Bestial Degeneracy

Over several centuries, wolves have been the scapegoats for crimes that defy belief that a human could have committed them. Victims might be bitten all over, torn limb from limb, drained of blood, or disemboweled. Since these offenses seemed altogether inhuman, villagers were certain they were committed by someone possessed by a force that could only originate from supernatural evil. Some evil is so overwhelming it’s nearly impossible for normal people to accept that it originated with a rational being. Such a person must have been transformed.

The belief in the possibility that humans could change shape has been traced to 600 B.c., when King Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible thought he’d suffered from a condition that made him grow out his hair and romp around as a wild beast. By the 1500s in France, lycanthropy was a diagnosable medical condition. An informative early book about the myths was The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century archaeologist and historian. Shape-shifting ideas were traced from ancient times and across different cultures, with many accepting that man-beasts were the result of an encounter with the devil.

These folks were thought to dress in wolfskins at night as a way to contact Satan to gain the wolf’s special powers. As the myth goes, when they managed to make “the change,” they gained a period of complete abandon into blood and violence. Common tales around Europe told of hunters who had hacked off the paw of a wolf that had run away only to find that the paw in their pouch had become a woman’s hand, and then they’d discover a woman in town with a mysteriously bandaged arm.

Some practitioners viewed shape-shifting as a gift, and those who possessed a strong sexual drive viewed a pact with the devil as a perfect excuse to claim that their misdeeds were beyond their control. For example, in 1521, Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun were tried in Besançon, France. They admitted that they had pledged obedience to the “master” of three black men they’d met in exchange for money and freedom from trouble. They were then anointed in a ceremony with unguents that changed them into savage animals. Together they had torn apart a seven-year-old boy, a grown woman, and a little girl, whose flesh they consumed.

A pioneer in the early days of
psychiatry, Richard von Krafft-
Ebing’s theories aided in the understanding
of killers such as Tessnow.

They so loved lapping up the warm blood, they stated, that they could not help but continue to kill. They also claimed they had sexual relations with female wolves. The court sentenced both men to be executed for sorcery.

The Psychology of Impulsivity

Lycanthropy has long been considered a form of lunacy that compels people to eat raw meat, attack others, let their hair grow, and run on all fours. By the late nineteenth century, such behavior had drawn the interest of mental health professionals, known as alienists. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, one such practitioner at the Feldhof Asylum, and a professor of psychiatry in Strasbourg, believed that without a standard diagnostic system, psychiatry could not consider itself equivalent to the field of medicine, so in 1880, he published three volumes, collectively titled A Textbook of Insanity, in which he outlined an elaborate system for categorizing mental diseases. By this time, insanity had already been accepted as a legal concept in England, so this medical context would cloud the waters, because it would become apparent in certain proceedings that some people who suffered from psychosis might still appreciate that what they were doing was wrong. Thus, they might be medically insane but legally sane.

Krafft-Ebing’s more well-known text, published in 1886, was Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study. His approach was to identify a foundational problem, the development of degeneracy, and study it according to its manifestations in sexual deviance. He set up a theoretical framework through which to identify and interpret the various behaviors, relying on such factors as heredity, corrupting influences on the nervous system, the evolution of a motive, and a qualitative set of details about the personality. He described the details of forty-five cases that focused largely on violent criminals or extraordinarily perverse practices (in later editions, the number of cases would grow to more than two hundred). These wretches illustrated the harmful consequences of a degenerate lifestyle, which itself was often influenced by specific types of temptations. Such persons were not well equipped to resist; they might be timid, lacking in education, unable to control themselves, or of limited intelligence. Nevertheless, they were considered to be responsible for exposing themselves to situations in which their weakness of character would undermine their efforts to be good.

Krafft-Ebing found a close link between lust and the impulse to murder. By selecting cases to correspond to a simplified framework that discounted multiple motives, he offered psychiatry a “vocabulary of perversion” and a seemingly viable standard of interpretation. He was the first to try to study and categorize the varieties of perversion, especially lust murders that inspired certain types of frenzied activity closer to what a beast might do than a human being. “A great number of so-called lust murders,” he wrote, “depend upon combined sexual hyperesthesia and parasthesia. As a result of this perverse coloring of the feelings, further acts of bestiality with the corpse may result.” He found that the largest percentage of offenders who indulged in truly perverse acts were white males. Once they were caught, they also apparently enjoyed describing the acts.

Krafft-Ebing’s work became both a professional and popular sensation, just in time to explain the bestial acts of the serial killer in Germany who had a lust for tearing apart children.

The small police force in Lechtingen began to question all the villagers to learn if anyone had seen the murdered girls that day. They failed to gain information specific to the victims, but they did hear about a suspicious man named Ludwig Tessnow, who was seen that day entering the village from the woods and whose apron was stained with some dark liquid. They went to see him, but he said he was a carpenter and the stains were from wood dye. His explanation seemed plausible enough, so they let him go.

However, one enterprising officer decided to take the investigation a step further; he went to Tessnow’s workshop to see what he might find. He saw a can of wood dye, just as Tessnow had said, so he decided to try an experiment. When Tessnow was near it, he pushed it so that some spilled onto Tessnow’s trousers. Since it resembled the stains seen on his clothes earlier that day, the investigator had to let the matter drop. Tessnow remained in the town, working among its inhabitants without further incident for the next four months. He then picked up and left to find work elsewhere, and the deaths of the two children went unexplained. Their mothers grieved without closure.

While Krafft-Ebing might have understood the offender who committed these crimes, his psychiatric approach could not have been used to catch him, because Tessnow had already learned an effective way to escape detection. His capture would depend on a different type of science.

Blood Work

Blood is one of the most mystifying and significant substances in life. It symbolizes so many things, from life itself to birth to kinship to death. As forensic science developed during the nineteenth century, biologists sought to better understand the activity, function, and composition of blood. One forensic interest was to distinguish human from animal blood, and another was to try to understand the activities at a crime scene that involved blood. For example, in Paris in 1869, an investigator named Gustave Macé gained fame from his quick-thinking examination of the floor of a murder/dismemberment scene. Although the floor had been scrubbed cleaned, he noted that the tiles sloped toward an area under a bed. He instructed a workman to lift the tiles, presuming that blood would have pooled underneath, and he was correct. Both the analysis of blood and its patterns come under the umbrella of the discipline of serology, or the science of biological fluids.

The first method for distinguishing animal blood from human was proposed in 1841: it was heated up with a chemical and sniffed for a specific odor, but there proved to be no scientific basis to this claim. During the next decade, Ludwig Teichmann mixed blood with a solution of potassium chloride, iodide, and bromide in galactic acid, showing that hemoglobin could be changed into hemin in order to examine the shape of the resulting crystals. While useless as yet for forensic investigation, this method stood for half a century before another scientist improved upon it.

Different blood types were recognized as early as 1875, but it wasn’t until 1901 that Dr. Karl Landsteiner, at the Institute of Pathology and Anatomy in Austria, named and standardized the groups. He asked colleagues for samples of their blood, and with a centrifuge he separated the clear serum from the red cells. He then placed the samples in a number of different test tubes, mixing the blood of one participant with the blood of all the others. He found that sometimes blood clumped together and sometimes the samples repelled one another. He determined from these experiments that there were three types of blood, based on differences in a substance called an antigen, which produces antibodies to fight infection. He labeled them types A (antigen A present, anti-B antibody present, but antigen B absent) and B (antigen B present, antigen A absent). A third distinct reaction was labeled C (both antigens A and B absent), but was later relabeled as O.

It took another two years, but a colleague of Landsteiner’s, Dr. Adriano Sturli, discovered yet another type in which both antigens were present, so he called it type AB. It soon became clear that the blood type depended on genetic inheritance from parents, which helped with paternity tests. Types A and O are the most common in the human population, and AB the rarest.

At the same time that Landsteiner was experimenting with blood types, another young doctor was working on the distinction between animal and human blood. German biologist Paul Uhlenhuth, working at the Institute of Hygiene in Griefswald, had taken up the study of hoof-and-mouth disease, and he hoped to develop a serum to combat it. Before him, Jules Bordet, from Belgium, had shown that a vaccination elicited a specific antibody and had worked with the behavior of antigens. He was able to see a visible reaction between the antibody and antigen. Others who injected animals against infectious diseases found that foreign substances caused the production of defensive substances specific to the injected material. These “precipitins” could be utilized to distinguish different types of protein.

Uhlenhuth continued to pursue the implications of this research with other experiments, learning that if he injected protein from a chicken egg into a rabbit, and then mixed serum from the rabbit with egg white, the egg proteins separated from the liquid to form a precipitin. As he proceeded, he found that the blood of each animal had its own characteristic protein, and then, after injecting human cells into the rabbit, he realized that the test was also applicable to humans.

This was welcome news for law enforcement, because crime suspects often claimed that blood on their clothing was from animals, and as yet their stories could not be scientifically disputed. With the precipitin test, those days appeared to be over. To be certain about this result, a coroner asked Uhlenhuth to test some dried bloodstains from both animals and humans, and the results proved the test to be reliable.

Then, just four months after Uhlenhuth announced his discovery, a particularly brutal crime brought the test into the forensic spotlight.

Flashback

This incident occurred in the village of Göhren, on the resort island of Rügen. It was Germany’s largest island in the Baltic and at this time no bridge connected it to the mainland. But it was nevertheless a popular tourist destination, because of its pristine beaches, white chalk cliffs, beechwood trees, and rugged but spectacular landscape. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, people went there for “rest cures,” a fad at this time throughout Europe.

It was July 1, 1901, a Sunday. Six-year-old Peter Stubbe and his older brother, Hermann, eight, had gone into the woods to play. No one worried, since the pretty island was considered safe and the boys often played in the woods. But when they failed to return for supper, their parents grew concerned. They looked around the immediate area but saw no sign of their sons, so they enlisted the help of neighbors. It was growing dark and they began to fear that Peter and Hermann might be lost in the woods. By nightfall, the search party had to light torches to continue. Everyone shouted the boys’ names, hoping to see them emerge or call out their location, but their voices were not heard. The search continued all night.

As the first light of day entered the woods and the weary searchers were about to give up hope, one man came across the bodies. It was the boys, both murdered. They lay together in some bushes and it was clear that their killer had crushed their skulls with a rock. More grotesque, he’d torn or cut off their arms and legs, and even removed the heart of the older boy, taking it away. The limbs were scattered about the area.

This scene resembled an incident that had occurred in the area just three weeks before. A farmer claimed he’d found seven of his sheep slaughtered, torn apart, and disemboweled. He had arrived in time to see a man running away, and while he did not recognize the person, he believed he could identify him if he saw him again. The sheep mutilation had not yet been solved.

As with the double homicide in Lechtingen, the police began interviewing everyone in the area. One villager said he had noticed the boys the day before, talking with a carpenter that he knew as Ludwig Tessnow. People tended to look askance at Tessnow, who disappeared for long stretches to travel around the country, and who lived as a recluse. No one knew him well, and one person who lived near Tessnow’s home said he had seen the man on Sunday evening wearing clothing with dark stains.

Investigators went to Tessnow’s home to ask some questions. He listened to their concerns about the boys, but denied any knowledge about them. Nevertheless, he was asked to step aside while they searched his home and carpentry shop. They found freshly laundered clothing that bore suspicious stains. Tessnow claimed that the stains came from wood dye, which he used daily in his carpentry work. He told them, step-by-step, where he had been all day on Sunday, and finally, with no evidence against the man, the police had to withdraw. But they did bring Tessnow in to see if the farmer whose sheep had been slaughtered might recognize him. Indeed he did, claiming that Tessnow was the man who had run away from the bloody scene. Tessnow denied it, and since it was one man’s word against another’s, with no witnesses, the law enforcement officers knew that nothing much could be done. Still, they confiscated some of the carpenter’s clothing and decided to keep an eye on him.

A local magistrate, Johann-Klaus Schmidt, thought about what had happened to the boys and recalled the two girls who were murdered and dismembered in the woods in a village not far away. He contacted officials there and learned that the name of their key suspect, who had since left the village, was Ludwig Tessnow.

The circumstances were now plain enough: Tessnow was killing but successfully eluding arrest. Schmidt discussed the situation with a prosecutor, Ernst Hubschmann. It turned out that he had read Paul Uhlenhuth’s recently published paper, “A Method for the Investigation of Different Types of Blood,” so he went to Uhlenhuth and asked him to examine the stains on Tessnow’s clothing. Over the course of four days, Uhlenhuth applied his method, which involved dissolving the stains in distilled water, to more than one hundred spots that he found on the material. While some stains did test positive for the presence of wood dye, in seventeen stains Uhlenhuth also detected traces of both animal and human blood. The animal blood proved to be from a sheep. He also found human blood on the rock believed to have been the weapon used on the boys. So much for Tessnow’s claim of innocence.

With this evidence, and the circumstances, Tessnow went to trial and Uhlenhuth appeared as an expert witness to explain to the judge and jury how his analysis worked. Tessnow was convicted of the murder of both Stubbe boys and sentenced to be executed. Thus a depraved killer was finally stopped.

It’s assumed that, while he was not tried for the murders of the girls in Lechtingen, he was also responsible for them. He apparently suffered from the sort of bestial bloodlust that Krafft-Ebing had documented in other sex murderers and seemed non-discriminating as to whether it was children or animals that he ripped into pieces. Although it was never determined whether his behavior was compulsive or committed during fits of psychosis, he fit the pattern of those “werewolf” killers who had been studied. Even today, what Krafft-Ebing identified is applicable to some of the most extreme cases of bloodlust and cannibalism.

Dr. Stephen Giannangelo has studied serial killers who derive a joy from their killing sprees in The Psychopathology of Sexual Murder. He says that they experience a “pervasive lost sense of self and intimacy, an inadequacy of identity, a feeling of no control.” These things then manifest in an ultimate act of control—murder. Such killers develop deviant sexual motivations that become consuming fantasies that issue in an initial murder. When they find reward in that, they continue to look for other opportunities, refining their approach and acting out further deviance. The form it takes is influenced by whatever image or object is a sexual hot button in their fantasy. Bestial paraphilias that encourage savage attacks are obviously potentially dangerous.

We will see similar cases later in this book, including the next one. Fortunately, the killers met their match in brilliant, indefatigable investigators.

Sources

Baring-Gould, Sabine. The Book of Were-wolves. Blackmask Online, 2002, first published in 1865.

Douglas, Adam. The Beast Within. New York: Avon, 1992.

Giannangelo, Stephen. The Psychopathology of Serial Murder. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters. New York: Checkmark Books, 2005.

Lee, Henry C., and Frank Tirnady. Blood Evidence: How DNA Revolutionized the Way We Solve Crimes. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003.

Masters, R.E.L., and Eduard Lea. Perverse Crimes in History. New York: The Julian Press, 1963.

Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Thorwald, J. The Century of the Detective. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964.

Von Krafft-Ebing, R. Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. Revised edition. Philadelphia: Physicians and Surgeons, 1928.

Wilson, Colin, and Damon Wilson. Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2003.

Wonder, A. Y. Blood Dynamics. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001.