Attending a murder scene, a detective usually asks the question: Who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit this crime and once that is figured out, it narrows down the suspect list, usually to a single suspect, or no more than a few. The motive could be greed, lust, revenge, or rage and is usually not that difficult to establish. However, in case of a serial killer investigation, the motive is the obstacle, for serial killer randomly kill strangers without any observable motive. The motive is hidden so deeply within the subconscious of the serial killer, they themselves often do not even know why they do it.
Many theories have been postulated as to the origin of serial killers, ranging from socio-economic, neurological even to ‘the Devil made them do it’. None of these theories could answer my question: How could twin boys grow up in the same socio-economic environment, perhaps both be subjected to neglect, physical and or sexual molestation, born from the same genetic parents, perhaps indoctrinated in the same religious fervour – in other words they were born and raised in exactly the same circumstances, yet one becomes a serial killer and the other one not? Not even neurological pathology can explain it, since obviously not all people with organicity or neurological injuries became serial killers. Can we conveniently lump them all together as psychopaths? No. Some are psychopaths or anti-social personality disorder, to use the correct term, and some are not. Not all psychopaths are serial killers either. A very small percentage of serial killers are mentally ill, and the Devil certainly did not make them do it.
Studying the corpus of psychologist Sigmund Freud’s work as a post graduate student in psychology at the University of Pretoria in the mid-1990’s, I found my answer. In a nutshell, my doctoral dissertation theory is that a serial killer fixates in one of Freud’s psychosexual developmental phases. This fixation is the seed from which his particular idiosyncratic fantasy germinates within the subconscious. The serial killer does not socialise like other children, is incapable of compassion and does not develop a conscience. Due to the lack of an inhibiting conscience, the fantasy freely emerges from the subconscious to the conscious. As soon as the serial killer’s fragile ego and low self-esteem is challenged or threatened, he feels compelled to act out his omnipotent fantasy in order to restore his mental homeostasis. I recognised a correlation between the serial killer’s early fixations and the fantasy he acts out on his crime scene.
In this three-part series of articles and videos I discuss my signature theory. This theory applies to male serial killers. Female serial killers will be discussed in another article.
Freud’s theory on the psychosexual developmental phases states that every human being passes through five developmental phases, before reaching adulthood. They are the oral phase, anal phase, Oedipus or phallic phase, latency phase and the genital phase. A person can fixate in any of these phases and failure to resolve the fixation could be cause for pathology. A layman’s term for a fixation would be a mental short-circuit – something went wrong.
The first developmental phase is the oral or breastfeeding phase, existing from birth to about two years. All the infant’s basic needs – such as survival, hunger, love and security – are satisfied orally by the mother’s milk and the erotogenic zone is the mouth. The oral phase is divided into two stages, namely oral erotic, which is the sucking stage, and oral sadistic, which is the period when the infant bites.
An infant can fixate in this phase by either not getting enough milk or by getting too much. If the infant feels that he is not getting sufficient milk, he perceives that his needs are not satisfied. The infant may develop into an adult who is forever searching to have his needs gratified and who may be over-sensitised to rejection and become very needy.
Stewart Wilken, alias Boetie Boer, is an example of a serial killer who fixated during the oral phase. At the age of six months he was abandoned in a telephone booth, and as a result deprived of being breastfed by his mother. His basic survival needs as an infant regarding hunger and security were grossly neglected.
The following psycho-sexual phase is the anal phase is the so-called ‘potty-training phase’, spanning from approximately two to four years of age. The erotogenic zone is the anus. The infant is learning to control the sphincter gland, to retain or release faeces. The passive infant is also developing into an active toddler, they begin to walk.
This phase is therefore all about control – control is power, related to perfectionism, as control is the opposite of chaos. That is why we refer to an ‘anal personality’, who wants everything neat and just so. They cannot abide a mess – it is chaos.
The toddler is engaged in a battle of power with his primary caretaker, usually the mother, who tries to teach him to use the potty. He can sit on the potty for hours and either ‘pass’ or ‘retain’ faeces which he perceives to be a product of his own body and of which he is very proud, while the mother patiently waits, usually on her haunches in front of the mighty toddler, sitting on the throne for him to bestow or withhold his gift. Having the most important person in his life on her haunches in front of him, is a very powerful feeling and then when he pleases her and bestows his gift of faeces, which he proudly produced from his own body – she flushes it away in the toilet!
The crime scenes of the Station Strangler in Cape Town spanning from the 1980’s to 1994 were exceptionally neat and almost carbon copies of each other. The victims were all little boys who were tied up and therefore rendered to a passive helpless position, indicating that power was very important to the killer. An adult male would have no need in tying up a small boy to control him. Unnecessary bondage always indicates a need to control. There were also indications that the boys had been sodomised.
I deducted the killer was suffering from an anal fixation and predicted he would be very neatly dressed, perfectionistic in his habits, and was probably molested during his childhood between the ages of eight to 13 years. Norman Simons, whom we arrested as the Station Strangler 1994, fitted the profile and he was even wearing a very smart double-breasted suit, on his police photograph.
In the early 20th century the psychoanalyst and follower of Freud, Melanie Klein, postulated that preverbal existential anxiety in infancy gives rise to the formation of the subconscious. By closely observing children as young as two-years old, she began interpreting the subconscious hidden meaning behind their play and the significant meaning that parents play in the child’s evolving fantasy life. Klein began exploring the ultra-aggressive fantasies of hate, envy and greed in very young disturbed children, as expressed during Freud’s psychosexual developmental phases.
During the oral sadistic phase, says Klein: “He has certain oral-sadistic fantasies of quite a definite character…in which he gets possession of the contents of his mother’s breast by sucking and scooping it out.” Klein explains that the child’s body feels empty, due to lack of feeding and oral satisfaction. The child fantasizes that the mother’s body is full of the desired food.
Remember Stewart Wilken was not breastfed. On his crime scene he mutilated the breast of his victim and committed cannibalism by eating her nipples. Symbolically he cut the breast to get to the milk he was craving, just as Melanie Klein predicted. (Of course, not all children who were not breastfed become serial killers who mutilate breasts. It is more complicated than that, as I will explain in following videos.)
Klein is of the opinion that any sadistic action, whether oral sadism, urethral sadism, anal sadism or muscular sadism, is always firstly directed towards the mother’s breast and then displaced to the mother’s body. The height of the sadistic period is from the oral sadistic phase to the beginning of the anal sadistic phase. Anal sadism is all about control – exemplified in the Station Strangler’s crime scenes.
It is difficult for anyone to imagine that children, under the age of four years can already harbour such extreme sadistic fantasies in their subconscious. Even psychologists may reject Freud and Melanie Klein’s theories on psycho-sexual developmental phases and sexual and aggressive fantasies, until one observes them clearly and in harsh reality on a crime scene. For to a serial killer, these fantasies are not in the subconscious – they are aware of them from a very young age.
Top image: Micon and Pero, ancient Roman fresco (45-79 AD), Pompeii, Italy. (Stefano Bolognini)
