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A combination of per verse sex and killing has also characterized many of the notorious mass murderers of history. Gilles de Rais, body guard to Joan of Arc, con fessed at his trial to slaugh tering hundreds of boys in the 15th century "solely for the pleasure and delectation of lust." Henri Landru, the French Bluebeard, specialized in ravishing and killing lonely women until the guillotine ended his career in 1922. A German schoolteacher named Wagner, who was obsessed with an act of sodomy that he said he committed when he was 27, killed his family of five, nine other people and a number of cows in 1913. Fritz Haarmann, the "ogre of Hannover," combined homosexuality with the killing of at least 24 victims shortly after World War I. His lover, Hans Grans, was also convicted in the murders. In 1958 Charles Starkweather ran amuck in Nebraska with his 14-year-old girl friend, Caril Fugate, and killed ten people; he interrupted his murderous spree with an abnormal sexual assault on the body of one of his victims, a teen-age girl.
Oddly enough, the murder of Dean Corll seems to have been touched off by an aversion to sex with women. Henley had brought 15-year-old Rhonda Williams to Corll's house. She was strapped to a board face up (a boy was manacled to the same board face down). Corll, according to Henley, "was mad because I brought the chick over there." That led to their fatal argument. Afterward Henley protested, "I didn't go to bed with that girl."
Despite the mass of seeming evidence, many experts dispute the view that aberrant sex is causally related to mass murder. Harry Kozol, director of the Center for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Dangerous Persons in Massachusetts, emphasizes that "while homosexual murders attract great attention, their incidence is rare." In mass murder, he has found, "sex doesn't seem to be the motivation." One trait that Kozol has found in common among mass murderers: "A certain homogeneity about the victims." Jack the Ripper, for example, invariably chose prostitutes, and the Boston Strangler (13 victims) selected mostly elderly women.
Perverted Sex. Psychiatrist Sher-vert Frazier, a Harvard Medical School expert on multicide and a member of the Texas panel that studied Charles Whitman (who shot 13 people from a tower in Austin in 1966), also insists that there is "no connection between homosexuality and murder per se." In Frazier's nearly two decades of experience with murders and mass murders, perverted sex has not played an important role in any of the cases he had studied.
Frazier also takes issue with his colleagues who try to draw a psychiatric profile of a murderer. "From what we know now," he says, "we cannot predict either who is going to commit murder or which people will commit single murders and which will do multiple murders."