It’s been a busy eighty-two years, full to bursting with rape, mutilation, necrophilia, sex-inspired cannibalism, and white slavery. Not to mention murder, vampirism, and toe-sucking. As lists go, the Ten Most Bizarre Sex Crimes of the Twentieth Century is not an easy one to make.
Bizarre Sex Crimes of the 20th Century
First off, what is a sex crime? Take the question of orgasm. A man who ejaculates while rubbing a goat has committed a sexual act, even if it’s the animal’s ear he’s been rubbing against. If he has not ejaculated, his behavior becomes more conjectural. Frequently, the police do not know if ejaculation has occurred. Quite often, official reticence has been so great that it is impossible to learn whether they know or not.
There is, of course, some element of sexuality in most human behavior, including the bizarre. Sexual excitation is not uncommon in killers at the moment they squeeze the trigger. What we’re after here, though, is crime that is explicitly sexual in motivation. The great cult crimes — Jonestown and the Manson family — were stricken from consideration. A strong case could be made for one or both. They were instigated by deranged prophets who used their considerable sexual magnetism and staying power to dominate and motivate underlings. Both crimes had powerful sexual overtones. But no overt sex act was involved.
The Wisconsin toe-sucker will also miss the list: while plausible enough, this tale hangs on too thin a thread of evidence. At about 1 :30 A.M. on June 30, 1980, a twenty-year-old woman hastened barefoot into a pizza parlor and called the campus constabulary of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She said that while walking across the campus, a good-looking white man had grabbed her from behind and thrown her to the ground. The man then knelt and sucked her toes. In a few minutes, apparently sated, he rose and loped off into the night, taking the shoes with him. The shoes were never recovered, and the toesucker is not known to have struck again. Detective Garry Moore of the campus police said the woman had suffered a scraped knee but no other physical damage. On the delicate point of her reliability, Moore was quietly affirmative. He said the toes looked sucked.
So much for the preliminaries. Here, in no particular order, are the ten most bizarre sex crimes of the twentieth century.
Bizarre Sex #2 | Sada: Love’s Ultimate Gift
Despite a reputation for docility, Far Eastern women from several cultures have long threatened to cut the penises off errant husbands and lovers. In Thailand the threat is a subject of endless banter, not all of it entirely frivolous. “I’ll cut your dick off and feed it to the ducks” is a standard warning, and the surgery has even been depicted on the side panels of some of the country’s gaily decorated trucks, along with the ducks.
One well-documented case is the death by strangulation and subsequent castration on May 18, 1936, of a Japanese gangster and pimp, Ishida Kichizo.
Abe Sada, a young prostitute, went to work as a geisha trainee in the whorehouse of Kichizo’s wife. Kichizo, pampered soul, controlled his wife’s world completely. He laid down the law and exploited her permission to use all the women on the premises. Sada quickly became the great love of his life.
As Japan surrendered to the orgy of militarism that became World War II, Sada and Kichizo devoted all of their time to sex with each other. Their love became total. In the Japanese tradition, in which pleasuring your partner is the highest sexual experience, the two competed vigorously to provide each other with more intense orgasms. S & M was more or less inevitable. Finally, Kichi asked Sada to attain the highest conceivable level of ecstasy by
strangling him at the moment of orgasm. She complied, then carved herself a set of souvenirs off the corpse. Sada was found four days later wandering the streets of the city, a bundle containing Kichi’s privates tied to her kimono and clutched in her hand.
Sada swiftly became a folk heroine, symbol of sexual emancipation and dedication to the highest pleasure. Convicted of the murder, she was apparently still in prison when the war ended and was released by mistake with some political prisoners.
A leading Japanese filmmaker, Nagisa Oshima, made a spectacular film about the case, In the Realm of the Senses. Sada’s name is now recognized throughout Japan. It has come to symbolize the search for the ultimate in human relationships.
Bizarre Sex #3 | Fritz Haarmann: Butcher’s Dozen
Fritz Haarmann, the master mincer of Hanover, turned to crime for profit. And sexual pleasure. He was a good German merchant who improved on the commercial practices of all but a few of his kind. He sold the clothes of his victims more or less routinely. But his real business, from 1918 to 1924, was their bodies, which, after odomy and murder, he then butchered.
Fritz sold meat in the Scheibermarkt (profiteers’ market) next to the train station. The master mincer specialized in the chopped, the minced, and the boneless. His customers asked few questions. Meat was virtually unobtainable in defeated, war-torn Deutschland, and one did not harass one’s butcher.
As if supply and demand weren’t protection enough, Haarmann also had a police connection. He spied for them and had a small badge to prove it. The job paid next to nothing, especially in a currency that lost its value while the ink dried. But his special relationship with the police was Haarmann’s license.
Haarmann liked to hang around the train station, the Hanover Hauptbahnhof, an enormous, ghoulish place aswarm with young men interested in what the traffic might bear. It was as evil a place as today’s Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, and in much the same way. Haarmann was gay — no surprise in a city of 450,000 with a homosexual population estimated at 40,000. Young drifters came in from all over North Germany. They were ready for anything.
And Haarman gave it to them.
He routinely toured the station’s waiting rooms at three in the morning or so, culling the lads for looks and, apparently, plumpness.
He had his standards. Accused eventualfy of killing one Herman Wolf the master mincer said; “I have my taste, after all. Such an ugly creature as, according to photographs, your son was, I would never have taken to.”
Haarmann was forty in 1919, when he met Hans Grans, a chunky but pretty thing half his age and better educated. It was love. Grans, a lazy, shiftless fellow, sometimes helped with the butchering. William Bolitho says in Murder for Profit that Haarmann let it be known he smuggled meat, and boys were constantly coming to hts house with wrapped parcels. Neighbors heard him chopping away at all hours of the night.
Deutschland was in those days a liveand-let-die sort of country. Not even the finding of four human skulls within a month in the depleted River Leine moved the police to action. Then a huge cache of bones and another skull were discovered. Rumors swept the town. Hanoverians lined the Leine to peer into its inhospitable waters, and the newspapers made a fuss. Finally the police dragged the river, and came up with 500 bones, enough for some two dozen skeletons.
They moved decisively against Haarmann after a bereft mother recognized her son’s coat on the back of Haarmann’s landlady’s son. In the end Haarmann claimed a grand total of thirty or forty victims, explaining he wasn’t sure which, and blamed Hans Grans for everything. He was a vociferous defendant, conducting some of his defense himself. “I want to be executed on the marketplace. On my tombstone there must be put this inscription: ‘Here lies Mass Murderer Haarmann,’” he told the court. Neither wish was granted. He was decapitated. Grans got life in prison, of which he served twelve years.
Bizarre Sex #5 | Ed Gein: Gentlest of Lovers
Necrophilia is one of the great cliches of strange sex crime. The prototype of the modern practitioner may be Ed Gein of Plainfield, Wisc., a farmer, handyman, and bachelor who was fifty-one when arrested in 1957 for the murder of Bernice Worden, proprietor of the local general store. At Gein’s house her body was found decapitated, dressed out, and hung by the heels to age, like a fresh-shot deer. Gein also confessed that he had killed and dressed out Mary Hogan, who kept the tavern In the town.
Besides murdering people, Geln also went around digging up new graves in the vicinity to liberate the corpses of a dozen middle-aged women. These he butchered into sections and sometimes skinned. Then he put most of them back into the holes they’d come out of, keeping only the sex and internal organs These seemed like living things, he later explained. and he could not stand the thought of the worms getting to them.
Gein was something of a student of history. He had followed the example of Ilse Koch, the Nazi Bitch of Buchenwald, and used some of the skin to ornament furniture and to make personal articles, such as belts and billfolds. He even preserved a complete breast.
Dr. W. G Larndt reported, in Bulletins of the Menninger Clinic, that Geln had often given his neighbors venison. But Ed told shrinks, “I’ve never shot a deer.”
Bizarre Sex #8 | Albert Desalvo: A Way With Women
Nothing is stranger than grown men who dislike, fear, and need women strongly enough to eliminate several of them from the face of the earth. Such men, however, tend to be strange in similar ways. They’ve had rotten childhoods, with plenty of neglect and physical abuse. And nothing is more consistent in their histories than savage beatings received while small. These men often appear foolish and ineffectual but are actually quite handy: murder requires al least a minimum of physical proficiency.
Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, can represent the lot, and with distinction. He killed twelve women, aged nineteen to seventy-five, strangling most but knifing others. A thirteenth, aged eighty-five, expired of a heart attack while he was warming her up for the kill.
DeSalvo was an all-around sex fiend who arranged the corpses of his victims for maximum dramatic effect: usually, facing the door with their legs spread wide apart and their genitals prominently displayed. He fondled and screwed and was fellated involuntarily by his victims. The pattern differed each time. He came in the face of one, he stabbed another repeatedly and horribly because she resisted him and screamed objections to his advances even after he had bound and gagged her. “She made me feel so unclean, the way she talked to me,” he explained later. “Everything I was doing to her, she just didn’t like it. No matter what I did she didn’t like it. And she wouldn’t keep quiet. … She kept saying, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t do it. …’ I was playing with her. She .kept yelling or — trying to yell — and I stabbed her. Once I did it once, I couldn’t stop.”
But DeSalvo’s weird ways with women did not always include murdering them. Prior to his two-year killing spree, he used to pose as a talent scout, a gag he had seen on television. He talked his way into women’s apartments, then unlimbered his tape measure, and thus laid his hands on their lusher body parts.
DeSalvo was expert at slipping locks and did so often to get at women. He was unfailingly, even squishily polite, and so deferential that the cops and shrinks refused to regard him as a suspect long after he confessed. Always one to please, the Strangler supported his confession with vivid, detailed memories of his crimes. It was, of course, his deference, along with a genius for knowing what to say to people who found him in their apartments, that made him such a successful killer.
Albert Fish was a molester of both boys and girls; a masochist who wore twenty-nine needles in his body; a vampire; a cannibal; and, if 1t needs saying, a sadist.
As with many sex criminals, Albert DeSalvo had a horrid childhood, including a subliterate mother, a brutal and florid father who shamed the family by consorting openly with prostitutes and whipped the children well beyond the point of statutory child abuse. Albert shoplifted and stole from his earliest years, spent lime in reform school, and then, thanks lo the army, became a good enough worker to earn a decent living as a maintenance hand and construction worker. His reign as the Strangler ran between his release from imprisonment (for his Measuring Man antics) in April 1962 and January 1964, when he claimed his last victim. He was arrested that November and jailed tor binding and molesting — but not physically harming — five women.
The police had concluded, on the best professional advice, that there were two killers, one for the old and one for the young. Both of these suspects, psychiatrists thought, were mother haters, lived alone, had respectable backgrounds, were severely inhibited sexually, and killed in sudden rages.
The officials were dead wrong. DeSalvo loved his mother passionately. He had been her favorite of six children, and she had sometimes protected him from his father’s drunken rages. He was not inhibited sexually. Albert liked sex four and five times a day. His wife considered him insatiable; he thought her frigid. Nor did he kill in a rage. Albert simply went to neighborhoods where many women lived, knocked on chance doors, and killed women he found alone. He was calm and avoided panic.
Albert DeSalvo did not know why he did the things he did. “That feeling just came over me,” he reminisced. Albert was found dead in his cell at Walpole Prison in 1973. He had been stabbed sixteen times, more times than he had ever stabbed anyone.
Bizarre Sex #5 | Doctor X: The Great Pretender
Marcia didn’t even know Ralph had a psychiatrist. But here was Ralph’s shrink on the phone, and telling her that Ralph was. desperate, on the verge of suicide and, well, Marcia just might be part of the problem.
“Me,” Marcia thought. “What can I do to help?” she asked, concerned.
“Ralph needs things looser.” said the shrink.
“Sure,” Marcia agreed. “What can I do?”
“Permission,” said the doctor,
“Permission?” asked Marcia.
“Yes, permission,” said the doctor.
And he told Marcia about group sex, wifeswapping, and all sorts of fun things that she and her husband had never tried.
“Just tell me what you’d like me 10 do,’” said Marcia.
The doctor was ready for that one. I-le told Marcia to look out her living-room window and find a man under the age of thirty. Then she was to bring him into the house and await further instructlons.
A young mailman walked by. Marcia went out and got him. The doctor called back a few minutes later and talked to tne mailman. He also talked to Marcia. Finally, the mailman and Marcia went to tre bedroom and did just as the doctor oroered, which was sex with oral variations. The doctor called agaln and gave the two oeople some more orders, which they followed. He also swore Marcia 10 absolute secrecy.
When Ralph got home that night, his wife was meltingly reassuring. “I did what your doctor said,” she told him. Marcia never was that good at keeping secrets.
“What doctor?’” asked Ralph.
Ralph and Marcia — their names have been changed to protect the innocent — are one of a dozen couples who told Long Island police that they had been duped by Doctor X, the fake shrink. More than fifty other women — some from as far away as Pennsylvania — reported that they also had been phoned by the smooth-talkmg pseudo-psychiatrist but had not fallen for his patter. Each of the twelve women who were victimized told a story similar to Marcia’s.
“This is incredible,” said Rita Gmtesman, a Nassau County detective who specializes in sex crimes. “But people have to realize this guy is very good at what he does. … He is very smooth … very authoriative on the telephone.”
Full disclosure, as you undoubtedly noticed, we did not recreate this entire article out here. Still, it might be worth noting at the outset that this bizarre sex list got compiled more than forty years ago. The fact that these still sound bizarre probably says something. … Should you have a curiosity in the true crime genre, we can tell you — and were in fact encouraged to do so — that the full article appears in the May, 1982, edition of Penthouse Magazine, which you just happen to be able to view in its entirety with fourteen bucks and a membership. You can also look through 500+ other magazines while there — a number counting up every week. Not every issue has true crime stories, though, but maybe you can find something else interesting in them.
