Gein, Christie, and West felt themselves to be disembodied as they killed, as they had sex with corpses—their wits escaped them, they were driven to perform and driven to do so in secrecy, their necrophiliac chaos enacted in confined spaces, in cellars, tombs, cupboards, to which no one had the key except themselves, all consumed in their act by silence and night, by a post-mortem, post-coital calm and peace, a life once again well controlled.
At least twenty women were tortured and killed by Gein, Christie, and West—the majority of them sexually defiled before, during, and after death. If these three necrophiles used the inner space of tombs, cellars, cupboards, then a man who killed more than 30 women used the open road, public dormitories, and beaches to find, kill, and have sex with his victims.
9
NecroSuperstar
This necrophile had no use for cramped space, for secrecy, had no real fear of capture. If Christie, Gein, and West were secretive, furtive, inadequate men with problems of intimacy and impotency, Ted Bundy[158] was brash, intelligent, and a relentless murderer and necrophile wandering the American landscape desensitized; a desiring machine in pursuit of sex and death, reterritorializing the cellar and the grave from stasis and enclosure into space and movement. Space initiates intimacy, topos becomes an extension of self, even detached intimacy means the other in the ‘place’ of the self, in place of the self. Movement, being on the road and voyaging, replaces topos with chaos, the self continually reterritorialized in search of the constantly fleeing interchangeable other. Gein used a pick-up truck to transport bodies from the cemetery to the farmhouse; West used vans to transport unconscious yet living women to his cellar. Ted Bundy as the symptom, his Volkswagen as a fetish, an impulse image (a sexual and violent energy), his use of fake plaster casts on his limbs to lure his victims into dis-location, a liminal world between desire and fear, where ultimately the reterritorilization becomes deterritorialization, the locus overriding the topos. For Bundy, the location of his victim’s corpse became a place of sexual fulfilment, a necrophiliac pilgrimage to a place (locus) where he was able to re-enact his desires, relive his power, ‘“You’re looking into their eyes and basically, a person in that situation is God! You then possess them and they shall forever be a part of you. And the grounds where you kill them or leave them become sacred to you and you will always be drawn back to them.”’[159]
Like Christie and West, Bundy took trophies from his victims and used them as fetish objects; like Gein, these fetishes were heads or body parts he had amputated. Like West and Christie, Bundy was a thief, a liar, and a voyeur. Like Gein, he was unrepentant. But Bundy wanted more than the release of psycho/sociopathic desires and sexual pressure. Bundy wanted to terrorize the country. Like Charles Manson, (arrested in 1969 for his involvement in the Tate and La Bianca murders)—the same year Bundy admitted to first actualizing his fantasy of kidnap and control, the year he found out the true identity of his mother—Bundy also wanted notoriety and fame.
Before an analysis of Bundy’s necrophilia, it is worth quoting Georges Bataille at length: ‘Sexual activity, whether perverted or not; the behaviour of one sex before the other; defecation; urination; death and the cult of cadavers (above all, insofar as it involves the stinking decomposition of bodies); the different taboos; ritual cannibalism; the sacrifice of animal-gods; omophagia; the laughter of exclusion; sobbing (which in general has death as its object); religious ecstasy; the identical attitude toward shit, gods, and cadavers; the terror that so often accompanies involuntary defecation; the custom of making women both brilliant and lubricious with makeup, gems and gleaming jewels; gambling, heedless expenditure, and certain fanciful uses of money, etc. together present a common character in that the object of the activity (excrement, shameful parts, cadavers, etc.) is found each time treated as a foreign body (daz ganz Anderes); in other words, it can just as well be expelled following a brutal rupture as reabsorbed through the desire to put one’s body and mind entirely in a more or less violent state of expulsion (or projection). The notion of the (heterogeneous) foreign body permits one to note the elementary subjective identity between types of excrement (menstrual blood, urine, fecal matter) and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvellous: a half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous shroud can be seen as characteristic of this unit.’[160]
‘The custom of making women both brilliant and lubricious with makeup…’ After Bundy had raped and killed the young women, mutilated them, vaginally and anally raped them post-mortem, he would drive away, back into town, to find new victims. But soon after the deaths, he would become consumed with a desire to visit the bodies again, to spend the night with them under the starry skies of Taylor Mountain. He would return, have sex with the bodies, wash their hair, and apply makeup to their faces. Mother destroyed, mother resurrected.
Born on the 24th of November 1946 in Vermont, Theodore Robert Cowell grew up not knowing that his sister Louise was, in fact, his mother and that his parents were actually his maternal grandparents. ‘Fear cements his compound, conjoined to another world, thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father; that is what he tries to cleanse himself of, tirelessly. What solace does he come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father, existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains. Without him the holy brat would probably have no sense of the sacred; a blank subject, he would remain, discomfited, at the dump for non-objects that are always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified by abjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, he through whom the abject exists.’[161]
156
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Punishment of Pride,’
158
Ted Bundy is somewhat of a superstar in the firmament/fundament of serial killers. Details on his life and crimes are detailed on many websites. Below is a list of the best of the secondary materiaclass="underline" Robert D., Keppel,
159
Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth,
160
Georges Bataille,
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Julia Kristeva,