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If, as Freud argues, ‘the less repellent so called sexual perversions are the most widespread,’[248] then conversely, necrophilia is still very rare. Yet, when it is discovered, there is national and international news coverage, usually with the attendant ‘ghoul’ and ‘vampire’ sensational headlines. One such case came to the attention of the media in 2006 when Nicholas and Alexander Grunke, and Dustin Radke were arrested for the attempted disinterment and planned rape of the body of 20-year-old Laura Tennessen.[249] Nicholas Grunke became sexually attracted to Laura after seeing her photograph in a local Wisconsin newspaper. On the 27th of August, Laura had died in a motorcycle accident and a week later, Nicholas persuaded his brother and a friend to accompany him to St Charles Cemetery in Cassville in order to exhume Laura’s body. The young men planned to take the corpse back to Nicholas’s house in order for him to have sex with it, they’d even purchased condoms in a local Wal-Mart on their way to the cemetery. Having shovelled through the top layer of earth, the men reached the concrete vault in which Laura’s coffin rested. A passerby had spotted their vehicle outside the cemetery and reported it to the police. On reaching the graveyard, the officers discovered Alexander Grunke close to the disturbed burial plot. He admitted to the attempted grave-robbing and his brother Nicolas and friend Dustin Radke were arrested soon after. Maybe the three men had been surfing the internet and discovered an article on necrophilia written in 1993 by someone called Theoderich in which he opines, ‘An experienced necrophiliac is always equipped with the bare essentials: a shovel, vaseline and a box of rubbers. Why the shovel is needed should be obvious, but if the ground is hard then you might need more equipment to dig up your date. Vaseline is used to loosen the corpse up a bit. This makes it less likely for a body part to break off while you’re having fun and it also prevents your mantool from becoming too irritated while screwing the dried out pussy. The BOX of condoms is used to play it safe; no necrophiliac should be without it. You never know which STDs your partner had during his/her lifetime, and believe me, it doesn’t get any better after the person dies. You can put on more than one rubber for extra protection if it is warranted, but screwing a corpse without protection is just plain stupid unless you want to be the next date for a necrophiliac.’[250]

The three men were originally sent to trial for criminal damage and theft, the judge ruling that there was no evidence of attempted sexual assault. However, in 2008, the State of Wisconsin passed the Laura Tennessen Necrophilia Law, making necrophilia (or attempted necrophilia) illegal. Although two out of the five high-court judges at the new trial argued that necrophilia was a victimless crime, Nicholas Grunke was found guilty of third-degree sexual assault. After plea-bargaining, Dustin Radke was also found guilty of third-degree sexual assault and claimed, ‘Nick said numerous times over the years how he’d love to have sex with a dead body because he wouldn’t want to have a woman to come home to holler at, or complain or nag at him. And he said that more than once.’[251] Making a claim that Nicholas was a classic necrophile in wanting an unresisting and partner and fearful of sexual rejection as our friend Theoderich explains, “[F]irstly, a corpse will never tell you to get off of it if you’re being a bit rough and it will never complain no matter what kinky sexual practices you use it for.’[252] Alexander Grunke was also found guilty of all charges. The men were sentenced to two years in prison and Nicholas placed on a five-year supervisory psychotherapy course and added to the Wisconsin sexual offenders register. Those are the facts but what might have happened if they had reached Laura’s body?

Even though Theoderich proselytizes that, ‘[H]opefully these vivid descriptions will encourage you to go out to your local cemetery and to join our ranks!’[253] The three young men from Wisconsin may not have thought this plan through thoroughly, after all, as Freud states, ‘the impulses of sexual life are among those least effectively controlled by the higher activities of the mind.’[254] But if their scheme had worked and they had uncovered Laura Tennessen, wrapped her in the grey tarp they had thoughtfully brought with them in the van and taken her back to the garden behind the family house for Nicholas to fulfil his lust (presumable with Alexander and Dustin as voyeuristic cheer-leaders), then what would they have found and how would they have coped with it? If we are ‘inclined to see disgust as one of the powers which have imposed boundaries upon the sexual goal’ and ‘the strength of the sexual drive enjoys actively overcoming disgust,’[255] then how would these men have coped with Laura Tennessen after she had been killed in a motor-vehicle accident, undergone a post-mortem, embalming and buried for a week?

Nicholas Grunke first became attracted to Laura after reading her obituary. Could he have been sexually stimulated not only by the sight of her all-American, pretty face, white teeth and long blonde hair but also by the fact that she had died in a motor-vehicle accident in which ‘the automobile, and in particular the automobile crash, provides a focus for the conceptualizing of a wide range of impulses involving the elements of psychopathology, sexuality, and self-sacrifice’[256] and ‘is seen as a fertilizing rather than a destructive experience, a liberation of sexual and machine libido, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an erotic intensity impossible in any other form.’[257] If so, Nicholas and his cohorts would have had to overcome feelings of disgust, dealing with decaying flesh, wounds, the odours of embalming and necrosis, with bodily fluids, escaping gases, maybe even insects that had begun to break down the body’s tissue and organs. Was it the case that in these young men’s ‘sexual li[ves], abject elements, even ones that ha[d] been denied, play[ed] the determining role of agents of erotic attraction’ and that ‘such elements rest[ed] on the possibility—always latent—of transforming repulsion into attraction.’[258] Theoretically. In reality, would they have, like Peter Sutcliffe, vomited at the smell and sight of the body, inverting the desired-for bodily ejaculation? As the young men had bought condoms to wear during the act, then we can surmise that they had qualms about disease, about flesh on decaying flesh, about the very act of penetrating a corpse. These would-be necrophiles, these attempted-rapists, fantasized about sexual intercourse with Laura’s dead body, they did not have to overcome their disgust, they imagined that that they would have a wholly compliant, non-nagging, sex toy. The embodiment and essence of a zombie. They did not act out their fantasy as had Jeffrey Dahmer, another Wisconsin citizen, 25 years previously.

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248

The Psychology of Love, p. 40.

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254

The Psychology of Love, p. 128.

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255

The Psychology of Love, p. 130.

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256

The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 156.

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257

The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 157.

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258

Georges Bataille, quoted in Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, p. 349.