Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (45 page)

came to oral sex few rapists showed interest in cunnilingus. What they demanded was fellatio done on them. What these rapists were looking for was another avenue or orifice by which to invade and thus humiliate their victim's physical integrity, her private inner space.

A former deputy police commissioner with a flair for words divulged in print, "In New York City last year we had
1,466
murders and many attempted murders. We in the police hierarchy took a personal interest in a few of these: the murder of cops, the Joe Colombo hit, and one or two rape-murders distinguished by the youth and beauty of the victim."

Leaving aside the obvious sexism of this remark ( for the rape murder of an elderly and homely woman is just as horrible a crime) , what the fellow said was significant. When the police take a personal interest, the newspapers take a personal interest, and vice versa, and so one could almost get the idea from reading the tabloids that a rape can easily wind up as a murder.

nf§
.
r
.
tunat
.
ely for those,cwho take comfort in statistics, there

·
are ncvavailable national figures on the; yearly nm
;
nber of rape-
·

·
murders
·
because the
:
act is treated as a homjcide by most police
4partments
and the courfS. The New York City Police Depart ment's sex crimes analysis squad reported
28
rape-murders in
1973;
the sex crime squad in Memphis reported six. In Washington, D.C., rape-murders are not classified separately; the homicide bureau estimated five out of a total of
286
murders ( one was an
86-
year-old woman ) .

Homicide statistics as they relate to the sexes are revealing. While 63 percent of all murders are male on male and a scant
4
percent are female on female, 18 percent are male on female and
16
percent are female on male. I know this adds up to
101
percent, but that's how the National Commission on the Causes and Pre vention of Violence rounded off its numbers. One out of every four homicides is a killing within a family unit. Sixteen percent of all homicides involve legal or common-law husbands and wives-who kill each other off in fairly equal numbers. From these few facts one can gather that when it comes to murder between the sexes,

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AGAINST OUR WILL

women give almost as m uch as they get, with a slight edge to the men. Not that everything evens out so nicely, for females invari ably kill people they know and males do kill strangers-the figure runs higher than 15 percent. ( When race is added to the picture, it develops that
white
females as a class commit the least amount of murder.) Our elusive rape-m urder statistic must be contained within the
2
percent differential between male/female and
fe
male/male homicides, in a catchall that would also include female victims of random shootings and female children murdered by their fathers.

Playing around with numbers, purely speculatively, if rape murder accounts for
2
percent of all murders ( the outside possibil ity ) , there are perhaps
400
rape-murders committed per year. This would amount to .8 percent of all reported rapes and
.2
percent of all actual rapes and rape attempts. An understanding that rapists seldom murder their victims is critical, and I will return to this theme in my "Victims" section, but here we are defining the beast, not his prey.

Aggravated assault, as defined by the law, is also a predomi nantly male-on-male phenomenon, displaying many of the statisti cal characteristics found in patterns of homicide, with some critical exceptions. More assaults-a total of
20
percent-are committed against strangers. Physical violence between husbands and wives ( 7 percent of all
reported
assaults, and I stress reported because police are notoriously reluctant to step into a family "squabble" in the age-old belief, once law, that a man's home is his castle) is 75 percent male against female. When assault statistics are viewed as a whole, only 9 percent of all offenders are females aggressing against males, but
27
percent ( more than one in four ) are males aggressing against females. These percentages do not include forc ible rape and assault with intent to commit rape, in which the offenders are exclusively male.

So, while murder between the sexes appears to be almost equally divided, violent physical aggression by males against fe males, short of murder but committed with brutal, punishing in tent, is a serious problem. The occasional rape-murder, with all its attendant publicity, is the ultimate manifestation and the perfect symbol of this unequal aggression.

Although 85 percent of all police-blotter rapists go on to commit additional criminal acts that range over the entire spec-

THE POLICE-BLOTTER RAPIST
I
199

trum of antisocial behavior, few advance to become rape-mur derers. But the few who do cannot be ignored-because it seems probable that the "support" they received during their raping careers, I mean either their success at eluding capture or the mini mal and nontherapeutic prison sentences they served, allowed their escalating violence to proceed unchecked.

It
comes as a surprise to most people that the murder of Kitty Genovese, stalked and stabbed to death shortly af ter 3
A.M.
on a bleak commercial-residential street in Queens on March i 3, i964-a much-discussed case in the nineteen sixties because thirty eight people heard the victim's cries or witnessed some part of her ordeal without calling the police-ended in her rape as she lay dying. Winston Moseley, Genovese's 29-year-old killer, later made an extraordinary confession. "I just set out to find any girl that was unattended and I was going to kill her," he calmly announced in court.

Moseley, a business-machine operator, had cruised about the quiet neighborhood in his white sports car until he spotted his prey. He recalled, "I could run much faster than she could-I jumped on her back and stabbed her several times." This was his first assault on his victim, when Kitty Genovese screamed, "Oh, my God, I've been stabbed! Please help me." Lights flashed on in a middle-class apartment building across the street and a man stuck his head out his bedroom window and bellowed, "Let that girl alone." Moseley backed off and returned to his car. Kitty Geno vese, stabbed four times and bleeding, staggered around the corner toward her tenement flat that faced the railroad tracks.

But the killer was just biding his time. He told the court, "I had a feeling that this man would close his window and go back to sleep." He found Genovese lying in the downstairs vestibule of her building. "She was twisting and turning, and I don't know how

' many times or where I stabbed her until she was fairly quiet." Then Moseley tore at her clothes and attacked her sexually. "I heard the upstairs door open at least twice, maybe three times," he testified, "but when I looked up there was nobody."

Among other salient facts revealed by Winston Moseley in the courtroom and in confessions to the police was the information that he had murdered three other women, setting fire
to
the genital area of one, raped "four or five others," and robbed and attempted to rape even more, all without getting caught. In the course of his

20C
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AGAINST OUR WILL

unchecked career he discovered he preferred to rape when his victims were, in his chilling words, "fairly quiet" and dying. Moseley was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Kitty Genovese, but there is an addendum to his story.
In
1968 he escaped from a prison hospital and captured a couple at gunpoint. He beat up the husband and raped the wife before he was reappre· bended. The New York State Court of Appeals agreed that the state had shown negligence in Moseley's escape and awarded the injured couple $60,000 in damages.

Albert DeSalvo, known far and wide as the Boston Strangler, was another escalator in violence who gained courage from success as he went along. From June, 1962, to January, 1964, the city of Boston was beset by a killer who strangled and stabbed eleven women, many of them elderly, and lef t their sexually mutilated bodies in garish postures with a nylon stocking knotted about the neck. Dumbfounded police conducted a nationwide manhunt for the elusive phantom, employing the services of seers and psychia trists, but to no avail. Then the killings stopped as suddenly as they began. Had ego not gotten the better of DeSalvo, confined to Bridgewater State Hospital in 1964 for observation in relation to a tying-up and abusing crime that happened to be his true specialty,: we might never have learned the identity of the notorious Strangler and the full extent of his crimes.

As reconstructed by Gerold Frank in his excellent book, the burly, five-foot-eight DeSalvo had begun his assaultive career years before. Hardly the mild-mannered, unprepossessing fellow of his press clippings, DeSalvo had spent nine years in the United States Army, much of it in boxing competitions, and had won the Army's title of European middleweight champion, which helps explain the phenomenal strength the Strangler had in his hands. But Frank dug up something else from DeSalvo's Army days. He had once been indicted for child molestation while stationed at Fort Dix.
'
The child's mother later withdrew the complaint because she feared unwelcome publicity and the charge was dropped.

A full two years before the Boston murders, DeSalvo, then 29, came to police attention in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as The Measuring Man, a nutty fellow who gained entrance to young women's apartments in and around Harvard Square by claiming he was a representative of a model agency. Once inside an apartment

THE POLICE-BLOTTER RAPIST 201

DeSalvo would proceed to impertinently "measure" his "prospec tive client's" breasts and hips. While Cambridge police were puz zling (or laughing? ) over their Measuring Man, police in New Haven, Hartford and other nearby Connecticut towns were collect ing information on an elusive Green Man. The Green Man, so named because he usually wore green work pants, was a quick strike rapist who gained admission to apartments by posing as a building maintenance employee. As the phantom Green Man, DeSalvo's modus operandi was an advance over his Measuring Man activities. Now he tied his victims to the bed and raped or sod omized them. Or tried to. In one of his misspelled, confessional letters to the police from Bridgewater, DeSalvo claimed that half the time, "I just put my hand on them and was finished . . . you see I was so build up by the time I found a woman I just got near her and I was releaved." (This matched the account of several of his victims. )

DeSalvo was eventually picked up and identified as the Cam bridge Measuring Man, but the charge that sent him to prison was "breaking and entering." A jury found him not guilty of ·t-vo counts of lewdness, and the police impression, too, was that ttey had cornered a petty thief with a curious m.o. This erroneous assumption proved costly in terms of lives, for when DeSalvo was released eleven months later and the Boston stranglings began, his name did not turn up on any computerized list of known sex offenders.