Gay and Lesbian Serial Killers: Identity, Stigma, and Paradigms

Introduction: The Celebrity of Serial Killers

Serial killers continue to hold a fascination on the American public. The crimes of this subset of murderers are frequently sexualized in nature, which perhaps adds to the titillation in media coverage. It is worth observing that many of the most widely publicized serial murder cases of the past fifty years have involved gay or lesbian serial killers: Jeffrey Dahmer remains a household name even today, but other cases such as Aileen Wuornos, John Wayne Gacy, Bob Berdella, Dean Corll, and — in the U.K. — Dennis Nilsen have received substantial publicity. Wuornos and Gacy have each been the subject of Hollywood films. It is worth investigating whether the issue of sexual orientation — as a possible source of social stigma or generalized antisocial deviance — has been linked to the pathology of serial murder. In an era of rapidly changing social attitudes toward homosexuality, it is worth considering whether there was ever a relation between the crimes and the sexuality of this subset of killers, and if so whether that relation might be expected to change along with social attitudes.

Is there anyone in America who has not heard of Jeffrey Dahmer? We live in a culture that promotes the "celebrity of serial killers," in the words of Kennedy (2006) — the media finds it simple to promote a "morality play in which consensus is relatively easy to achieve" because "the serial killer is a monster and deserves the harshest punishment" (1303). Hollywood lavishes Oscars upon films like Silence of the Lambs, and rewarded Charlize Theron with a Best Actress prize for her portrayal of female serial killer Aileen Wuornos in a film entitled Monster. In some sense, the serial killer is the perfect figure for the media culture in which we live — serial killers provide suspense and a clear-cut narrative of good and evil. As Lotz (1998) notes, "the news media make people aware of the murders and foster public preoccupation with them" (530). When a serial killer is arrested and tried (like Dahmer) or executed (like Wuornos), the moralistic satisfaction for the public at large is tremendous.

We are not accustomed to thinking of Jeffrey Dahmer or Aileen Wuornos as sympathetic figures, but in terms of changing public narratives it is worth noting a fairly obvious fact: Jeffrey Dahmer was gay, and Aileen Wuornos was lesbian. Recent years have witnessed a fairly substantial revolution in public and political attitudes toward homosexuality even relative to the time period when Dahmer and Wuornos each made headlines in the 1990s. In that decade, homosexuality was still largely associated in the public mind with the AIDS epidemic, which would not abate until 1997 with the advent of medications that changed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic disease. Whether the AIDS epidemic had any influence over the remarkable rapidity with which civil rights for gays and lesbians have been achieved in the new century is a matter of some conjecture. What is most important to note is that, in contrast with other civil rights struggles, the acceptance of gays and lesbians legally and socially seems to have been accomplished almost overnight.

A substantial number of high-profile serial killer cases have involved gays and lesbians: beyond Dahmer and Wuornos, a quick survey would include John Wayne Gacy (one of the most notorious serial killers of the 1970s), Dennis Nilsen (one of the most notorious British serial killers), Dean Corll, Bob Berdella, and several others. It would not seem that gays and lesbians are necessarily overrepresented in the population of serial killers — although figures are hard to come by for an exact percentage of gays and lesbians in the American population at large, it does not seem statistically likely that homosexuals are predisposed to become serial killers in any way.

Gay and Lesbian Killers and the Standard Paradigm

What is interesting, and worth closer examination, is the way in which the existence of gay and lesbian serial killers disrupts the standard narratives we have for how serial murder is perpetrated. In general, the standard narrative follows the polemical argument made by Caputi (1989): those "who torture, kill, and mutilate" in the ways most often associated with serial murder "are men, while their victims are characteristically females — women and girls — and to a lesser extent younger males. As this hierarchy indicates, these are crimes of sexually political, essentially patriarchal, domination" (445). Even the famous example of Jeffrey Dahmer must undergo a certain amount of revision to fit into a standardized Hollywood narrative of serial murder, as in Silence of the Lambs, which presents the prospect of an LGBT-seeming serial killer who only hunts young women. There has never been a real-life case that resembles the gothic fantasy of Silence of the Lambs, but the fantasy clearly exists for a reason: public fascination with Dahmer himself had to be combined somehow with the public sense of how serial killers are understood to operate. The general understanding is that serial killers are white heterosexual males who prey on vulnerable women, and thus the notion of a gay or lesbian serial killer is potentially disruptive to the received criminological paradigm.

This paper examines that received paradigm with a specific interest in gay and lesbian serial killers. The specific questions concern whether the existence of gay and lesbian serial killers wholly undercuts previous models of serial killer behavior, whether they might adhere to their own model that could be regarded as a subset of the existing paradigm, whether social stigma plays a role in the crimes, and whether the gay or lesbian identity itself — or a potential refusal of that designation on the part of the criminal — might actually bear some relation to the crime beyond choice of victim.

There does not appear to be any reputable study focusing specifically on homosexual serial killers and how their sexuality might impact their crimes. As a result, the literature review for this thesis entails an examination of two areas: the psychology of serial killers, and more specifically the existing studies on homosexual killers. In the latter, the focus will be primarily on Aileen Wuornos because, as the subject of both Hollywood and documentary films in which she gave on-camera interviews, Wuornos is particularly well-documented. Also, as a lesbian whose victims were primarily male, she is the case most likely to disrupt any existing behavioral paradigms.

Literature Review

Sexuality obviously plays a large role in the literature on serial murder because so many of the crimes are sexualized; however, specific commentary about the role of homosexuality is hard to come by. A good starting point is provided by Fox and Levin (1998) in their extensive theoretical treatment of serial murder. They note that the social stigma attached to homosexuality plays into the process by which serial murderers contemplate their victims. As they argue:

"Through essentially the same process of dehumanization, many serial killers have slaughtered innocent people by viewing them as worthless and, therefore, expendable. Thus, prostitutes are seen as mere 'sex machines,' gays as AIDS carriers, nursing home patients as 'vegetables,' and homeless alcoholics as nothing more than trash. By regarding their victims as subhuman elements of society, the killers can actually delude themselves into believing that they are doing something positive rather than negative. From their point of view, they are cleaning the streets of filth or ridding the world of evil… The theory of dehumanization can be extended to speculate about why some serial killers freely confess once in custody. Unlike true sociopaths who are incapable of feeling remorse, serial killers who must dehumanize their victims can for just so long maintain the myth that their victims deserved to die. After being apprehended, they may be forced to confront the disturbing reality that they have killed human beings, not animals or objects." (Fox and Levin 423)

A variation on this observation is offered by Heide (1991), who includes homosexuals in the category of frequent victims targeted by serial murderers — without specific consideration of how homosexuality might impact the serial murderers themselves: "Victims may have symbolic value and are perceived to be prestigeless and in most instances are unable to defend themselves or alert others to their plight, or are perceived as powerless given their situation in time, place or status within their immediate surroundings (such as vagrants, prostitutes, migrant workers, homosexuals, missing children, and single and often elderly women)" (1103). Both of these articles suggest that social stigma around homosexuality has relevance to understanding victims of serial murder. This notion becomes particularly fascinating when we consider the various permutations that can be taken by a specifically homosexual serial killer.

The homosexual can prey upon other homosexuals: this is the case with Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen. The homosexual can prey upon heterosexuals of the same gender: this is arguably the case with Gacy, Berdella, and Dean Corll. Although many of the young men who were victims of these three killers were solicited for sex, generally the situation was such that the victims were heterosexually identified and motivated by the promise of payment — what psychologists and public health advocates would describe as MSM (men who have sex with men) rather than specifically gay. Wuornos provides the most interesting case: a homosexual woman who preyed upon heterosexual men who had solicited her as a prostitute. There do not appear to be recorded cases of homosexual male serial killers who preyed on the opposite sex, in spite of the popularity of Silence of the Lambs. Cases of pedophiliac serial killers or those who target children are excluded here, as a pedophile who preys upon children of the same gender should not be considered homosexual in the terms under consideration.

These patterns are all subject to closer analysis in terms of how Fox and Levin hypothesize that the social stigma of homosexuality makes the homosexual easier to dehumanize. The pattern of both Dahmer and Nilsen — picking up men at gay bars and clubs, and killing them as part of a seeming parody of relationship patterns (i.e., wanting a partner who will never leave) — seems to indicate that the dehumanization was extended by the killers to themselves as well. In some perverse sense, the pattern of Dahmer's and Nilsen's crimes would appear to be a critique on the fleeting nature of many gay relationships.

It is worth observing the various theoretical suggestions about the role of sex in serial murder and considering their applicability to homosexual serial murderers specifically. Canter, Alison et al. (2004) discuss the classic paradigm of "organized" versus "disorganized" serial murder and the role that the integration of sexuality into the crime plays in this paradigm. They note that the "disorganized" killer is frequently marked by "social inadequacy and inability to maintain interpersonal relationships," which "increases the likelihood of sexual ignorance as well as the potential for sexual perversions or dysfunctions as part of the homicidal acts" (Canter 294). This is a point at which the role of homosexuality might very well be raised — depending on the decade, it might itself have been considered a "perversion" or "dysfunction" (before 1973 it was still classified as a mental illness), whereas the notion of "sexual ignorance" is also more considerable with homosexuals, as the presence of social stigma meant that seeking out partners may have been more difficult.

However, much of the reviewed literature discusses the fact that the received paradigms relating to serial murder may be deeply flawed. As Seltzer (1995) argues, "one of the governing popular misconceptions about serial killing is the assumption that serial killers are almost invariably white males, despite the fact that the percentage of known black male serial killers is closely comparable to their proportion in the U.S. population as a whole (the estimates run from 13 to 16%) and despite the fact that perhaps 10 to 15% of known American serial killers are women. The construction of serial killing as 'femicide'… goes some way in accounting for these reverse biases" (127). Likewise, Heide (1991) reveals that "historical research on serial murderers… challenges the commonly held view that serial murder is a recent and almost exclusively male phenomenon," stating that a "review of various biographical materials" covering "almost two hundred years (1795–1988) reveals that over two hundred individuals in the United States have killed three or more persons over a period of days to years" and that "interestingly, 34 of the 203 (16.7%) serial murderers identified were women, a percentage that closely approximates the current involvement of females in overall homicide arrests in the United States" (1104). The problem may be one of media bias and perpetuation of an outmoded paradigm: there is a gap between the actual statistics and the way information about serial killers reaches the public.

There are also basic methodological problems with the study of serial murderers. Ball (1989) notes the relative lack of in-depth personal interviews and surveys with those convicted of serial murder, arguing that in terms of basic psychiatric understanding, "the fact that the serial murderers themselves tended to refuse cooperation on personal grounds or advice of attorney has made for a necessarily sketchy and somewhat repetitious reliance on those sources that could be mined" (594). There are also problems with the assumptions made about the psychiatric histories of serial murderers, as Seltzer (1997) observes: "As the forensic psychiatrist Helen Morrison observes, the foundational status of trauma in serial killing is, at least, open to question: 'A serial killer may complain that he was abused as a child, either physically or sexually. Little or no evidence has demonstrated, however, that these complaints are consistent or that the alleged abuses have any real foundation'" (7–8).

These studies largely date from an older psychiatric paradigm that depended heavily on Freudian and post-Freudian models of behavior. That paradigm has been partially replaced by more neurological models — focusing on frontal lobe trauma or amygdala function — that do not bring with them any kind of theory of mind that might be predictive. Limited amygdala function may be a defining characteristic of sociopaths, for example, but all available literature on serial murderers emphasizes that they are not necessarily sociopaths; the behavioral distinction between the two has been emphasized repeatedly in the scientific literature. Thus Husain (1995) claims that "scoptophilia plays a predominant part among the psychopath's attempts at control," where "the execution of dominance-submission patterns, within which the object is necessarily apprehended as a prey" is being accomplished by the serial killer (138). This is interesting when attempting to theorize something in common between homosexual serial killers, given that a predominance of looking — rather than talking or otherwise interacting in potentially homophobic environments — may in fact be a characteristic of gay behavior more broadly. This is not to suggest that gay serial killers are more likely to qualify as psychopaths than as serial murderers per se, but rather to indicate one way in which they seem to question received generalizations concerning behavior.

For what it is worth, the literature on the differences between serial murder and psychopathy generally tends to acknowledge that John Wayne Gacy followed a larger number of the traits of the latter — his unwillingness to confess after arrest, for example, and his attempt to set up an insanity defense by faking a case of what was then termed "multiple personality disorder," now largely conceived of as either iatrogenic or factitious. The reason this is intriguing is that, of all the gay and lesbian serial killers under survey, Gacy is perhaps the one who is least gay-identified and most similar to a different sort of paraphiliac. In reality his sexual orientation would appear to be ephebophiliac insofar as he was attracted predominantly to post-adolescent young men, who were frequently under the age of consent. He was therefore arrested for statutory rape and jailed before he moved to Chicago and began his career as a serial murderer. In Chicago, Gacy insisted on marrying a woman and posing as a heterosexual — his sexual activities with young men were generally manipulative and involved posing as a rugged heterosexual who occasionally had sex with men. This is not something we notice in any of the other most salient cases: Dahmer and Nilsen, for example, found their victims in gay bars, and Berdella and Corll were open about their sexuality but largely preyed upon male prostitutes rather than casual sex pick-ups.

This suggests that one field of investigation may involve mapping the actual sexual identities of gay serial killers in terms of how their psychopathology may have otherwise expressed itself in their crimes. To inquire whether the axis of sociopath versus serial killer finds different expression in gay serial killers — when the most clearly sociopathic one is also the one who is clearly least comfortable with his sexual identity — might be a fruitful avenue of study. Of course, the difficulty here is that Gacy was also the least conventionally attractive of these men: in a gay community where being a morbidly obese amateur clown is not conducive to casual sex encounters, it may be that Gacy was simply fulfilling his sexual urges in the way where he could best manipulate the advantages he had, usually by inducing young employees of his contracting business to become involved in sex games, although Gacy also preyed upon male prostitutes, in the fashion of Corll and Berdella.