If the escalation in Bertrand’s perversions culminated in his capture, what were the origins of that perversion and what tipped dark fantasy into darker reality? As Foucault states, in the nineteenth century, ‘sex gradually became an object of great suspicion; the general and disquieting meaning that pervades our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point of weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the fragment of darkness that we each carry with us: a general signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends.’[113]
In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, Philippines police dubbed a successor to Sergeant Bertrand the ‘Tomb Raider.’ At first, local residents thought a gang of necrophiles was responsible for the disinterred female corpses spread-eagled on tombs. In the small Barangay of Mercedes, over a period of six months between October 2009 and May 2010, local people found five bodies laid out on their own graves, all had been sexually abused. The victims ranged in age from an elderly woman to a 13-day-old girl. Other victims included a 17-year-old student and a female teacher found hanging naked from a post. After a few false leads, police arrested 19-year-old Randy Uro Galvez for breaking into tombs at two cemeteries in Mercedes. Nonito Toribio Sr., the acting caretaker of the Mercedes New Cemetery caught Galvez with a slab of wood and a stick with which he hammered open the tombs and desecrated them. In June 2010, the Philippines Government proposed Senate Bill 1038 making necrophilia illegal. Previously, sexual intercourse with a female corpse was ‘beyond the pale’[114] of the criminal justice system and the bill hoped to ‘plug this distinct lacuna in the law by penalizing necrophiles or those who morbidly derive sexual gratification by copulating with a corpse. That such forcible imposition of manhood is directed against a lifeless female does not make the grisly act and less detestable and heinous. In fact, this vicious bestiality is notoriously offensive and revolting to the feelings of the living even as it grossly desecrates the dead.’ The Senate passed the bill and imposed a death penalty for the crime. While Galvez awaited trial for the alleged assaults, in the Philippines town of San Jose, a cemetery worker discovered the exhumed naked body of 15-year-old high-school student Jay Molina who had been killed in a motor accident a week earlier; a medical examiner found evidence of rape.
Both Bertrand and the Tomb Raider suffer from ‘Ophelia’s Grave’ syndrome, acting out a desire to ‘Hold off the earth awhile / Till I have caught her once more in mine arms,’[115] the earth a return to the womb and a drive toward their own death. Like Laertes who ‘leaps into the grave and embraces the object whose loss is the cause of his desire, an object that has attained an existence that is all the more absolute because it no longer corresponds to anything in reality. The one unbearable dimension of possible human existence is not the experience of one’s own death, which no one has, but the experience of the death of another,’[116] both Bertrand and the Tomb Raider, like Marx’s Paris of June 1848, impose new realities, new sexual landscapes. For both men, the desecration of the grave, the act of exhumation, the laying out of the corpse, ritualized the act of necrophilia; Bertrand added mutilation to his sexual rites, whereas the Tomb Raider preferred humiliation—he left the body of the teacher hanging from a post suspended by her stockings with her underwear removed and placed over her head. Where Bertrand mostly placed the bodies back in the grave, the Tomb Raider left them on display—Bertrand a humble Laertes to the Tomb Raider’s histrionic Hamlet—each a double of the other, separated by a quarter of a millennium, they come together in an orgy of death, lust, and desecration. These examples of necrophilia stem from the stuff of myth, of vampires and werewolves, digging corpses from graves with their bare hands, smashing sepulchres with hammers, levering lids from coffins, grave robbers and bodysnatchers, an unholy amalgamation of Dracula, Ed Gein, and Burke and Hare, yet both men are classified as ‘classic’ or ‘regular’ necrophiles, what Wulffen termed ‘necrostuprum’[117] or grave robbers, necrophiles who use already dead bodies as sex object. Although they mutilate, they do not murder to obtain a body.
Initially, sexologists considered necrophilia a form of sadism, yet Bertrand could inflict no pain on the bodies. Indeed, the amount of pain he went through getting to the corpse or escaping the guards and dogs, made the savage lust his own personal form of necrophilia—necromasochism. Often necrophiles become so through rejection by the opposite sex, but Bertrand had intercourse with living women in the different towns he visited with the army; apparently a good lover, women vowed to marry him.[118] Despite this, every two weeks or so, Bertrand would suffer from intense headaches and become obsessed with a desire for violence and violation, despite the weather, icy waters, frozen or baked earth, guns and booby traps. The necromasochism flipped into necrosadism as a means to enhance the sexual thrill, mutilation as foreplay. Epaulard quotes from Marchal de Calvi’s interview where Bertrand confessed, ‘I have always loved women madly; I have permitted no one to insult them in my presence. I have everywhere had young and charming women as mistresses, whom I have completely satisfied and who have yielded very willingly to me. As proof of this, some, although of rich and distinguished family, have wanted to follow me. I have never touched a married woman. Indecent talk has always offended me. I always tried to bring the conversation to another channel, when such a theme was broached in my presence. I was brought up strictly religious; I have always cared for religion and defended it, but without fanaticism.’
In the late nineteenth century, the Socialist criminologist Enrico Ferri stated ‘Again, there are the necrophiles, like Sergeant Bertrand, Verzeni, Menesclou, and very probably the undetected “Jack the Ripper” of London, who are tainted with a form of sexual psychopathy. Yet again there are such as are tainted with hereditary madness, and especially the epileptics and epileptoids, who may also be assigned to the class of born criminals, according to the plausible hypothesis of Lombroso as to the fundamental identity of congenital criminality, moral madness, and epilepsy. I have always found in my own experience that outrageous murders, not to be explained according to the ordinary psychology of criminals, are accompanied by psychical epilepsy, or larvea.’[119]
5
NecroGermania
Sexual psychopaths and sadistic killers do not always become necrophiles, nor do they all mutilate corpses, but some are only able to experience orgasm at the point of another’s death, during the act of murder or attempted murder—the death of their victims at the point of the killer’s orgasm make them necrophiles by projection. If the authorities mythologized Sergeant Bertrand as the Vampire of Montparnasse, 80 years later and 250 miles from Paris, the German police, in order to comprehend the perpetrator of a spate of vicious sex murders, searched for a man the newspapers were calling the Vampire of Düsseldorf.[120]
116
Jacques Lacan, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in
118
For details of Bertrand’s crimes and case, see Dr Alexis Épaulard,
119
Enrico Ferri,
120
Details of the lives and crimes of Kürten, Haarmann, Grossmann, and Denke, are from various sources, my descriptions should be considered an amalgamation of available texts, including: Theodor Lessing, Karl Berg, George Godwin,