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August 2020: A Real Life Psycho Killer Faces His Victims

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
16 replies | jump to latest

I'd say this one is certainly on topic (to "Psycho) though it perhaps leaves the Gothic fun of Hitchcock's seminal shocker for the gut-clenching realities of the homicidal maniac.

This past week, for three days, a parade of witnesses took to the microphone in Sacramento, to tell a man named Joseph DeAngelo exactly what they thought of him. He terrorized California(from North to South) over a decade, invading homes at night, tying up men(and putting plates on their chests and saying if the plates hit the floor, he'd kill them) raping women. He went by "the East Area Rapist" then, terrorizing the state capital of Sacramento. But eventually he turned to killing the couples he terrorized, and ended up with the monicker "The Golden State Killer." He killed 13 people and raped many, many women.

Several survivors told the same story: that this phantom psycho who appeared in their bedrooms in the middle of the night, told them to be quiet and accept the rape or he would "cut off the ear" of a husband or a child and bring it to them.

A real nice guy.

DeAngelo sat in a wheelchair with a mask covering the lower part of his face(COVID, don't you know) and remained totally impassive for three days as a parade of witnesses did their best to try to get through to him: You're a monster. You're nobody. You didn't live a life worth living. You're a coward. You're going to hell.

A fair number of them noted that he was famous among victims for his small penis -- and there was laughter and applause.

And he just sat there. When they'd demand: "Look at me," he just looked into space.

I've watched clips of a lot of this on YouTube. You can too.

Discussing this with friends , there seemed to be two points of contention:

ONE: Why do this? Wasn't DeAngelo simply "getting off" on all these people helping him relive the nights when he terrorized them?

TWO: As a psychopath(or a sociopath, take your pick)...NOTHING that any of these people could say to him would matter at all, one way or the other.

Finally, on Friday, he was sentenced. And finally, DeAngelo rose from his wheelchair(contended to be a ruse; he's not that frail) and took off the mask from his face and spoke (in a voice that, all his victims had told the police, was very high pitched, and yes, it WAS). He said: "I've listened to all of your stories -- each of them -- and I'm truly sorry." And then he sat down. All that horror, and that was his statement(likely written for him.)

Which was a lesson in itself: that's all you're going to get, society. Send him off to prison for the rest of his life (though he can't go yet, in California -- COVID-19 is in the prisons.) No death penalty -- he plea bargained it away, and the current Governor of California refuses to allow death penalty cases to proceed to execution, even thought the state's voters voted the death penalty in.

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The Golden State Killer -- as a real life specimen -- is yet another reminder that our "movie psychos" are of a more glamourous and interesting sort. DeAngelo reminds us of "the banality of evil."

The justifiable hatred directed at him by many of the witnesses certainly made him an object of rage, but I will admit that I picture, just for a moment -- Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates sitting there. Had not both the original Psycho and certainly its sequels posited Norman as a nice, vulnerable young fellow, a victim of circumstance no matter what he did so horribly to Marion and Arbogast?

Easier to picture sitting there was Bob Rusk of Frenzy. The fictional Rusk and the real D'Angelo are pretty much what real sexual psychopaths ARE -- sadists out to terrorize their victims and the community at large. But when a letter was read from DeAngelo's niece in his defense, saying "I can't believe this of him. He was always nice Uncle Joe to me" -- we're reminded that Rusk, too, was well liked and functional in the community. (DeAngelo, like a few other serial killers, had a wife and children -- they can be gotten.)

One had to keep circling back to the fact that, even if this was "not enough"(DeAngelo just sat there emotionless, and never took the time to even try to explain himself because -- how could he, anyway?) there WAS the triumph that he WAS caught, and that he WAS put out there in a public place for a few days like a slug dragged out from under a rock to be exposed.

But the real-life D'Angelo remains the reason why we've had a number of successful MOVIE psychopaths, too: Norman Bates. Hannibal Lecter. The "Se7en" killer. And for some of us minimalists, Bob Rusk. At the heart of all these human monsters, fictional and real, are the unanswerable questions: HOW does a person like this come to exist? WHY do they do what they do?

These are mysteries that will never be answered.

PS. While promoting Psycho in 1960, Hitchcock told the New York Times, "Its about a young man who runs a motel in Northern California...near Sacramento."

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

a letter was read from DeAngelo's niece in his defense, saying "I can't believe this of him. He was always nice Uncle Joe to me"

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Wow, she was in the mini-series too of course. It did seem clear that she'd actually had some important influence on DeAngelo, that he at least paused killing and raping when she came to live with him, right? Do we have a good sense yet of why DeAngelo permanently stopped his sprees in 1987? Did the niece or other family members finally in a sense cure him? Or was it lithium or prozac/paxil etc. or some other modern psycho-actives that made the difference though the '90s?

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Those are very good questions. For all the unforgivable horrors he inflicted, he DID stop, and that is worthy of further study by the professionals who will now have further access to him.

Psychopathic killers often kill themselves(I am thinking of the Columbine killers and Las Vegas shooter), or are caught while still "active" -- to have one in custody who managed to live for decades WITHOUT killing or raping -- I suppose the goal would be to see how to convince a "killer at large" that they CAN stop.

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It's awful but there's still a lot more investigating to be done about this case.

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At the heart of it is how much DeAngelo will tell them about anything. I'm reminded -- to reference another cinematic psycho -- how Michael Myers in Halloween was said to have just sat silently in the asylum for decades after his childhood arrest for the murder of his sister.

And of course we've got good old Hannibal Lecter in his dungeon super-cell, manipulating away.

But that's "the movies." In real life , I expect that DeAngelo will be a very banal man in a prison cell and just how much he can tell anybody about why he did anything(including stopping) will be a problem.

But it is worth a try, for sure. And probably some detailed discussions with that niece(actually, more than one) will help make a study of the man AFTER he retired from doing what he did.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Back to fiction:

I'm reminded that our old friend here -- Norman Bates -- DID face an angry "victim survivor" in one movie -- Psycho II, which opens with Norman at a hearing to be RELEASED from custody(still an unbelievable premise to me) and with Lila Crane Loomis(Vera Miles) waving a petition signed by "family members of the seven people he killed"(hey in Psycho the count was six.)

As a movie scene, its a bad scene -- other than Miles, Robert Loggia, and a silent Perkins, the bit players can't read their lines well -- but it does posit the extent to which a survivor like Lila would want to confront and verbally abuse the kiiler of her sister. Problem is -- in Psycho II -- they let Norman OUT, and the sequels continue with a new sheriff character who continually berates Lila and others to "just leave poor Norman alone." Poor Norman. Hasn't he gone through enough? (After stabbing a naked woman to death multiple times, slashing a man in the face before stabbing HIM, poisoning his own mother and stuffing her corpse, etc.) Its nonsensical, non-dramatic stuff, this positing of "poor Norman" and his supporters. The sequels are crazy.

One more thing(at least for now) here: sickening and heartrending as last week's hearing was , what we were witnessing in "real life" here is a dramatization of the "psychiatrist scene in Psycho." The horrors DeAngelo committed were still reduced to a silent old man sitting in a room surrounded by "normal" people and being "processed" into prison.

In real life as in Psycho...the bureaucracy reduces the horror to something manageable.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

In real life as in Psycho...the bureaucracy reduces the horror to something manageable.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Right now in NZ we have the sentencing/victims-impact-statements phase of the trial of the Mosques murderer here (51 people killed by an Aussie, self-pitying - 'white genocide'-manifesto-publishing - white supremacist Islamophobe in the worst mass murder and terrorist event on NZ soil). He's being tried as a serial-murderer and as a terrorist but the political aspects of why the killer did what he did seem to me to be being played down. Maybe that's the right move.

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This is where I like to say "we're on EXACTLY the right board." Psycho's historical status may be a matter of shocks and cinema(or only, as Hitchcock hater Stanley Kauffman said "giving ma and pa a couple of little shocks before beer and bed") but at its haunting center is: how DO we end up with insane people who want to kill, among us?

And politics has offered a rationale to many a madman. Religion too. (Not to say that politics or religion -- the bugaboos of conversation for centuries -- don't have their sane practitioners, too.)

But here is where not only the legal process, but the "social media" process comes in , too.

In the past few years, we have had some mass shootings(and stabbings) get broadcast on the social media, and the NEXT killer has taken to social media to say that he(always a he these days) wanted to "honor" his predecessor, wanted to "out do" his predecessor.

Social media -- and media in general -- had to say "we HAVE to cover this." To their credit, they are covering these things less these days, and mentioning the killer's name usually only once -- but they still cover it.

And just as the media must "air the grievances" of these madmen, the courts must give them their day in court.

I suppose cutting down on political speechifying might "help" -- but you're dealing with insane people.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The Golden State Killer(who ended up with a ridiculous number of names, I think that's good -- harder to go down in history; I knew of him as the East Area Rapist, and the idea that he was confused with the OTHER Night Stalker is black comedy) may indeed have "gotten off" as his victims read their detailed accounts of what he did to them but they WANTED to face him and say those things, and they got satisfaction of sorts, evidently.

In any event, courtroom procedures(in statute?) allowed for these statements to be made.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The trial has been conducted in such a way to minimise the chance the killer has of *using* the trial as a pulpit from which to preach his lunacy the way his idol/model, Anders Brevik, did in *his* trial in Norway (I believe that NZ authorities took a lot of advice from Norway about what not to do) but we're now reaching the moment in proceedings in which the Mosques killer, representing himself, may yet have a chance to preach. Grim. :(

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I saw the movie about that Norway killer -- very sobering. And yes, he got to make his crackpot speech and it disgusted the victims' parents and other survivors. But in the end, it WAS the speech of an insane person and it came to naught(he promised that he was "but one of an army, and this is war" -- but his fellow warriors are fellow insane people)

I'm always reminded of the critic Robert Hatch in 1960 saying that he was "offended and disgusted" by Psycho for how it used mental illness as a scare tactic -- but hell, WHAT a scare tactic it was. Frankenstein's monster? Fantasy. Dracula? Conjecture. A homicidal maniac who kills either because he id DRIVEN to(probably Norman) or maybe LIKES to (Rusk.) To convert that into a scream machine that also had food for thought...was an achievement. A dark achievement, but nonetheless...

[–] jasonbourne (1027) 4 years ago

I hope his victims got some kind of satisfaction in court being able to face him and talk to him. As for DeAngelo, he's still a mystery to me as well as the people who watched him during his presentencing hearing. I don't think I've heard a psychiatrist talk about his case.

What I read was his nephew discussed about him as a child of 7 watching his mother get raped by two military officer in an airplane hangar (his mother and father and family were poor and moved around a lot), "He watched her getting raped. The very thing that happened to my mother is the very thing that he did to other women. I don't understand that. How sickening is that?"

DeAngelo didn't appear to be abandoned by his mother and have a fear of rejection. He wasn't abused by his mother. OTOH, Norman was and the rejection from his mother set him off. Anyway, DeAngelo was able to form relationships with others and continue to live in the area where he once preyed on his victims.

>>PS. While promoting Psycho in 1960, Hitchcock told the New York Times, "Its about a young man who runs a motel in Northern California...near Sacramento."<<

I suppose Fairvale could've been near Sacramento, but probably not as notorious as LA. Maybe it was cheaper to find a location near Hollywood.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

>>PS. While promoting Psycho in 1960, Hitchcock told the New York Times, "Its about a young man who runs a motel in Northern California...near Sacramento."<<

I suppose Fairvale could've been near Sacramento, but probably not as notorious as LA. Maybe it was cheaper to find a location near Hollywood.

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Perhaps. In the novel, the story begins with "Mary Crane" embezzling the 40 grand from her boss in...Dallas, Texas. (Lila is on a business trip to nearby Fort Worth.) Mary drives north and though the state where the Bates Motel is located is never named, it is likely Kansas or Missouri(because of references to other events happening "down in Oklahoma" and "up north in Illinois.)

Hitchcock seems to have wanted the Bates Motel moved to Northern California, and based much of Marion's drive in California on his OWN drives(driven by a chauffeur) from Los Angeles(Beverly Hills) to his second home in Santa Cruz, on the northern California coast.

With the Bates Motel moved to Northern California, the story couldn't really start in Dallas. So Hitch moved the beginning to ...Phoenix(thereby getting bird symbolism in a movie full of it, and something that rises from the ashes of death...like Mrs. Bates.)

Hitch told the NYT "near Sacramento," but he specified Redding in another interview and the Shasta County map on the wall proves that one right.

Meanwhile, there is NO Fairvale near Redding. Hitch kept the imaginary name of an imaginary town in Bloch's novel. Lots of movies did that -- Bedford Falls is an example.

And yet, Hitchcock set other movies in REAL towns and cities and got what movies get from that: a sense of a real place for a fictional story. Its why Hitchcock fans flocked to SF and Bodega Bay and even Santa Rosa "back in the day." Less so now.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Hitchcock would return one more time to a fictional setting after Psycho -- and it was a doozy. "Family Plot" spoke of only one(fictional town) - "Barlow Creek" -- and was filmed both in Los Angeles(where Madame Blanche's home was filmed) and San Francisco(where Adamson's town house was filmed) and mixed them both into a fictional unnamed city that was jokingly called "either Los Francisco or San Angeles." Why Hitch did this...nobody knows. My guess: he didn't want to set a lesser movie than "Vertigo"(which is SET in San Francisco)...in San Francisco.

It HAS been suggested that Hitchcock kept Fairvale fictional so as not to mark a real town or city with the horrors of the Bates Motel...or motels near such a real locale.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

DeAngelo didn't appear to be abandoned by his mother and have a fear of rejection. He wasn't abused by his mother. OTOH, Norman was and the rejection from his mother set him off. Anyway, DeAngelo was able to form relationships with others and continue to live in the area where he once preyed on his victims.

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The "back story" you related is new to me and horrific...of course. In truth a lot of psychopathic killers had horrible and abusive childhoods. Though some did not.

One thing I read one time is that many persons are "born" with the brain chemistry to be psychopaths, but if raised in a good home, they keep it under control. If raised in a bad home...they "grow bad." (This goes for garden variety gangsters and other criminals of course -- are they insane or just real mean?)

I trust that DeAngelo will be visited by psychiatrists and I think they should zero in on why he stopped -- that might be a way to foil future such killers. That said, from practically every psychiatric report I've ever read on psychotic killers in custody...NO psychiatrist could say EXACTLY why they were what they were. "Bad brain chemistry?" Maybe. "Malformed brain with "missing parts"(say , no control over lust)? Maybe.

Or ..evil.

[–] jasonbourne (1027) 4 years ago

>>The "back story" you related is new to me and horrific...of course. In truth a lot of psychopathic killers had horrible and abusive childhoods. Though some did not.<<

I got it from a couple of sources. DeAngelo could've been 9 or 10 and watched his 7 yr old sister get raped.

https://meaww.com/ill-be-gone-in-the-dark-golden-state-killer-joseph-de-angelo-episode-6-walk-light-review-464103

https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/golden-state-killer-joseph-deangelos-family-reacts-to-conviction

What's puzzling is that he wasn't the one abused. Instead, he was influenced to follow in the paths of the bad men. Maybe he wasn't as crazy as we thought. He just acted that way and wanted to be bad. It gave him thrills and kicks getting away with the worst crimes. It was a power trip. With his police background, ability to be motionless, and rational and deliberate homicidal thinking if he thought he was recognized meant that he could get away with it more readily than if he was psycho. It would explain how he was able to live a normal life unknown to even his closest family.

ETA: It would also explain why no psychiatrist has come forward to explain DeAngelo's motivations and cause why he did what he did.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

a fictional unnamed city that was jokingly called "either Los Francisco or San Angeles."

The action scenes up on high mountain pass roads always loom large in my memory of Family Plot... and they're pure LA. For me, then, notwithstanding the official jokey indeterminacy of setting, FP is *really* an LA film.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The action scenes up on high mountain pass roads always loom large in my memory of Family Plot... and they're pure LA.

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Yes..that's The Angeles National Forest...and that road starts down around Pasadena.

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For me, then, notwithstanding the official jokey indeterminacy of setting, FP is *really* an LA film.

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What's interesting is that Hitchcock never chose to really make a "Los Angeles film." I've always wondered why. Many a Raymond Chandler story is set there(The Big Sleep is the big one on screen) and later movies like The Long Goodbye(Chandler again) Chinatown(pseudo-Chandler) and LA Confidential explored LA in big ways. Not to mention Sunset Blvd.

I'm guessing that perhaps Hitch felt that LA -- his "factory town" where he slaved away -- just wasn't good Hitchcock Territory.

There is the irony that in Psycho, Marion buys a Los Angeles paper and declares "Los Angeles" to Norman as her home base...but Los Angeles really doesn't figure in the film and later, Sam tells Norman he was "trying to make it to San Francisco."

The one Hitchcock movie that spends some time in Los Angeles and says so is ..Saboteur. But that's so the story can begin in the aircraft-building facilities where Bob Cummings works -- those were in Burbank; he lives in Glendale. Soon, however, he's on the run cross-country to NYC.

So Family Plot ends up "the Hitchcock movie with a lot of LA scenes" and yet:

Adamson's town house exterior IS in San Francisco. I've been in the doorway where Blanche leaves a note for Adamson, and I"ve been in the alley way where Lumley(Dern) sneaks into the house(actually I think that alley was re-built at Universal.) (A book called "Footsteps in the Fog" has maps to the real locales.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The bishop is kidnapped from Grace Cathedral...San Francisco. That's where oily Robert Vaughn serves a writ on good SF cop Simon Oakland(the Psycho psychiatrist!) in Bullitt, and the outside of Grace Cathedral can be seen behind James Stewart in Vertigo early on, when he is watching Madeleine's apartment building.

Funny thing: I know clearly SOME of the LA locales in Family Plot, and SOME of the SF locales in the same film, but I'm not sure about other locales.

For instance, the department store scene with the saleswoman is in LA; the cemetary is near Pasadena but...

...Mrs. Rainbird's mansion? I dunno.

And how about where Maloney's gas station is? That one has driven me nuts for years. Near LA? Near SF? Or maybe just on the Universal backlot?

That's where Abe and Mabel's mountain diner is...

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

There is the irony that in Psycho, Marion buys a Los Angeles paper and declares "Los Angeles" to Norman as her home base...but Los Angeles really doesn't figure in the film

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I think I'll pick a nit here.

I would suppose that original 1960 audiences -- across the US and worldwide -- might well think that when Marion buys that Los Angeles newspaper from the newsstand near the car lot -- she is IN Los Angeles.

The truth of the matter is the STORY has Marion about 110 miles north of Los Angeles, in a valley city called Bakersfield (you can see the City Limits sign in some second unit POV footage.)

But the truth of the matter of LOCATION FILMING is that Janet Leigh bought that paper IN Los Angeles -- well, North Hollywood to be exact, a few blocks from Universal Studios.

Hitch was likely toying around with his locations here. As a matter of accuracy, Marion buys that Los Angeles paper in Bakersfield. In terms of the movie, its a Los Angeles paper, the words "Los Angeles" pop up out of her purse and she therefore says "Los Angeles" to Norman. (What's she gonna say? Phoenix? Bakersfield?)

The upshot: Los Angeles may not be the LOCATION of any major Hitchcock film, but it FIGURES in the most famous Hitchcock film ever made.

PS. The main papers in Los Angeles at that time were the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. The movie comes up with a fictitious name for the paper. I can't remember what.

PPS. One time when I saw Psycho with some wiseacres in a college crowd, when Marion bought that newspaper from the stand and read it, a guy yelled out: "Blonde Steals $40,000." Got a good laugh.