THE REPRESENTATIONS OF SERIAL KILLERS PETER J M CONNELLY Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Studies University of Stirling September 2010 ii Contents Abstract iii Declaration iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Thomas de Quincey’s Murder Essays 17 Chapter 2: Frankenstein, Romanticism and Serial Killing 49 Chapter 3: Beyond Jack the Ripper: The Lodger and Ritual in the Dark 79 Chapter 4: Thomas Harris: Lecter and Others 112 Chapter 5: Serial Killer Narratives: Creating Authorising Narratives 138 Conclusion 189 Bibliography 194 iii Abstract. In this thesis, I have analysed representations of a selection of fictional and factual serial killers from Thomas de Quincey to Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the autobiographical narratives of real life serial killers Carl Panzram, Donald Gaskins and Ian Brady. My analysis of these texts identifies the portrayals of serial killers in terms of representations as aesthetic, existential, socially othered phenomena. The thesis proceeds from the premise that serial killer narratives often obscure the existential brute reality of murder. As such, I examine serial killing vis‐à‐vis attempted explanatory shifts in such narratives which represent serial murder and serial killers in terms of aesthetic, psychopathological, moral/religious/supernatural and socio‐political phenomena, and I investigate the implications of these shifts. I focus initially on Romantic ideas of the self, and in the relationship between the ‘outsider’ artist/poet and the textual emergence of the figure of the solitary ‘serial’ murderer in the early nineteenth century, particularly in relation to De Quincey’s aesthetic murder essays. Subsequent fluctuations of the representation of serial killing between mental‐health, law‐and‐order and political/social discourses are discussed in relation to the subsequent texts. I conclude by examining cognitive dissonance theory, A.E. Van Vogt’s description of the Violent Man, and James Gilligan’s theories on violence, in order to propose a possible synergetic response to narratives and representations of serial killers and serial killing. iv Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and that all critical and other sources (literary and electronic) have been specifically and properly acknowledged, as and when they occur in the body of my text. Signed: v Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Glennis Byron, for her support and guidance and for putting up with me. Many, many thanks. I would also like to thank my mother, Agnes Connelly , Margaret Clarke, my aunt, and also my sister, Cathy. And thanks, too, to Elaine Rodger, for her unwavering support. Thanks to you all. 1 Introduction The terms ‘serial killing’ and ‘serial killer’ are, perhaps, somewhat morally and legally misleading labels. Killing is not always illegal. In self-defence or in war, the killing of one human being by another may not, depending on the particular circumstances, be deemed to be illegal. Murder, however, as ‘the unlawful premeditated killing of one person by another’ (O.E.D.) is, by definition, unlawful. A ‘serial killer’, then, may not necessarily be acting outside of the law. A serial murderer, however, always does. In his book Serial Killers: They Kill to Live (2005), Rodney Castleden includes such figures as William the Conqueror, Henry VIII, Joseph Stalin, Ho Chi Mihn and Saddam Hussein among the more consensually accepted figures of the serial killer ‘canon’, such as Jack the Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, Jeffery Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. However, to charge political figures and heads of state, or ‘tyrant killers’ as Castleden calls them, of being serial killers is problematic in the extreme, 2 for such people seldom actively and directly participate in the killing of other people. Furthermore, such people, although powerful in the context of their own states, regimes or political movement, could perhaps rather be considered to be the symbolic heads of much larger mass movements. Although, from a viewpoint external to the political context in which such tyrants operated, they are undoubtedly complicit in the deaths of many people, they do not generally meet the popularly accepted criteria of the lone serial killer operating on the fringes of society. Castleden’s inclusion of political and state figures among the role of serial killers is, in any case, rare. Nor would we normally consider such a person as the United Kingdom’s erstwhile official hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, as a serial killer either, as he was acting as an agent of state. While Pierrepoint undoubtedly killed people, he did not murder them. While the term ‘serial killer’ should, in my opinion, be replaced by the term ‘serial murderer’ to avoid ambiguity, I have nonetheless generally chosen to use the term ‘serial killer’ instead, in part to reflect its popular cultural resonance. I have also used ‘serial killer’ to emphasise that the term itself leaves out the connotations of the word ‘murder,’ and in so doing also somewhat obscures the actual processes of the human act of murder: the planning; the suffering; the repercussions. The snappier and more popularly catchy ‘serial killer’, however, is vaguer, more romantic, and, unfortunately, lighter than the darker and less evasive term ‘serial murderer’. The popularity of ‘serial killer’ over ‘serial murderer’ perhaps provides a clue as to the misplaced popularity and fascination in these factual and fictional people. I will therefore tend to use ‘serial killer’ instead of ‘serial murderer’ throughout this thesis 3 as an acknowledgement of this factor, but I do not use the former term with any relish, but, rather, with some regret that the term exists at all. There is no real consensus as to what constitutes a serial killer. Phillip Jenkins defines serial killing (or murder) ‘as involving an offender associated with the killing of at least four victims, over a period of greater than seventy-two hours’ (1994: 23). The Crime Classification Manual states that ‘serial murder generally involves three or more victims’ with a ‘cooling-off period between murders’ of ‘days, months, or years’ (Douglas, John E. et al 2006: 461). For Steven Egger, serial murder ‘occurs when one or more individuals … commits a second murder and/or subsequent murder’ (quoted in Hickey 2006: 19). Nor is there a consensus on who coined the term ‘serial killer’, although it has been attributed to Robert Ressler of the F.B.I. in the 1970s.1 Mentions of serial murder, however, predate Ressler’s coinage, and as far back as 1838 Thomas de Quincey writes of a sequence of murders which ‘were understood to be no casual occurrences, but links in a systematic series’.2 The phenomenon of serial killing is often historically traced back to 1888, 3 with the emergence of the unidentified, and much speculated upon, figure of a murderer known by the sobriquet of Jack the Ripper (or Red Jack, or Leather-Apron) in London, who killed a number of prostitutes in the East End of London. 1 Robert K. Ressler is a former FBI agent and psychological profiler who co-authored the Crime Classification Manual. He is also the author and co-author of several books, including Whoever Fights Monsters (1992), in which he claims to have coined the term ‘serial killer’. 2 In The Avenger, published in Blackwood’s Magazine in August, pp. 208-33. 3 ‘The prototype of the serial killer’, writes Mark Seltzer, ‘is of course, the case of Jack the Ripper’ (1998: 8). 4 Major media, and therefore public, interest in serial killers peaked again in the 1960s, following the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho in 1960, and then again following the release of the film version of Thomas Harris’s thriller The Silence of the Lambs, in 1991. The serial killer is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon; the crimes of actual serial killers have been framed, re-imagined and re-sold in a variety of ways, from true-crime books and speculative faction (factual fiction, such as Emelyn Williams’s account of the ‘Moors murderers’ in the 1960s, Beyond Belief ) to a plethora of films and television documentaries and often lurid media coverage. To all but a very few victims, their families, law enforcement agencies and associated medical personnel, serial killers are primarily media creations. Particular examples of serial killer representations include The Smiths’ song ‘Suffer Little Children,’ (the title of which alludes to the victims of the ‘Moors murderers’, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley) and Blake Morrison’s poem ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’ which is a vernacular account by an unknown speaker of the crimes of Peter Sutcliffe, the titular ‘Ripper’: ‘Like most serial killers’, notes Morrison, ‘Peter Sutcliffe has left his mark on literature’.4 Alternatively, Throbbing Gristle’s sinister 18-minute track ‘Very Friendly’ (1975) offers a detached spoken-lyric, kitchen sink realist account of the murder of Edward Evans by Ian Brady.5 Ian Brady is also represented in the first part of Ken Smith’s poetic trilogy ‘Figures in Three Landscapes’ (1990), in the monologue ‘Brady at Saddleworth Moor.’ Here, Smith gives poetic voice to Ian Brady upon the occasion of his visit to the scene of his crimes in to try to locate the graves of his 4 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/mar/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview8 (accessed Sept 11, 2010) 5 A transcription of which is available at http://gruntring.blogspot.com/2009/03/throbbing-gristle-very- friendly.html (accessed 11th Sept 2010). 5 victims. Smith’s first person ‘I’ locates the aestheticised speaker still at the centre of his universe: ‘I can forget, I can remember, I can be mad / I will never be as free again, ever’ (Smith 1990: 17).