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The Productive Power of Confessions of Cruelty
Sara L. Knox
University of Western Sydney
S.Knox@uws.edu.au
© 2001 Sara L. Knox.
All rights reserved.
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1. The ideological work of narratives of extreme violence is the
subject of this essay. The apocryphal confessions of Henry Lee
Lucas will be examined in order to show that narrative authority
has greater power than fact, even where that fact is at issue in
law. What maintains Lucas's reputation as one of the world's
worst serial killers--even after the debunking of the majority
of his confessions by the Attorney General of Texas--is the
typicality of his self-spun narrative of serial killing. The
cruelty to which he confessed eclipsed other more "ordinary"
homicides, cases cleared on the basis of his confessions. In
this way the "ideological work" of Lucas's confessions is the
construction of a horizon of "unacceptable" violence beneath
which more ordinary cruelties vanish from sight.
The Making of a Serial Killer
2. Early in July 1998 Henry Lee Lucas had his single death sentence
commuted to life imprisonment by then Governor of Texas, George
W. Bush. This was a surprising event in several ways. It was
surprising for Texas--the state with the largest number of
prisoners on Death Row and the most executions since the
reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. Stays and
commutations sought on the basis of "new evidence" are seldom
successful--the state is not above executing someone who is
wrongfully accused, innocent, or (more frequently) has had no
benefit of competent counsel.[1] The increasing formalism of
capital due process has meant a reduction of legitimate avenues
for appeal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit found
against one of Lucas's habeas corpus requests for review on the
basis that "it is not settled law that a compelling claim of
innocence is alone grounds for federal intervention"--that is to
say, innocence is not enough if the death sentence was arrived
at during a fair trial, by deliberation on the evidence then
available.[2] Lucas's commutation came at the recommendation of
the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, a body who--in the
twenty previous years of escalating execution rates--had not
intervened once to stop an execution.[3]
3. But also surprising is the fact that this sudden largesse was
directed at someone who continues to figure--in Web sites, true
crime encyclopedias, monographs, and in the popular
imagination--as one of America's worst serial killers; Lucas is
widely thought to have killed over 200 people. Even those whose
business it is to critique the category of the serial killer
tend to forget that the evidence to support his inflated kill
ratio is slight. They forget the findings of the methodically
researched "Lucas Report," commissioned by the Texas Attorney
General's Office in 1986, which raised serious doubts about
Lucas's perverse success as a serial killer.[4] The "Lucas
Report" notwithstanding, Lucas's name has not been erased from
the popular pantheon of killers. People seem to want to believe
the grimly evocative tales Lucas told to the Texas Rangers and
folks from various County Sheriff's offices who came to him, hat
in hand, with their unsolved cases. It is almost as if
compulsive lying could be taken as evidence of--or as an
acceptable equivalent for--the supposedly compulsive quality of
the most serial serial killings. In the case of Henry Lee Lucas,
then, two questions arise. Firstly, why has the narrative of his
guilt proven--against all evidence--so enduring? And, secondly,
why was his claim for relief successful when the equally strong
claims of so many others before him had not been? I'm going to
argue that the answers to these two questions are related, as
are the questions themselves.
4. As I've already indicated, the law in the Lucas case was not
exceptional enough to fully explain the granting of relief.
Thus, in what follows, I explore the surprising coalescence of
mercy and justice on the part of the State of Texas by comparing
the case of Lucas to that of another convicted murderer, Karla
Faye Tucker. Tucker was not a serial killer, but she confessed
to and was condemned to death for crimes that were considered
monstrous--by the trial jury and the media. The different ways
in which both of these killers exercised the practice of
confession, and the markedly different results of those
confessions, reveal something about contemporary attitudes
toward violence, as well as the degree of cultural interest in
narratives of extreme cruelty.
5. Like Karla Faye Tucker, Henry Lee Lucas was taken into custody
in 1983. After his conviction in 1984 for the "Orange Socks"
Murder,[5] he was for a while the most well-traveled killer in
custody, being chauffeured across Texas and between states by
the Texas Rangers, to whom he had begun to confess his many
"additional" murders. 213 cases, the majority of them within the
state of Texas, were cleared and accounted for as Lucas's work
or that of both Lucas and his partner, Ottis Toole.
6. In his early years in custody Lucas inspired a number of popular
"true" crime or fictional texts around his life, including Mike
Cox's quasi-biographical Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas and the
controversial film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Arrested
at the age of 49, Lucas was older than many of his serial killer
contemporaries, who are typically profiled as deadly between the
ages of 27 and 45. He made up for this atypicality with his
self-selection to type. He told stories of an abusive and
deprived childhood, went on to describe his rootless existence
as an adult, and--in detailing the murders--flourished his
pronounced psychopathology to both expert and lay interviewers.
One brief description succinctly describes Lucas's inflated
claims:
First Henry Lee Lucas confessed to strangling his traveling
companion, 15-year-old Becky Powell, and burying her in a
field. The one-eyed drifter's next admission was grislier.
He said he stabbed 82-year-old Kate Rich to death, had sex
with her, lugged the body home, cut it to pieces and burned
it in a wood stove behind his cabin in Texas. The shocks
were just beginning. Arraigned for her murder in 1983,
Lucas told a packed courtroom: "I killed Kate Rich, and at
least a hundred more." He gave bigger death counts later,
some precise, some rounded up: 157 in all... no, 200, 231,
600. He said he'd killed women in 27 states with nylon
rope, a phone cord, .22s, .38s, .357 magnums, rifles,
knives, statues, vases, a hammer, a roofer's axe and a
two-by-four. (Pedersen 64)
This paragraph captures the gruesome élan of the serial killer's
excess, excess that Lucas was seen by many to exemplify.
7. Lucas's lengthy confessions should have raised doubts about his
credibility. Not only did he claim a tally of somewhere between
157 and 600 dead, but he accounted for his victims across
fifteen states and, in one particularly florid tale, outside of
the U.S. altogether.[6] Loquacious about his ordinary
brutalities, Lucas was equally articulate about acts
extraordinary even for him. He was the man who killed Jimmy
Hoffa--he said. He oversaw the delivery of poison to the Rev.
Jim Jones's compound in Guyana--he said. And, to give some kind
of overarching form to the various cruelties he'd claimed, Lucas
asserted that he'd done much of his killing under the auspices
of a satanic cult, "The Hands of Death." These incredulous
claims were buried beneath the information about Lucas's
"regular" killings that was being amassed by the Texas Rangers.
8. Lucas's spirit of cooperation was itself taken as evidence of a
serial killer's nature. As one anonymous FBI witness put it to
the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Government
Operations, "You just can't shut these guys up. They... want to
talk about their crimes" (qtd. in Tithecott 101). Lucas's
confessions were detailed, grisly and full of
self-aggrandizement. He had a nuanced sense of the language
suitable for a psychopath, lacking not just affect but any
appreciation whatsoever of the integrity and particularity of
others. Mark Seltzer quotes Lucas as saying "[a] person was a
blank" (12).
9. Lucas began recanting his confessions just prior to the release
of the Attorney General's Report and the deepening of the
appeals process. He then admitted that he'd gotten the
information he'd "confessed to" from the Orange Socks case file,
left sitting in front of him by an over-zealous Texas Ranger
(Pagel). Later in the appeals process, Lucas told a reporter
from the Detroit News, "I don't think anybody, a human being
anyway, could kill 600 people. I made up some of the worst
details you've ever heard, like how to mutilate a human
being.... I told them I cut this one girl up in pieces and made
hamburger out of her. I didn't do any such thing" (Pressley).
Lucas insisted he'd killed no one but his mother--and even that
he couldn't remember: " I just remember hitting her, but they
say I [killed her] , so I'll go along with that one" (Pressley).
10. Lucas's tales of murder restyled as feckless criminality showed
an apparent change of heart about the world and his place in it.
He struggled to shed the psychopathic image he'd previously
cultivated. In this way he distanced himself from his friend and
confederate, Ottis Toole, who was busily recanting his own
confessions.[7] The tone of Lucas's recanting moved from one of
bafflement to one of righteous indignation as he accused the
police (whose attentions he'd earlier craved) of underwriting
his confessions just to get cases off their books. Lucas's
magnanimity receded with each failure of the appeals process. As
could be expected, the closer the execution came, the more his
mind turned to his own situation. Lucas began to think that his
"biggest crime [since the murder of his mother] was to play
along with police officers who viewed him as a convenient
scapegoat." And his capital crime? "They're going to execute me
for lying. That's what they're going to execute me for" (qtd. in
Hylton).
11. Lucas had begun to heartily regret having confessed so
spectacularly to Texas Rangers and local agencies of the FBI.
Even the solid evidence that supported his recantations didn't
seem to help. According to Phil Ryan, the Ranger who'd arrested
Lucas, "If anybody deserves to die for something he didn't do,
I've never met a better candidate than Henry" (Pedersen 64).
Despite his own protests and the evidence to support his
recantation put forward by the Texas Attorney General's office,
opinion remained divided about the status of his confessions.
Understandably, the Texas Rangers continued to defend their
clearing of the associated cases. One retired Ranger, Jack
Peoples, warned that "if the people of this area believe him
[recanting], that's their problem" (Thurman). The son of a woman
supposedly murdered by Lucas (her murder being one of the
"cleared" cases) sent an angry rebuke to Peoples in the Amarillo
Globe-News: "First of all, it is not a matter of believing
anyone. The evidence, or lack thereof, speaks for itself.... A
confession does not a killer make" (Thurman). Perhaps not, but a
chauffeured walk down I-95 with a member of the Georgia Bureau
of Investigation and the County Sheriff looking for body dump
sites certainly did seem to make a killer. Law enforcement in
Georgia and Florida stood by the initial clearances and seem to
want to continue to do so despite the commutation of Lucas's
sentence.
12. Indeed, in this story of confession and recantation, everything
seemed to happen despite countervailing information. Lucas
seemed set to be executed despite the evidence suggesting his
innocence for the crimes. People continued private
investigations into the murders of their relatives despite the
official closing of the cases. The Texas Rangers stood by their
clearance of those cases despite heavy criticism from the State
Attorney General's Office about both their procedure and its
results. The tag "serial killer" continues to prefix the name
Henry Lee Lucas despite the lack of evidence for his inflated
kill ratio. The narrative continues despite the facts. This is
not news regarding either due process or the media (one need
only remember the sad case of the security guard who discovered
the backpack-bomb at the Atlanta games). A bad reputation, once
made, is very difficult to unmake--the reputation for killing
included. But there are other things in play in the struggle
over the confessions of Henry Lee Lucas. What was it that made
his confessions so tenable?[8]
Confession, Testimony and "False Witness"
13. The discursive field for confession has increasingly come to
include a commodification of suffering. Trauma as narrative
crosses and re-crosses the contemporary American cultural
terrain. Confession as a narrative of trauma marks the
intersection of all sorts of competing discourses in the popular
realm--legal, criminological, psychological, therapeutic, and
folkloric. James Ellroy's Dark Places marks one such
intersection. Ellroy made successive public appeals for
information on his mother's unsolved 1958 murder. His book
records just some of the responses that crammed his answering
machine. Of those offering leads, a fair proportion were women
accusing fathers (who had abused them) of the rape-murder of
Jean Ellroy. One of these, whom Ellroy called the "Black Dahlia
lady," dutifully replied to each and every plea for information.
After cross-checking her story, he dismissed her claim and
decided that she could not explain his mother's murder or his
own favorite bęte noir, the killing of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a.
the "Black Dahlia."[9]
14. While Ellroy didn't doubt the tales of abuse he heard, he found
the structure of narrative oddly colonizing: "Their grief was
all-inclusive. They were writing an oral history of the ravaged
kids of our time. They wanted to include my story. They were
evangelical recruiters" (Ellroy 297). "All-inclusive" naturally
says it all. A close reading of Janice Knowlton's memoirs (she
was the so-called "Black Dahlia Lady") reveals a tale of
suffering that is a grab-bag of horrors. The authority of her
story of her father's hidden career of murder has a similar
mechanism to Lucas's florid confessions. Where he includes Jim
Jones and the "The Hands of Death," she has the conspiracy
against Marilyn Monroe and unnamed cults.
15. Knowlton details a traumatic epic, the narrative comprised of
recovered memories of her childhood and adolescence. She
remembers witnessing numbers of killings (from which, at the
time, she "went away"--her coy term for what both her therapists
and co-author agree was a dissociative state). Her father's
alleged killings neither ended nor began with the death of the
Black Dahlia but covered a five-state area and thirty-year
period. Knowlton links her father not only to the most notorious
murder in postwar Los Angeles, but also to a Satanic Cult active
in the 1950s. And her links between the secret and the public
don't just refer to the realm of the macabre, but refer to other
cultural landmarks as well--linking, for instance, the Black
Dahlia to a "secret" friendship with Marilyn Monroe. What
Knowlton's narrative lacks in its basis in fact,[10] it makes up
for in its claim to authority: the sheer breadth of its linkages
with the commonsensical and the mythological. That search for
authority extends outward into myth, mystery, and notoriety.
(Indeed, one of the few things that Knowlton doesn't blame her
father for is the death of Elvis.) Knowlton's testimony of
personal violence is laid upon a backdrop of public, popular,
and even historical trauma.
16. The intimate exposure of the convex folds of memory becomes
therefore not just a public act of confession, but an
intervention into the meaning of public life and public record.
Her narrative thus fits into a set of proliferating discourses
about "personal" traumas played out on a public stage. And, more
importantly, her narrative pairs the portrait of victimization
(the narrative of suffering) with that of the serial killer, the
authority of the one supported by the horror of the other.
Customarily, the narratives of those who suffer and those who
cause harm are separated--theirs is no dialogue but rather one
answering the other to rectify loss and the record of wrong (as
in the case of victim impact statements in the penalty phase of
capital trials). But in what other ways can narratives of the
agents and the victims of trauma be seen to relate to one
another? Are they in any way interchangeable at the level of
consumption? The similarities between Knowlton's figuring of her
father's wanton and inexhaustible cruelties and the continued
persuasiveness to the popular imagination of Lucas's stylization
of himself as serial killer would seem to suggest that such
narratives of suffering and cruelty are indeed related.
17. Narratives of cruelty and narratives of suffering hold in common
their ability to impart meaning and identity to those who suffer
cruelty and those who commit it (although both groups need not
be mutually exclusive). Serving time in prison for committing a
violent crime, one inmate spoke of the choice posed by
suffering: "'If I don't do evil, then evil will do me. If I
weren't evil, I'd be shit'" (qtd. in Alford 115). What
Knowlton's narrative and Lucas's confessions share is their
ability to construct an awful ideality: the meta-identities of
victim and killer.
18. If testimony, in Judith Herman's phrase, "has both a private
dimension, which is confessional and spiritual, and a public
aspect, which is political and judicial," then, by the very
nature of the act of testimony, the narrator of suffering
endured is initiating the "restoration of the social order"
(qtd. in Leys 123). Herman assumes that testimony and its power
belong primarily to those who have suffered the cruelty or the
annihilating intent of others.[11] But what of the situation of
those who have not only suffered cruelty, but dispensed it as
well? (Such is the case of certain ex-combatants suffering
war-related trauma, where one suffers for what one has done as
well as for what one has witnessed or endured.)[12] And what of
those who have primarily been agents of cruelty? Does the
"remembering and telling of terrible events" work toward the
"restoration of the social order and... the healing of
individual victims" when the person testifying put those events
in train?
19. The testimony of the guilty is problematic because it fulfils
the broad definition of testimony (bearing witness to terrible
events) while simultaneously being suspect, potentially or
implicitly self-serving. Often, guilty witnesses will witness to
the terror in general but not to what they themselves did. They
will, in short, place themselves outside of the stream of
events, as if they were merely recording, rather than carrying
out, that destruction. And such prevarication might not even be
conscious. As Primo Levi puts it:
We are unable to detect whether the subject does or does
not know he is lying. Supposing, absurdly, that the liar
should for one instant become truthful, he himself would
not know how to answer the dilemma; in the act of lying he
is an actor totally fused with his part, he is no longer
distinguishable from it. (17)
In Levi's formula we can read the act of lying testimony as
being a matter of identity: the liar as wedded to the lie. The
lie tells him as effectively as the truth would, because his
identity is the lie. But in this description of the liar, Levi
also gives us a way to look at the political dimensions of the
lie, the world by which the confession, the testimony, and the
witnessing is received. Neither the liar nor the lie can stand
alone. Both the narrative obscured and the story told are
productive--a part of history, or the silence from which a
history (and a politics) arises.
20. Where testimony relates to matters that pass under the banner of
"evil" as it is presently understood (murder, and particularly
serial murder, being a case in point), testimony is imbued with
the aura, the uncertainty, and the complexity of its relation to
the Holocaust--as the Holocaust continues to be the "leading
image of evil" for our times (Alford 17).[13] And one of the
particular burdens of testimonies of suffering has been to
provoke recognition from those responsible for that suffering.
Painful assertions of historical and personal truth continue to
be met with the silence, the forgetfulness, and the lying of the
perpetrators--those who have given false witness, those who--in
Levi's phrase--have acted in "bad faith" (the Institute for
Historical Research is a particularly flagrant example). In such
a situation a free confession of guilt--a confession that places
the agent of violence at the center of the narrative--may be
greeted with profound relief. Even when that confession is a
lie.
21. Robert Jay Lifton has written of the "false witness" to death of
those who secure a measure of psychological survival by the
strategy of visiting suffering upon others, thereby displacing
the "death taint" and their own proven vulnerability. Lifton's
discussion takes in the problematic case of the soldiers at My
Lai and, in a very different way, the case of the prisoner
doctors at Auschwitz. But the implications of his analysis of
the "false witness" are more general:
False witness tends to be a political and ideological
process. And really false witness is at the heart of most
victimization. Groups victimize others, they create what I
now call "designated victims,".... They are people off whom
we live not only economically... but psychologically.... We
reassert our own vitality and symbolic immortality by
denying them their right to live and by identifying them
with the death taint, by designating them as victims. So we
live off them. That's what false witness is. (Lifton, qtd.
in Caruth 139)
While Lifton is discussing survival, responsibility, and
witnessing in the context of specific persons and specific
historical events, his widening of the implications of "false
witness" implies that "false witness" is discursive, not solely
a property of persons but a productive property of cultures--an
engine of history, not its consequence. It is this concept of
"false witness" to which I would now like to turn with a
comparison of the ideological work of the literal "false
witness" of Henry Lee Lucas to the quite different workings of
false witness in Karla Faye Tucker's confession of cruelty and
later attempted redemption through religious witness.
Karla Faye Tucker
22. Like Henry Lee Lucas, Karla Faye Tucker confessed to having
committed extraordinary cruelties. But her confession (replayed
during the trial and much publicized thereafter) did not
establish an awful ideality and invite fascination along with
disgust. Instead, it described a violence so anomalous and so
extreme that it seemed to stand utterly without reference. And
the power of that anomalous confession of sexual cruelty--by a
woman--was such that Tucker was never able to successfully
remake herself as penitent in the public eye. While Lucas's
confessions seemed to describe that typical atypicality of the
serial killer, Tucker's were the antithesis of contemporary
cultural understandings of female violence and, indeed, wider
stereotypes of femininity.
23. Karla Faye Tucker's execution by the State of Texas was perhaps
the most controversial execution in the U.S. since that of Gary
Gilmore in 1976. The controversy surrounded her gender as read
through the lens of the contest between the killer and the
born-again penitent about to be executed. Tucker had implicated
herself by confessing, not merely to murder, but to the
additional "crime" of having sexually enjoyed the killings. That
is, Tucker confessed to having orgasmed while repeatedly
stabbing both Jerry Dean and Deborah Thornton with a pickaxe in
Dean's apartment in 1983. On the strength of that boastful
confession to friends (played to the jury during the trial),
Tucker's example has been held out as evidence for what some
consider to be a new "trend" in female sex crimes
(Rappaport).[14] The other circumstances of the crime--that it
was committed with her companion, Daniel Garrett, the
culmination of three days of heavy drug use--were overshadowed
by this single fact. The aggravated circumstances of the crime
taken into account during sentencing seemed to be more about
Karla Faye Tucker's orgasm than they were, say, about the
unusual brutality or the "motivelessness" of the act. The
"thrill" in the kill was Karla Faye's and so, coincidentally,
was the fate prescribed for it--she alone was executed, while
Daniel Garrett died in prison of liver disease.[15]
24. In the fifteen years between the killings and her execution,
Karla Faye Tucker was saved: she was "born again" (not
necessarily unusual on death row). Though not unique in being
penitent, the contrast between the murderer and the penitent was
particularly starkly drawn in the furor surrounding Tucker's
gender. One of only a few women on Death Row in Texas, Tucker
became the first woman to be executed there since the Civil War.
While the battle raged between those who thought it impolitic to
execute a woman and those who thought feminism was getting what
it asked for, deep-seated cultural anxieties were exposed by the
discourse around Tucker's gender.
25. The problem for Karla Faye Tucker was that the power of witness
could not eradicate and over-write the cultural power of her
original confession to cruelty. While Tucker had latterly
provided an admission of guilt and the even more satisfying
contrition to accompany it, the distance between her present
incarnation as repentant witness and her past incarnation as
professed sinner was a narrow one. While her supporters agreed
that she was a "different person" than the one who did the
killing ("International Appeals to Spare Tucker Fail"), the
irreducible and particularly embodied fact of her sinning self
remained.
26. Tucker's persona as repentant witness and member of the faithful
rewrote the "kind of woman" she had been. That is to say, by
remaking her soul, Tucker invited potential new readings of her
femininity and her sexuality. One writer commented on the
"fresh-faced sexual desirability" of Tucker in her last days;
her ultra-feminine "winsomeness" (King 72). Being saved entailed
a renovation of her femininity--in her last year she presented
herself as being respectable and conservative. But then, in
another sense, the style of Tucker's contrition and her
narrative of salvation can be seen as being discursively
undermined by the persistence--in the face of her spiritual
redemption--of a highly sexualized and gendered corporeality.
The Christian tenet of a relationship between the fate of the
flesh and that of the spirit (where the spirit is cleansed by
the sufferings of the flesh) broke down in the case of Tucker,
despite the pleas of numerous concerned divines that her debt be
considered paid. An ostensibly gender-free, anti-Aristotelian
distinction between flesh and spirit has been a constant
throughout the history of Protestant attitudes to sin,
redemption, and punishment. While the physical form has become
less important and the life of the soul more important
throughout the development of--particularly--evangelical
Protestant traditions, the situation of the condemned criminal
has always been slightly novel. The coverage of Tucker's
contrition and of her punishment are inextricably entwined, so
that Tucker remained accountable for her transgressions even
after her death.[16] It was--after all--a language of the body
that condemned Karla Faye Tucker. Her original confession
retains a strange residual power in its embodiment of the
feminine, that orgasmic, drug-crazed, dissipated female body
that the State of Texas would execute to allow the liberation of
the penitent spirit.
27. The ungendered discourse of redemption by witness can't contain
the wanton particularity of the confession and its transgression
of the feminine. As one writer cynically remarked:
Her irreparable mistake was boasting that she orgasms while
killing.... True, she was a prostitute, but the orgasm
claim was surely a lie. The murder occurred in 1983 when
the multiple-orgasm craze was going full-tilt.... I would
bet that enough of this pop carnality filtered through to
Karla Faye to inspire the trendy lie that sealed her doom.
(King 72)
The tense says it all: she orgasms while killing. That boastful
moment becomes in this formulation a statement about habits--a
description of all possible potential encounters. Reading this,
one is forced to wonder whether Tucker would still orgasm while
killing. The original confession bequeaths a future that is
ineradicable. Ironically, Tucker can't escape the femininity
she's impugned. The witness does not cancel out the confession.
Tucker's literalization of the profanity of the female body
doubly condemned her.
The False Witness of Karla Faye Tucker
28. In what way can the concept of false witness be applied to the
case of Karla Faye Tucker? False witness is, in one way, a
failure to witness. Not failure in the sense that Dori Laub,
referring to the Holocaust, defines as the inability of the
"historical insider" to remove him- or herself "sufficiently
from the contaminating power of the historical event" (Laub 66).
False witness is a very different kind of failure to witness,
although it too contains a failure or inability to bear witness
to oneself. Certainly, if we go along with Florence King's
theory about the "trendy lie that sealed her doom," then Karla
Faye Tucker acted as false witness to herself.
29. But there is something more to it, another level of false
witness at work within the case of Karla Faye Tucker. She is
both the object and the subject of false witness. In the most
general sense, Tucker is the object of false witness because she
was arbitrarily (due process notwithstanding) selected for
death. The majority of those currently on death row throughout
the United States are African American and Latino men from the
working classes or the permanently, structurally unemployed.
While the racial demographics of women on death row shows a less
clearly raced and classed group, the way in which their crimes
are gendered (and gender is itself raced and classed)
demonstrates a particular unhappy truth about capital due
process--a truth that George McClesky failed to advance in his
own defense (or, for that matter, failed to advance in the
defense of others similarly situated).[17] That is, capital due
process sacrifices those upon whose lives a lower social value
is placed in reprisal for the loss of those more highly valued.
30. This is not to say that individuals are not guilty of specific
crimes and that those crimes very often are--in Lifton's
terms--themselves the product of false witness (viz. the
displacement of one's own suffering upon others). In a larger
sense the "juridical complex" (the judiciary, penal
institutions, and capital due process) is itself a material
strategy of the "ideological process" of false
witness--symbolically and literally producing, and then
eliminating, a whole class of "designated victims." And the
sacrifice of those "designated victims" rehabilitates the very
system that assigns the order of victims to begin with, and thus
seems to divide the guilty from the innocent, and the "socially
valuable" from the "socially dangerous." Capital due process is
a mechanism for the exorcism of what Lifton calls the "death
taint." It does so literally (in the form of its differential
impact upon already socially vulnerable populations) and
symbolically (by its attempt to locate and contain urban decay,
male violence, racial tension, and economic stratification
within those various particular and pathologized bodies
earmarked by the state for destruction). In this way Karla Faye
Tucker is one of many possible objects of false witness. And
this, perhaps, says nothing about her in her particularity. Had
the State of Texas executed Henry Lee Lucas then he, too, would
have been the object of this kind of false witness.
31. Karla Faye Tucker, however, was the object of a more specific
form of false witness. That is, she suffered a rhetorical
obliteration during the controversy attending the lead-up to her
execution, and that rhetorical destruction was aimed at the
woman she once had been (or, more properly, the type of woman
she once had been). The fifteen years between the killings and
the execution were not only marked by Tucker's conversion, but
also (and more importantly for the mechanism of false witness)
by a profoundly conservative shift in the political sphere. The
moral politics of neo-conservatism sought to clarify a
traditional opposition between public and private realms by a
whole set of linked discursive strategies. One of these was the
plea--couched in the rhetoric of neo-maternalism--for women to
get back to the home. (Materially underlying that plea were
welfare cuts, the abandonment of anti-discrimination policies,
and the continuing disparity of men's and women's wages.) And
increasingly bipartisan law-and-order platforms focused on
crimes in the public realm (at the expense of continuing high
levels of domestic violence) and the restitution of "public
order" policing. The focus in law-and-order discourse on gang
violence, stranger killing, drug crimes, and the "problem" of
recidivism made certain public spaces, certain communities,
certain classes or groups of persons the a priori markers of
dangerousness. These "others" were those most likely to offend;
they were souls beyond saving, the always already guilty
suspect--those circumstantially, and by inheritance, doomed. The
rewriting of the realms of public and private taking place under
the sign of neo-maternalism and law-and-order discourse
effectively re-articulated a commonsensical (and not
inconsequentially gendered) binary opposition of the public to
the private.
32. The ideological work of false witness in the cases of Tucker and
Lucas operates around this demarcation of the public and the
private, or around what counts as--or for--the social. In his
discussion of serial killing as a "situated practice" in the
postmodern social, Jon Stratton suggests that the supposed
"motivelessness" of such killing acts out on the individual
level the greater social drama of the loss--in postmodernity--of
the possibility of anomie; normlessness only becomes possible to
the extent that there are normative values to begin with. But
what the discourse of the "motivelessness" of serial killing
elides is the transition of the personal or individual motive to
the social motive--and the social scene--of killing.[18] This
social scene includes scenes not normally associated with the
actual scene of killing. In a culture of spectacle the serial
killer "gains his meaning because his attack is not on his
individual victims but on the audience who make up the
membership of the social" (Stratton 96). The serial killer
manufactures display (the bodies turned inside-out and left in
public or semi-public spaces) and is manufactured as display
(the fame and infamy of the serial killer). Both Stratton and
Mark Seltzer therefore use the figure of the serial killer as a
discursive crux in which the individual, the private, and the
interior become social, public, and exterior. Their critiques
are useful for situating the discourse of serial killing in
wider cultural and historical frames.[19] Their analysis enables
us to understand the survival (literally and figuratively) of
Henry Lee Lucas and, contradictorily, the elimination of Karla
Faye Tucker.
33. Henry Lee Lucas's confessions were refined distillations of an
established sub-genre of serial killing. The techniques he
claimed to have used varied, but their aim did not. He described
brutal damages. His victims were supposedly the usual misplaced,
missing, or unwanted figures--the socially marginal:
prostitutes, runaways, hitch-hikers. The scenes of murder he
described included the deserted semi-public spaces of what
Seltzer terms the "pathological public sphere" and the ad hoc
private of motels and car interiors (transience temporarily
stilled). And in Lucas's confessions the occasional imputed
witness kept a silence that could only be taken as evidence of
social dislocation (for so many killings, how could no one have
seen?).
34. The total effect of Lucas's confessions, then, was to submit to
closer scrutiny a depressingly familiar portrait of the
postmodern killing scene. Lucas's confessions were credible
precisely to the extent that they conformed to the
commonsensical. The confessions (and the 213 cases cleared
because of them) made--ironically--for a supportable accounting
of death. In this way the figurative dead in Lucas's false
confessions transmuted bureaucratically into 213 actual dead,
and the cleared cases represent the nominal sum of "designated
victims" for this particular case of false witness. This is not
to confuse false confession and false witness. Lucas lied, but
the bureaucratic depth of belief for his lies, and the popular
market for them, defines the point at which the effect of false
confession leaves off and the ideological work of false witness
begins. The kinds of crimes described, the kinds of victims, and
even the killer (self-selected to type) went together handily to
portray a set of pre-eminently public crimes.
35. Lucas's invented crimes policed the margins of a tame, familiar,
and entirely figurative public sphere by defining the
pathological public sphere supposedly anterior to it. His
inventions intersected conveniently with a list of actual dead,
and his claim to authorship of the killings gave an acceptable
discursive clothing to the unnamed, partly naked bodies of the
women, children, and young men that turned up (and continue to
turn up) in the vacant lots, roadsides, abandoned buildings, and
dumpsters that mark the borders of habitable America. The
rewriting of these 213 deaths under the putative authorship of
Lucas severs their last ties with place, with domesticity,
privacy, and, often, their very names, as the name of the victim
is obliterated by the more famous name of the killer. The
victims become "lost," "abandoned," "abducted" or "runaway"; the
prey of one who is himself the embodiment of social
dislocation--drifter, drinker, loner, killer. For the 213 people
supposedly killed by Lucas there can be no imputation of death's
grim domesticity: no death from spousal violence; no death
caused by the malice or lack of care of friends and relatives;
no death due to simple robbery with violence. The many possible
fatal risks endemic to private life vanish from the historical
record.
36. In this way, Lucas's legendary brutality has a productive side.
The events engendered by his false confessions produce an image
of violent, inexplicable deaths. Lucas's killings are
exceptionalized and abstracted into the realm of awful chance;
they are deaths for which rare evil, monstrosity, or madness are
supposedly responsible. Lucas's confessions discount the social
and, in that sense, do a very good job of what Lifton describes
as "false witness." The death taint is displaced onto the
pre-eminent human agent of death--the serial killer--and by the
"inexplicable" and terrifying deaths of the victims accounted to
him. That is why it is not surprising that Lucas himself
survived death row when others before him have not. That, also,
is why the myth of Lucas (as a template of serial killing)
survives--even in the face of the facts that contradict it.
Although proven not to have been the itinerant drifter killer,
the figure of the killer he performed so effectively remains
important. The splitting of the mythological Lucas
(serial-killer author of the discounted dead) from Lucas the
legal subject (the lying non-entity whose death sentence was
commuted) leaves the myth of the crime and the necessary fiction
of the serial killer intact.[20]
37. As I've already suggested, the ideological work of false witness
in the case of Karla Faye Tucker is quite different. Tucker's
first confession (to sexual enjoyment of the murders) breached
the fragile container of a gendered realm of the private. That
is, her narrative of sex and violence radically destabilized
even the traditional explanatory frameworks for female violence.
By confessing to sexual enjoyment of the murders Tucker gave up
the chance to obscure her own agency and thereby skirt criminal
responsibility. Had she called upon the available templates for
female monstrosity (claiming that she'd been a victim of
Garrett's will, or, perhaps, merely his collaborator) Tucker
might have been able to find shelter temporarily under the
warped chivalry of the law. As an exemplar of an already
statistically and theoretically problematic category (the woman
who kills strangers), Tucker became even more exceptionalized by
her "free" confession to sexual sadism. Tucker transgressed
Reaganite America's bitterly defended and heavily gendered
constructions of the public-private divide by exceeding even the
available categories of female monstrosity, thereby sparking a
debate about the socially degenerative effects of feminism:
a.k.a. the "new trend" in female violence. Her later repentance
managed only to compound that transgression (the bodily bequest
of sin that she is not allowed to shed).
38. Years after the crime and the trial, the impact of that
transgression still makes itself felt in the (often sympathetic)
media coverage of the lead-up to her execution. One writer
described her as "charismatic and beautiful"--a description that
seemingly looks to the repentant, refeminized Tucker. But in the
very next sentence the writer relocates those characteristics in
the endless present of her crime: "even when she was high she
was charismatic. She always said she was going to be famous"
(Dudman 20). The crime begets the execution, her fame secured by
both (as if, all along, that had been her intent). It is not
Tucker's conversion that, ultimately, "makes the difference."
The ideological work of false witness proceeds, in Tucker's
case, by means of a symbolically violent rewriting of the
femininity she disavowed with her early confession to sexual
sadism. All the uncertainty about what kind of woman she was/is
(penitent sinner, self-interested fake) falls away at the moment
of her death. The specter of the whore and the sadist is
sundered--the possibly penitent spirit is liberated and the
desired innocence of femininity restored. We can see this
transformation discursively enacted in the coverage of the
execution: "One guard gently pulled back her flowing curly brown
hair so it dangled over the table's edge. He then lowered the
microphone to Karla's face. [She] smiled as she spoke her last
words" (Dudman 17). Tellingly here the text is capped with a
photo of Tucker surrounded by her doll collection. We are made
to recognize less of the penitent (though elements of Christian
forbearance and grace are clearly discernible) and more of
Tucker's purged femininity--her dolls and Shirley Temple
curls.[21]
39. In Tucker's case the action of false witness works to obliterate
the traces and markings of an untenable femininity: untenable
because of its violence, its sexual sadism, and the immutability
of the female flesh that witnessed to the sin. On a larger
level, the rhetorical annihilation of Karla Faye Tucker (or,
perhaps, her transfiguration) arises from its times. It arises
from a neo-conservative era informed by a grassroots
fundamentalism that holds the theological premise of equality
before God of all the penitent, while also propagating an
exclusionary politics that attempts to forge a community of
strict identity, intolerant of difference (despite the very idea
of difference at the heart of an epistemology of
conversion).[22] Tucker's annihilation was at least partly the
result of neo-maternalism's discursive push toward a more
conservative femininity. And her rhetorical annihilation was the
consequence of a law-and-order discourse that figures the
private as embattled sanctuary for the law-abiding and
proscribes public-order crime and "predation."
40. In both Lucas's confessions and Janice Knowlton's testimony to
violence, witnessed interpersonal violence is relocated into the
realm of impersonal violence--the private in the public, the
banal in the rare. Behind both body-counts (Knowlton's not less
significant than Lucas's) should stand a whole set of killers,
not just the ascribed murderous "One." Like the commodified,
"talked-up" confessions of cruelty witnessed to by true crime
and talk-show culture, both these violent narratives (and the
slightly different story of Karla Faye Tucker) take part in the
larger strategy of law-and-order discourse in seeking the
strange face of a tiresomely familiar violence. Monstrous, evil
and multiple killers give an ironically acceptable handle to the
unwieldy, ordinary, and routine sufferings of private lives
transferred, discursively, to the public account. And that is
the consequence of a larger cultural trend in false witness--to
displace the scene and the site of violence, and to continually
police what counts as the social.
Humanities Group, School of Cultural Inquiry
University of Western Sydney
S.Knox@uws.edu.au
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Notes
1. Take the story of one Texas trial judge who, on reviewing an
appellant's claim for relief on the basis of incompetent counsel
(the defense attorney slept through much of the trial), said,
"The constitution says everyone is entitled to the attorney of
their choice. The constitution does not say the lawyer has to be
awake." (That nice sense of irony condemned a man to death.)
Justice Doug Shaver, quoted in "United States of America: Death
Penalty in Texas: Lethal Injustice" (13).
2. See "The Lucas Case," The Washington Post 22 June 1998: A20.
3. According to the former Attorney General of Texas, Jim
Mattox, evidence had come to hand proving beyond a shadow of a
doubt that Lucas had been over a thousand miles away from Texas
on the day that the murder he'd confessed to had occurred. The
only thing linking Lucas to the "Orange Socks" murder was,
essentially, his confession, and that confession had been but
one among up to 600 spurious others. It was the 213 cases that
were documented and "cleared" by the process of his false and
spurious confessions that most concerned the writers of the
"Lucas Report," a report commissioned by the Texas Attorney
General's office that raised doubts about Lucas's guilt for many
of his confessed crimes.
4. It might be said that the difference between 10 (the number
of murders conservatively credited to Lucas) and 360 is moot in
terms of the prevailing definition of serial killing: more than
3 persons killed with a "cooling off" period between the crimes.
Some critics have argued, however, that only the first killing
attributed to Lucas is sufficiently documented. But the issue in
question is not so much whether Lucas qualifies as a serial
killer in these terms, but the way in which his infamy is in
strict proportion both to his own narrative of excess and the
degree to which his excessive violence was credited as true.
5. The body of this Jane Doe was found under an overpass of
I-95. The corpse was clad only in a pair of orange socks, thus
the name.
6. As becomes apparent in Philip Jenkins's discussion of the
then widely quoted figures for victimization by serial killers,
Lucas's then accepted kill ratio accounts for exactly 10% of the
total figure. Is this symmetry coincidental? I don't think so.
3,600 was the figure quoted repeatedly by the 1983 "Specter"
Committee (Juvenile Justice Sub-Committee of the Judiciary
Committee of the U.S. Senate) and it was the 360 figure that got
popular attention for Lucas. See Philip Jenkins, Using Murder
(64-66).
7. Toole died in Florida while serving five life sentences. One
of the most famous of the scores of murders his name had become
associated with (not only by virtue of his confessions) was that
of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, whose parents later were instrumental
in the setting up of the massively influential National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children. Toole later denied killing
Walsh, although Lucas still firmly insists that his friend was
responsible for that killing.
8. There is a small but significant scholarship on the question
of the ethics of police interrogation procedures. In these, the
question of false confession is considered in relation to the
conviction and punishment of innocent persons. See Richard A.
Leo and Richard J. Ofshe's "The Consequence of False
Confessions: Deprivations of Liberty and Miscarriages of Justice
in the Age of Psychological Interrogation" for a strong critique
of police procedure and an exhaustive tallying of the cases of
likely extorted confession. For a law-and-order perspective on
the question of police procedure and the "risks" of extorted
confession, see Paul Cassell, "Protecting the Innocent from
False Confessions and Lost Confessions--And from Miranda." From
the perspective of forensic medicine, see Mark Powlson,
"Psychology of False Confessions" and "Guilty Innocents: the
Road to False Confessions." While Lucas's confessions should be
taken--in part--as a cautionary tale for police procedure, it is
the authoritative standing of those confessions that concerns me
here. Lucas was taken as saying something meaningful about
serial killing. His "confessions" have a cultural valence in
excess of the narrative of individual responsibility and guilt
generated by the other cases of extorted or coaxed confessions
that Ofshe and Leo consider.
9. On January 15, 1947 Elizabeth Short's bisected body was
discovered in a vacant lot overgrown with weeds on Norton
Avenue, Los Angeles. Short had been a good-looking woman, and
had worked a few bit parts in Hollywood productions. Both the
brutality of the killing and the aura of the exotic surrounding
this young, "beautiful" victim (dubbed "The Black Dahlia")
created a sensation of the case relatively quickly. The failure
to close the case has merely maintained its notoriety.
10. Just an example of the questionable factual base to the
narrative: Knowlton tells the story of Elizabeth Short's murder
as occurring just a few hours after Short had miscarried with
Knowlton's father's child. It seems likely that such an event
would have left postmortem evidence, but nothing to this effect
appears in the autopsy report that Knowlton handily reproduces
in full earlier in the book.
11. Herman's argument for the personal and ideological necessity
of "remembering and telling the truth about terrible events"
must be read in the context of her work--which is exclusively
about the damage done by trauma to its survivors.
12. "The enemy was cruel, it was clear, yet this did not trouble
me as deeply as did our own cruelty" (Gray 513). For an analysis
of the troubled question of agency and constructions of the
traumatized veteran, see Allan Young's The Harmony of Illusions.
13. Interestingly, Alford suggests that one of the competing
leading images of evil for our times is the serial killer.
14. Rappaport suggests that Tucker's case had attracted the
capital sentence, and was unlikely to dislodge it, because of
the aggravated cruelty and the sexual element to the crime. On
the sexualization of female violent crime and murder in
particular ("lust-killing"), see Candace Skrapec's "The Female
Serial Killer: an Evolving Crimininality."
15. That radical desertion by one (less famous) member of a pair
of killers is echoed by the death of Ottis Toole, also on death
row, and also of liver disease.
16. Added punishment was, after all, the aim of the eighteenth
century practice of gibbeting, and--during the nineteenth
century--the making available of the cadaver of the executed for
anatomical study. In the twentieth century, the added burden
placed upon the condemned was transferred to those who are
symbolically and socially dead, the "lifer" (who, for instance,
might elicit the favor of the authorities by volunteering for
dangerous drug trials).
17. In 1986 George McCleskey, a death row inmate, "petitioned
the U.S. Supreme Court with a claim that the Georgia capital
statutes were applied in a 'racially discriminatory fashion.'"
For an in-depth discussion of the racially discriminatory nature
of capital due process see my Murder: A Tale of Modern American
Life (69-72, 145-149).
18. "Where the modern serial killer aided in the production of
the social, the postmodern serial killer takes the social for
granted and acts on it as a reification. This development is
reinforced by two interconnected things. On the one hand the
gradual breakdown of the moral consensus which underpinned the
modern social and the corresponding normalization of the
experience of anomie and, on the other hand, the shift towards
the society of the spectacle" (Stratton 84).
19. Although both of them inadvertently reinscribe the very
categories they are in fact critiquing--reconstituting the
social construction of the serial killer that Philip Jenkins so
systematically dissects in his Using Murder.
20. A wrongful execution might well have caused more controversy
than that productive split could withstand.
21. Ironically, while Tucker is discursively obliterated by the
action of the earlier confession to sexual sadism contradictory
of any socially acceptable model of the feminine, at the actual
moment of her annihilation she is rehabilitated by being
returned to a moment prior to that confession.
22. This epistemology of difference is explored in Robert
Duvall's recent film, The Apostle. In this, the central
character, who is a father of an established fundamentalist
church, kills the boyfriend of his ex-wife in a rage of jealousy
and frustration. He flees the state and, after not much
soul-searching, sets up a new Church in the area where he has
settled. While the film maintains a careful distance and
refrains from judging the main character, it is significant that
he is buoyed and driven by faith throughout the film. Although,
finally, he does not dodge responsibility for the crime, the
whole portrait of "the apostle" stresses the continuity, and the
strength, of his faith: the durability of his call. The
immorality of his act thereby takes second place to his tireless
work for the Lord. Of course, there is no point of conversion in
the film. The central character is buoyed by Christ from his
early childhood. But I would argue that his ability to embody,
without too much discomfort, the contradictions of sin and
tireless service to the Lord, hinges upon his masculinity (and
the gendered nature of his crime) more than upon fact that he is
not a repentant sinner and a convert (converted sinners embody
most starkly the epistemology of difference: they carry within
them, at all times, the person that was--the sin defines the
degree of faith). The contrition of the major character in The
Apostle is tenable because, unlike Karla Faye Tucker's, his
social transgression has not been great.
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