This case is a reverse of the Death and the Maiden story. Laura as Persephone, but this time raised from the dead to be abducted by a triad of slacker young men and taken to their personal Hades—the Grunke’s back garden. Eros and Thanatos. Rather than picking the narcissus, Persephone/Laura was to be bedded among the flowers. As in Death and the Maiden paintings by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, Hans Baldung Grien, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, the Maiden does not resist the sexual approaches of Death, she is compliant, unresisting. No fear is shown by the maiden, nor any signs of disgust. With Eros and Thanatos, desire and disgust, there is an attraction and a repellence, ‘disgusting things, whether they be slugs, saliva, dead bodies or sex with dead bodies, are disgusting to us but they also interest us. Our intrigue with what is disgusting taps into the inherent curiosity and fascination we have with ourselves—who we are, what we are made of, and how we will die.’[259]
If, as Nietzsche writes, disgust come about through, ‘[t]he aesthetically insulting at work in the inner human without skin—bloody masses, muck-bowels, viscera, all those sucking, pumping monstrosities—formless or ugly or grotesque, painful for the smell to boot.’ How did Bertrand, Gein and Dahmer et al deal with it? The majority of people adhere to Nietzsche’s reasoning, ‘Hence away with it in thought! What still does emerge excites shame… This body, concealed by the skin as if in shame… hence: there is disgust-exciting matter.’ The body is the disgust-exciting matter yet for necrophiles it is lust-exciting matter. Nietzsche again, ‘the more ignorant humans are about their organism, the lesser can they distinguish between raw meat, rot, stink, maggots.’ Yet Bertrand and Gein revelled in the rot, the stink, the sexuality of raw meat. ‘To the extent he is not a Gestalt, the human being is disgusting to himself—he does everything to not think about it.’[260] This is the embodiment and essence of the vampire—living death with all its attendant decay sheathed in a beautiful skin. Bertrand masturbated over the intestines of exhumed bodies. Gein made kitchen objects and clothing from human remains, Dahmer kept body parts in his fridge. They did not find bodies disgusting, they thought about them. How did they overcome their feelings of disgust when this strong and basic emotion is integral to structuring social and moral order?
The professions and interests of necrophiles may provide us with a clue. Sergeant Bertrand was a soldier who had seen active service in the wars and revolutions of mid-nineteenth-century France. Peter Kürten was a butcher. Fred West worked in an abattoir. Jeffrey Dahmer experimented on roadkill. Many others were employed in hospitals, mortuaries, funeral homes or cemeteries. Their relation to the human body is similar to the effects that Hans Bellmer’s dolls have on the viewer, the body parts are fetishized liberating the viewer, the necrophile from ethical codes, from the habit of disgust where trauma is desire and repression surfaces. If physical disgust became sublimated by proximity to dead bodies—a perverted inversion of Freud’s sublimation theory that sexual desire is transformed into social and/or cultural achievements—then certain necrophiles used this repression or overcoming of physical disgust and, in effect, expanded their sexual desire network. But how did they supplant or neglect their moral disgust. Proximity, familiarization and desensitization may also be a factor in transgressing social and personal morality.
The argument may be that ‘[e]very ethical act, as pure and disinterested as it may appear, is always grounded in some “pathological” motivation (the agent’s own long-term interest)’ and that ‘desire itself (i.e., acting upon one’s desire, not compromising it) can no longer be grounded in any “pathological” interest or motivation, and thus meets the criteria of the Kantian ethical act, so that “following one’s desire” overlaps with “doing one’s duty”.’[261]
In California in February 2003, Donald Luis Cooper, pleaded guilty to the sexual abuse of Robyn Gillett, a four-year-old girl who had died from influenza. Cooper had transported her body to the San Bernardino county morgue from Victor Valley Community Hospital. As his girlfriend, Chaunee Marie Helm, stood lookout, he sexually assaulted the body but was caught on CCTV cameras. As in the case of Laura Tennessen in Wisconsin, California had no laws to criminalize necrophilia and Cooper was charged and found guilty of the felony mutilation of human remains and received a suspended two-year prison sentence. However, after breaking his parole and being charged with cruelty to animals, Cooper was sentenced to two years at the California Institution for Men in Chino in accordance to Robyn’s law introduced in 2004 making necrophilia illegal in California.
Tsutomu Miyazaki abducted, raped, mutilated, killed and cannibalized four young girls between 1988 and 1989. In his mid-twenties at the time of the murders, Miyazaki was obsessed with child pornography, hentai and horror movies. He became known as the Otaku Murderer. In Japanese society, an “otaku” is an obsessive fan, usually of anime but also of lolicon, cosplay or any other obsession. In killing the four girls and sexually assaulting their bodies, Miyazaki played out his fantasies, videoing and photographing the bodies in sexually provocative poses. During the period of his crimes, he sent remnants of the bodies to the girls’ parents along with mocking postcards boasting of his acts and called their houses remaining silent when the distraught parents answered the phone. After his arrest in 1989, Miyazaki claimed to have an alter ego called Rat Man. Psychiatrists clamed Miyazaki had multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. Despite this, he was found accountable for his crimes and sentenced to death and hanged on the 17th of June 2008.
Cooper’s crime was one of opportunity and proximity, Miyazaki’s crimes of paedophilia and obsessive fantasy. In the four major classes of necrophilia, necrophiliac homicide-murder, in which a corpse is obtained by homicide for sexual purposes; regular [sic] necrophilia, in which already dead bodies are used for sex; necrophiliac fantasy, fantasizing about sexual intercourse with a dead body without actually committing necrophilia; and pseudonecrophilia, in which sexual activity with a corpse is only part of a wider sexuality,[262] it is apparent that necrophilia fantasy and necrophiliac homicide-murder are poles apart in any moral calculus. However, Miyazaki was both a necrophiliac fantasist and a necrophiliac-murderer. Cooper was a pseudonecrophile and a regular necrophile, opportunistically using a dead body for sex. How far outside moral norms and ethical rules are the varying types of necrophile?
A contemporary of the Marquis de Sade, Immanuel Kant argues, ‘Thus it is that man lays claim to a will which does not let anything come into account if it belongs merely to his desires and inclinations, but, contrary to these, thinks of acts being possible for him, indeed necessary, which could only occur after all desires and sensory stimulation have been ignored.’[263]
Not so the necrophile. Be it a fantasist or a murderer, the necrophile obsesses on his or her desires and sensory stimulation, goes beyond any “will” to suppress their inclinations. But that is no different than the desiring drive of a paedophile, a homosexual, a heterosexual. The homicidal and the regular necrophile, however, must transgress morality and ethical standards by committing murder and rape.
Is the necrophile, in whichever guise, an anti-Kantian, a Nietzschean, rebelling against the injustices of society’s ethical straitjacket? Written and published in 1887, a year before Jack the Ripper’s murder spree in London, Nietzsche states in The Genealogy of Morals, ‘Hostility, cruelty, pleasure in persecution, in assault, in change, in destruction—all that turning against the man who possesses such instincts: such is the origin of “bad conscience”. The man who is forced into an oppressively narrow and regular morality, who for want of external enemies and resistance impatiently tears, persecutes, gnaws, disturbs, mistreats himself, this animal which is to be “tamed”, which rubs himself raw on the bars of his cage, this deprived man consumed with homesickness for the desert, who had no choice to transform himself into an adventure, a place of torture, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness—this fool, this yearning and desperate prisoner became the inventor of “bad conscience”.’[264]
259
Rachel Herz,
260
Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in
262
Jonathan P. Rosman, MD and Phillip J. Resnick, MD, ‘Sexual Attraction to Corpses: A Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia,’
263
Immanuel Kant,
264
Friedrich Nietzsche,