10
NecroBanality
‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied—as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels—that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.’[204]
On the 12th of June 1978, a New York court sentenced 25-year-old David Berkowitz, known to the media as Son of Sam, to a maximum 365 years for six murders and seven attempted murders in NYC between the summers of 1976 and 1977. Six days before the announcement, 18-year-old Jeffrey Dahmer gave a ride to Steven Hicks hitchhiking near Bath, Ohio. Dahmer took him back to his father’s house where the two drank beer and had sex. When the 19-year-old Hicks attempted leave, Dahmer struck him with a 10lb weight and then crushed his throat with the barbell. He had sex with the body, dismembered it, put it in plastic bags under the house’s crawl space, then stripped it of flesh, broke the bones down into smaller pieces, and then buried them in the woods near the house alongside the dead animals he had dissected over the years. Thirteen years later, he would confess that he murdered because ‘the guy wanted to leave and I didn’t want him to.’ Hannah Arendt again, ‘The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.’[205]
On the 20th of December 1978, police visited the house of John Wayne Gacy in Newport Park, Illinois, not far from Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The police had had Gacy under surveillance for suspected involvement in a number of murders after finding suspicious evidence in his house. On this occasion, the officers detected the aroma of decomposing flesh. Two days later, after excavating under Gacy’s crawl space, officers found human bones and arrested him for murder. Gacy quickly confessed to 30 murders of young men and boys between 1972 and 1978. Offering jobs or money for sex, Gacy would incapacitate the young men and strangle them while having sex with them and/or raping them. Eight days after Gacy’s arrest, 33-year-old Dennis Nilsen, murdered Stephen Dean Holmes whom he had met during a binge-drinking session in the Cricklewood Arms, London. Nilsen took the boy home where they drank more alcohol and spent the night together. The next morning, Nilsen strangled the 14-year-old boy with a tie and then plunged his head into a bucket of water to drown him. Nilsen confessed to police in 2006, after identifying a photograph of Stephen Holmes, that he had killed because he was scared the boy would leave. Nilsen placed the body under the floorboards of his flat, taking it out from time to time to have sex with it, before burying the decomposed body in the back garden of the house on Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood.
Although born 15 years and 4,000 miles apart, the lives and crimes of two homosexual necrophiles had many similarities and connections and shared many traits with the lives of Gein, Christie, Bundy, and West. Confusingly, Aggrawal classifies Dahmer as a class iXf necrophile—the same classification as Bundy—in that he tortured and had sex while his victims were living, killed them, mutilated them, and had sex with the dead bodies. However, Dahmer and Nilsen’s victims were men, their crimes were homosexual in nature, they had oral and anal sex with the bodies. This would surely put Dahmer and Nilsen into Aggrawal’s category of Type III homosexual necrophiles who have sex with both living and dead males, but the author claims there are no reported cases despite including a case study of Dahmer and surely being aware of Nilsen’s crimes.
Ritual, the use and abuse of alcohol, depression and loneliness pervaded the lives of these two men who shared a parallax view of love, sex, and abandonment. ‘One leaves the village or the city, only to return. The jumps may be regulated not only by presignifying rituals but also by a whole imperial bureaucracy passing judgment on their legitimacy. The jumps are not made at random, they are not without rules. Not only are they regulated, but some are prohibited: Do not overstep the outermost circle, do not approach the innermost circle… There is a distinction between circles because, although all signs refer to each other only to the extent that they are deterritorialized, oriented toward the same center of signifiance, distributed throughout an amorphous continuum, they have different speeds of deterritorialization attesting to a place of origin (temple, palace, house, street, village, bush, etc.), and they have differential relations maintaining the distinction between circles or constituting thresholds in the atmosphere of the continuum (private and public, family incident and social disorder). Moreover, the distribution of these thresholds and circles changes according to the case. Deception is fundamental to the system. Jumping from circle to circle, always moving the scene, playing it out somewhere else: such is the hysteric operation of the deceiver as subject, answering to the paranoid operation of the despot installed in his center of signifiance.’[206] And, ‘For even violence can be submitted to a marginal ritual treatment, that is, to an evaluation of the “last violence” insofar as it impregnates the entire series of blows (beyond which another regime of violence would begin). We previously defined primitive societies by the existence of anticipation-prevention mechanisms. Now we can see more clearly how these mechanisms are constituted and distributed: it is the evaluation of the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage).’[207]
It is not certain that Dahmer and Nilsen were aware of the crimes and arrests of Berkowitiz and Gacy, but both men were of above-average intelligence and both had access to news stories, so it is not beyond the stretch of the imagination that these notorious serial killers had some influence on Dahmer and Nilsen’s first lust murders.
Both men grew up in rural landscapes—Dahmer in Ohio, USA, Nilsen in Fraserburgh, Scotland. Both had spells in the army—the imperial bureaucracy—where they were both initially successful (Dahmer for two years, Nilsen for eleven) and then both men gravitated to the city, Dahmer becoming a mixer in a chocolate factory in Milwaukee, Nilsen—extending his stint in imperial bureaucracy—a Metropolitan police officer and then a civil servant in a job centre in Kentish Town, London. Both left the village, the rural, to enter the city, only to return within the confines of their small flats, their small apartments, to the confines of the village, the dead animals found on solitary walks became the lone men in bars and pubs. Violence and lust regulated by the availability or unavailability of male partners. Dahmer joined the army; Nilsen did, too. They were legitimately learning how to kill—the rituals of violence. The move to the city intensified and accelerated their drive to necrophilia.
Both Dahmer and Nilsen’s parents divorced (family incident), both used alcohol as a means of overcoming prohibition; joining the army (social disorder) regulated their desires, gave them rules within rules to countermand their lust. Doing so brought them within a circle within a circle, circumscribed their actions and yet deterritorialized them from the outside, gave them a conscience within a determined ethical and moral machine because they had no conscience without that machine, as they were not organs of the social machine. They had no centres of significance—fixed morals, fixed meanings—but they existed in a continual amorphous realm of signifiance, transgressive meaning, beyond the social, a realm of decomposing signs and bodies.