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Reach out and touch yourself
A phone-sex virgin creates her own private marathon.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[08/24/99]

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[08/23/99]

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Sexpert Opinion
For more information...
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[08/21/99]

Sexpert Opinion
Herpes nation
Readers praise and blast me for saying the virus is no big deal. Let's clear up a few things.
By Susie Bright
[08/21/99]

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If they survive going postal (and few of them do), Dietz reports, mass killers are uniformly disappointed to discover the experience doesn't solve, but actually intensifies, their psychic pain. Moreover, for all the bloody drama, mass murder is a copycat crime. These killers take their inspiration from each other, all variations on an original theme by Charles Joseph Whitman, the University of Texas tower shooter who invented modern mass murder 33 years ago.

Not so the self-realizing ritualistic killer, who selects for cunning, psychopathology and hyper-narcissism. Above all, this killer savors his work, obsesses on it, keeps souvenirs and sometimes detailed records. He is not in pain; he causes it. His need exceeds sex and violence. It is a pathological desire for complete mastery; he wants to engulf and to annihilate a victim. As Bundy explicitly expressed it to me, the thrill in sexual homicide comes with "possessing" victims "physically as one would possess a potted plant, a painting or a Porsche. Owning, as it were, this individual."

Roy Hazelwood, a former FBI profiler and specialist in sexual criminals now retired from the bureau's Behavioral Science Unit, says it was Harvey Glatman, Los Angeles' so-called Lonely Hearts Killer of the 1950s, who first illustrated this truth to him.

Studying Glatman (who was executed in 1959), Hazelwood puzzled over his habit of first incapacitating his victims in their apartments, then binding them and transporting them out into the desert, where Glatman finally killed them. "He could have raped and killed these women in their apartments," says Hazelwood. "But Glatman kept them alive at increased risk to himself. I realized that the enjoyment he took made the risk worth it to him. I later understood that enjoyment, that sense of possession, is power to the ritualistic offender, and total possession is absolute power."

All sexual crime is driven by fantasy -- Stayner, the accused Yosemite killer, told a reporter he'd been dreaming of killing women for 30 years, since he was 7 -- and because no two serial killers share exactly the same murder fantasy, possession means something different to each of them, too.

Bundy, for example, desired a lifeless female form -- comatose or dead. Just before his 1989 execution, he admitted to police detectives that he kept some of his victims in such a state for hours or days before disposing of them. Various of his 30 or so victims were buried in shallow woodland graves, where he sometimes revisited them. One who was found frozen in the mountains of Utah appeared to have received a post-mortem shampoo. Another was given a fresh application of make-up before Bundy discarded her body. "If you've got time, they can be anyone you want them to be," he later told FBI agent Bill Hagmaier, who came to know Bundy intimately while interviewing him in the 1980s.

Bundy explained to the agent that "murder isn't just a crime of lust or violence. It becomes possession. They are part of you ... You feel the last bit of breath leaving their bodies ... You're looking into their eyes ... A person in that situation is God!"

Bundy even photographed his victims and kept a stash of their skulls in his Seattle apartment. "When you work hard to do something right," he said, "you don't want to forget it."

For Mike DeBardeleben, a sexual sadist who is spending the balance of his days in federal prison for crimes as various as counterfeiting and rape-abduction, possession meant a live victim, suffering under his control. "There is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her," DeBardeleben wrote in his private journal. "To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the constant domination over another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive."

John Wayne Gacy asserted total command of his young male victims by burying most of them directly under his house. They literally were arrayed beneath his feet.

Jeffrey Dahmer went so far as to physically consume his victims -- complete possession, total annihilation -- as did California serial killer Edmund Kemper, who sliced a bit of one girl's leg into a macaroni casserole.

Next page | Unlike mass killers, sexual killers find the act of murder itself profoundly gratifying