A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

failed to grasp that all experience is fifty per cent ‘mental’. (And this explains why even intelligent
Victorians found the philosophy of Kant - which is based on this recognition - so difficult to
understand.) In fact, experience varies greatly from day to day because of the varying amount we
‘put into it’. I may do the same thing - say, take the identical walk - on two successive days, and
feel bored and irritable one day, wide-awake and receptive the next; in which case, the scenery will
strike me as self-evidently dreary one day, and delightful the next. Experience has to be chewed and
swallowed and digested, just like food.
Lonely, frustrated men like Frederick Baker have a poor stomach for real experience, which they
have learned to mistrust; it usually gives them indigestion. But in the nineteenth century, European
man had stumbled upon the pleasures of the imagination. Poets and novelists used it to create an
extraordinarily rich fantasy world, and fifteen-bob-a-week clerks used it to taste the pleasures of
being a ‘toff and having ten thousand a year. But for a bored depressive like Baker, it could also be
dangerous. As he fantasises about women, he discovers that the sexual emotion can be sharply
intensified by adding a dash of cruelty - say, tying her up and gagging her. As his imagination
becomes accustomed to sexual aggression, he adds further refinements. Eventually, by Pavlovian
conditioning, he associates sexual pleasure with the idea of violence - in Baker’s case, apparently,
decapitation and dismemberment. And one day, as his imagination again begins to flag, he begins
to toy with the breathtaking idea of turning the fantasy into reality...
It is interesting to note how often this kind of extreme violence is associated with the sex crimes of
this period. Four years after the murder of Fanny Adams, a young man named Eusebius
Pieydagnelle gave himself up to the police in his native village of Vinuville, confessing to seven
murders involving stabbing and mutilation. Since childhood he had lived opposite a butcher’s shop
and had become fascinated by the sight and smell of blood. He persuaded his parents to apprentice
him to the butcher, a M. Cristobal, and enjoyed drinking blood and wounding the cattle. His father
decided that he ought to have a more respectable profession and apprenticed him to a lawyer;
Pieydagnelle plunged into depression. One day he crept into a room where a girl was sleeping,
intending rape; then he noticed a kitchen knife, and felt a compulsion to stab her. He achieved
orgasm at the sight of the blood, and went on to commit six more murders - his final victim being
his ex-employer Cristobal.
In Italy in the same year - 1871 - the twenty-three-year-old Vincenz Verzeni committed two sex
murders - of a fourteen-year-old girl and a twenty-eight-year-old married woman. Both were
attacked in the fields and strangled; then the intestines and genitals were torn out. He was arrested
after trying to strangle his cousin, a girl of nineteen, who succeeded in persuading him to let her go.
Verzeni admitted that he began to experience sexual pleasure as soon as he began to choke a
woman; in three earlier attempts he had achieved orgasm while pressing the throat, and allowed the
victim to live.
In 1874, a fourteen-year-old youth named Jesse Pomeroy received an exceptionally savage
sentence for the murder of two children - solitary confinement for the rest of his life. (In fact, he
spent fifty-eight years in prison, dying in 1932.) Pomeroy was a tall, gangling boy with a hare lip,
and one of his eyes was completely white. At the age of twelve, he had already been arrested for
attacking two boys - he stripped both and flogged them with a rope end. He spent two years in a
reformatory, and was out again in 1874. In March of that year, a ten-year-old girl named Katie
Curran vanished from the area near Pomeroy’s home in Boston. The following month, a four-yearold
boy was found dead with thirty-one knife wounds. The police searched Jesse Pomeroy’s house
and found a knife with blood on it; a further search revealed the body of Katie Curran buried in the