SONS OF CAIN-Peter Vronsky

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In Sons of Cain, a book that fills the gap between dry academic studies and sensationalized true crime, investigative historian Peter Vronsky examines our understanding of serial killing from its prehistoric anthropological evolutionary dimensions in the pre civilization era fifteen thousand BC to today, delving further back into human history

and deeper into the human psyche than serial killers. Vronsky's two thousand and four book, which has been called the Definitive History of serial murder, he focused strictly on sexual serial killers thrill killers who engage in murder, rape, torture, cannibalism, and necrophilia, as opposed to for profit serial killers, including hitmen or political serial killers like terrorists or genocidal murderers. These sexual serial killers differ from all other serial killers

in their motives and their foundations. They are uniquely human and, as popular culture has demonstrated, uniquely fascinating. The book that we're featuring this evening is Sons of Cain, A History of serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present, with my special guests, journalist and author, filmmaker and investigative historian Peter Vronsky. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Peter Frois fine,

thank you, Thank you very very much. This is very exciting. As I put on Facebook as a preview for this program, this is a book for every true crime fan, no matter where you are in the evolution of your sort of fascination with true crime. So I'm very very excited to have you on and talk about this very very incredible book, Sons of Kin.

ordinary guy, right. And so I encountered in the elevator doors an individual who had murdered two women in his room. He had severed their heads and their hands and set fire to their torsols and and then fled with the heads, kind of bumping into me in the elevator doors in the lobby as I was waiting to go up. So, you know, he kind of annoyed me because he had held up the elevator. You know, I'm impatient. I want to, you know, go in, take a walk around, decide if

I want to stay in this place or not. So you know, who's holding up the elevator. So I kind of gave him a hard look when the doors opened, and he didn't he didn't look me in the eye. He kind of was as if I was invisible almost. He just walked through me, bumping me on the shins with some kind of soft bag he was carrying, which you know, felt like to me at the time, felt like he was carrying bowling balls in this bag. When you know, I didn't pay much more attention to him.

I chose to go to the floor where he had held up the elevator, just a grandom, you know. And so once I got off at his floor, I immediately smelt, you know, something burning, and I thought at first, well, you know, that's how this place probably smells, right, And then shortly after fire alarms go off and and and

so you know, we have to evacuate the hotel. And as I come out into the street, the fire department is arriving, and I figured, well, I'm not gonna stay here, and so I went stayed somewhere else, without knowing what had occurred at that hotel. The next morning, I go in where I have to be, and in the lobby there are all these newspapers from you know, morning papers, and there it is, you know, these stories about how torsoles, headless torsos set on fire, discovered in that very hotel.

While I was checking into I did not think at all of the guy I had encountered on the elevator, you know, because you don't think that way. We know

that's what serial killers do today. You know that they walk among us and and and you know, I probably had I known the notion of serial killers, would have immediately thought and the guy I had passed by a few minutes before I went up, But I didn't think that way, and and and so for for over a year, my story, as I told it over dinners and drinks to my friends, was, you know how I ended up trying to check into a hotel where there were these

torsos set on fire. A year later, he's apprehended and I see his picture in the newspaper, and of course I recognized the guy, not so much by his face, but you know, by that haircut he had. There was they had this weird haircut that immediately kind of caught my attention, and so I recognized my got you know, the guy I had bumped into the elevator, that that was him. And of course it made sense in terms

of the timeline. So, you know, from that point on, I it became very interested with you know, what these monsters were, like, where were they coming from? You know, we had all sorts of different words for serial killers, from you know, recreational killers, multiple killers, we called them stranger on strangers killers because we thought, you know, they only killed strangers. We know better now, but the term

serial killer still had not been around. So I kind of entered this field exploring this notion of where these kind of Alfred Hitchcock movie monsters are coming from, and and that led to my kind of historical inquiries into what these guys are, what they're all about.

And and indeed, you know, we're beginning to lose track of these personalities today where back you know, in those decades, guys like Author Shawcross, uh, Edmund Temper, all these you know, uh, Henry Lee Lucas, all these serial killers were packed tightly

into that period. And and of course the mystery was, and I guess still is, because all I can offer hypothesis why in those three decades, and you know, we often associated it with society of those eras you know, for example, the nineteen sixties kind of being this new sexual permissiveness rebellion, the nineteen seventies, this kind of hedonistic decay, the nineteen nineties, the greed decade, and so forth. We never really quite understood, however, how that, you know, how

that made people kill. And one of the things as I was researching, began to occur to me is, well, wait a minute. Serial killers are essentially formed in their childhood, and the statistical norm when a serial killer first kills

is usually around twenty seven twenty eight years old. So if they're formed in their childhood between as early as the age of five to the age of fourteen roughly, and then nurture for all this time for up to twenty years their fantasies before they crossed the line and killed, you have to take those golden age serial killers, and you got to back them up twenty years. And so we're talking about guys that are being born during the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, being raised in that era

and in that culture. And so as I began to look at, you know, what was it like for kids to be brought up in forties and the fifties. You know, a couple of things struck me. One was, of course, is you know, the all these families broken first by

the Great Depression. You have a lot of unemployed men who've lost their pride, lost their sense of self, lost their families in the thirties, Then you go into the Second World War, which you know, we have still this kind of Hollywood perception of the Second World War as kind of the last good war that we had fought somehow the enemy was primitive and savage and genocidal, but we fought honorably. Right. That, you know, is something that

we're revaluating now over the last twenty decades. We begin to realize that to fight that kind of enemy we fought, we had to be pretty primitive and savage ourselves. And so we began to look at, you know, in in in the early two thousands, historians began to look at, you know, war crimes rapes committed by our side, by g I s in territories where we were liberating, for example, in Italy and France and and and and so forth,

and as well in the Pacific. This this incredible UH activity of beheading uh the enemies dead and collecting their their skulls and bringing their skulls back home to the United States kind of war trophy, species of necrophilia UH. And and and so I began to look as as much as you can at those serial killer fathers UH from that era. And and whenever there I could find

an account. Often I discovered that that these kids talk about, you know, their father coming home from the war and and being isolated, kind of sullen, not being able to talk about about the war. And indeed, you know, today, of course we've diagnosed PTSD since the Vietnam War, But in the Second World War, there, you know, there was

no such thing. And and so moreover, at the end of the Second World War, we were very quickly expecting perhaps to go into World War three, uh, to fight uh the Soviet Union, the Russians and and and so our returning soldiers, very many of them just had to suck up that trauma UH and keep it to themselves. And and and so you do find, certainly, not all, but you certainly find, you know, a generation that fought in that war and had to just repress it. And of course that takes a toll on you, takes a

toll on your family. It takes a toll on the kids you're you're raising. I'm sure you know, people listening to this of my own age, you know, baby boomers who had fathers or grandfathers who fought in the Second World War. I think I have a sense of you know what I'm talking about, this this kind of sullen silence about their experience in the war. Very few will we'll talk about it. And of course as a historian, I've talked at least to Canadian soldiers who fought in

the Second World War. The statistics we have are on American gis, but Canadian soldiers have told me similar things from that era that yes, of course, you know, when we were fighting the Nazis, sometimes we had to fight them the way they fought, and you know, all sorts of violations were committed on the battlefield, you know, vis are the taking POW's for example, stories that are still non acknowledged and not somehow on the record as to

exactly how that war was fought. So I think it had a tremendous impact among other things, because it's never one single thing. You know, there was a post war culture as well, of kind of popular rape literature, talking about men's adventure magazines that would feature on the cover usually this painted image of a woman somehow subdued about to be tortured, raped and murdered, either by you know, Pacific cannibals or by Japanese later by Korean troops or Nazis.

But it was always this book some female who is, like I said, restrained and tortured. And then you had at the same time these two crime magazines, and these would also feature a photograph of a model posing as if she's a victim of a sex crime, often looking from the cover of the magazine outwards towards the buyer, as if it's the buyer who's about to victimize her.

And so, you know, the FBI, you know, it described Detective True Detective magazines as pornography for serial killers, because as as they were arresting these guys in the seventies and eighties, it's you know, andrewed reading material for many of these guys. And this is not stuff that was sold underneath the counter. It wasn't explicitly pornographic, which perhaps made it worse. It was implicitly sexual, and and so

it fed kind of fantasy scripting. It fed the imagination, and so you know, you have combinations of factors and things that come together. It's never one single thing.

or being aroused by partialism or fetishes. So you talk about you talk about the sexual serial killers and also their formation. So as you talk about that there's a small minority of people convicting or that were perpetrating these crimes in wartime, whether it was in the Pacific or in World War Two, but you said that almost all of these men had to witness or werewity to some of these atrocities, and like you say, you had to

absorb that trauma. That trauma was never dealt with. And so then you have a generation of kids that were just not raised by fathers properly. Part of the problem. Then we talk about some of these other things. But when we talk about these kinds of people with paraphilias, we're talking about an even rare subset of perpetrators, aren't we.

of get a rise out of that myself. Right. The difference, of course, is for Jerry Bruders, he's shamed in that and and and so he's a feeling that he has to surreptitiously practice this and eventually he is going to be actually abducting women and cutting off their feet and keeping them in a freezer in a high heel shoe. That's the point he reaches. But the story of how he at least reports to psychiatrists how he first slipped

into that paraphelia was around the age of five. He had found a pair of high heeled shoes in a dump, and out of curiosity, at children's curiosity, you know, brought them home. You know, he saw other women wearing you know, high heel shoes, and and and and so he's just curious about him. And so he puts these high heel shoes on and walks into the kitchen where his mother is preparing dinner. And here's problem number two for little Jerry. His mother doesn't particularly like him or want him as

a son. She wanted a daughter. So already we have issues. On top of that, he's got a learning disability, uh too, So you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a number of things. When his mother sees this five year old boy tottering around in these high heel shoes, she completely freaks out, and so she tells him he's wicked. She punishes him, and she takes the shoes, and she ritualizes this kind

of burning of the shoes. And so, combined with the punishment, combined with already his mother's disdain for him, a learning disability, and who knows what else, a little five year old Jerry Brutus now is set for the rest of his life with this fetish for high heel shoes, something prohibited, something his mother had had burned. And so he'll struggle with that for you know, the rest of his life

as other factors begin to combine as as well. You know, when he's public school, he ends up stealing a pair of high heel his teacher's high heel shoes from her desk. He's caught, and that further humiliates him, It alienates him

from his peers. And now, typically of serial killers, you know, little Jerry Brutus is lonely, and he begins developing these fantasies of control and revenge, you know, control over women, control over those beings that wear those high heel shoes, right, and it begins to expand to other female garments as well. All these garments kind of begin to symbolize to him some kind of perhaps a sense of being oppressed by females or being punished by females, but some kind of

need for revenge and control over them. And and that essentially is what serial killing is about. It's about control. That's what you know. Most serial killers are are seeking their their their motive. And so, you know, slowly he starts taking these fantasies out on the road, you know, fetish burglaries where he's stealing neighbors lingerie. He then abducts a teenage girl when he's a teenager himself, and tries to force her to pose in pornographic pictures. It's, you know,

a very clumsy abduction. He ends up getting caught. He you know, now he has a juvenile record, And you know what often happens is, you know, these individuals they struggle between their fantasies, and because they're not insane, they know there's something wrong with what they're fantasizing about. They they kind of struggle to suppress that fantasy, and sometimes

they succeed, sometimes they don't. Sometimes it's temporary. Often what profilers are looking when they have a suspect in mind, especially around when you know, we think they may have committed their first murder, is the so called the trigger. It could be a loss of a job, or a marriage breakdown, loss of a girlfriend, and so forth. And certainly, in you know, Jerry Brutus's case, it looks like after he gets out of the juvenile facility, he finishes school,

he gets a radio engineering degree. He finds himself gainfully employed at a radio stations as a radio engineer. He meets a young woman, they fall in love, she marries He has kids. It it looks like it's all you know, He's got his life on track. And then he starts having marital problems and begins now to feel rejected by his wife, and he begins to withdraw into his basement, into his garage. He creates this, you know, kind of

a man cave. He now also begins attacking women in the street, knocking them down, uh and running off with their high heeled shoes. And at one point a woman, a saleswoman I think an avon lady, comes to his door, uh, and he spontaneously crosses the line. He takes her into the house and he murders her and uses her body as kind of like a sex doll essentially, and once he's finished, he gets rid of the body, except he

keeps the foot in his freezer. He also amputates the breasts and it kind of puts them into plastic trophy like cases. Right. So you know there's the dynamic for you from childhood to adulthood.

these fantasies on the road and test these limits. But once they cross that limit anygain. The average ages around twenty seven twenty eight. Once they cross through that realization of their fantasy, there's a horrific shock. The shock is guess what, reality is never like the fantasy. And so, but there's no way of going back now. You can't return now to the comfort and joy of the fantasy

having tasted it in reality. And and and often what the problem for the serial killer is is that the victim does not behave and do the things that they had fantasized the victim to do, and and and so the first reaction often is deep depression, disillusionment, you know, with this fantasy you might have had for twenty years. Uh and and then this kind of obsession now to improve on the fantasy, to do it better the next time. Uh and and and so that's when you start having

you know, the second, the third, the fourth killing. You go on this cycle of trying to constantly improve that that that fantasy until you reach a point as a serial killer where either you realize that you know, you're never going to now live out that fantasy, and some serial killers retire they just stop killing, as you know, the Golden State Killer allegedly did, as Gary Ridgway did,

the BTK killer. A lot of retired serial killer, especially when they reach their middle ages and the testosterone is beginning to you know, fade and so forth, they become less kind of driven. So that's one scenario. The other scenario is kind of the Ted Bundy scenario, where the serial killer's personality begins to disintegrate, and Ted Bundy in

the end, you know, when he gets to Florida. Here's a guy who was kind of meticulously organized at the beginning of his career, but by the time he gets to Florida, he's this kind of lurching, raving, disorganized serial killer who takes no heed in the way he used to. Uh, you know, and and and so it's almost like a form of suicide. Uh. And and Buddy, of course, is very quickly randomly arrested after committing these these disorganized murders.

So that's the other scenario. Sometimes it could be a literary literally literally a suicide they just killed themselves or others. Uh. You know, I could think of Edmund Kemper, for example, who I think killed something like twelve people but realized who he really wanted to kill was his mother. Uh. And then finally he kills his mother and the next day, uh, turns himself into the police. He's he essentially has cured himself. Uh. You know, Kemper has been able to do what legions

of psychiatrists were unable. He was able to understand himself and and do something about it. But here, you know, you have a very rare, highly intelligent serial killer. Company's IQ's is you know, in kind of the genius level, very articulate, very smart serial killer who essentially took himself off the killing ground and put himself away into a prison.

So those are the kind of the various scenarios as to what eventually won't happen if a serial killer is an apprehended, you know, or why some serial killers appear to retire or just vanish. You know, the Zodiac killer might be still around having lived all these decades a you know, a perhaps a reasonably productive life with no history of other crimes, having lived out his fantasies, and you know, realized what you know, realizing a fantasy may meet.

fifteen twenty. They start blaming religious assent on the Devil's terrorist witches and were wolves, And I mean it's integral to explain how we got to popular culture and literature and Grim's fairy tales and this idea of werewolves and demons, and we touched on it. But also that the church had employed these demonologists. They were real experts in defining who was had a pack with the devil and what should happen to those people and how they should be tortured.

So could you tell us a little bit about the research that you did here and what you found in terms of how this sort of was an outlet for the serial killers of the time.

devil was a trickster. Once the monopoly of Catholicism in Europe is now challenged by the emergence of Protestantism. Uh, there's a division in the church, and there's a desperate need to now unify all the elites on both sides, on the Protestant side and on the Catholic side, behind whatever the agenda is for whichever religion is chosen. And so an enemy has to be found for both religions. And so the enemy now because the devil and the

Devil's minions. And in the case of females, although men can also be accused of witchcraft and are approximately twenty percent were males, but the majority eighty percent were females.

Females are now in this kind of misogynistic notion are now considered to be concubines of the devil if there's something unusual about them, perhaps they're not married, or it's the elderly woman living at the edge of the woods, or it could be you know, a young woman who you asked on the date and she turned you down right.

Bitch to which or which to bitch right, So it's it's you know, there's a kind of a vendetta now and of course males in general are kind of conflicted over female power because that's what we have to deal with as children. You know, we're trying to negotiate our masculine independence from first of all, our mothers, our big sisters,

the babysitter, the teacher. So whenever we are, you know, find ourselves in any way constricted from that, some males will react with frustration and violence and develop I hate towards the female figure if they can't, especially if you have an overbearing mother, which we do often see in serial killer cases. So you know, males have this conflicted

relationship with with with with females. And so we're talking now about hundreds of thousands of women being arrested over a two hundred year period and subjected to these horrific tortures that you know, focused essentially on their genitals, on their breasts, and their their reproductive generals. There were even you know, special torture instruments designed, these kind of gynecological torture instruments, and of course the torture would be conducted

by these lay contractors hired by the church. The priests and the monks would supervise kind of the sexual fantasies that they expected the women to confess to, you know, sex with the devil and so forth, while lay contractors would unleash all these tortures on women, including rape, and and and so what we have here is essentially, you know, state and church sponsored institutional serial killing, you know, familiar to the Holocaust era when uh, you know, thousands of

Nazi German UH functionaries were recruited to murder people one by one, you know, before they started putting people into the gas chambers. They killed over a million and a half UH people by single shots to the head, not by firing squads. Everyone had their own person to kill, uh, and and and and so that too, is kind of a form of institutionalized serial killing because of course they

killed two three people a day. They go home, their wife washes out, you know, the blood from their uniform, They read the newspaper, they play with the kids, and then the next day they come back and they kill another few people, right and and you know it's males they're killing, it's babies, it's it's it's women. Uh, you know,

the Nazis murdered that way. I don't mean, you know, bomb or casualties on the battlefield, civilians caught in the battlefield talking about murdered, hung shot, gassed, poisoned, used for medical experience experiments. Eleven million people, of which six million were Jews. But you know, there were Gypsies, there were Poles, there were Czechs, there were Eastern Europeans, Russians, Ukrainians who were all being systematically murdered, and often that murder was

taking place one by one. So the witch hunt of the Great Hunt, as it's sometimes called, is a similar kind of phenomenon, except it's much more sexualized than you know what the Nazis were perpetrating. So uh, and parallel to that, of course, now the werewolf is back right in again. The Middle Eval period, the werewolf was seen almost as a tragic romantic figure. Often it was a knight who finds the key to transforming himself into a

wolf out of love for a woman. Usually that woman in these medieval tales betrays him by taking his transformational device, and now the night is forever unable to have his woman and trapped in this wolf stage. Those were the earlier where wolf myths. By the Renaissance period, as we start prosecuting witches, we also start prosecuting werewolves. And you know, the Internet is an amazing place in terms of historical research because now all these medieval and Renaissance documents, many

of them have been digitized. All this information is now available. And so I began to find all these were wolf trials and and and what these individuals were accused of, uh committing, and and when I read the descriptions, things like one where wolf is abducting and mutilating children, another where wolf is targeting women walking down the country road or working in the fields and raping and mutilating them. Right, there's a were wolf who actually has a store in

the town, and everybody knows him in the town. But he's luring adolescents into his store and murdering them and and and raping them and and dismembering their their their bodies. At the same time as he's talking to the parents and and looking, you know, when the child the youth is missing, and so forth, helping in the search parties.

All these descriptions are are there from the you know, fourteen one hundred and fifteen hundred and sixteen hundreds, and so as I'm reading them, I'm going, hey, you know, this is John Wayne Gacy. I've just described to you, right, these are serial killers and what they're doing. And I even found that in the French system there was already an insanity plea long before the British introduced the McNaughton

rules for insanity. As you know, to be legally insane, you have to not be aware of reality of what you're doing or its consequences, right, that is what technically makes you insane. Of course, serial killers are aware of what they're doing, which is why we don't consider them under the law insane. So there is an insanity plea in this case, but it's a kind of a three option.

Physicians would come in and interview the werewolf to determine whether this actually is a mortal who is insane and deluded believing that he is a werewolf and acting out as a werewolf, therefore therefore insane, or is he a defendant feigning insanity pretending that he is deluded into thinking that he's a werewolf. That was option two, and then

option three is he actually a real werewolf? And so you have this process of you know, insanity please being entered in the sixteen hundreds and sometimes successfully in these trials. So there's quite an extensive record, and I describe a number of these so called werewolf serial werewolf trials, and the apprehensions and the trials are happening approximately at the same rate that we had serial killer apprehensions in the United States States in the early part of the twentieth century.

You know, several a year are being charged with these crimes.

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way to hire. Now, Peter, we were talking about ancient history, and we're talking about but we have to fast forward a little bit to talk about and explain what people think is the first emergence of serial killers. You alluded to that France had already with your research. You've seen werewolf trials and in France, and so we're let's talk about the effect of industrialization where you say a large

middle class emerges and shared space with the poor. Tell us how that creates a situation, makes it a ripe and environment for Jack the Ripper. And we can talk about the rise of the modern serial killer before that, before Jack the Ripper, But tell us how industrialization and the middle class mixing in with the poor and big cities what happens.

in the summer. They'd be looking for work in farming during the summer, so it was kind of a seasonal phenomenon. Once you have industrialization, you now have these permanent, impoverished populations living in these dense slums in the cities. And of course, because we don't have a highly evolved trans transport system, you know, there are no suburbs. People live close to each other right. In fact, there are no elevators,

so sometimes even classes are stacked. The higher your class, the lower you were in the building, the lesser stairs you had to climb. You know, it's the elevator that begins to give us a kind of a harmony in neighborhoods where all the middle classes are all the upper classes. Now they have elevators and they can all live together on multiple floor But prior to that we lived close to each other. And and and so there is this now emerging disdain for certain kinds of people that that

still persists to this day. Uh. And it's usually people who are marginalized. We're talking about, you know, the homeless, we're talking about unemployed, elderly, We're talking about street prostitutes, We're talking about drug addicted street prostitutes, the runaway youths, and and and so forth, and and so serial killers, there's this term mimetic compulsion. Serial killers mimic uh often in who they target. They mimic societies disdain at that

particular historical moment, and and they often fetishize it. They work that victim into their own sexual fantasies that they have been nurturing, of controlling and taking revenge on people. And so what I discover, for example, is in the early nineteenth century, the early eighteen hundreds, just as cities are beginning to kind of buke up and you have a middle class emerging, the preferred target of serial killers

were often servant girls. And there were all these kinds of fetishes related to servant girl clothing, which we still see today. I mean, you know, the servant the French servant girl is you know, an outfit that you can buy in a sex shop, right, a Halloween costume. Right. Just in the same way as from the inquisition, dungeon play is still a theme in sexual fantasies. So all these things are still going today in our in our society,

in our sexology. But but you know, I begin to see these serial killers that are targeting servant girls and their clothing in particular, because of course servant girls are often, uh, you know, very low class individuals who have to work in a middle class household and and and so middle class households prefer that their servant girls be dressed like them, be perfumed and coifferred as if there were you know,

in the middle class. And so you have this kind of almost Albert Dissolvo kind of rage against uppity servant girls who are now also well dressed and perfumed. And and you have these serial killers attacking these women, abducting these these these servant girls, and and often keeping their clothing as these kind of fetishistic totems, almost literally killing them for the clothing.

her life. And so he tells these women to bring with them their best clothing so that the spirit of the fiance through the mirror will we'll see the best dressed woman that he will fall in love. And of course, once he restrains her, you know, he would then kill her, rape or take her clothing, mutilate the corpse, and and and you know, there's a pattern of these kinds of servant girl killers. As cities start really becoming, you know, very dense and dynamic, and you begin to see a

permanent population of of destitute prostitutes now on the scene. Gradually, the kind of focus towards the next half of the nineteenth century begins on, you know, focusing on street prostitutes, which of course Jack the Ripper kind of is is defines kind of the stereotypical what we would describe the

first modern serial killer. He of course isn't, but but he is targeting precisely that victim, which Orian society holds in you know, disdain in the same way as as a gain we still hold in disdain today Crack addicted to prostitute, street prostitutes. You know, nothing has changed since since.

rip for is the first known serial killer. In your research and through this book, what's the explanation of why some of these other people have been forgotten?

be the capital of English language newsprint. I mean there were many more newspapers in London at that time than there would have been in New York and and and so he's committing these crimes in in in the media English language and media capital where newspapers are competing with each other to outward each other. So that's one element. The fact that he's targeting, of course prostitutes is a salacious story. And of course that he's never identified that

gives him kind of gives him legs. He's you know, the myth and the story of Jack the Ripper lives on to this day. And and of course this element as well, was he corresponding with the press and with the police. You know, it's fifty to fifty that it was other journalists who wrote those Jack the Ripper letters. We have not a single shred of evidence that definitively connects those letters to the perpetrator known as the White Chapel Killer, who you know, nicknamed Jack the Ripper. There's

there's no proven connection. So all those letters, including his self naming himself Jack the Ripper, could be entirely myth. We don't know, and we don't know what happened to him. Was he one of those self curing serial killers. Did he move on somewhere else, did he dine in an accident, Was he put into prison for some other charge? Did

he commit suicide? We have all these different scenarios. One thing we do believe, and I say we, you know, professional forensic profilers, psychopathologists, they believe that he was a local person, especially geographic forensic profilers as well. Just judging by the position of his victims and their proximity to each other. It's very likely that he was of the same class as the women were. That he was someone local in that neighborhood, familiar with that neighborhood, could have

had a store there or lived there. But it's highly unlikely he came from the outside, you know, from the royal family, or from you know that he was a famous surgeon, or you know that he was you know H. H. Holmes from Chicago who you know who? During the jack the Ripper killers was busy in lawsuits in Chicago, building his so called murder hotel, which never was a murder hotel as far as we know. So you know, the fact that we never identify Jack the Ripper is I

think what keeps ripperology and ripperologists going. And you know, it was quite a challenge for me to try to say anything significant in the chapter on Jack the Ripper, considering how sophisticated some of the theories are and the arguments as to his identity. But likely, as I say, it was an homonymous, absolutely non aristocratic, kind of a Gary Ridgeway type of killer that was targeting those women.

frauds and insurance frauds in particular. And the myth, of course is that he built this rooming house hotel during the World's Fair in Chicago, and that this house had all these secret chambers and shoots to draw bodies down into the basement where they would be burned, that he had these gas chambers in there. The only secret room apparently that there was in that whole hotel and that building was a room where he would hide stolen furniture.

But there he's never been any significant evidence or persuasive evidence that he had murdered more than the three individuals that he was accused of murdering. And and Holmes as well wrote these confessions as well that he was paid for by by the Hearst newspaper chain on top of that.

But we know that the summer, in the summer when he's supposed you know, there are these allegations as well that he traveled to London and committed the Jack the Ripper cases. But in the summer and fall when those Jack the Ripper cases were occurring, he's in Chicago and involved in a lawsuit with contractors over the building of his hotel. So there again is absolutely not a single shred of evidence that Holmes ever crossed the Atlantic. Yeah.

strange you know, gun deaths suddenly cluster. We have these Belfry murders in Baptist churches with no connection between the two perpetrators. Uh and and and yet you know how odd, right, both come from Canada, both are sections in in in

Baptist churches, one in Boston, one in San Francisco. Right, So it's it's amazing sometimes the kind of synchronicity you you you have in in the history, you know, or is it some kind of you know, following that serial killers somehow like like you know, crows or whales uh cluster around each other. You know. It's it's it's a mystery how these these surges occur, and we're trying to find some kind of logical explanation for it.

They attributed it to the robbery as a motive. So there was all kinds of advances forensically, but also very much importantly trying to understand through well through the confessions, but all through through the interviews, to get a grasp of what these people the motivation for their crimes, and so well before H. H. Holmes did his suppose it or alleged confession, they had a certain amount of information to try to understand this.

supernatural phenomenon. Witches were wolves. But of course after the Enlightenment, as we get into the nineteenth century, we begin to see the emergence of alienists or psychiatrists and and and you know, there's a case of necrophilia in kind of the mid century, the Vampire of Montparnasse, and it was when the term necrophilia, having sex with the dead, is actually coined. And and and for the first time, you begin to see psychiatrists now stifying in court as to

the motive of the individual. And so approximately the eighteen fifties, now you have this kind of robust development of forensic psychiatry and attempting to describe the motives, the behaviors, you know those. It's kind of a first generation of those mind hunters from the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties who were interviewing serial killers. So a lot of that pioneering work had already been done back in the nineteenth century.

And certainly the vampire you know of Momparnasse was surprised everybody because at that time the motion of criminality was closely linked to physical appearance, and it was expected the criminals looked like criminals, that they looked like primitive beings.

automatically a criminal. And of course, like I saying, the French school of criminology that no, no, it's the environment that makes the criminal eventually will displace Lombrososh school. But I think we should review Lombroso's idea of criminal behavior being kind of a pre civilizational, primitive impulse, and of course it could be enclosed in a very civilized looking person like Ted Bundy for example. You know, that's where

I think Lombroso went off the track. But certainly there are now these debates in the nineteenth century, whether you know, this is a question we asked today are serial killers born or made? Well, this was exactly the debate taking place one hundred and fifty years ago between Lombroso and lack of Sang, between the Italians and the French, with the Italians essentially saying serial killers are born, the French saying they're made. So we already had that debate.

catalog these pyrohelias. That's when we coin terms like saddism, masochism, many of the terms that.

that time. But very soon after that there a lot of forensic psychiatrists and criminologists familiar with the concept of a serial killer, although they haven't yet stumbled on the name for it, but they're familiar with that concept and some of the mechanisms of identifying them and finding their movements and patterns, as they had to do with Vashar, This kind of migratory serial killer are the very opposite

of who Jack the Ripper was. Jack the Ripper was working in uh targeting his victims over several square blocks in an urban center. Vashire was was compulsively tramping thousands of miles in circles around France, killing victims, kind of

like Ted Bundy. And and of course it's it's one investigator at that time who begins to suspect that there's something pathological about the murders in his district, and he telegraphs to all the other districts, kind of like an early viscap bolo be on the lookout for uh Ah certain types of offenses and reports of you know, because he had kind of physical features that were distinctive a

suspect with these kinds of physical features. And and sure enough, within a week he gets a call h a telegram from somebody who had put away uh exactly that description of a person for an attempted rape. Uh and and and so now he'll interrogate and question uh that Shah and and and and here you have again the first uh kind of psychological interview where uh, you know, the interviewer is seeking away for the suspect to make it easy for him to confess and and and he works

exactly the way serial killer interviews take place today. Uh. You know, he on the suspect's ego. He pretends to be writing a book about vagrants in France, And would the Shar comment to him about what it's like to be a vagrant? Would he assess his book right? And and and in fact, he wasn't pretending. Indeed, he was writing a book on vagrants. And so Vashar kind of reviews his manuscript and and is honored by all this attention.

And of course, as he's commenting on his book, Vashar inadvertently is providing evidence of you know, where he was in all these different places, not realizing that you know, this isn't about vagrants. This is about tying all these unsolved cases, cold cases to him. So Vashar essentially puts his neck under the guillotine. Blade. Uh, you know, as in a classic of classic serial killer interrogation.

And of course it takes in the United States another twenty years, you know, before they actually start implementing these these suggestions that were thought to be revolutionary in the nineteen fifties, they were simply forgotten from what the French were already doing.

The third generation you could now just send it in electronically. But about still about ten years ago, eight years ago, individual police departments could not query the white VISCAP database. What police officers had to do a police department had to make a formal request from the FBI, who who administrates VISCAP, for them to run a data analysis on

the form that they submit. And so it wasn't used very frequently and of course, VISKAP is introduced in the nineteen eighties, but a lot of those police officers familiar with VISCAP retired and some don't even know that ViCAP even existed, and so you had this I think his name was Leonard, a trucker killer in the two thousands whose data was in VISCAP, but in the jurisdictions where he was committing his last crimes, they were unaware of ViCAP and never made the query, and it wasn't until

a career was made that all the connections were made. And so after that, VISCAP four kind of now allows for a police department to query the database on their own. But statistically speaking, in terms of how often VISCAP has resulted in an arrest, it's not very often. And of course we have a similar system in Canada. I think it's called the CLASS. But when you compare, you know, Canada has thirty six million people, United States three hundred

million people. When you compare how many police officers are permanently or how many staff are permanently working at CLASS maintaining it and at VISCAP, you know, the Canadians have put tons of money into this system and a lot of it's very labor intensive. VISCAP in the United States has this kind of skeleton crew, and it's a big question to this day just how effective and helpful CAP is.

And so there was a pro public investigation into just the effectiveness of WHITECAP and it wasn't a you know, it wasn't a very enthusiastic review of the successes of YECAP.

you do much better explanation than I do. Tell us where the potential killer would we go to today with under the same kinds of conditions that would spawn him to be a serial killer?

So we're kind of shaped off in that way in our criminal behavior. But as far as serial killing goes, the thing is, of course, is that homicides in general have significantly dropped since the mid nineteen nineties. So we're not sure why, we don't really understand it, but there appears to be as well a decline in serial killer apprehensions.

That could mean, of course, that serial killers have become better at what they do and evading police, you know, because certainly serial killing is a learning process, and many serial killers are forensically aware as they as they say, they read forensic literature, they know how serial homicides are investigated, They've looked at careers of other serial killers, and you know,

the research. So that's one possibility. But we're hoping that things like, first of all, of course, evolution in the DNA technology, you know, now, just even over the last ten years, DNA technology has has has radically been advanced, and and and now as in the case of the UH Golden State serial killer, we have this new notion of familial DNA.

in homicides. You know, they find it difficult to imagine that a single perpetrator would commit that many homicides or over that many jurisdictions. So you know, that was what VITEAP was supposed to address. So all these you know, and as well as just people's awareness ordinary people potential witness is awareness of serial killers and what they might

be like and so forth. So we're now seeing these kinds of cases that are sometimes characterized as an arrest of a budding serial killer or a wanna be serial killer. This is an individual who has the psychopathology of a serial killer, but they're arrested after their first murder, and

so we're recognizing them much earlier. And indeed, when we do arrest serial killers aside from you know, the code cases from the Golden era, like again the Golden State killer, you know, here's a guy from the late seventies, early eighties. He's exactly from that period. The BTK killer was, the Green River killer was as well. They're arrested in the two thousands for crimes they committed in the nineties and eighties.

So aside from those guys serial killers often from the two thousands, we're seeing that the body counts now are much lower than they were in those gold Narra cases. It's you know, already the case we have here in Toronto where we have a suspect arrested and charged with eight murders. That already is a spectacular number for the two thousands. You know, eight murders in the nineteen seventies or nineteen eighties, you would have shrugged, you know, you

know the Green River killer. I think forty nine murders or sixty two murders, something like that, right, So those numbers are declining. We're apprehending them. Earlier in their careers there seemed to be less of them. So monosis for the current era is good. But you know, these serial killing waves, they come in waves, in peaks, in valleys. And if my hypothesis of war and financial ruin are accurate,

then we have a problem. Around two thousand and eight, we have this huge financial crash comparable to the Great Depression that takes place in two thousand and eight that decimates families, homeowners in particular. So you now have a whole generation of kids who grew up in the house but lost it and are living in these dumpy, third

class motel rooms trying to survive. And then you have this very brutal war on terror that not only the fathers but the mothers of this generation of kids are fighting, and who knows what traumas they're bringing back. You know, we had hints of what was happening in the War on Terror, and and and you know, the question is what have we yet found out about just the brutality

of that war because we're fighting. You know, when it comes to isis we're fighting an enemy as brutal as the as the Nazis were, and and and so are we going to now see eighteen years down the road, twenty years down the road, are we going to see a new surge? You know, only time will tell. You know, that'll be a good test from my World War Two pulp magazine Great Depression hypothesis as to why you had

that golden age in the seventies and eighties. You know, twenty years down the road, there could be possibly another surge there.

it's a fascinating, fascinating book. I want to thank you very much Peter for coming on and talking about it.