This is the full-text of A.P. Wolf's Jack the Myth, originally published by Robert Hale in 1993. It is reprinted here in its entirety, with new revisions, by the kind permission of A.P. Wolf. You may start reading it from the beginning, or you can jump to specific chapters by clicking the links below.
Chapter 14 - Bad Rabbits
Richard Chase withdrew into himself even further whilst in prison, becoming
a virtual catatonic and eventually killed himself by saving up his daily
medication and taking the lot in one big swallow.
Interestingly enough when the ‘Sun’ reporters went to interview Thomas
Cutbush in Broadmoor in 1894 they found a walking zombie, a man in a totally
catatonic state, incapable or unwilling of speech and completely unaware of
his surroundings. This is the typical reaction of a chronic paranoid
schizophrenic who has gone through the acute state of explosive, violent
behaviour and settled down to spend the rest of his life locked away within
himself.
Sadly we are as yet unable to learn from Cutbush’s youth what role religion
may have played in his upbringing and subsequent illness. However his
uncle’s obsession with Catholics does show the family having some sort of
strong religious connection, and all the signs are there in Thomas’ own
household that he too was the victim of a domineering hysterical mother who
harboured extreme feelings of hate towards the subject of sex and the female
body.
Let us look at the behaviour of some other mass killers - particularly the
killers with a supposed mission - since the days of Thomas Cutbush and Jack
the Ripper.
Harvey Carignan assured the policemen who arrested him in 1974 for multiple
rape, mutilation and murder that they had made a mistake because the person
they had arrested - himself - was: ’An instrument of God, one who was
acting under His personal instructions. Murder, rape and mutilation are all
part of a Grand Plan. God is a figure with a large hood and you can’t see
his face.’
A devout and obsessive religious upbringing as a child probably influenced
the killer Herbert Mullin to start murdering people in the USA in 1972.
Voices told him what to do as he shot four young boys to death in a park at
Santa Cruz. When his murder count reached thirteen the police caught him and
were no doubt highly impressed by his claim that he had received telepathic
messages from God, and he was in fact the ’saviour of the world’ who had
just saved the world by shooting people.
An American civil rights group who attempted to have the sentence of death
revoked on the mass-murderer Carl Panzram in 1930 were probably astounded
when he told them:
‘I wish you all had one neck and I had my hands on it. I believe the only
way to reform people is to kill them’.
And there it is, said as only someone who has been there and done it could
say it ’To reform people you kill them’. What Panzram was really saying was
’without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness’ and he was quoting
the Bible. To free people you killed them.
Richard Ramirez is an even better example. When he was handed down nineteen
death sentences in Texas in 1985 he informed the court:
‘Big deal…Death comes with the territory… see you in Disneyland… Evil, evil,
you maggots make me sick. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within all of
us.’
The Puerto Rican, Miguel Rivera, kidnapped young boys in the 1970’s around
Harlem and castrated them because ‘God had instructed me to change the
little boys into little girls.’
The French serial killer, Joseph Vacher, who was examined in an earlier
chapter, shouted to the court in 1898 who had sentenced him to death for the
murder and mutilation of at least eleven young boys and girls:
‘Glory to Jesus! Long live Joan of Arc. Glory to the great martyr of our
time. Glory to the great saviour!’
David Berkowitz was born a bastard and dragged through his formative years
by a disinterested mother who had him adopted as soon as she could. In 1974
voices started to tell him to kill for his ‘Master’ and the ‘Son of Sam’ was
born and began to terrorize the city of New York by gunning down innocent
people.
An unhappy childhood where his father died when he was five and a later
obsession with religion, particularly the idea that atonement could only be
obtained from self-inflicted punishment, led Albert Fish to murder and
mutilate young boys and girls in the USA in the 1920’s and 1930’s. When he
was led to the electric chair in 1936 he smiled at his captors and told them
that he was looking forward to the electric chair as the final experience of
true pain. The thinking is totally perverse but had obviously been built up
by his religious obsession. Remember the chapter on the death of Mary Jane
Kelly? Hebrews 10:22 again:
‘In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood,
and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.’
This was Fish’s concept. He went out and murdered and mutilated young
children, he shed their blood and then he went home and literally whipped
himself into a frenzy of remorse and stuck heated needles into his body as
punishment. An ever tightening noose of shedding blood followed by
forgiveness. If he didn’t shed blood then he couldn’t be forgiven. He had to
atone for his sins, therefore he had to commit them first, and of course the
final atonement of sins was his death on the electric chair. But he probably
saw himself as a martyr who had fulfilled his mission and had been finally
freed.
When his childhood is examined it is not difficult to see why Fish turned
out the way he did. In the Catholic orphanage where he ended up at the age
of five he was forced to pray for hours on end every day and was flogged
into learning whole chapters of the Bible by heart. The slightest mistake in
his Bible learning and the vicious sadist who was supposed to be the matron
in charge of these young souls pulled his pants down and whipped his naked
bottom. Fish eventually began to enjoy the floggings and achieved sexual
satisfaction from it and then throughout his life he associated religion and
the Bible with sex and punishment. As he carefully explained to the jury at
his trial when asked why he had castrated young boys:
‘It is symbolic of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.’
Feeling that the jury were still not satisfied with his answer he
elaborated:
‘I am God… my killings were an act of mercy to save the victims from the
horrors of life.’
When Jason Nelson - a strict Mormon and seminary student - murdered his baby
son as he lay sleeping in the cot in Utah in 1981 by stabbing him with a
knife, he was following the instructions of the prophet Abraham which he had
received perversely enough while watching ‘Mary Poppins’ on television.
Another domineering and spiteful mother was probably responsible for the
spree of murder that William Heirens embarked on in Chicago in 1945. His
mother had literally beaten into him the concept that sex and the female
body were evil and dirty things and later in life he was unable to touch a
girl without being physically sick. But that didn’t stop him from murdering
and mutilating females. He scrawled on the bedroom wall of one of his
victims:
‘For heavens sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.’
Interestingly enough Heirens was also a medical student much given to the
study of medical textbooks.
Joseph Kallinger was chosen by God to annihilate mankind and funnily enough
he interpreted this heavenly message by going out and killing a young boy
and then mutilating his body. At his trial in New Jersey in 1976 he claimed
to be in daily contact with the Lord and for the benefit of the jury spoke
in ‘tongues’. His childhood had also been absolutely appalling with his
foster parents teaching him that sex and the sexual organs were evil and
wicked and they convinced the impressionable child that he had been
castrated to prevent him from contamination with women.
His mother sent Henry Lucas to his very first day at school dressed as a
girl, and even had his hair permed to complete the disguise. At home he was
forced to dress and act like a little girl, when he didn’t he was so
savagely beaten by his mother that x-rays taken over thirty years later
showed that his brain had been severely and permanently damaged. When he
eventually broke free from his mother by stabbing her to death when he was
twenty-four he was sentenced to forty years in the Ionia State Psychiatric
Hospital. Even though he pleaded with the authorities there not to free him
they let him out early and he went on kill what is estimated to be two
hundred people.
Known as the ‘Gorilla Murderer’ Earle Nelson murdered and mutilated
twenty-two women in a trail of carnage across Canada and the USA in 1926 and
1927. When Nelson was barely a year old his mother died of syphilis which
she had caught from his often absent father and the young boy was given into
the care of his aunt. She was a religious fanatic who raised her nephew with
strict biblical authority and the good book was the be all and end all of
their narrow existence. When he was twenty-nine he took his Bible and begun
his terrible journey of hate and vengeance across the country, a prayer on
his lips for the women he strangled and mutilated. Amazingly at his trial
his aunt actually appeared to vouch for her nephew’s insanity.
Dayton Rogers was another product of a strict religious upbringing, a
Seventh-day Adventist who decided that prostitutes had to pay for the evil
in the world and ritualistically murdered seven of them in a peculiar
fashion before he was captured in 1987. He had no sexual contact with his
obviously available victims, satisfying himself instead by slashing their
breasts and ankles with a knife.
A strict religious upbringing led to Thomas Piper taking up a position of
sexton at the Warren Avenue Baptist Church but it also led him to murder and
mutilate some of his female flock during the 1870’s, eventually being caught
when he enticed a five year old girl up to the belfry and battered her to
death.
The study of medical books in combination with the Bible was certainly a
deadly mixture for Sunday School teacher and medical student, Theodore
Durrant, as he took to inviting his young female students at the Emanuel
Baptist Church into the church library where he left them for a few moments
and then reappeared naked. In 1895 he brutally raped and murdered two of
them, leaving one victim in the library while he went to preach the word to
his Sunday School.
Perhaps the most hideous case on record took place in 1970 on the Canary
Islands when the male members of a fanatically religious German family
brutally murdered and mutilated the female members of the family. The
father, Harald Alexander, had decided that his sixteen year old son was a
‘prophet… inspired by God’ and when he found his son beating his mother to
death with a wooden coat-hangar in front of his two sisters he knew that the
‘hour of killing had arrived’ and set about attacking his daughters with a
hammer. The girls didn’t protest because they knew that their brother was
the ‘representative of God on earth’. When the father and son had finally
killed the three women of their family they took turns in cutting their
hearts out while the other played the electronic organ. The hearts were then
impaled on wooden stakes. When the remaining daughter of the family - who
only avoided the same terrible fate by being out of the house at the time -
was told of the horrific murders later, she clutched her father’s hand and
told him:
‘I’m sure you’ve done what you thought necessary.’
The motive for the seemingly motiveless attacks we have already met before,
as the father quite happily told the startled police officials who were
interviewing him:
‘To be truly free, you must kill those whom you love more than anything
else.’
Again the same sentiment… to be free you have to kill, to free others you
have to kill them.
It is a common thread running through the thinking of almost all of these
mass murderers, particularly where religious obsession is concerned, and it
is also a common thread running through the Bible. After all we are assured
by John 1&2:15 as a general rule:
‘Do not love the world or anything in the world.’
Now that is Richard Ramirez speaking, or at least it is language and
sentiment he would understand.
The last macabre case also shows us convincingly that not all incidences of
murder and mutilation are sexually related crimes, many of these truly
brutal crimes in fact have their origins in religious doctrine and an over
zealous love for and interpretation of what we still call today the ‘good
book’.
It appears that the ‘good book’ might be producing some ‘bad rabbits’.
Alonzo Lopez, the mass murderer of Ecuador, explained it thus:
‘The arrival of life is divine. It comes through the act of sex. And so if
an innocent person dies in the act of sex, it is also divine. That person
will find heaven without suffering in this world.’
This wacky thinking is sponsored purely by the Christian faith.
Heinrich Pommerencke came away from the cinema in 1959 in Germany deeply
influenced by the film he had just seen. It was the ‘Ten Commandments’ and
he certainly underwent some kind of religious conversion because a few hours
later he murdered and mutilated a woman. He told the police about the film
he had seen:
‘I saw half-naked women dancing around the golden calf. I thought then that
many women were evil and did not deserve to live. I knew that I would have
to kill.’
Again the whacky thinking is pure biblical sponsorship. Someone untainted by
this bizarre thinking of the Bible, church and religious doctrine would have
viewed the half-naked women with pleasure and probably gone to see the film
a dozen times. This reinforces the point I made in an earlier chapter that
many killers need to be ‘provoked’ into the act of killing rather than
motivated, even when we might not ourselves understand this strange
provocation mechanism, this case does show how it works.
The ‘Amityville Horror’ movie was based on the true story of Ronald De Feo
who shot dead six members of his family while they slept. He claimed that he
had shot all six in self-defence. When asked why, he replied:
‘I am God.’
Kidnapper and murderer Gary Heidnik had a long history of schizophrenia
which turned to murder after he had a ‘revelation from God’. He founded his
own church, made himself a bishop and when in court for multiple murder was
never without his Bible.
He in fact justified his wicked acts through the holy scriptures.
Eric Chapman arrived at his Californian family home in July 1971 with a
rifle in his hand. He informed his parents that as the ‘second son of God’
he was there to ‘save them’. And how was Eric going to save them? By
shooting them of course. Eventually he strangled his grandmother and was
arrested as he tried to kill his parents yet again. When asked to explain
his actions he responded:
‘The Bible says to take a weapon and kill your parents… Yeah, I told the
police I had to kill my parents to be free. The Bible says to help them out,
and they won’t make you feel guilty anymore if they’re dead… my mother had a
vase that proved I’m Jesus Christ, and when I was a child I broke the vase
so they couldn’t prove I wasn’t Jesus Christ… I resurrected her (the
grandmother he strangled). I look a little like Him… My accomplishment could
save the world… I’m Jesus.’
Who knows, perhaps Jack thought he was Jesus as well and went around saving
people by killing them?
When one reads through this terrible catalogue of murder, mutilation and
mayhem it is obvious that there are common factors involved in most of the
crimes. Religious obsession is a dominating factor and so it seems is the
brutal treatment most of these killers suffered as children usually handed
out by a cruel and domineering mother obsessed herself with the idea that
religion means suffering, and who despises her biological self and then
teaches her son by the use of violence or brainwashing that sex, the sexual
parts of women and women themselves are evil, sinful things with no place in
the world. A child brought up thus is nothing less than a time bomb waiting
to explode.
From the little we know of Thomas Cutbush it would seem that he was such a
child. And when we look at the crimes of Jack the Ripper we can now see that
they were committed by such a child as Thomas Cutbush.
The final question of this penultimate chapter must be what exactly are
these hordes of mass murderers and mutilators trying to tell us?
Make no mistake they are not offering up apologies or excuses for mass
murder, Panzram makes that quite clear: ‘The only way to reform people is to
kill them.’
Ramirez makes it even clearer: ‘See you in Disneyland.’
Disneyland is Walt Disney’s perfect world where religion doesn’t exist, a
land where all the mothers love their sons and evil is always vanquished by
good. Sex doesn’t exist here so it isn’t evil or sinful and there’s no need
to mutilate or murder anyone.
There is a coded message here for mankind but mankind had refused to
acknowledge that message and until mankind does this very particular type of
serial murder is bound to increase. Especially if we allow modern-day
prophets like Colin Wilson - and many other modern so-called ‘profilers’ who
are all caught in some kind of weird Freudian-Ebing worm hole - to lead us
on the false path of believing that these mass murderers are sexual
criminals seeking sexual satisfaction. It may suit Wilson and his modern
followers to believe that but the truth of the matter is that these serial
killers are symptomatic reactions to a system and a society that still even
today preaches that sex and the female body are evil.
These killers have in fact an anti-sexual motive, for they are actually
attempting to kill sex itself.
If we continue to teach our children that sex is somehow sinful and
something to be punished, we will never be in credible position to
justifiably punish that child when he is an adult and brutally attacks that
sin. Even when he commits mass murder and mutilates the reproductive organs
of women, he is only fulfilling the role that society, the church and his
family have programmed him for, and the most disturbing aspect about mass
murder is that Richard Ramirez was probably absolutely right when he said:
‘Lucifer dwells in all of us.’
But surely he meant God?
And was Thomas Hayne Cutbush Jack the Ripper?
The next chapter seems to indicate that he was but quite honestly it doesn’t
matter, for Jack the Ripper is still out there walking the streets of
Whitechapel…
