Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia by Finbow Steve

Author:Finbow, Steve [Finbow, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-341-0
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2014-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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