Neighbors’ Cellars: Real Live Monsters in Modern America

A commonly held notion among storytellers is that every hero needs a villain. The villain represents a foil to the hero, often dark and selfish against the hero’s hopeful altruism. The villain represents the opposition Man can bring against Man, a rival force created equal to the hero. The monster is another idea entirely. The monster represents not the darkness within the human soul, but the darkness within a hostile world around. It possesses faculties and weaknesses entirely inhuman. It would not be a stretch to say that the flashing red eyes and the teeth that will tear a grown man to shreds were taken from the predators that hunted Early Man in the jungles, waiting just outside of the camp, in the darkness beyond the light and safety of the bonfire.

But what of the common instance of a monster taking human form? Modern horror is littered with examples. The virgin rises from her grave as a blasphemous vampire. The average man howls at the full moon as his skin splits to reveal a ferocious werewolf. Millions of loyal consumers are transformed by a murderous plague into shambling, flesh-hungry zombies. Grendel himself, the archetypical monster slain by Beowulf, was a descendant of Cain and, by extension, Adam and Eve, arguably rendering him completely human. The chimerism of human and monster is in no way new. It has been a tool used by society to dehumanize undesirables for centuries. In order to preserve their conception of proper humanity, people will simply exclude those who violate it by turning them into monsters.

In the days before flashy entertainment products like television, recorded music, and videogames, public executions were a popular form of entertainment, and colonial America was no exception. Schmid writes, “Public hangings aroused tremendous popular interest during the Puritan period, and, not surprisingly, Puritan ministers seized the opportunity to instruct the crowds attending these events about the proper way to view the criminal’s demise.” (179) These spectacles were religious in nature, with a church gathering usually before, as if people were celebrating the cleansing of their society, almost like a sacrifice. This attitude continued through American history, in both lynchings and lawful executions as people gathered to see the ultimate expulsion of the undesirable. One day, this attitude of alienation came to rest on an outwardly-typical Illinois man.

John Wayne Gacy was, to say the least, a troubled man. He had a deep wound in his heart over his late father, an abusive alcoholic. He lived in a “good neighborhood to settle in. The homes were as clean and as solidly constructed as the people who lived and raised families in them. Each had its own driveway, garage, and scrupulously manicured lawn in front and back. The street was rarely used except by residents and their guests, but was convenient to busy arterial roads that carry traffic to nearby expressways, towns, and shopping centers.” (Linedecker, 50-51) He was an industrious, gregarious fellow. He loved a good conversation, and “[i]f no one was impressed when he bragged of once being married to the daughter of the man who founded the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain, he didn’t seem to notice. He continued telling the story, or other tales, about his days as a U.S. Marine, and of the thousands of dollars he won and lost at the gambling tables in Las Vegas where he said he once worked as an ambulance driver.” (Linedecker, 49). He threw block parties, volunteered, and was well-liked around the community.

In 1978, people from all around Chicago flocked to Norwood Park Township to witness something that would be burned into the American psyche from then on. The home of John Wayne Gacy, considered a model citizen and all-around stand-up guy, was vomiting up from the depths of its crawlspace the decomposing bodies of missing young men as the local police tirelessly excavated. The crawlspace was a stinking hole of mud, rotting flesh, and a soup of chemicals Gacy had used in an effort to expedite decomposition. The house was utterly dismantled by the time the excavation was complete. The police had found twenty-nine bodies of young men, some with tourniquets or ropes around their necks, others with their underwear shoved down their throats, along with a collection of wallets and personal items belonging to teenagers and young men. (Cahill, n.p.).

It is interesting to note the sheer volume of people that came to watch the excavations. The whole scene could be accurately described as a spectacle, as “[m]orbidity, like a magnet, drew hundreds of people from Chicago and nearby suburbs to Norwood Park. They stood outside the death house, hunched against the cold and shifting from foot to foot. Ropes strung to stakes served as police lines and kept the crowds off Gacy’s property and that of his two adjacent neighbors. When more bodies were carried out of the house and into the glare of the television lights, the crowd reacted as one, surging forward, and their voices, from a slight distance, sounded like the rumbling of a single great beast.” (Cahill, np) It was almost as if something inside the people called them to the scene of the murders as if they themselves had some bizarre lust for death creeping in their hearts. In a grand display of humanity through the multitude, legions of people stood and watched in fascination as somber workers pulled the dead from the ground of a suburban neighborhood, and reveled in revulsion at this beast-in-man’s-clothing who could do such things.

This development, of course, came as a shock to these people who had, for the most part, been living in good areas in a fairly typical American setting. A veil had been lifted, an illusion dispelled: There were monsters among them. Even in their good neighborhoods, there were men who had crawlspaces full of putrefying victims. And not just any man, but the model citizen had been the one to turn his basement into a graveyard! Safety became an illusion as thick or thin as the trust one has in his neighbor. This sort of disillusionment could mean the difference between living at one’s home in comfort, or living in one’s home in terror.

But who would dare bring this upon them? How could it be that humans, good, Christian, normal people, would be able to have a secret life of vices behind closed doors that plunged so deep into depravity that they would commit murder? This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen in their suburban, civilized lives.

In order to resolve this issue people ultimately have with their own human nature, they resort to alienating the individual in question. When portrayed in public media, “serial killers are generally depicted… as individualized monstrous psychopaths, whose crimes tell us little or nothing about the societies in which they live. True-crime narratives disconnect these individuals from the social fabric in order to present them as aberrations and freaks.” (Schmid, 177). When works are written on the topic of serial killers, “[e]ven the most cursory glance at most of the self-consciously ‘nonfiction’ work on serial killers, from psychologists’ and anthropologists’ textbooks to true-crime books and journalists’ interviews, reveals the degree to which gothic metaphors and the attendant rhetoric of monstrosity pertain almost exclusively.” (Nixon, 224)

Schmid demonstrates this in writing of how true-crime novels disassociate Ted Bundy’s crimes from the common persuasion of heterosexuality, writing, “by presenting Bundy as an aberrational rather than normative straight man, true-crime narratives seek to relieve straight men of any guilt by association with Bundy and others of his ilk.” (Schmid, 178). This attitude that does not seek to render justice but rather seeks to cleanse society of guilt is the defining attitude of monsterization.

This attitudes came to shape the ensuing court proceedings in surprising ways when “Gacy’s figural monstrosity was accentuated rather profoundly at his trial when Sam Amirante, his attorney, attempted to bolster Gacy’s insanity defense by reading aloud passages of Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He then urged the jury members to view Gacy not as a mere human killer but as the ‘personification of this novel written in 1886’.” (Nixon, 225). The narrative of monstrosity was so ingrained into the public view of the case that the defense actually saw fit to simply run with it. It wasn’t that he was a monster, but that was a good guess. It was that he couldn’t control himself. The defense went so far as to issue an insanity plea. Gacy interestingly “attributed his killings to ‘the Other Guy tilt to his personality,’ even as he described himself as ‘a man who gave of himself for the benefit of others’: a man who ‘live[d] for others’ and who, ‘community-minded,’ experienced this giving of himself for others as ‘like becoming someone else.’” (Seltzer, 138). This sort of experience is well documented among people with dissociative disorders, particularly those with multiple personalities. Perhaps Gacy was simply a victim of the same darkness inside him that had claimed the lives of the twenty-nine in the crawlspace.

John Wayne Gacy was executed on May 10, 1994. People celebrated in the streets outside, waving signs declaring his glorious entrance into Hell. The monster was dead. Society was cleaned of its blemish. The world could sleep safer, content with the death of a twisted, vile, utterly inhuman creature that, so many years ago, had dressed up as Pogo the clown to entertain sick children at a hospital, who laughed and played and brought a smile to an injured little boy’s face. And in his cold, black, monstrous heart, he felt “the full, welcome feeling you get after confession, the warm, peaceful feeling that fills your chest when you step out of church after Mass.” (Cahill, n.p.) Another one bites the dust.

Perhaps, for more people than most would like to admit, there is an element in jealousy in the way they view the serial killer. Seltzer writes, “Serial killing has its place in a public culture in which addictive violence has become not merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where private desire and public fantasy cross.” (1). Maybe for many people, underneath the accusation of murder, there lies the knowledge of a similar thirst in themselves. Maybe when they demand, “why did you kill these people?” they really ask, “why should you do it if I can’t?” Perhaps the horror many people see in a serial killer is simply the reflection of some dark, perverted desire inside themselves. Perhaps for many a seemingly normal, law-abiding citizen, there is, like was in John Wayne Gacy, “an utter non-communication between his ‘outdoor’ life and his ‘buried dreams.’” (Seltzer, 189).

By cutting the aberrant human away from society, by making him an alien parasite that masquerades as human but in reality preys upon the society it has infiltrated, society can psychologically vindicate itself of the social conditions that made the monster. Incarnations of this behavior happen every day. Society wants to get tough on crime rather than eliminate the conditions that breed it. Society wants to destroy the terrorist factions that threaten its security without analyzing what it could have possibly done to make so many people hate it. Society wants to exclude the ignorant from its intellectual circles rather than recognize its own prejudices. Perhaps society simply has a literal need for witches to burn, a constant line of scapegoats to bear an increasingly heavy transmission of guilt.

Works Cited

Cahill, Tim. Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer. Premier Digital Publishing, 1986. Web. 2 Dec. 2013.

Linedecker, Clifford L. The Man Who Killed Boys. New York: St. Marins Press, 1980. Web. 2 Dec. 2013.

Nixon, Nicola. “Making Monsters or Serializing Killers.” American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Martin, Robert K., and Savoy, Eric, eds. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. 217-236. Web. 2 Dec. 2013.

Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Web. 2 Dec. 2013.

Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Web. 2 Dec. 2013.