The Throat

Roaring, Dakins had gotten back on his feet with his hands cuffed in front of him, and Dragonette stabbed him in the back a couple of times to slow him down. Then he stabbed him in the neck. Dakins had chased him into the kitchen, and Walter banged him on the head with a cast-iron frying pan. Dakins dropped to his knees, and Walter slammed the heavy pan against the side of his head and knocked him out more successfully than the first time.

He covered the living room floor with old newspapers and dragged Dakins out of the kitchen. Three more layers of papers went around and beneath his body. Then Walter had removed the trousers, underwear, and socks he had been wearing, mounted Dakins's huge chest, and finished the job of strangling him.

He had photographed Dakins once more.

Then he had 'punished' Dakins for giving him so much unnecessary trouble and stabbed him half a dozen times in the back. When he felt that Dakins had been punished enough, he had anal intercourse with his dead body. Afterward, he went into the kitchen for his hacksaw and cut off Dakins's big bowling-ball head. Then the blade had broken.

On the top shelf of Dragonette's refrigerator, the police discovered four other severed heads, two of black males, one of a white male, and one of a white female who appeared to be in her early teens. The second shelf contained an unopened loaf of Branola bread, half a pound of ground chuck in a supermarket wrapper, a squeezable plastic container of French's mustard, and a six-pack of Pforzheimer beer. On the third shelf down stood two large sealed jugs each containing two severed penises, a human heart on a white china plate, and a human liver wrapped in Clingfilm. In the vegetable crisper on the right side of the refrigerator were a moldering head of iceberg lettuce, an opened bag of carrots, and three withered tomatoes. In the left crisper, police found two human hands, one partially stripped of its flesh.

Human Hand, on the list of Les Viandes.

On a shelf in the hall closet, in a row with two felt hats, one gray, one brown, were three skulls that had been completely cleaned of flesh. Two topcoats, brown and gray, a red-and-blue down jacket, and a brown leather jacket, hung from hangers; beneath the two jackets was a sixty-seven-gallon metal drum with three headless torsos floating in a dark liquid at first thought to be acid but later identified as tap water. Beside the drum was a spray can of Lysol disinfectant and two bottles of liquid bleach. When the big drum had been removed from the closet, a smaller drum was discovered behind it. Inside the second drum, two penises, five hands, and one foot had been kept in a liquid later determined to be tap water, vodka, rubbing alcohol, and pickle juice.

A row of skulls stood as bookends and decorations on a long shelf in the living room—they had been meticulously cleaned and painted with a gray lacquer that made them look artificial, like Halloween jokes. (The books that separated the skulls, chiefly cookbooks and manuals of etiquette, had belonged to Florence Dragonette.)

A long freezer in excellent working condition stood against one wall of the living room. When the policemen opened the freezer, they discovered six more heads, three male and three female, each of these encased in a large food-storage bag, two pairs of male human legs without feet, a freezer bag of entrails labeled STUDY, a large quantity of pickles that had been drained and dumped into a brown paper bag, two pounds of ground round, and the hand of a preteen female, minus three fingers. To the left of the freezer were an electric drill, an electrical saw, a box of baking soda, and a stainless-steel carving knife.

A manila envelope on top of a dresser in the bedroom contained hundreds of Polaroid photographs of bodies before death, after death, and after dismemberment. Behind the house, police found a number of black plastic garbage sacks filled with bones and rotting flesh. One policeman described Dragonette's backyard as a 'trash dump.' Bones and bone fragments littered the uncut grass, along with ripped clothes, old magazines, some discarded eyeglasses and one partial upper plate, and broken pieces of electrical equipment.

The initial assessment of the investigating officers was that the remains of at least nineteen people, and possibly as many as another five, had been located in Dragonette's house. An Associated Press reporter made the obvious point that this made the Dragonette case—the 'Meat Man' case—among the worst instances of multiple murder in American history, and, to prove the point, listed some of the competition:

1980s: about fifty murdered women, most of them prostitutes, found near the Green River in the Seattle- Tacoma area

1978: the bodies of thirty-three young men and boys found at John Wayne Gacy's house in suburban Chicago

1970s: twenty-six tortured and murdered youths discovered in the Houston area, and Elmer Wayne Henley convicted in six of the deaths

1971: the bodies of twenty-five farmworkers killed by Juan Corona discovered in California

The reporter went on to list James Huberty, who killed twenty-one people in a McDonald's; Charles Whitman, who killed sixteen people by sniping from a tower in Texas; George Banks, the murderer of twelve people in Pennsylvania; and several others, including Howard Unruh of Camden, New Jersey, who in 1948 shot and killed thirteen people in the space of twelve minutes and said, 'I'd have killed a thousand if I'd had enough bullets.' In the heat of his research, the AP reporter forgot to mention Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas, both of whom were responsible for more deaths than any of these; and it is possible that he had never heard of Ed Gein, with whom Walter Dragonette had several things in common, although Walter Dragonette had certainly never heard of him.

A college professor in Boston who had written a book about mass murderers and serial killers said— presumably via telephone to the offices of the Ledger—that serial killers 'tended to be either of the disorganized or the organized type,' and that Walter Dragonette seemed to him 'a perfect example of the disorganized type.' Disorganized serial killers, said the professor, acted on impulse, were usually white male loners in their thirties with blue-collar jobs and a history of failed relationships. (Walter Dragonette, in spite of the professor's confidence, had a white-collar job and had known exactly one supremely successful relationship in all his life, that with his mother.) Disorganized serial killers liked to keep the evidence around the house. They were easier to catch than the organized killers, who chose their victims carefully and covered their tracks.

And how, the Ledger asked, could anyone do what Walter Dragonette had done? How could Lizzy Borden have done it? How could Jack the Ripper have done it? And how, for the Ledger writers did remember this name, could Ed Gein have dug those women out of their graves and skinned their bodies? If the professor in Boston could not answer this question—for wasn't this question the essential question?—then the Ledger needed more experts. It had no trouble finding them.

A psychologist at a state mental hospital in Chicago offered the suggestion that 'none of these people will win any mental health awards,' and that they cut up their victims' bodies to conceal what they had done. He blamed 'violent pornography' for their actions.

A criminologist in San Francisco who had written a 'true crime' book about a serial killer in California blamed the anonymity of modern life. A Millhaven priest blamed the loss of traditional religious values. A University of Chicago sociologist blamed the disappearance of the traditional family. The clinical director of the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital told the Ledger that serial killers 'confused sex and aggression.' The head of a crime task force in New York blamed the relaxation of sexual mores which had made homosexuality and 'perversion in general' more acceptable. Someone blamed sunspots, and someone else blamed 'the climate of economic despair that is all around us now.'

A woman holding her two-year-old daughter on her shoulders in the crowd that had already collected in front of the white house on North Twentieth Street thought that Walter Dragonette did it because he wanted to be famous, and that the plan was going to work out just fine: 'Well, take me, I came down here, didn't I? This is history, right here. In six months, everything you see in front of you is going to be a miniseries on Channel Two.'

These were the Ledger's answers to the question of how anyone could do the