VICTIMS AND KILLERS AND THE UNKNOWN LEGACY

The remains of people who have met their end by fair means or foul are for the most part in their sanctioned state and place, be it in the bone, ash or even preserved cadaver, but there are many who have simply vanished far and wide, in myriad, misfortunate or purposeful circumstances that are either known or assumed to be final. Though those people are physically missing closure is requited to emotionally dependent parties: formal reverence has been accorded, spiritual passage ordained; therefore they are only missing in the one sense – they have been fittingly mourned into the ether. In contrast are the missing who might be or are quite likely dead, and if so, it is not only that eventuality that respectively poses a nightmare for families, familiars, and wider society (in the abstract sense), but the potentially hideous circumstances of the demise. Notwithstanding the tantalizing, yet diminishing prospect of miraculous return, there is that faint (though inordinately more distressing) possibility that such persons have fallen prey to a monster, are captives in suffering, or are alike those gruesome relics of unimaginable ordeal, which are so sensationalized in the media; the thought of them in their desecrated repose, denied their eschatological rites is so obscene to atavistic sensibilities! Paradoxically, it is the torment of not knowing; the spectrum of outcomes, which may be a worse ordeal than the truth revealed.

Submerged in the psyche of Americans is the ever likely latent activity of serial killers that history has shown is inherent to their society, this awakened when bodies are found and patterns of disappearances emerge that are highly indicative of their agency. The contemporaneous documented evidence of this is much greater now, pointing perhaps to an increase in such behavior, but it is willfully foolish to assume that such aberrant human nature was less prevalent further back because accounts are scarcer and fable-like; quite impossible to believe when one considers how tyranny, general barbarity and callous justice seem so much diminished with time, contrary to the value of human life. That said, societies, much tighter, stricter, much more superstitious, may have been less commodious to the depredations of serial killers, when the totalitarian ruling elites, the regnant, religious, would arbitrarily expunge any threat to order – though there was often the licence to murder subjects for the cruel in power. Consider how suspect members of society were branded witches and destroyed, but also how devious politics might have been determinate!

The price of life has risen over the ages like a commodity, (though inversely so), and with hiatus: periods of economic turmoil leading to abject poverty, political upheaval leading to war and genocide, lives rendered worthless. But now, in America, life is valued in a way drastically transformed to those aged folk who may remember a form of poverty, the racism, the general neglect for the unfortunate, the risks of life in general – that sense of human dispensability now so removed.

Unsurprisingly what constitutes a missing person as an official category has changed with the evolution of society. It is true that before welfare provisions “one half of society did not know how the other half lived” and nor did it care in the main. There is no watershed event which altered this situation completely, instead incremental legislative reforms for welfare (coordinate with burgeoning human compassion) and the development of institutions to register and monitor persons of concern begat a state that took up the issue of poverty and of supposedly errant persons at risk. Now, we have the NCIC (National Crime Information Centre) instituted in 1967 under the auspices of the FBI, itself established in 1908. Whereas once home economics dictated that the offspring of the poor flew the nest and fended for themselves, of little concern to anyone (unless an outlaw), now the runaway is a source of great private and public concern, this despite the likelihood – which is proven true in short order in most cases (see below) - that the runaway is bound to come back, recriminations and all, returned to home by the elastic of emotional dependence. Unsurprisingly most missing persons (56.8% (2010 NCIC figures)) are under the age of twenty; it would be prudent to assume that a far greater majority are under the age of thirty. They are indeed runaways, fugitives from their growing pains, their responsibilities, and their place in society.

The figures for missing persons are perhaps unhelpful to provide since they are based on supposition. But those figures do give a rough picture of the greater social malaise in America, how the stage is set for those who prey on human egregiousness, the body of delinquents, those dislocated from their social substrate, who may be vulnerable.

During 2010, 692,944 missing person records were entered into NCIC and 703,316 cases were removed, many dating back some time no doubt. By the end of that year there were 85,820 active cases, i.e. people who were considered seriously at risk or dead (there is no mention of felons in that resource so it should be assumed that they are categorized separately). These figures vary from year to year but not drastically: for 1990, 663,921 cases entered, 661,945 removed; 2000, 876,213 cases entered, 882,163 removed. It can be surmised then that a lot people go missing and a lot return, year in year out in America.

Although the circumstances of all recorded murders are mostly antithetical to those of serial killer murders as statistics make clear, the data for homicides is valuable insight into American society, especially when compared to that of a similarly advanced nation such as the U.K. In 2010 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported 14,748 homicides or 4.8 per 100,000 for America, (Historical rates per 100,000: 5.5, 2000; 9.4, 1990; 10.2, 1980; 7.9 in 1970; 5.4, 1960; 4.6, 1950 (FBI Uniform Crime Reports)). N.B., there was quite a rise during the period of the “Crack Epidemic”. For 2004, the homicide rate for England and Wales was 1.6 (W.H.O.). There are around 800 murders per year in this region, so when the serial killer Dr Harold Shipman (1946 - 2004) was found to have killed circa 250 patients between 1975 and 1998 (although no one knows how many for sure - 459 died under his care), the retrospective statistics for homicide were drastically upset, although when homicides are recorded is unknown to this author.

Of course not all serial killers roam the nation looking for itinerant people but the scenario is compelling. That and serial killers traveling around to parts they are unknown and preying on unwitting locals. But you do not have to be far from home to be outside of a society; people eschew their community, or are never part of it due to their lifestyle, while being in the vicinity, seemingly invisible, or disregarded as miscreant. This is so much the case with prostitutes, who many willfully deny the existence of, to the point of pretending they do not believe what is before their eyes; they are a class of people very vulnerable to serial killers, to whom they represent easy, but perhaps too easy a form of prey.

While Dr Harold Shipman was very much part of his community, he carried on his awful and overwhelmingly unsuspected practice of killing the mostly elderly, mostly female patients who came to him or were sent by relatives, unwittingly seeking him out for wholly different attentions. His motives are quite unfathomable notwithstanding his forgery of patient wills (why a G.P. would be that desperate for money is a mystery!). Dr Shipman escaped suspicion for so long because he was a meek and gentlemanly professional; his set up was incumbent, his victims did not go missing, they simply died where they were known to be, and in inconceivably large numbers, in some cases perfectly healthy, if a little decrepit. It is almost impossible for many people to believe that a community doctor would engage in murder on any scale, and this must have been crucial to his fortunes, if indeed he killed for any form of gain at all.

There are many other examples of serial killers whose activities were predominantly home-based or based in a haunted locale, and of those who also killed wherever the opportunity presented further afield. A notorious proprietor-serial killer was H.H. Holmes (1861 – 1896), aka, Herman Webster Mudgett, aka, Dr. Henry Howard Holmes (another qualified doctor). He is best known for the in-situ killings in his Chicago boarding house, later discovered to be a “house of horrors” known as the “Murder Castle”. He did in fact kill on the road later on, but it seems he was most comfortable working from home.

In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, which drew in people from as far as transport allowed, in huge numbers. They came to witness the wonders here, many not knowing the city at all, completely in thrall to the prospective spectacle; the last thing on their minds was that there existed in the midst a serial killer who would welcome all comers to his hotel. (And were there other, disparate killers perhaps?) Nor did the locals suspect a serial killer was present, despite the strange appearance of his establishment, or if they did, they were surely complicit. It was a great recipe for success: the erudite Dr H. H. Holmes’ substantial, elaborate, well maintained premises was a seemingly inviting prospect to clientele desperate to find board in the crush, and his professional demeanor, his deceptive charm, made for a honeypot of depraved endeavor.

H.H. Holmes killed at least 27 people according to records, and may have killed 200 according to the investigating authorities. What is documented is that he employed elaborate means, in his elaborate edifice, to subdue them, in the inescapable confines of the rooms, via gas poisoning, via his own physical attentions, delighting in the suffering he witnessed, then the dissection of them before disposal by boiler-fire or lime-pit, or who knows what means?

In those old sepia tinted pictures pertaining to killers so illusory is the truth of events rendered and such events further back are so much more lost in the fog of myth. The true hideousness of their activities and the experience of their victims seems somewhat harmless when depicted in the parodical figments of contemporary fiction, the sanitized portrayals by Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson et al, in which the bloodcurdling screams of agony, the miserable pleadings for mercy, the whimpering wretchedness of accepted death, the blood and gore, are elided, or so coyly, unconvincingly alluded to.

There is then the case of the infamous Gloucester (U.K.) killer-couple, Frederic and Rosemary West (29 September 1941 – 1 January 1995; 1953 - ), which in some ways resembles that of H. H. Holmes in that Fred and Rose ran a “house of horrors”. In it they raped, tortured, killed, and buried a number of their victims, but the similarities are limited - many serial killers kept such outfits. Unlike H.H. Holmes, both Fred and Rosemary were primitive creatures, devoid of erudition whatsoever, of an ilk established to be something quite shockingly at odds with a society that, though admittedly still recovering from the Second World War, was trying to advance beyond the unreconstructed ways in many parts of the country, the pre-welfare state. Both evolved from the recesses. In Fred’s case, of a foul, incestuous bucolic lifestyle in which sodomising animals, masturbating as they were killed, was instructive; of sexual attentions from the parents, which perhaps were not actually abusive, the norm, perhaps welcome. In Rose’s case, it was a damaged, lost, post-war-traumatized family, also replete with sexual abuse; at the hands of a deranged schizophrenic father it is stated.

The West’s household was a den of licentiousness, lasciviousness, incestuous molestation; it was a brothel, Rose’s services freely known in the city and further afield. Given the nature of these people, it is unsurprising that a certain type of wayward person would be attracted to the beacon of moral dissolution, be welcomed and enjoy the lifestyle on offer, until of course it reached its dire conclusion, the torture and horrible death. But people were missing in their droves then and no one cared much where a teenage drug-addicted prostitute was or perhaps even whether she was alive. Those people were hugely problematic for the police, educational and social services which were perhaps glad to be rid of them. That was then; now the failures of the authorities, the sexual abuse in institutions (including the Church) past and present are a great stain on the national conscience, which has determined that no such complacency can exist and rigorous detection and righting of it – no matter what the social mores of the day in question – is now imperative.

The Wests were not content with the body of misdirected souls who strayed their way so went roaming for victims, in a time when people were much more accustomed to traveling by foot and accepting of lifts from strangers. (You will see in many parts of the U.K. mostly redundant tarmacked pathways attesting to the old habit or necessity, of walking from village to village, town or city.) They found hitchhikers who were lulled by their seemingly winsome mien, the concerned couple, disarming in their agrestic nature; those eager for a lift would be genuinely grateful, while those reluctant, perhaps so abashed at the prospect of refusing it because they were averse to such backward types, that they overrode their suspicions and agreed. Once they’d accepted the offer, those poor girls were enrolled in the course of sadistic punishment premeditated, with no – or very little - avenue of escape. One has to wonder to what extent unsuspectingly seductive girls were inculcated with precautions respecting predatory men – though women were not deemed in anyway such a threat – and how effective the communication, whether such things were difficult to comprehend, were beyond mention?

While it is fair to assume that most of the Wests’ victims were errant youths or older slatterns, one of them is a stark exception to this assumption, she was Lucy Partington, the cousin of the famous author Martin Amis, the son of the famous author Kingsley Amis, and she was appropriated by the Wests, presumably by her own volition, and it is to be upheld that she was devoid of the moral flaws of the main body of the victims. Also, putatively in this meagre category of victims was Therese Siegenthaler, a hitchhiker from Switzerland. It does beg the question of what ostensibly ordinary and innocent people are really like…What façade they show…Are their intentions inconceivably impure? Can the truly innocent really fall victim so easily, or is there a chink in the armour of one’s defences against the predator, that they see as a route in of justification, then widen inexorably, are then in charge?

Of the victims of serial killers from the wrong side of the rails, those of killers John Wayne Gacy (1942 – 1994) and Jeffrey Dahmer (1960 – 1994) are archetypal, being runaways, rentboys (in some cases), those ejected from their families for being homosexual, for being delinquent (whatever that meant). They were looking for escape and found it, and inasmuch as they longed to escape, their false saviours longed for them, for their fell purposes, and in that medium of senselessness there was the effortless capture.

Many a serial killer is spawned from a truly rotten hearth and perhaps inexorably driven to enact behaviours commensurate with mistreatment or misdirection, as though it were their erroneous programmed code. But some are seemingly offered a better prospect in life and abjure it, favouring the nihilistic life of a murderer, the pleasure of death in contravention and repudiation of all the charms of comfort and consolation offered in the early stages, available later for conforming to social strictures. A great candidate for this provenance is Theodore Robert “Ted” Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell: 1946 – 1989). It could also be suggested that he was in fact abused hideously from an early age and hence his crimes were understandable, but that is not recorded – though it is alluded to. But Ted did have options to go the right way and he went the wrong way with alacrity, having worked out how to be right.

No repetition of Ted Bundy’s background is necessary here, it having been flogged to death. What Bundy is useful to recount for is that perfect archetype of the vagrant serial killer that used the road as a medium of access to those who were also on the road perhaps in the sentiment of those beat generation writers who eschewed the sense of belonging to a community, in favour of the wider experience flavoured with adventure. And so his quarry were the young who were convinced of a newly uninhibited, free and easy America, as a playground for their idealistic ambitions, and he saw it as a playground of free and easy death.

When Ted Bundy was active, many people were on the road, were missing in their pursuit of the carefree life and freed up to explore sexual and narcotic practices that were largely forbidden for the morally paranoid, socially obedient previous generation. There were many students discovering the art of disporting without realising that they were off-guard to the likes of Bundy, who with his charm and manners, could persuade girls and young women to aid him, in his ruses.

Going further back, there is Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish (1870 – 1936) a truly demonic product of untrammelled abuse from his days in the orphanage, who also roamed a realm where there was a large supply of people that no one would miss; the blacks, the very poor, the uneducated who could not understand the dreadful intentions of those sufficiently dissimulated, acting a familiar and credible part – the kindly old grandfather in his case. Back then, the missing were just that; people were slow to care to consider that they were the victims of some “bogeyman”, were slow to care what had become of children, who were in many cases unwanted anyway. While the morals of the day may seem repressive by modern standards, it seems that there was also mass neglect. These souls were not part of society or were comparatively cheap in their prospective fortunes; infant mortality a constant reminder of the ever present spectre of death, the loss of life nothing hugely surprising, and accepted in the many likely forms, the least imaginable at the hands of a perverted killer – something beyond any common rationale. Albert Fish might have been an entrepreneur in his field given his cynical nature, formed through his treatment. Serial killers are perhaps then the capitalists of the window of opportunity complacent society offers at intervals, before it shuts clam-tight when the breach of security is learnt.

There are most likely many bodies yet to be discovered and attributed to known serial killers, but there must surely be many undetected monsters as there were before their apprehension. It is a vein of humanity that no one can fully profess to understand, certainly not deny as being somehow cured, despite the advancement of society – it is human nature.