Unearthing the secret lives of murderers

By Brandon Wilson
Daily Bruin Contributor

The first three pictures in the set are nothing special.

They show a young man mugging wildly to the camera in a photo
booth. With his shag haircut and English public school uniform, he
looks like a would-be rocker trying to take just the right picture
for his album cover.

But then there is the last of the four pictures. In it,
Englishman Patrick Mackay, a psychopath with at least eleven brutal
and senseless slayings to his credit, transforms himself into the
vision of evil itself. Somehow, without using any sort of make-up
or special effects, Mackay with teeth bared and blue eyes burning a
hole through the camera lens, turns his face into a mask of vicious
rage and animal ferocity. More is said by that face about the man’s
sickness than volumes of analysis or descriptions of his crimes
could ever convey. "Lustmord: The Writing and Artifacts of
Murderers" wisely eschews analyzing people like Mackay. Instead it
presents sobering portraits of people like Mackay to speak for
themselves. The book also mercifully shows no bloody crime scene
photos or coroner shots.

It’s restraint is fortunate; Mackay’s photo booth mugshot is
disturbing enough. His fearsome look, with all the boundless
insanity of pure evil, makes one understand why in "The Silence of
the Lambs" one of Hannibal Lector’s few surviving victims wound up
in an insane asylum himself: because even if you lived through an
attack by someone like Mackay, you would never be undaunted by the
stark horror of being face-to-face with a killer.

Mackay’s is just one of the many entries to be found in
"Lustmord" (Bloat Books). Edited by Brian King, the book features
the poetry, drawings, and confessions of over thirty infamous
figures, such as serial killers, mass murderers, cannibals,
necrophiliacs, and sadists. Some of them have a body count well
into the double-digits, while others only killed once or twice.
Despite the differences in their crimes and psychological profiles,
the killers in "Lustmord" (which translates roughly from German as
"lustful murder") have one thing in common: they don’t kill for
love or money, not out of a moment’s rage or for God and Country,
nor do they kill for political gain. They simply kill for the
pleasure of seeing another person suffer and/or die.

Thanks in part to the aforementioned "Silence of the Lambs," the
serial killer has become something of an icon in the 1990s. The
fascination with killers is as old as time itself, but in the last
ten years, the serial killer has nearly usurped the vampire as the
most popular monster figure around. Serial killer movies have been
a staple of ’90s cinema, from Hannibal Lector to John Doe from last
year’s "Seven." But what makes "Lustmord" worth reading is its
sober approach to its oft-sensationalized subject(s). And of
course, the fact that we as a culture have been so inundated with
killer stories real and imagined, there is the danger that we will
be desensitized, or that the killer will become so familiar a
figure that the danger and horror of these people will be
diluted.

By profiling killers both infamous and unknown, "Lustmord"
succeeds in countering this false familiarity with the killer by
providing some horrific accounts and chilling products of sick,
tortured, and sometimes hauntingly bright minds.

Some of the standouts include Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old girl
who inexplicably murdered two smaller children on two separate
occasions, thus becoming the youngest known serial killer in
history. There’s the eloquent autobiography of Bruno G., a German
police officer in the 1920s who committed two murders after
enduring an abusive childhood and a lifetime of sexual frustration
that ultimately led to an outburst of violence. His story, told in
his own words, has moments of clarity and lucidity which makes his
descent into violence all the more disturbing. There’s the story of
Issei Sagawa, a Japanese student in Paris who killed a woman who
spurned him, had sex with the body and then partially consumed it,
which led to him becoming a celebrity in his native Japan.

But most gripping in "Lustmord" are the memoirs by killers like
Carl Panzram (recently featured in "Killer" starring James Woods)
or Charles Starkweather (who serves as the basis for Martin Sheen’s
Kit in "Badlands" and Mickey Knox from "Natural Born Killers").
Both men wrote voluminous notes on themselves and why they killed,
and while their crimes are horrible and inexcusable, many of their
observations about society cannot be discounted as the ramblings of
madmen, but must be taken seriously as the thoughts of society’s
castoffs.

"Lustmord" isn’t for everybody. The subject matter and frank
depiction of it will disturb and sicken even the most jaded reader.
But such a reaction is healthy and understandable. The reason to
read "Lustmord" isn’t for entertainment, but because the mind of
the killer must be understood if we hope to ever create a world
where such people are less commonplace. "Lustmord" shows that even
the most vicious serial killer has a certain humanity, and
recognizing ourselves in these people is perhaps the scariest, and
most important fact of all.