Free Serial Killer Investigations by Colin Wilson Page B

killed thousands of women in fantasy before he did it in reality. In his classic Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes (1957), James Melvin Reinhardt, professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska, starts by underlining the central role played by fantasy in sexual aberration, and adds: ‘These tend to generate their own psychic energies’—that is to say, the fantasy takes over. The result, says Reinhardt, is that they can bring about a ‘deterioration that leads to criminality, alcoholism and other modes of escape’. One of the central chapters of the book is entitled ‘Fantasy Finds a Victim,’ and deals with various cases in which fantasy played a central part.
    One of the oddest of these cases concerns the shooting of Eddie Waitkus, first baseman of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, by an admiring fan. On 15 June 1949, 19-year-old Ruth Anne Steinhagen, an attractive six-foot brunette, left a note for Waitkus in the Edgewater Hotel in Chicago saying that she had to see him urgently. When he came to her room, she let him in, and then shot him with a rifle she had bought in a pawnshop. It collapsed his right lung, but struck no vital organs.
    She explained in a letter to her court-appointed psychiatrist: ‘As time went on I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy. I knew I would never get to know him in a normal way, so I kept thinking I will never get him, and if I can’t have him nobody else can. Then I decided I would kill him.’
    With other fans she would wait for hours outside the baseball park to see him leave. Yet when he finally emerged, she always hid. Her fantasy had built up so much psychic energy that it was unable to endure the least contact with reality.
    What strikes us as odd is that her adoration was transformed—not into hatred, but into a kind of sadism. The thought of killing her hero convulsed some strange sexual nerve. We can see the parallel with Harvey Glatman, snatching girl’s purses in the playground and then flinging them back at them. It is as if both he and she are saying: ‘If you won’t take an interest in me, then you’ll pay for it.’ And in Glatman’s case, women did literally pay for it with their lives.
    Here we are coming close to the basic motivation of the serial killer, and how desire can be transformed into violence.
    Another case cited by Reinhardt involved a huge white-haired rapist named Carl J. Folk, a carnival owner who had been released from a mental hospital after tying a girl to a tree and raping and beating her.
    In December 1953, Folk engaged a young couple in conversation at a gas station, Raymond and Betty Allen, who were towing a trailer en route to their new home in California. Folk followed them all day, and that night entered their trailer, knocked Allen unconscious, and then spent the night raping and torturing his wife, while Allen, tied hand and foot, was forced to listen to her screams. Finally Allen succeeded in freeing his legs and escaping from the trailer; a passing motorist untied his hands, and Allen went and got his revolver from his car. As Folk poured gasoline over Betty and her baby, with the intention of burning the trailer, Allen shot him in the stomach, disabling but not killing him. His wife proved to be dead—Folk had strangled her after burning her with matches and cigarettes and biting her all over.
    Folk was executed in the gas chamber in March 1955. In view of the fact that he was middle aged, it seems likely that Betty Allen was not his first murder victim.
    Folk had obviously spent a lifetime engaged in sadistic fantasies. What seems surprising about Kemper is that he had reached the same stage by the age of 23.
    That Ressler was aware of Kemper’s continued potential for violence is illustrated by an amusing story he tells of their third interview. On this occasion he had been alone with Kemper, and at the end of a four-hour session that included detailed discussion of appalling depravities, Ressler pushed the