Serial killers like Charles Manson or the fictional Hannibal Lecter are by and large not a serious threat to society, but we have a strange, almost morbid interest in them. The BBC Future columnist tried to figure out what this was about.
In the tiny town of Pennsburg, located in eastern Pennsylvania, there is a small house. It contains a collection that you are unlikely to find in a museum.
All the walls of the room on the ground floor are hung with paintings depicting pain and suffering, skulls of various shapes and colors, women in candid poses, folklore and fantastic animals.
However, what makes them special is not so much the content as the authorship: they were all painted by serial killers.
This house belongs to John Schwenck, a man who collects drawings of murderers and their things, like others collect stamps or souvenirs.
One of the most valuable items in his collection, he considers a portrait by John Wayne Gacy, who raped and killed at least 33 boys and young people in Chicago in the 1970s.
He earned the nickname "The Clown Killer" for his performances at children's parties, where he portrayed a clown.
Other gems in Schwenk's collection include a skull drawn by Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, who was responsible for numerous California murders and rapes in 1984 and 1985, and several drawings by Charles Manson, leader of the Family commune.
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It was Manson who in 1969 organized the brutal murder of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six other people in Los Angeles.
In addition to the drawings, Schwenk's collection contains thousands of letters from serial killers awaiting execution on death row. Many of them are addressed to him personally.
He is sent strands of hair, prison uniforms, prisoner ID cards, false jaws, unused dental floss, and many other strange and sinister objects.
With some of the killers, he managed not only to exchange letters, but also to meet. And even make friends.
"I wonder what makes people kill their own kind and do it over and over again," he says. He admits that two or three of his acquaintances are "really creepy personalities."
That is what he calls those unrepairable sex maniacs who, as Schwenk's wife Stacy hopes, will never come out from behind bars. She is frightened by the fact that they know the address of the Shvenkov couple.
When I asked Schwenk to tell him what these people were so interested in, he let me listen to a tape of one of his many telephone conversations with Manson.
At the beginning of the conversation, Manson in a drawn-out, raspy voice asks Schwenk where he is calling from. Schwenk replies that he is at home in Pennsylvania, and then the famous criminal makes a few remarks about the Amish (a conservative religious sect whose members live mainly in the United States and Canada. - Translator's note).
After that, he begins to jump from one topic to another, giving out a completely incoherent monologue about environmental movements, the Vietnam War, his old habit of sneaking into large mansions (and killing their residents, by the way), about everyone who owes him money, and about what he would do with them, and also about the "new world order."
At some point, he begins humming the song "American Pie" by Don McLean.
It's hard to say whether this conversation gives even a small idea of what is going on in Manson's head (Schwenk says that of all their conversations, this one is still quite intelligible).
At the same time, you can not share Schwenk's hobby and still find him interesting. The topic of violent crimes and especially serial killers is very popular in popular culture.
The portrayal of Jack the Ripper as the most famous serial killer (perhaps because he never got caught) has, with a fair amount of artistic liberties, been immortalized in hundreds of novels, comics, films and television shows.
Excursions (especially at night) in east London, where he once operated, are still very popular. Crime dramas such as True Detective, Dexter, The Crash and Jinx are reaching millions of audiences.
The 2014 12-part podcast "Serial", which follows the 1999 murder of 17-year-old schoolgirl Hae Min Lee, has been downloaded over 70 million times (no podcast has ever passed the five million download mark before).
It seems that this hype is not going to subside.
Last October, the Museum of London opened an exhibition of 600 items from the archives of the Metropolitan Police Service, to which previously only law enforcement officers had access. No other paid museum exhibition could match this exposition in terms of the number of tickets purchased in advance.
From the point of view of popular criminology, this is in the order of things. Until its closure in September last year, the private National Crime and Punishment Museum in Washington was one of the most popular attractions for families.
Among the more curious items on display were Gacy's clown Pogo costumes and paints used to paint pictures like the one hanging in Schwenk's house, as well as the rusty light brown Volkswagen Beetle that Ted Bundy used in 1970. years in California, lured dozens of young women to rape and kill them.
Serial killers in the United States account for less than 1% of homicides per year
Harold Schechter, an American writer and author of documentary books on serial killers, calls the general public's interest in this topic "something of a cultural hysteria."
According to Scott Bonn, a sociologist and criminologist at Drew University in Madison, the share of serial killers in the United States accounts for less than 1% of murders per year, and at the same time there are no more than two dozen such criminals in the country.
Nevertheless, the phenomenon of serial killers fascinates us so much that we forget about the much more serious dangers that surround us. Why are these unhealthy personalities turning into legendary characters by our efforts? And what does this say about ourselves?
Wave of Madness
Serial killers and the like have attracted the attention of the general public since the tabloid press appeared in the early 19th century.
According to Shane McCorristin, a cultural historian at the University of Cambridge, William Corder, one of the last publicly hanged criminals in England to be sentenced to death for the murder of his mistress, caused a "wave of insanity" that swept society before his death in 1828 and continued many years.
Corder committed only one murder, and not particularly serious, but in his time he enjoyed the same notoriety as Jack the Ripper at the end of the same century or Charles Manson today.
His story was staged in theatrical performances and puppet shows at village fairs.
Hundreds of thousands of sheet music ballads about this crime have been sold. Tens of thousands of people came to see the barn in Sussex where the murder took place.
At least 7,000 people attended the execution of Corder, and a piece of his scalp, along with an ear, was displayed for several weeks in a shop window on London's Oxford Street.
“It seems incredible today that Corder's body was dismembered for the amusement of the crowd, and that his crime was the subject of countless staging,” McCorristin writes in his book William Corder and the Murder in the Red Barn, published last August.
Yes, it may be incredible, but this is not an isolated case. In November 1957, Plainfield, Wisconsin, USA police found the body of a local store owner, headless and visceral, suspended by his heels, in the kitchen of a suburban farmhouse.
Human skulls were found in the house that served as soup bowls; four chairs upholstered in human skin; a belt decorated with female nipples; human lips strung on a string, and a collection of female genitals hidden in a shoebox.
Another box contained four human noses. A vest made of human skin, lampshades, a trash basket and bracelets of the same origin were also found at the crime scene, as well as many other horrific artifacts, including nine masks made of human skin carefully cut from the bone.
The owner of the house, Ed Gein, subsequently confessed to the two murders and to the excavation of the bodies of middle-aged women who reminded him of his deceased mother.
Gein became famous all over the world, becoming the prototype of Norman Bates - a fictional character from the movie "Psycho" by Alfred Hitchcock, shot by him in 1960 based on the book by Robert Bloch.
On weekends, whole families would go to Plainfield to see Ed Gein's slaughterhouse.
He also served as the inspiration for Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
In Wisconsin, heightened interest in the killer arose immediately after his arrest.
According to McCorristin, everyone wanted to gaze at the crime scene. On weekends, whole families would go to Plainfield to see Ed Gein's house, which he had turned into a massacre.
In March of the following year, the house mysteriously burned down, but this did not stop another twenty thousand people from coming to this place in time to inspect it before it was put up for auction.
So, again: why are serial killers so attractive to us?
"They are something unreal, something caricatured monstrous, like the heroes of the horror stories we are told as children," says James Hoare, editor of the monthly glossy magazine Real Crime, which first appeared in the UK last August. In its first issues, it was about the "bloodiest serial killers in the world" and Charles Manson.
“No one can remain indifferent to the fact that such terrible things sometimes happen next to us,” he notes.
Schachter calls stories of serial killers adult fairy tales.
“There is a need in our psyche to tell stories about how monsters are chasing us,” he says.
The crimes committed by serial killers are sometimes really blood-curdling. Jeffrey Dahmer, the "Milwaukee Cannibal," boiled the heads of his victims and kept them, and also performed intercourse with their corpses. Albert Fish, the "Brooklyn Vampire," tortured and tortured children before killing them.
Perhaps the most terrifying thing about serial killers is that they are ordinary people.
According to a 2005 study on serial murder by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, “They are not monsters and may seem like completely ordinary people. Serial killers often have a home and family, good jobs, and seem like normal members of society.”
This is true: the police considered Dahmer so harmless that, without knowing it, they returned one of his victims to his apartment; Fish's neighbors considered him a kind, child-loving elderly man, and Gacy, in addition to working as a clown at children's parties, was also known for his charitable activities.
They are adorable, too, and charismatic, like Cary Grant or George Clooney - Helen Morrison, forensic scientist
Who are all these people? Alien creatures or one of us? In order to answer this question, an in-depth study of their personalities is required.
Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist who has interviewed more than 80 serial killers and testified as a defense witness at Gacy's trial, believes they are great actors who don't have to pretend to be normal.
In her memoir, My Life Among Serial Killers, she writes: “I never knew exactly who I was dealing with. They are so friendly and kind and so eager to help in the beginning of our work together … They are charming, even too, and charismatic, like Cary Grant or George Clooney."
Sociologist Bonn believes that the attractiveness of maniacs is their worst feature. Look at Ted Bundy. He was very handsome, successful, women liked him, and that is why he managed to lure 36 girls into his car [to kidnap and kill them].
He looked like the guy living next door, which is awful, because if your neighbor is a serial killer, that means anyone can be the victim.”
This is especially true when you consider that their victims are almost always strangers (with the exception of female serial killers who prefer to kill people they know).
In September 1978, serial killer Rodney Alcala took part in the American television show Dating Game.
To understand why a serial killer is so hard to spot and why cops almost never catch him quickly, consider the case of serial rapist and killer Rodney Alcala.
In September 1978, he took part in the American television show The Dating Game, in which a single woman - in this case acting teacher Cheryl Bradshaw - asks three single men without seeing them, and then chooses one based on their responses.
At that time, no one had any idea that Alcala had already raped and killed at least two women in California and two in New York. On the show, he comes across as a witty and attractive young man.
He has a beautiful hairstyle and wears a suit and smart shirt. Bradshaw chooses him. However, after talking to him backstage, she decides not to go on a date with him because he seemed creepy to her.
Perhaps it saved her life. Over the next two years, Alcala raped and killed three more girls.
The seeming normality of serial killers - the simultaneous presence of humanity and cruelty - is of genuine interest to enthusiasts like Schwenk, for whom his correspondence and collection is partly an attempt to understand what drives them.
“They look like ordinary people and act the same way. Like me and you. Many of them are nice, normal guys. It's just that something is wrong in their heads,”he says.
Stephen Skoller, a documentary filmmaker and collector based in Scotland, went even further: he befriended a murderer who had been released from prison.
Nico Klaw, who has served eight of his twelve years, is not a serial killer.
He was convicted of only one murder, but at the same time he regularly stole parts of human bodies from Parisian cemeteries, ate the flesh of the dead in the morgue and stole blood from hospitals to cool it at home, mix it with human ashes and drink.
Skoller says he and Cloe are the same age and have similar tastes in music and film. "We have a lot in common. He is an interesting guy, he is witty, polite, well-mannered. He very much regrets and regrets what he did."
Clough recently took Skoller to the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the final resting place of Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and Frederic Chopin.
It was there that Cloe preferred to dig graves. “You can read everything in the world about cannibal serial killers, but come face to face with a person who tells you about how and where he did it … on the one hand, it's creepy, but on the other, it's a very rare opportunity.
Skoller recalls that after that, he and Cloe went to lunch, and Cloe ordered a steak with blood (exhibits from the Skoller collection can be viewed below).
Stephen Skoller owns items that once belonged to the most famous serial killers of the last century, including Charles Manson.
The Skoller collection contains a Fred West ID issued by the local government.
Some collectors especially appreciate the body parts of the killers themselves. This is a lock of hair from the Jenesse River Assassin.
Dahmer's intentions went far beyond murder: he boiled the heads of his victims and performed sexual acts with their bodies.
Looking at the drawing by John Wayne Gacy, it's hard to imagine that its author is a serial killer.
One summer evening, I decided to visit the artist Joe Coleman in his apartment located on one of the top floors of a brick building in Brooklyn Heights, New York.
Coleman's paintings are expressive, filled with small details, and often apocalyptic, akin to religious iconography.
They are in great demand, including among celebrities: Iggy Pop, Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio are seen among the buyers. Coleman is also known for his interest in the dark side of human nature and its personification.
He opens the door and I see a man in front of me, dressed in a three-piece suit with a black tie. On his vest, you can see unusual brooches in the form of a tooth and a miniature skull.
His living room is a collection of many curious things: a mummified child, an antelope with two heads, dried heads, death masks of executed murderers, a child with anomalies in a formalin jar, wax figures of gangsters and full-length murderers.
We sit down on a sofa opposite which stands a statue of the Christian martyr Saint Agnes, which supposedly contains the remains of her skeleton.
On the wall behind us hangs a painting by Coleman himself depicting 11-year-old Mary Bell who strangled two little boys in Newcastle in 1968.
Some of them live in all of us, and a part of us all live in them - Joe Coleman
Next to it is one of the artist's favorite artifacts, the visiting card of the British executioner William Marwood, who invented a humane method of hanging (on a long rope with a fixed noose): with his help, at the end of the 19th century, he executed 170 people.
In this room, you can also find a bullet from a pistol that served as the murder weapon of Lee Harvey Oswald, a lock of Manson's hair, a shirt in which Elmo-Patrick Saunier (who became the prototype of Sean Penn's character in Dead Man Walking) went to the electric chair, drawings and letters to Gacy, Manson and other serial killers.
Coleman shows me the most valuable letter he has. It was addressed by Albert Fish to the mother of Grace Budd, his final victim, in which he describes how he strangled, dismembered, boiled and ate her young daughter.
Why does he need all these sinister artifacts? Historian McCorristin believes that getting close to people who have committed unusually cruel crimes is a way to feel the breath of death without falling victim to it, to witness death and thus gain some power over it.
Coleman agrees with him. He adds that all these items associated with killers - strands of hair, letters and drawings - remind him that there are dark forces in the world that can cause any of us to deviate from the true path.
“I've always felt that I also have a really dark side. As a child, I tried to set fire to a school stadium. I have done terrible things, and now I feel that I have become who I am only because of the will of God."
He involuntarily sympathizes with criminals and feels the need to acknowledge that, despite the evil they have committed, they are also human.
He is sure that “a part of them lives in all of us, and a part of us all lives in them. If a society is unable to show even a little bit of sympathy or empathy for the worst representatives of humanity, it is doomed."
Before Coleman finished his speech, a huge cockroach crawled out from under the statue of St. Agnes, ran across the floor towards us, disappeared under the sofa, and then reappeared on the wall behind us, heading for the portrait of Mary Bell.
Seeing the cockroach trying to crawl through the faded death mask that blocked his path, Coleman broke down and grabbed the camera.
In most apartments in Brooklyn Heights, such audacity would end in inevitable death for a cockroach, but in the Coleman Museum of Curiosities, he is just another exhibit.
Schwenk has the hair of Dorothea Puente, Coleman has a lock of Manson, Skoller has a topknot of gray hair from New York serial killer Arthur Shawcross
The reverence and power that Coleman has for the items in his collection will be easier to understand if you visit the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and see the death mask of 19th century serial killer William Burke and a notebook wrapped in his skin.
Or walk into the Washington Museum of Journalism and News and take a look at the smoke and sweat-scented hut where Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, lived and planned his 17-year mail-bomb campaign.
Over the years, these exhibits have remained the most popular in these museums, almost certainly due to their connection to serial murders.
Through experimental research, Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom and his team found that when faced with such objects, we all begin to think in terms of magic and believe that someone's qualities or essence can be transmitted through physical contact with things that belong to him.
This is how things become "contagious." This is especially true for the remains of criminals - skin, hair or nails.
In Victorian times, it was customary to keep a lock of hair from a deceased lover or beloved (I personally have the hair of my great-great-grandmother). It is these artifacts that most attract fans of serial killers, although it is sometimes difficult to prove their origin.
Schwenk has the hair of Dorothea Puente, who was after the elderly inhabitants of her boarding house in Sacramento, Coleman has a lock of Manson, and Skoller has a topknot of gray hair from New York serial killer Arthur Shawcross. “I have a part of him,” he says.
For many, even the thought of touching such an object will be disgusting, but for those interested in serial killers, getting a part of their body is like meeting them in their own home.
It may sound a little crazy, but Schwenk, Coleman and Skoller do not even doubt the normality of their hobbies. “It's just a hobby,” says Schwenk. - Everything is fine with me.
For Coleman, collecting is a kind of cleansing, a way to "get rid of demons in a constructive, not destructive way."
Inanimate objects can have the same power as biological remains - especially letters that have a lot to say about the personality of their author (Manson's letters are mostly as incoherent as his statements and drawings), as well as works of art.
Stephen Giannangelo, a lecturer in criminology at the University of Illinois, acquired several of Gacy's drawings for use as teaching material.
He says that the students are very impressed. “When I show them, three quarters of the students who have not taken their eyes off their phones before suddenly start taking pictures of them, coming closer and asking all sorts of questions.”
Memorabilia of Serial Killers
It's not hard to imagine the reaction of his students if he brought something more sinister to the lecture, for example, the razor with which Ed Gein created products from human skin, which is now in the Skoller collection.
During my visit to Skoller, I managed to hold it in my hands. It was small, worn, with jagged edges. Skoller didn't tell me where he got it. The trade in the memorabilia of the murderers is conducted underground.
Skoller bought the first piece of his collection, Arthur Shawcross's hair, from eBay, but in 2001 the site banned the sale of items related to the killers out of respect for the victims.
Several specialized online auctions are available to collectors of genuine killer items
This has led to the flourishing of several specialized online auctions such as Murder Auction, Serial Killers Ink, and Supernaught, targeting collectors of genuine items belonging to killers.
They can buy a handful of earth from Gein's grave ($ 25), a belt from Shawcross's car ($ 800), an unfinished burrito started by Manson in a prison visiting room ($ 800), a TV that Ramirez used in prison ($ 4,200), and two signed drawings by Gacy of the clown Pogo ($ 125,000).
Eric Holler, owner of Serial Killers Ink in Jacksonville, Florida, says things related to famous serial killers are sold out in hours and bought by a wide variety of people.
“My clients are people from different countries of the world, men and women, military men, law enforcement officers, psychologists, criminal law teachers and simply collectors.”
If the intentions of Texas Senator John Kornin were to come true, no one could make money from the murders.
Since 2007, Kornin has been trying to persuade the US Congress to consider a bill banning the trafficking of crime-related materials, but has so far been unsuccessful.
He, like many others, believes that such trade exalts violence, generates income for murderers (although in most cases they are not allowed to profit from their murders) and causes suffering for the victims.
However, these arguments did not influence the US government's decision to auction off the Unabomber's personal belongings in 2011. It should be noted, however, that the funds received were intended for his victims.
The following lots were put up for sale: his manifesto against the "industrial-technological system", published in The Washington Post and New York Times in 1995, before he was caught; the typewriter on which the manifesto was printed; a sweatshirt with a hood and sunglasses, in which he was depicted on the wanted notice; and a bow and arrow, with which he hunted animals near his hut in Montana.
As expected, there was no end of buyers: the auction raised $ 232,246.
Often, those who are attracted to the artifacts of serial killers are also interested in the places where the murders themselves were committed. Once criminals are caught, their homes and crime scenes often become centers of pilgrimage.
According to cultural historian Alexandra Warwick, the crime scene appears to them as “a map of the criminal's brain. In fact, this is a blueprint for what is in his head, his work, signed and on display, a text that should be read."
American photographer Stephen Chalmers recently brought this idea to life in his Unmarked project, celebrating the places where the serial killers of the American West left the bodies of their victims.
We see a beautiful landscape and at the same time remember the terrible events that took place here
He managed to find them thanks to open sources and police reports. Most of the places he chose for his work are located close to hiking trails.
In his photographs, these places appear before us incredibly beautiful. The photographer does this in order to preserve the memory of the victims, not of the crimes.
Chalmers got the idea when he was walking with his girlfriend near Mount Tiger near Seattle. "The sun was shining, the birds were singing, we had a picnic, and everything was fine."
And then a friend told him that they were walking in the very place where Ted Bundy disposed of the bodies of his victims. "And I began to associate this place with something terrible."
In every photo of this project, the camera focuses exactly on the place where the victim was found, and looking at it, we see a beautiful landscape and at the same time remember the terrible events that happened here.
Knowing what happened completely changes our perception. Chalmers recently returned to the area to collect herbs and flowers here and take them to his home near Youngstown, Ohio, where he is now making a herbarium out of them.
He plans to put the dried plants into a limited edition photo book of the Bezymyannoe project this year, to heighten his sense of connection with the places he has captured.
They will almost certainly become collectibles, and not just among the art lovers the book is targeted at.
Catharsis?
One of the more surprising explanations for the attractiveness of serial killers is the assumption that they serve a certain social function, allowing us to enjoy our vilest fantasies without realizing them, and after catching the killer, feel no guilt.
“They are almost like a catharsis for the worst of us, a lightning rod for our darkest thoughts, like the sin eaters of the Middle Ages who took on other people's sins and thus purified society,” Bonn says.
They also give us the opportunity to experience death at a distance, “to stand on the very edge of the abyss, but not fall into it,” as McCorristin describes it.
According to him, this is why many cannot resist watching creepy videos of ISIS executions, although later they sometimes regret it.
Perhaps we ourselves enjoy being scared.
It also explains why we slow down when we see an accident on the road, trying to get at least a quick glance at the dire consequences.
Perhaps we ourselves enjoy being scared. I must admit that I am no exception.
In 1995, in Paris, I met a girl who was convinced that she was being pursued by a serial killer.
The police believed her. They thought that her persecutor could be a man who, over the past six months, raped and stabbed four girls in the area of Paris where she lived.
The police gave her a phone number, which she could call at any time, if necessary, and friends supplied her with a pistol, which she kept under the bed.
She lived in constant fear. Often she did not open the door for me, fearing that her pursuer was behind her. It scared me too.
But at the same time it fascinated me and even caused a kind of addiction. But I didn't admit it to her.
The threat soon ceased to exist. Three years later, police arrested a man who confessed to four murders in the mid-90s and three others.
His name was Guy Georges, now known as the "Beast of the Bastille". He is serving a life sentence with no chance of release.
I have no desire to write to him, much less ask him for a drawing or a lock of hair. But I will most likely watch the film "The CK1 Case" released this year, based on its history.
I can hardly forget him.