A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Grossmann, a sadistic sexual degenerate, lived from 1914 to 1921 on the flesh of victims he lured
to his room in Berlin; police investigating sounds of a struggle found the trussed-up carcase of a
girl on the bed, the cords tightened as if for butchering into neat sections. Peter Kiirten, the
Diisseldorf ‘Ripper’, killed nine victims - including a man, women and children - in 1929; he
admitted that he could only achieve sexual orgasm through strangling or stabbing, and that he had
committed his first murder as a child.
In America in 1926, Earle Nelson - who had spent some time in an asylum - travelled around the
northern United States and Canada on a rampage of sex murder, killing twenty-two women. Nelson
would go to houses with a To Let’ notice in the window and, if the landlady was alone, strangle and
rape her. Newspapers dubbed him the ‘Gorilla murderer’, and the trail of violated landladies
continued to make headlines until he was caught in Canada. Nelson was hanged in 1927. There can
be no doubt that this kind of sensational publicity helped to make everyone more conscious of sex
crime, and therefore increased the number of such crimes. In England, on the other hand, the press
still observed a rule of gentlemanly restraint. In 1921, a chauffeur named Thomas Allaway
answered the advertisement of thirty-one-year-old Irene Wilkins, who wanted a job as a cook; he
met her by car at Bournemouth, knocked her unconscious, and attempted rape (which he did not
complete). Traced through witnesses who had seen the car, he was tried for her murder and hanged.
But although the judge mentioned that Allaway had lured Irene to Bournemouth ‘for an immoral
purpose’, the rape motive was played down. This approach may help to explain why sex crime
remained rare in England until the Second World War.
In 1922, the Allaway trial was eclipsed by the enormous publicity given to the trial of Edith
Thompson and Frederick Bywaters. The two were lovers, and Bywaters had stabbed Edith’s
husband to death. Mrs Thompson was accused of inciting the murder, but the evidence was slender;
nevertheless, she was also sentenced to death and hanged. The case leaves the impression that she
was sentenced as much for adultery as for incitement to murder. In America, the parallel case of the
1920s involved the murder of Albert Snyder by Judd Gray, the lover of Snyder’s wife Ruth. Snyder
was beaten unconscious with a sashweight, then strangled with picture wire. The police tricked
Ruth Snyder into confessing by claiming that Gray had admitted the killing. When she was
electrocuted in Sing Sing in 1928, a reporter succeeded in photographing the moment of death with
a camera strapped to his leg; the grim picture was syndicated all over the world, and was felt to
underline the moral that ‘the wages of sin is death’.
But real sex crime continued to increase, and the major cases displayed an increasingly strange
element of perversion. In 1932, a Hungarian company director, Sylvestre Matushka, was tried for
causing two train crashes and attempting to cause a third. In August 1931 the Vienna express was
derailed near Berlin by an explosion, and sixteen passengers were injured; in September, the
Budapest-Vienna express was derailed by an explosion and twenty-two people were killed, some
literally blown to pieces. Matushka admitted that the thought of trains crashing caused him intense
sexual excitement, and that he experienced orgasm when it actually happened. Sentenced to life
imprisonment, he escaped and reappeared during the Korean War in 1953 as the head of a unit for
blowing up trains.
In New York in 1928, a kindly-looking old man named Albert Fish persuaded the Budd family to
allow him to take their ten-year-old daughter Grace to a party; she was never seen again. Six years
later, Fish wrote Mrs Budd a letter describing how he had strangled Grace and eaten parts of her
body in a stew. The police were able to trace him through the letter, and it became clear that Fish
was what Freud called a ‘polymorphous pervert’ whose sexual oddities including eating excrement