satisfies, the next step is voyeurism. The voyeur can be highly specialized. “I had a case where the voyeur was a Peeping Tom specializing in Army lieutenants’ wives,” Walter said.
The following step, when the voyeur needs more, is frotteurism. “We’ve all been victims of frotteurs,” Richard Walter said. “These are the people who get sexual gratification from anonymously rubbing against you in a crowd.” As an adjunct professor at Michigan State University, Walter investigated two students, homosexual twins, who wore tight jeans every Saturday and waited for the 72,000 faithful to pour out of Spartan Stadium after football games, touching and feeling as they worked unseen against the crowd.
The sadist is now on a path to achieve intimacy and sexual gratification without vulnerability, making the wrong choice endlessly depicted in the oldest stories, taking without giving his heart. Unable to form authentic relationships, he becomes a “master at manipulating others to get what he wants. Sadists even go through marriages, but by and large unless the person has something they want, they just don’t count.” Many achieve normal sexual relations with wives, husbands, or lovers, but after a time that level of emotional vulnerability becomes intolerable. It’s “far more satisfying to target potential victims and imagine or later actualize out the relationship with them in the total control position.”
Fetishists, voyeurs, and frotteurs choose and control their victims from an emotional distance. But in subsequent steps the sadist crosses a dangerous divide. Fantasy or limited touching or striking is no longer enough; he desires the more intimate relationship, and approaches the victim with punishing control in mind: dominance, submission, bondage, and discipline.
“He can’t bond, he can’t achieve sexual satisfaction by being honest and legitimate, can’t emotionally invest in anybody else, is totally exploiting, so he finds secondary sexual gratification by dominating a victim utterly. It’s a systematic way to feed and empower himself through fantasies by creating a sense of dread and dependency in the victim. Their thrill comes from the feeling ‘I own you. You don’t eat unless I say so. You live and breathe at my request. Your life is not your own.’ It gives them a messianic sense of importance.”
When bondage no longer satisfies, the developing sadist inevitably becomes a devotee of picquerism. A picquer derives from the French, meaning to penetrate, cut. “Picquers derive sexual satisfaction from stabbing, cutting, slicing, rendering human flesh. It’s the people who cut leather coats in stores as a second skin, a practice skin. They’re freeway snipers firing rifle shots into the victim, like the Tower Killer, or lovers’-lane killers like the Son of Sam.”
The final descent is to full-blown sadism. One becomes a sadistic killer, deriving sexual satisfaction from a complex ritual of torturing and murdering a victim. Bundy, who said pornography started him onto the path of the Helix, ended here.
The Bundy-type killer has prepared extensively for this moment. He has taken health classes so he will not contract AIDS or another illness. He becomes expert on the universal methods of saving his victim’s life—again and again—to prolong the pleasure of torture. He strangles her to within an inch of death, stops to apply Red Cross–approved mouth-to-mouth. He strangles her again, this time with ligature, a pleasure of a different shade, and moments before death revives her again with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Then it’s on to the bathroom, where he holds her head under a full tub of cool water and drowns her to within an inch of her life yet again. This is a subtly different pleasure entirely; while instructing police worldwide on the varieties of sadistic experience, Walter tells them to fill a bucket with cool water and hold a large sponge underwater with both hands, allowing themselves to feel the tingles on the small hairs along the arm, the awakening of an erogenous zone. Then they realize why so many female strangling victims are found near or in water or bathtubs—it’s not, as police commonly assume, to destroy the evidence. The water heightens the killer’s sensitivity and pleasure.
The horrors are limited only by the sadist’s imagination. The endgame, always, is sexual gratification produced by constantly exposing the victim to dominance, degradation, and dread. Walter has interviewed a few extremely lucky and rare women who survived twelve hours at the hands of a sexual sadist and somehow escaped. “They were begging to die,” he said.
Even during the torture and murder, the killer cannot expose himself emotionally to the victim. Only after he takes body parts back to his lair can