The young Canadian considered himself a 300-year-old werewolf who was part of a “lycan brotherhood” that would one day conquer the world, he boasted that he liked to drink blood and carried a vial of blood hanging around his neck, supposedly from Jasmine. In a recording made clandestinely he comments: “It's true, man. I was drinking blood. (…) A friend made me blood cookies. It was supposed to be a white dough cookie, like a sugar cookie. When they came out of the oven they were pink. That is how much blood he put in them. Well, the cookies were alright but I was … a little hesitant on eating because of STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) and shit like that.” All these fantasies reveal a morbid recreation that has more to do with youthful rebellion, the search for transgression of the norm in a sophisticated way, adjusting to the iconic patterns of their subculture, but in the end the couple's crime is of two psychopathic personalities, a product of both the violent environment of broken families and the alienated life of their community. Lycanthropy in Jeremy Steinke, then, appears as a cathartic mythomania, and it is the media that turns it into a criminal cause, recovering for our times the paranoia of religious obscurantism in the form of puritan ideology. The story ends (or doesn’t?) with both members of the couple charged with three counts of first-degree murder: Jasmine Richardson is sentenced to 10 years in prison (the maximum sentence for a minor), the first four in a psychiatric hospital, she was released in 2011 to serve her sentence under conditional supervision and finished her sentence in 2016, at age 17, without showing remorse for her crime; Jeremy Steinke gets a life sentence, with no parole up to a minimum of 25 years, and remains currently in prison.
The latest case that is known reveals yet another twist in the application of the myth, this time in what has to do with the perception and confusion of reality, something that responds quite a bit to the idiosyncrasy of virtual hegemony typical of the 21st century. Its protagonist is Pankaj Bashin, better known as the “Werewolf Killer”, who in 2018 stabbed Brad Johnson, 65-year-old manager of a furniture store in Alexandria, Virginia, 53 times and gouged out his eyes with a box cutter. The two had previously argued because Bashin, then thirty-four years old, came into the store acting unbalanced, asking about boxes that had human DNA samples inside. Police found him in a car shortly after, covered in blood and naked from the waist down. Bashin told police that Jackson was turning into a werewolf and that he killed him “to save 99 percent of the moon and the planets.” Here the lycanthropy is part of a hallucination and is projected onto another person, triggering an outburst of panic that ultimately leads to murder. For eight months Bashin's mental health had been deteriorating without apparent cause, to the point of having to be hospitalized a month before the crime, where he improved with medication, but when he left he worsened again and ended up disappearing. During the trial, five doctors diagnosed him with bipolar I disorder (BD-I), the most extreme degree of this type of mental illness, characterized by severe manic episodes that can last several days, so the insanity plea allowed him a verdict of not guilty on July 1, 2019. Bashin was confined in a mental institution in Virginia until 2022, when doctors considered him cured and an Alexandria judge signed his conditional release, prohibiting him from accessing social networks while that situation lasts.
Against all odds, it does not seem that homicidal werewolves are going to disappear in the future. Everything indicates that, either challenging progress or adapting to it, serial werewolves will endure, honoring their shapeshifting nature: adopting new forms, which we cannot yet anticipate.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. It is a long historical survey, and the distinction it depends on should be stated plainly: the sixteenth and seventeenth century werewolf cases it describes are witchcraft prosecutions, and the confessions in them were obtained under torture. Peter Stumpp, Gilles Garnier, Jacques Roulet, Jean Grenier and the rest were convicted by courts that accepted transformation into an animal as a fact, so nothing in those records establishes what any of those people actually did. The article says as much about the trials, and the reader should carry that through the whole first half. The modern cases are different and are in this archive: Michael Lupo, called the Wolf Man of London, has four convictions on his own guilty plea with two attempted murders; Joseph Vacher eleven established with more claimed; Martin Dumollard was convicted and guillotined with six or more deaths attributed; Albert Fish three to ten or more; David Berkowitz six; Joseph Paul Franklin convicted across a series of trials with around twenty confessed.