mutilates her genitals, tears out her heart, eats of it, drinks the blood, and buries the remains. Arrested, at first he lied, but finally confessed his crime with cynical cold-bloodedness. He listened to his sentence of death with indifference, and was executed. At the post-mortem examination, Esquirol found morbid adhesions between the cerebral membranes and the brain (Gorget, “Darstellung der Prozesse Leger, Feldtmann,” etc., Darmstadt, 1827).
Case 20. Tirsch, hospital beneficiary of Prag, aged 55, always silent, peculiar, coarse, very irritable, grumbling, revengeful, was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, on account of violating a girl ten years old. He had attracted attention on account of outbursts of anger from insignificant causes, and also on account of tædium vitæ. In 1864, on account of the refusal of an offer of marriage which he made to a widow, he developed a hatred toward women, and on July 8th he went about with the intention of killing one of this hated sex. Vetulam occurentem in silvam allexit, coitum poposcit, renitentem prostravit, jugulum feminæ compressit “furore captus.” Cadaver virga betulæ desecta verberare voluit neque tamen id perfecit, quia conscientia sua hæc fieri vetuit, cultello mammæ et genitalia desecta domi cocta proximis diebus cum globis comedit. On September 12th, when he was arrested, the remains of this meal were found. He gave as the motive of this act “inner impulse.” He himself wished to be executed because he had always been persecuted. In confinement there were great emotional irritability and occasional outbursts of fury, preceded by refusal of food, which made isolation, lasting several days, necessary. It was authoritatively established that the most of his earlier excesses were coincident with outbreaks of excitement and fury (Maschka, Prager Vierteljahrsschrift, 1866, i, p. 79).
The Whitechapel murderer, who still eludes the vigilance of the police, probably belongs in this category of psycho-sexual monsters.[1] The constant absence of uterus, ovaries, and labia, in the victims (ten) of this modern Bluebeard, allows the presumption that he seeks and finds still further satisfaction in anthropophagy.
In other cases of lust-murder, for physical and mental reasons (vide supra), violation is omitted, and the sadistic crime alone becomes the equivalent of coitus. The prototype of such cases is the following one of Verzeni. The life of his victim hung on the rapid or retarded occurrence of ejaculation. Since
- ↑ Comp. Spitzka, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, December, 1888; Kiernan, The Medical Standard, November, December, 1888.
