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Robert Hale 1993 (hardcover)
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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…