Breakfast Essay: Homo Homini Lupus Est

In this article in the Panama City News Herald, I have learned that Stephanie Pistey, a 19-year old, has plead "no contest" to accessory to murder charges in the brutal death of Jacob Hendershot last year, and has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

I have been following this story because in a publicized prisonhouse interview Pistey claimed to be "part vampire, part werewolf," and thus brings herself into the very strange history I am hunting, which amounts to a thousand years of claiming lycanthropy as a legal defense against certain crimes (please click on the "werewolves" tab in the right-hand column to read more). What had intrigued me about this was that it appeared the defense still had fangs, pardon the pun, because Pistey was using this as grounds for a "diminished capacity" defense, which appeared to be working (while it did not work for her co-conspirators, the men who did the actual killing).

The new information this article conveys includes an apology that Pistey made to Hendershot's mother at her sentencing. She said "it was very wrong, and I'm sorry." Quoting from Chris Olwell's article:

Stephanie Pistey, 19, entered a plea to Judge James Fensom shortly after he declared her mental competency had been restored during her stay at a state hospital. Fensom sentenced her to three years of probation after she serves her prison term.

This is an astonishing transformation from the Pistey who, less than a year ago, lured Jacob Hendershot to his death, lied to the police about it, taunted the distraught Mrs. Hendershot on the street whenever she saw her, bragged on her facebook page about how sanguine (literally) she was about his death (giving the game away in so doing), and then gave that prison interview, all coy smiles, as if Jacob Hendershot's violent death was part of a huge joke to which only Pistey herself knew the punchline. All of this was wrapped up in a little Twilight-era quasi-supernatural self-satisfaction, which I have suggested is a horrible commercialized bastardization of Byronic heroism.

I'm not blaming Twilight. I think we postmoderns identify with the monster for the same reason the medievals who claimed to be werewolves did; it provides us with a certain amount of spiritual cover-fire, a sense that we are beyond good and evil, a step closer to becoming the Nietzschean ubermensch.  But a lot of folks identify with monsters when they are teenagers, myself included I'm afraid (as if you hadn't deduced that), and yet somehow never manage to do anything more antisocial than wearing a lot of black, writing awful self-pitying poetry, and staying up way too late listening to Bauhaus. Some of us even find ways to parlay that into productive adult projects, becoming novelists or actors or professors with monster fixations.

Of course, since the dawn of the Inquisition a lot of those folks accused of werewolfism did not confess until they had been tortured (not that it mattered much in the end). Pistey, on the other hand, disappeared into a state hospital for a few months and came out confessing not to be a werewolf, but a human being, with human moral responsibilities, which she had utterly shirked, to her now-sober regret.

Lupus est homo homini, wrote Plautus: man is a wolf to other men (it's more commonly quoted in the form of the title of this post). Werewolves, throughout history, are not always killers - some are even beneficial, like the werewolf who is recorded to have won the boxing competition in the first Olympics, or the Northumberland, PA werewolf who legendarily protected a young girl and her flock from other wolves. What all werewolf legends and trials and stories share is the transformation, of man to wolf and back to man. Whatever the case, Pistey has accomplished this. I do not believe it will profit her much.

Parker Werewolf Murderers Sentenced

On this blog, I have been following the story of the brutal beating death of a Florida teenager by his erstwhile girlfriend's adult male friends, a story of human viciousness that is as insipid as it is abhorrent. The girlfriend, Stephanie Pistey, told her three adult male friends (one of whom appears to have been her lover) that the victim, who was her boyfriend, had raped her. She then lured him to a house, where some very little children were being supervised by another woman. Once there, he was set upon by her friends and severely beaten. He tried to run away, but they followed him onto the lawn and continued beating him until he died. They then hid the remains in a storm drain, where they were discovered a month later. This disgusting tale is of interest to me because of Pistey's claim, in a prison interview and on her facebook page (where she rather unwisely bragged about getting away with the murder), that she was "part vampire and part werewolf," and claimed to have drunk the blood of her lover.

If you are one (or the other) of the regular readers of this blog you know that in my spare time (ha!) I am collecting information about historical "werewolf trials," legal proceedings in which the defendant claims to be a werewolf. I am interested in the way these proceedings generated a kind of "diminished capacity" legal defense which usually resulted in a reduced sentence. I had imagined that these trials were exclusively of the distant past (the medieval and early modern periods), but just through idle mouse-clicking I discovered some eight cases in the US just in 2011. These were mostly in the realm of the banal but more or less harmless - from a fellow who hid in portapotties to ambush tennis players in a public park to a couple of lassies who lured a man across country and then held him against his will and played violent sex games with him.

This case was different. If, as the medieval witch-sniffers had it, becoming a werewolf is a willful abdication of the moral strictures that govern human life, the Pistey case is a keen, if horrifying, example. But the outcome was eerily similar to those medieval events - Pistey has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial, while one of her accomplices plead no contest to second degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years. Interestingly, another of her accomplices hoped to be also found incompetent to stand trial, but his gambit failed, and he is facing further charges.

Read more, if you can stomach it, here.

Gevaudan, solved

18th century print.

UNC Chapel Hill historian Jay M. Smith has published a new book, Monsters of the Gevaudan, which purports to have solved the centuries-old mystery of the identity of the grisly murderer of some 100 peasants in northern France (modern-day Lozere and Haute-Loire) in 1764-5. The legend has grown over the years, with new manifestations as recently as a smash film in 2001 (Brotherhood of the Wolf - very scary, beautifully shot). The public discourse about this figure was explosive, even in the 18th century - naturalists, hunters, academics, theologians, aristocrats, even the King got involved in researching and speculating on the nature of the beast. There were many eyewitnesses and survivors of the beast's attacks, who described a huge, horrifying predator. Three hunters went forth to slay the beast - two killed large wolves. Here are some of explanations that were proffered as serious alternatives over the centuries:

1. A huge wolf;
2. An unknown species of bear or wolf, possibly a crossbreed between a wolf and a domestic dog;
3. A hyena, brought to France for inclusion in a nobleman's menagerie;
4. A last surviving member of the extinct Eocene predator, the Mesonychid;
5. A sorcerer capable of transforming himself into a monster;
6. A werewolf, of course;
7. A psychotic human who had trained a wolf, bear, hyena, or even a lion; and, ever popular,
7. The wrath of God.

Dr. Smith has crafted a work that is threatening to become very dear to my heart. He argues that there is a clear preponderance of evidence to lay the blame for the murders clearly at the feet of a pack of wolves, which is why killing one or two did not stop the predations. He demonstrates that the eyewitness accounts are deliciously entangled - for example, one of the hunters heard an eyewitness account and later repeated it as if it were his own account. But far more interesting to me is his further discussion of why the story of the beast would grow from the actual events, brutal and horrifying as they were, into a great myth and legend. This convincing discourse engages the birth of modernism in a country suffering from the hangover of a horrendous war; in short, all the elements that Cohen's "Monster Theory" encourages us to pursue as we attempt to decode the secrets of monsters. Wolves are wolves; they do what they do. Monsters live in the human psyche, and they do what we do.

In my study of monsters I try to maintain a balance between rational skepticism and an open mind. My students ask me all the time, "do you believe in monsters?" I reply, "I don't have to believe in them, I know for a fact they exist." Monsters bodies, as Cohen recognizes, are purely cultural, but that does not mean they do not have real effects on real people. There are many strange things in the historical record that, as events, defy explanation; but I am actually much more interested in the way stories move and morph through cultures and time. I'm much more interested in what the Beast of Gevaudan can tell us about the people of 18th century France. Dr. Smith has done a brilliant job of this, and I thank him for his contribution.

Greatest. Thing. Ever. On. Internets.

http://vimeo.com/33418523

"An Inconvenient Werewolf."

Talk about paradigm shifts! Talk about normalizing transitional platforms. I have so been there, buddy. I have so been there.

More Werewolf Crime

This one, I'm happy to say, is back in the realm of the bathetic. An Arizona man met a woman on line and, for the promise of sex, hopped a bus to Milwaukee where he met this woman, and her female friend. Allegedly they tied him down and had sex with him for two days straight. When he escaped, or was released, he went to the cops, who took him to the hospital where it was determined he had in excess of 300 stab wounds, punctures, lacerations and slashes. The two women, who shared an apartment full of occult and lycanthropic literature, are apparently experimenting with contacting werewolf spirits. As in the Florida event, the case is marked by a callow narcissistic pop-culture fantasia which seems to legitimize these bizarre actions. Also, in the accounts of both this case and the Florida case, the perpetrators seemed to be expecting the police and turned themselves over quietly. The Arizona man, whose name I discovered after about ten seconds of searching (it was not redacted once in the pdf of the police report), is fine... if you can call what I read on his facebook page "fine." Happy hunting.

I Saw a Werewolf Writing an Almanac at Trader Vic's...

Fig. 1. A penny saved is a penny arrghararagagawooooooo!

...And his hair was perfect.

In honor of the only holiday I truly observe anymore, this link, and Figures 1-3.

Fig 2. Little Red Riding Steampunk-aerialist

Fig 3. Peter and the Wolf

A Brutal Wake-Up Call

I'm afraid I have another Lupinotuum case to discuss. This one, regretfully, is far more tragic than the others I've reported on. On July 30, a tv station in Panama City, Florida, reported on a 16 year old teenager who had been missing for two weeks. Shortly afterwards, the young man's body was discovered in a concrete culvert. On August 15, two suspects were reported arrested and admitted to murdering the victim. According to a report in the Panama City News Herald, the men claimed that the victim had raped the girlfriend of one of them, and in an attempt to discourage such behavior the two men invited the victim to their residence, where he was kicked and beaten. He attempted to escape, but the men choked to death. The men attempted to slit the corpse's throat, then they stripped his body, dumped him into an empty structure, and eventually put him into the culvert. Later on, a third man was arrested, apparently the alleged rape victim, his girlfriend, had put incriminating evidence on her facebook page. I investigated the page, and I regret it: it is festooned with pictures of manga-style vampires, references to vampires, and so on. Speaking of her boyfriend on August 11, she wrote:

"yea were merryied and hes going to die hes the one that killed [the victim] well i let him i wanted the blood"


On September 9, her most recent post, she discussed getting suspended from school for, I deduce, bringing a newspaper with herself mentioned in it, and being bored.

Last week she was arrested as an accessory after the fact (she helped dispose of the body and lied to the police afterwards), making her one of five people currently under arrest, and today she gave an interview in which she explained that she was "part vampire, part werewolf." It gets worse - the young lady was babysitting two kids in the house where the victim was beaten and choked to death. Recounting the victim's brutal murder with a playful smile, she said "since I was like twelve every fiber in my body, basically everything, I know this is going to be crazy, but I believe that I'm a vampire and part werewolf." She claims to have drunk the blood of her fiancee.

When I began documenting modern cases of werewolf-related crimes I had hoped that the days of blaming truly violent criminal behavior on lycanthropy were centuries past - I've been having some fun looking at different instances of disorderly, or even silly behavior, like whacking dumpsters and ambushing people in public toilets. This is of a different order of magnitude, but I'm afraid I see the same pattern working.

Our propensity to identify with "the Monster," in whatever form, is deeply seated in our attempts to cope with anxiety and desire. The werewolf, perhaps alone among monsters, cannot do evil, because it cannot form the necessary intent to sin (see previous posts on the subject). So the werewolf can rut and slay and devour, but cannot be held accountable for those crimes; not, at least, on a spiritual level. But for this little cabal of murderers, the myth appears to be a thin veil separating reality from a serious sociopathy, a romantic notion of the vampire/werewolf as Byronic, Nietzschean, in the jenseits von Gut und Böse sense of the word. Unaccountable. Whether this notion is employed to keep a French peasant off the pyre, or in the asylum instead of the prison, or the soul out of Hell, seems to pale when contrasted with its service here to a callous, narcissistic brutality that inspires horror as much from its social-network superficiality as it does from its violence.

Werewolf Hunter Arrested

I've noticed that the Thomas Stroup story (see: Non Culpae Ex Esse Lupintotuum below) was picked up by online and television "news" services all through June, including a site dedicated to hunting which seems to be encouraging adding werewolves to the US Big Game lists. I feel obliged to point out that so far your humble correspondent has been the only source to do any investigative journalism; it was here, on Glorious Wreckage, that the information about the populations of wolves in Germany and the phase of the moon during Stroup's transformation was uncovered. You're welcome.

But today I ran across this little item. Apparently a shirtless man was approached by police while he was attacking objects with a sword in a parking lot. He explained that he was "hunting werewolves and C.H.U.D.s."

Ridiculous. C.H.U.D.s are only found in New York.

Another Werewolf Arrested

So here's another case of modern criminal behavior associated with werewolfism:

http://www.sonomanews.com/News-2011/Daylight-doesnt-dissuade-Werewolf-of-Larson-Park/

Non Culpae ex Esse Lupinotuum? The Werewolf Defense

Woodcarving of the execution of werewolf Peter Stumpfe

Check THIS out. A fellow named Thomas Stroup, from Ohio, was arrested after behaving violently at a campground, on May 31. He told the arresting officers he was scratched by a wolf in Germany, and ever since has blacked out during full moons. He was charged with underage intoxication.

What's interesting about this story is that the plea of "not guilty by reason of being a werewolf" is a very old legal defense with a strong precedent. For centuries people convicted of particularly violent or abhorrent crimes including rape, murder, cannibalism and graverobbing (and combinations thereof) have, at their trials, claimed to be werewolves and had their sentences commuted. It is a kind of "diminished capacity" or "insanity" defense, although it has very specific features, chief among them the subject's modeling explicitly wolflike behavior. Depending on where the trial was held, who was jerking the reins of power at the moment, and which book on the occult the prosecutors happened to be reading, werewolves could be grouped as witches (fully culpable) to be tortured and burned at the stake, or forgiven morally of the crimes committed while a wolf but still considered culpable of willfully becoming a wolf (and so to be executed), or just sentenced to two years in the madhouse as was the case with Jacques Roulet in 1598. In the 16th century, there was suddenly a massive uptick in the number of crimes blamed on werewolves - tens of thousands over a period of about forty years. The early decades of the 17th century, however,  saw a growing number of writers (including James I) who insisted that werewolfism, although certainly a common enough problem, was a psychological one, the product of an unstable mind rather than an unstable body. To this day, clinicians consider lycanthropy or therianthropy to be a valid, serious psychopathological condition.

Fig. 1. Not exactly "full."

Mr. Stroup would indeed have been unlucky to have encountered a wolf in Germany - wolves were hunted to extinction around the 18th and 19th centuries, apparently there are only a few dozen wolves (recent immigrants from Poland) in the whole country, and those in remote areas. Also, on May 31, 2011, the moon was in the waning crescent phase [Fig. 1]. These facts poke some holes in Mr. Stroup's defense, but I note that despite his violent behavior he was charged only with "underage intoxication." That is to say, he is guilty of the crime of choosing to become irrational, not of the crimes he committed while irrational. So, the defense appears to still have some bite to it.

The Benefits of Getting Your Throat Ripped Out

I'm writing this because I've always wanted to put it down on paper but frankly I never had the self-awareness before to really describe it.

Fig. 1. Anthony Hopkins as John Talbot. Go get 'em, Tony!

When you are an insomniac, nighttime is, to steal a phrase from the character John Talbot in the recent remake of The Wolfman, "a wilderness of horrors" [Fig. 1]. You never know what kind of a journey you're going to have, but you know it won't be nice. You dread bedtime. You avoid it, you pace around it like a wolf in a cage. A good night is when you lie awake thinking of all the things you've done wrong, ever. Something hunts you. Your brain runs grainy, poorly-produced films of your failures. You spend your time staring at that frozen clock blinking 3:20 am knowing that now, no matter what happens, tomorrow is going to suck. Maybe you get up and watch tv, but you can't really work because you're tired and raw and scattered. On a good night, if you're me, you prowl the house, the internet, the refrigerator, and get whatever sleep you can on the couch. If you do sleep, it's an abyss, full of nightmares, or a gray, timeless blank that seems to do nothing to assuage the fatigue toxins accumulated in the previous day. Coffee would help clear your head, but then you can forget about sleeping at all. I've gone the other way a lot - brew up some joe, do some jumping jacks, and then you can work or play coherently through the night. But that's not a good idea - you can get away with a day, maybe, but the second day is much worse, and by nighttime you want to crawl out of your skin. After three days, you're in a perpetual fog. Little creatures flash at the peripheries. After five days of not sleeping, you have conversations with people who aren't there, and this is in the daytime. You take little side trips to alternate dimensions, which sounds fun, doesn't it? Whee. The thing that hunts you gets closer [Fig. 2].

Fig. 2. Insomnia - an insider's perspective.

Sleep to me is something that has for the past twenty years come in sporadic, short bursts - little oases in a big desert that slake just enough to make the aridity worse. If you're an insomiac, you know this - you fall asleep for fifteen minutes, then you're awake for two hours, sleep for fifteen minutes, and awaken again disoriented, frustrated, heart pounding, brain yoked in steel wool. The thing hunting you all night manifests in the room, staring from the edge of the bed. After a century, it gives up that soulless stare and gradually resolves itself into a shirt hanging from a hook, or something, which is small comfort. You feel like you're losing your mind. Or, you choke down some zolpidem tartrate (the down-market ambien), and then you feel like the poisoned corpse of Alexander VI, so bloated that the Swiss Guard have to jump on you to stuff you into your coffin. Sleep comes then under pressure, like a big hand holding you down until the alarm goes off. You come out of that groggy and bleary and on edge, and it takes a steady suction of caffeine to get through the waking day.

This experience is not uncommon, I know. But in my case, things continued to get worse over the years. For years, the second I fell asleep, I stopped breathing, so my brain mainlined the adrenaline cascade, and I caromed out of a dreamless sleep bolt upright, scared, angry, ready to fight or run, sometimes thrashing. The air pressure unit I had made things better for a while. If you have a CPAP you know it's no picnic - it's uncomfortable, noisy, it constantly blasts you with random spurts of air in your face, when it's up to speed you have to really work your lungs to exhale, and it perpetually farts and squeaks. Mine was set at 18 psi, out of 20 maximum - I hear that's pretty extreme - everyone else I know has theirs set at 4 or 6. But for me it improved my ability to stay asleep by about 50%, and so it was worth putting up with.

Fig. 3. This won't hurt a bit.

How you live with this, and try to eat right and exercise, and have a career and raise a family? Well you can plow forward with your wind machine telling yourself nothing's seriously wrong and yet complaining about it to anyone who has the misfortune of being stuck in an elevator with you until sooner or later it gets the better of you and some doctor says "it's time to rip out your throat" [Fig. 3]. Which, if you have a sense of humor about it (which I did NOT) is kind of like letting that thing that was hunting you catch up and kill you, and in the process discovering that you actually were the thing that was hunting you. Very Zen.

So the good news is, like most of the things that Zen promises if only you can resolve the ridiculous paradoxes, it worked. Haven't used the CPAP since. I admit it has been hard to fall asleep, because I am pretty uncomfortable from the surgery still, but once I fall asleep I more or less stay asleep -at least, I do not choke or stop breathing, and when I wake up I FEEL like I've slept! I used to drink about six cups of coffee before 1 o'clock - now I drink one or two.  I used to drink four diet cokes in in the afternoon and at dinner, now I drink one. I'm settling into a sleep pattern I can describe as "regular." The effects of the surgery were immediate but, as the scars in my throat solidify and tighten, it's getting even better.

I'm not fully recovered yet from the surgery, but it's kind of a new world. And best of all I'm not going to have to buy those silver bullets - which is a relief, because, have you priced those things lately?

Carnival! You-shoulda-been-there for bbq

Fig 1. Bad Moon Rising

Carnegie Mellon has a tradition of taking two days off in April to celebrate the rites of spring, which takes the form of a buggy race called "Sweepstakes." It's the one sport we really excel in, largely because it involves stuffing very small women into very small vehicles designed painstakingly by nerds. My student Catherine Rodriguez is a buggy driver this year. She's very small. Be safe, Cal.

Carnival also involves werewolf sightings (see Fig. 1)

Fig. 2. Not a werewolf.

David Holcomb (Fig. 2) and I may not be werewolves, but like them we track our prey by smell, and so discovered a huge campus-wide barbeque, free to anyone with a card. 

Good stuff. A good day.