A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

continued their steady increase. By 1960 there were approximately ten thousand murders a year in
America (mostly by guns). By 1970, the figure had risen to fifteen thousand - that is to say,
approximately one every half hour. At the time of this writing (1983) the murder rate is well over
twenty thousand per year - about one every quarter of an hour. Rape has risen even more steeply.
The ‘overcrowded rat syndrome’ continues to operate.
Rape has remained the most typical crime of the twentieth century: that is to say, in any list of
major crimes, there would be a high proportion of sex murders. We have seen that sex crime began
to occupy this prominent position in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that one of the
major causes was Victorian prudery, the notion of sex as something wicked and ‘forbidden’
(although the population increase in big cities undoubtedly played its part). After 1900, this prudery
gave way to a healthier sexual realism, and sex crime suddenly became less prominent. But this
was deceptive. Sex continued to be the great underlying preoccupation of society - as shown in the
case of Mary Phagan (1913), which became a national obsession in America and continued to sell
newspapers for years. In England, the most sensational murder trial of the First World War was that
of George Joseph Smith, a commonplace swindler who graduated to murder - drowning his newlymarried
brides in the bath after acquiring their savings. Smith was described by the newspapers as a
Don Juan whose basilisk gaze made him irresistible to women; this was enough to keep the
courtroom crowded with morbid females. The same was true of the trial of Henri Desire Landru in
1921; Landru had murdered ten women - whom he first seduced - for their savings, burning their
bodies piecemeal in a stove; again, the majority of spectators in the crowded courtroom were
women. (When one of them came in late and was unable to find a seat, Landru raised a smile by
offering her his own.) It may have been the Landru case that inspired the painter Kokoschka to
write a satirical play called Murderer, Hope of Women.
Yet not all sex crimes aroused the same morbid interest. In 1916, soldiers looking for petrol at a
farm near Czinkota, Hungary, discovered more than twenty petrol drums, each containing the
garrotted corpse of a woman preserved in alcohol. The former tenant, Bela Kiss, had apparently
advertised periodically for female companions. Prostitutes from the red light district of Budapest
described Kiss as sexually insatiable. Like Smith and Landru, Kiss had apparently stolen the
belongings of his victims. Then why did the case fail to arouse the same intense curiosity as those
of the other ‘bluebeards’? It was not simply because it happened in the middle of a war, or because
he was never caught. (It was reported that he had been killed in the army, but later discovered that
he had stolen the papers of a dead soldier.) This crime was simply a little too ‘nasty’, with its hints
of necrophilia. A masochistic woman might conceivably enjoy imagining herself being seduced by
Smith or Landru; but being trussed up and preserved in alcohol was too nauseating to be
incorporated in anybody’s daydream.
The Austrian novelist Robert Musil, writing in the 1920s, made a multiple sex-killer called
Moosbrugger one of the central characters in his masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. When he
remarked: ‘If mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger’, he was expressing
the recognition that figures like Moosbrugger and Bela Kiss are ‘plague rats’, expressions of the
underlying sickness of a society. In post-war Germany, Musil could have found many models for
his ‘collective nightmare’. Fritz Haarmann, a homosexual butcher of Hanover, made use of the
post-war chaos to kill about fifty young male vagrants, whose bodies he sold for meat; Haarmann
claimed that he killed them by biting them through the windpipe. During the same period Karl
Denke, landlord of a house in Miinsterberg, killed more than a dozen vagrants - male and female -
who called at his door, and ate portions of their bodies, which he kept pickled in brine. Georg