Today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel carries a very humorous column by Jim Stingl about the most unfunny stabbing of a man by two Milwaukee women. The stabber-in-chief said they were just trying to achieve a risque form of entertainment they called spirit werewolfism. Since many of my book titles include the word “werewolves,” I received a call from Stingl — of whom I am a fan — who wondered if I had any thoughts on the bizarre event.
I told him that it seemed like an eerie replay of a 1989 event where one Deborah Kazuck and a woman friend lured a man to their apartment and then ambushed him by leaping from behind the shower curtain with an ax. They chased him while shouting Redrum! (murder backwards). They explained later that they were trying to invoke the spirit of Jack the Ripper by “kacking” someone.The kackee survived, as did the werewolf spirit victim, but both suffered severe injuries. Stingl, in fact, wrote a 1996 column about Kazuck’s possible release from a mental hospital
The parallels seem amazing to me, as does the fact that both these cases are obvious instances of mental illness. In 1989 Jack the Ripper was popular as a violent power symbol, and right now it’s the werewolf. I’m not sure what the next big anti-hero fad will be, but I advise lonely single guys in Milwaukee to be very very careful of any woman’s apartment decorated with posters of, say, the devil. And for safety’s sake, they may want to consider dating upright canines or lady Bigfoot instead — at least no one I know of has been sent to the hospital by those creatures.
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Well, this is the problem with “feeding a craving” and it is why most religions advise moderation (if not absolute abstention) in all things. These women have gone through the books and the movies and the video games and the “role-playing fantasies” and at each level there comes a time when “the thrill is gone.”
Then they take it into real life. For bigger and better thrills. Jack the Ripper, himself, is an example of this. With each killing the frenzy and the ferocity got more intense until they came to an end with the November 8, 1888 murder and dissection of Mary Jane Kelly at 13 Miller’s Court in Whitechapel.
Now, you may say, “Cassandra, are you saying we should ban all videogames and movies and books about werewolves and vampires and Jack the Ripper?”
No, of course not. For most people these are harmless diversions.
But there will always be those whose grip on sanity is weaker than others.
Remember the 1990 lawsuit against Judas Priest and CBS Records which claimed that their album “Stained Class” had caused the suicide of two young men in Nevada?
The claim was ridiculous and the families of the young men who filed the lawsuit knew damn well it was ridiculous. What motivated them was greed, pure and simple. They wanted MONEY.
The reason those two committed suicide was because they were psychologically and emotionally unbalanced. And the same holds true of the spirit werewolf stabbers and the “Jack the Ripper” emulators.
ANYTHING could have triggered their varied expressions of lunacy. They just would have manifested in different forms,