Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409270059
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by LANA WHITED
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
By Brian Masters. Random House. $24.
Shot in the Heart.
By Mikal Gilmore. Doubleday. $24.95.
We in the South think we know what drives a person to murder - what my grandmother and Flannery O'Connor called "meanness." Two recent books offer more detailed theories.
Brian Masters' "Killing for Company" was published in England in 1985. It chronicles the life and crimes of Dennis Nilsen, England's most prolific serial murderer of record. Between New Year's Day 1979 and February 1983, Nilsen, an apparently mild-mannered employment office worker, killed 15 people. He buried them under his floorboards and periodically resurrected their bodies to bathe, dress and socialize with them. Ultimately, he dissected, dismembered (butchering was a skill he picked up in the army) and buried or burned the corpses. "Killing for Company" was published late last year in the United States after Masters noticed many similarities between Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer, subject of his second true-crime book.
Masters' purpose, he says, is "to open a window upon human behavior which it is worthwhile peering through in order to learn ... something of the nature of madness." He makes a convincing explanation for Dennis Nilsen's "madness," based largely on three factors: his loss in childhood of a beloved grandfather, especially the confusion about death Nilsen suffered from being invited into the parlor "to see ... Grandad" without benefit of having been told that Grandad was dead; his acute awareness that, as a homosexual, he was a social pariah; and, third, his conviction that his victims (young social outcasts much like himself, only one of whose disappearances was ever reported to the authorities) were better off dead.
A man tormented by loneliness, Nilsen apparently killed "for company," stimulated by alcohol consumed to numb the fear that he could not compel living persons to stay with him. In prison, he wrote that the only similarity in his feelings during all the murders was "the need not to be alone." Masters argues convincingly that had a rather traditionally domestic two-year relationship between Nilsen and another man in the late 1970s continued, the murders might never have begun.
Despite his sordid material, Masters' book escapes the risk of prurience, largely because of his narrative skill and tone. Throughout, Masters has the good sense to realize that dwelling on the killings would be exploitative. He recounts all 15 murders in one 24-page chapter, moving with a cataloguer's pace from one to the next. He treats each victim with the attitude of the polite mourner who takes a careful look at the deceased but does not stare.
When Masters needs gruesome details to make a point, he generally uses Nilsen's own words. It was the author's good fortune to have full access to his subject in prison and to his journals, a gory record complete with sketches (many included here). Thus the tone of the most graphic sections is Nilsen's sterility: "The victim is the dirty platter after the feast and the washing-up is a clinically ordinary task." The crimes - the dissections in particular - seem much more shocking when presented with such detachment.
With an honesty that admits that answers are not simple (nor always possible), Masters takes us farther into the mind of a murderer than most of us have ever been before, or may care to go. He presents a troubling analysis of a man who could conduct his daily affairs "in a thoroughly normal way" while corpses decomposed beneath his floorboards, a man sufficiently aware of his own predicament to call his arrest "the day help arrived."
Rolling Stone journalist Mikal Gilmore has an even more personal reason for wanting to understand the "why?" of murder. He is the youngest brother of Gary Gilmore, the first man executed in the United States after the Supreme Court's 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty and the subject of Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Executioner's Song."
Mikal Gilmore's "Shot in the Heart" is not a true-crime book; it is a history of sorts, an exploration of the genesis of violence, which Gilmore traces way beyond his nuclear family's origins to the early Mormon settlers of Utah and their doctrine of "blood atonement." He examines the Mormon background of his mother's family and his father's brutality in an attempt to discover "the origins of Gary's violence - the true history of my family, and how its webwork of dark secrets and failed hopes helped create the legacy that, in part, became my brother's impetus to murder."
With searing honesty, Mikal Gilmore acknowledges that whatever genetic disposition to violence Gary possessed is also present in him, that he is "a man who carried the mark of his family." With the occasional disorientation of a man stumbling in the dark, Mikal Gilmore explores the questions, "Why Gary?" and "Why not me?" After years of painful consideration, he realizes that the difference between him and his celebrity brother is simple but profound: "I was finally like my brother in all respects except one: He was destroyed enough to pull the trigger, and I was not."
"Shot in the Heart" presents a perspective seldom given sufficient attention in discussions of the death penalty: the family of the murderer, who (like Mikal Gilmore) may be just as innocent as the murder victims, and who - like Mikal, his mother and his oldest brother, Frank - also suffer unnecessarily. Gilmore recounts that after Gary's execution, he received letters from strangers who suggested that he, by virtue of family connection, also deserved punishment - that he should lose his job, his friends, even his life.
With the skill and candor of a seasoned journalist (and only occasional lapses into melodrama), Mikal Gilmore presents the psychic history not only of the man who was destroyed by violence, but also of the one who has survived it.
He and Masters argue that men murder not out of inherent "meaness," but because of meaness perpetrated on them. This is a more positive theory, because it suggests that violence may be preventable. If we choose not to believe it, we are left with what Masters calls "the miserable conclusion that a man becomes a murderer merely by chance."
Lana Whited teaches English and journalism at Ferrum College.
by CNB