A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

the church, and put his appalling fantasies into practice, binding her with hot wires and whipping
her. Finally, he raped and killed her. Leaving the area the following day - after throwing the body
down a well - he drove off the road and became stuck in the mud; a farmer had to tow him out. It
was this farmer’s description that later led to Fearn’s arrest, and to his execution in the gas
chamber.
The role of the imagination can be seen even more clearly in the case of William Heirens, the
eighteen-year-old Chicago sex killer who was arrested in 1946. Since the age of thirteen, Heirens
had been committing burglaries: his aim was to steal women’s panties, which he wore and used for
masturbation. Heirens came to associate burglary with sex to the point where he could achieve an
orgasm by simply entering through a window. If he was interrupted in the course of his burglaries,
he would become extremely violent. In October 1945, a nurse came in as he was burgling her
apartment; he fractured her skull. When he found a woman asleep in bed during a burglary, he
stabbed her in the throat. After murdering and mutilating a girl named Frances Brown in her
bedroom, he scrawled on the wall: ‘For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control
myself.’ In January 1946, Heirens entered the bedroom of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, and
carried her to a nearby basement were he raped her; after this he strangled her, cut up the body, and
disposed of it down manholes. He was caught a few months later when police were alerted that
someone had been heard breaking into an empty apartment.
It emerged at the trial that Heirens was in the grip of a sexual obsession. On one occasion, he had
even put his clothes in the bathroom and thrown the key inside to make it impossible to leave the
house; but the urge became so powerful that he recovered them by crawling along the gutter and
getting in through a window. The judge who sentenced Heirens ordered that he should never be
released.
Cases like this could be classified as ‘imaginative possession’; the sexual emotion is amplified by
the imagination until it achieves a morbid intensity. In January 1947, a mutilated corpse was found
on a piece of waste ground in Los Angeles; it had been cut in half at the waist, and medical
examination showed that the woman had been hung upside down and tortured. She was identified
as a twenty-two-year-old waitress named Elizabeth Short; she had come to Hollywood hoping to
become a film star, but had only succeeded in becoming an amateur prostitute. Her friends knew
her as the Black Dahlia, because she wore black clothes and black underwear. Her killer was never
caught. The horror of the crime gripped the public imagination, and one result was half a dozen
other ‘imitative’ crimes in Los Angeles in the same year; in one case, the killer scrawled ‘BD’
(black dahlia?) in lipstick on the victim’s breast.
Stranger still, no less than twenty-seven men confessed to the murder; all confessions were
investigated and proved false. A twenty-eighth confession was made as long as nine years later. But
why should anyone wish to confess to a crime he did not commit? The Freudian view, expressed by
Theodore Reik in The Compulsion to Confess, is that the criminal is relieving himself and society
of an unconscious feeling of guilt and hoping for the gratitude of society (p.279). But we can also
sense very clearly the element of envy of the murderer’s experience, arising out of morbid
fascination. Imitative crimes are indeed committed in the imagination. So here is a case in which
sexual violence triggered off thirty-four parallel reactions - six murders and twenty-eight false
confessions - all in an area about the size of Greater London. One may speculate how many other
inhabitants of the same area experienced the same morbid fascination, but confined their imitations
to the imagination. In Henri Barbusse’s novel Hell, the narrator describes the after-dinner
conversation of a barrister about a man who has strangled and raped a little girl. He observes the