How the Great Depression and WWII Gave Birth to the Modern Serial Killer

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These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand.

—Ernie Pyle, war correspondent

Between the abduction and cannibal-mutilation murder of Grace Budd by Albert Fish in 1928 and the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, “the Black Dahlia,” in 1947, a generation of future “epidemic era” serial killers was born, including Juan Corona (1934), Angelo Buono (1934), Charles Manson(1934), Joseph Kallinger (1935), Henry Lee Lucas (1936), Carroll Edward Cole (1938), Jerry Brudos (1939), Dean Corll (1939), Patrick Kearney (1939), Robert Hansen (1939), Lawrence Bittaker (1940), John Wayne Gacy (1942), Rodney Alcala (1943), Gary Heidnik (1943), Arthur Shawcross (1945), Dennis Rader (1945), Robert Rhoades (1945), Chris Wilder (1945), Randy Kraft (1945), Manuel Moore (1945), Paul Knowles (1946), Ted Bundy (1946), Richard Cottingham (1946), Gerald Gallego (1946), Gerard Schaefer (1946), William Bonin (1947), Ottis Toole (1947), John N. Collins (1947), Herbert Baumeister (1947) and Herbert Mullin (1947).

They were followed by the births of Edmund Kemper (1948), Douglas Clark (1948), Gary Ridgway (1949), Robert Berdella (1949), Richard Chase (1950), William Suff (1950), Randy Woodfield (1950), Joseph Franklin (1950), Gerald Stano (1951), Kenneth Bianchi (1951), Gary Schaefer (1951), Robert Yates (1952), David Berkowitz (1953), Carl Eugene Watts (1953), Robin Gecht (1953), David Gore (1953), Bobby Joe Long (1953), Danny Rolling (1954), Keith Jesperson (1955), Alton Coleman (1955), Wayne Williams (1958), Joel Rifkin (1959), Anthony Sowell (1959), Richard Ramirez (1960), Charles Ng (1960) and Jeffrey Dahmer (1960).

The vast majority of these children would not begin their serial killing until they were in their late twenties or early thirties in the 1970s and 1980s, with the exception of Edmund Kemper, who first killed in 1964, Patrick Kearney who began killing in 1965, John N. Collins in 1967, Richard Cottingham in 1967 (perhaps even as early as 1963) and Jerry Brudos in 1968.

In trying to explain the surge of serial murders from the 1970s to the 1990s, we often invoke the epoch in which the serial killings happened. From the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and the wanton hedonism of the 1970s to the cruel Reaganomics callousness of the 1980s and the rapacious greed of the 1990s, we argued that somehow serial killing was a product of the violent times in which the killing happened. But that was only half the story.

Psychopathology is first shaped in childhood, so to understand surge-era serial killers of the 1970s and 1980s, we actually need to look back some twenty or thirty years earlier, to the eras in which they were steeped as children in the 1940s and 1950s. I’ve already described the process of basic “scripting” of transgressive fantasies. The direction these “scripts” take and how people are chosen for the role of victim in them has a complex structure pinning it all together.

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In explaining surges of serial murder, criminologist Steven Egger argues, it was not that there were more serial killers but that there were more available victims whose worth was discounted and devalued by society. Egger maintains that society perceives certain categories of murder victims as “less-dead” than others, such as sex workers, homeless transients, drug addicts, the mentally ill, runaway youths, senior citizens, minorities, Indigenous women and the inner-city poor; these victims are all perceived as less-dead than, say, a white college girl from a middle-class suburb or an innocent fair-haired child. Sometimes the disappearance of these victims is not even reported. Criminologists label them the “missing missing.”

Egger writes:

“The victims of serial killers, viewed when alive as a devalued strata of humanity, become ‘less-dead’ (since for many they were less-alive before their death and now they become the ‘never-were’) and their demise becomes the elimination of sores or blemishes cleansed by those who dare to wash away these undesirable elements.”

We popularly regard serial killers as disconnected outcasts, as those who reject societal norms, but more often the opposite is true. In killing prostitutes, Jack the Ripper, for example, was targeting the women that Victorian society chose for its most vehement disdain and scorn. Gary Ridgway, “the Green River Killer,” who was convicted for the murder of forty-nine women, mostly sex workers, said he thought he was doing the police a favor, because they themselves could not deal with the problem of prostitution. As Angus McLaren observed in his study of Victorian-era serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who murdered at least five victims (prostitutes and unmarried women coming to him seeking abortions), Cream’s murders “were determined largely by the society that produced them.”

The serial killer, according to McLaren, rather than being an outcast, is “likely best understood not so much as an ‘outlaw’ as an ‘oversocialized’ individual who saw himself simply carrying out sentences that society at large leveled.” Social critic Mark Seltzer suggests that serial killers today are fed and nurtured by a “wound culture,” “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound,” to which serial killers respond with their own homicidal contributions in a process that Seltzer calls “mimetic compulsion.”

Or, as the late Robert Kennedy once put it more simply, “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.”

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Prior to the First World War (1914–1918), American society was relatively disciplined and cohesively structured between the upper, middle and working classes, between rural and urban, and between white and people of color. The privileges and burdens, the rights and responsibilities of each class of Americans, aside from that of industrial labor, were rarely challenged, questioned or crossed before the Great War. In the way that medieval Europeans with passive Christian forbearance lived their place in society from birth to death as divine destiny, Americans settled into their place in the social hierarchy on the basis of Horatio Alger’s “rags-to-riches” promise that with hard work and prayer, anyone can rise in the American class hierarchy to something spectacularly better than what they were born into. Most Americans quietly settled for moderately better, and did so, and that was what made America great.

World War I and its aftermath changed all that. It challenged the notion that duty and sacrifice would be rewarded with real change. A “Lost Generation” of disillusioned and shell-shocked American men returned from the horrors of a “war to end all wars” that did nothing of the sort.

In October 1929, it all crashed on Wall Street, wiping out billions of dollars of wealth in what became known as the Great Depression. By 1933, the unemployment rate in the United States was an astonishing 25 percent. Making matters worse in the Midwest, an environmental disaster in the form of the Dust Bowl uprooted millions of families from their homes and farms. All this without a “social safety net” of welfare, food stamps or public housing. Men raised and socialized for generations into their role as family patriarchs and breadwinners suddenly found themselves helpless and broken, shivering in a soup kitchen line just to eat.

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That battered generation of young men who matured over the 1930s was now sent into what was going to be history’s most lethal and brutal war, sometimes referred to as the “last good war” because of the unambiguous evil of the enemy we fought.

In December 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, dragging it into World War II. Some 16.5 million men (61 percent of American males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six) were mobilized into the military and deployed in Europe, the Pacific or on wartime duty at home. Their average age was twenty-six.

About 990,000 of them would see combat, and 405,000 were killed. Nothing in their experience at home prepared them for what they were going to see in this war, a primitive war of total kill-or-be-killed annihilation culminating with two thermonuclear detonations that in several nanoseconds incinerated 120,000 men, women and children. Winston Churchill said it best: “The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.”

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The familiar term PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—would appear only the 1980s in the wake of the Vietnam War, but during World War II the terms “combat stress reaction” (CSR), “battle fatigue” or “battle neurosis” were rolled up into a general statistical term: “neuropsychiatric casualty.” Of American ground combat troops deployed in World War II, an astonishing 37 percent were discharged and sent home as neuropsychiatric casualties. It just wasn’t often reported or talked about. America preferred to see their sons coming home less a leg or arm than “crazy in the head.” Hometown newspapers would euphemistically report on returning “wounded” or “casualty” figures without specifying the nature of the “wound” or “casualty.”

Returning World War II veterans did not have the current diagnosis of PTSD to take comfort in. “Combat psychoneurosis” sounded shamefully “psycho,” and most wanted to just go home and forget about everything they had seen and endured. Our returning soldiers were patted on the back and told they did their duty in a just cause, were given medals and a parade and tossed a GI Bill and then sent home to suck it up in sullen silence in the privacy of their own trauma. They couldn’t even talk to their families about it. Nobody wanted to hear it . . . at least not the truth. Our traumatized fathers and grandfathers were forever trapped in silence, like prehistoric life preserved in transparent amber as “the greatest generation any soci­ety has ever produced,” a term journalist Tom Brokaw coined in his 1998 book, The Greatest Generation.

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It wasn’t just the war over there that affected people. There was a seismic shift in popular culture at home that took a darker and more paranoid turn. In his disturbing study of postwar America, The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War, historian Richard Lingeman describes an era of anxiety and dread rather than the optimistic Norman Rockwell impression that we have of happy-to-be-home soldiers and optimistic baby-boom years. After describing the mass arrivals in 1947 of hundreds of thousands of coffins from Europe and the Pacific (the war dead had been temporarily interred overseas, and families had the option to leave them there in military cemeteries or have them shipped home for reburial), Lingemen describes how Hollywood launched a new genre of brutally violent and cynical crime movies, the so-called red meat movies that French film critics would later dub “film noir.” Lingemen writes that the typical film noir was “peopled with recognizable contemporary American types who spoke of death in callous, calculating language and shot with dark chiaroscuro lighting, told an unedifying tabloid-style story of greed, lust, and murder. . . .”

It wasn’t just the war over there that affected people. There was a seismic shift in popular culture at home that took a darker and more paranoid turn.

It was something the New York Times pondered in the last days of the war, describing a crop of “homicidal films” either just released or in production, like Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet, Conflict, Laura, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Lady in the Lake, Blue Dahlia, Serenade and The Big Sleep.

Hollywood says the moviegoer is getting this type of story because he likes it, and psychologists explain that he likes because it serves as a violent escape in tune with the violence of the times, a cathartic for pent-up emotions. . . . The average moviegoer has become calloused to death, hardened to homicide and more capable of understanding a murderer’s motive. After watching a newsreel showing the horrors of a German concentration camp, the movie fan, they say, feels no shock, no remorse, no moral repugnance when the screen villain puts a bullet through his wife’s head or shoves her off a cliff and runs away with his voluptuous next-door neighbor.

The femme fatale was now raised to iconic heights, starring in the film noir as a greedy, narcissistic, bored, oversexed female often plotting to do away with her poor husband. An article in the New York Times in 1946 entitled “The American Woman? Not for This GI” gave voice to the thousands of frustrated veterans coming home to find women transformed:

Being nice is almost a lost art among American women. They elbow their way through crowds, swipe your seat at bars and bump and push their way around regardless. Their idea of equality is to enjoy all the rights men are supposed to have with none of the responsibilities. . . . The business amazon would not fit into the feminine pattern in France or Italy. . . . They are mainly interested in the rather fundamental business of getting married, having children and making the best homes their means or condition will allow. They feel that they can best attain their goals by being easy on the eyes and nerves of their menfolk. . . . Despite the terrible beating many women in Europe have taken, I heard few complaints from them and rarely met one, either young or old, whose courtesy and desire to please left anything wanting.

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Cave drawings, myths, popular lore, folk and fairy tales, fables and literature often reflect the hidden unspoken yearnings and deep, dark fears and hates in a society, as well as its traumas and triumphs. In the limited three-TV-channel-plus-Hollywood-movies world of postwar American popular culture, without cable and satellite TV, without video, without video games, DVDs, the Internet or Netflix, guys read mainstream magazines, comics and paperbacks for entertainment. Other than movies, radio and later TV, there wasn’t much of anything else in the way of popular narrative entertainment.

What entertained and came to obsess some boys of Ted Bundy’s and John Wayne Gacy’s generation, and their fathers, were dozens of men’s adventure magazines like Argosy, Saga, True, Stag, Male, Man’s Adventure, True Adventure, Man’s Action and True Men.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, these magazines often presented salaciously exaggerated accounts of wartime Nazi rape atrocities. The magazine covers featured garish images of bound and battered women with headlines like SOFT NUDES FOR THE NAZIS’ DOKTOR HORROR; HITLER’S HIDEOUS HAREM OF AGONY; GRISLY RITES OF HITLER’S MONSTER FLESH STRIPPER; HOW THE NAZIS FED TANYA SEX DRUGS; CRYPT IN HELL FOR HITLER’S PASSION SLAVES.

Even today, nearly seventy years after the war, the Nazis and their psychosexual sadistic cruelty remain a major theme in our popular culture and imagination, from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, The Night Porter and Seven Beauties to the more recent Inglourious Basterds and The Reader.

The adventure magazines were known as the “sweats” for the luridly colored cover illustrations of male torturers and female victims glistening with sweat, an effect enhanced by casein paints and acrylics used by the cover artists. These magazines featured not only a gamut of Nazi and Japanese atrocities but sweaty cannibal stories based in the South Seas and Africa; Middle East harem rape scenarios; and eventually Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War vice and torture themes.

Parallel to the “sweats” was a genre of grotesque crime tabloids like the National Enquirer (before it turned to celebrity gossip) and titles like Midnight, Exploiter, Globe, Flash and Examiner and true-detective magazines that mixed staged bondage photos with horrific crime scene photos and tales of sex, death and mutilation, with headlines like 39 STAB WOUNDS WAS ALL THE NAKED STRIPPER WORE; HE KILLED HER MOTHER AND THEN FORCED HER TO COMMIT UNNATURAL SEX ACTS; I LIKE TO SEE NUDE WOMEN LYING IN BLOOD; SEX MONSTERS! THE SLUT HITCHHIKER’S LAST RIDE TO DOOM; RAPE ME BUT DON’T KILL ME.

All these hundreds of magazines had one thing in common: their covers featured a photograph of a professional model posing as a bound victim (detective magazines) or a lurid painted illustration of a bound victim (men’s adventure magazines). Either way, she was inevitably scantily clad or her dress was in disarray or tatters, her skirt hiked up to expose her thighs or stockings, her breasts straining under the thin material of her torn clothing, her bronzed flesh glowing with a fine sheen of perspiration, often with bound legs or legs spread open, tied up in a torture chamber, in a basement, on the floor, on a bed, on the ground outside; tied to a chair, a table, a rack, a sacrificial pole; in a cage or suspended from a dungeon ceiling next to red-hot pokers and branding irons heating on glowing coals, turning on a roasting spit to be cooked by lusty cannibals, strapped spread-eagle on surgical tables for mad Nazi scientists to probe and mutilate. The woman’s face is contorted in fear and submission, sometimes gazing out from the magazine cover toward the male reader, as if she was the reader’s victim, his personal slave who could be possessed for the price of the magazine.

Norm Eastman, one of the cover artists for those magazines in the 1950s, recalled in 2003, “I often wondered why they stuck with the torture themes so much. That must have been where they were heavy with sales. I really was kind of ashamed of painting them, though I am not sure they did any harm. It did seem like a weird thing to do.”

Women in these blatantly misogynistic publications were portrayed in only two biblically paraphilic ways: either as captives bound and forced into sex against their will or as sexually aggressive, bare-shouldered women with a cigarette dangling from their lips, subject to punishment or death for their evil-minded sexuality. In this paraphilic world of the “sweats,” women were either a sacred Madonna defiled or a profligate whore punished; there were no other options available.

These magazines were not squirreled away behind counters or in adult bookstores or limited to some subculture; they were as mainstream as apple pie. Some had monthly circulations of over two million copies at their height and were openly sold everywhere: on newsstands; in grocery stores, candy stores, supermarkets; on drugstore magazine racks, right next to Time, Life, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics and Ladies’ Home Journal. They would be found lying around anywhere and everywhere men and their sons gathered, in workshops, barbershops, auto shop waiting rooms, mail rooms, locker rooms and factory lunchrooms. At their peak, there were over a hundred monthly adventure and true-detective magazine titles, available to all ages.

All this in a country where it is still taboo to show even a glimpse of a bare female breast or buttock on television.

These men’s magazines, along with true-detective magazines, would increasingly be cited as favorite childhood and adolescent reading by “golden age” serial killers.

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From AMERICAN SERIAL KILLERS: The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 by Peter Vronsky, published by Berkley, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Peter Wronsky.

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