Lupina insania: Criminalizing Werewolves
Serial lust and mutilation murders of children and women in the medieval and renaissance Europe, were typically attributed to supernatural creatures like werewolves or lycanthropes.
Werewolf Devouring Children, Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1512.
In the pre-modern eras, the behaviors and psychopathology of serial killers could only be understood as a form of supernatural 'monstrous' lycanthropy or as a result of communion with the Devil.
(Above) From 1450 to 1650, serial killers were arrested, tried and executed as werewolves at about the same rate that serial killers were apprehended in the United States in the early 20th Century. There was even a form of insanity plea for accused serial lycanthropes and a procedure for expert witnesses, usually physicians, to determine whether the accused was: 1. Insane and suffering from delusions that he is a werewolf; 2. Faking insanity, pretending that he believes he is a werewolf; 3. Literally a werewolf.
(Below) Modern single and serial lust mutilation murders can indeed resemble what one imagines victims of a werewolf attack might have looked like... if only werewolves had existed.
Mary Kelly, a victim murdered and mutilated by the Whitechapel serial killer "Jack the Ripper", London, November 1888.
(Above) A modern "werewolf" crime scene: Barclay Hotel, Los Angeles, November 1944. The victim, twenty-six-year-old Virginia “Virgie” Lee Griffith, a prostitute, was lured to the room by thirty-four-year-old lust killer Otto Stephen Wilson, a recently discharged Navy pharmacist’s mate. He then went to see the movie "Walking Dead" and lured another prostitute, forty-eight-year-old Lillian Johnson, to a different hotel, where he murdered and mutilated her.
Even as late as the 1850s, serial killers in some parts of Europe were considered to be werewolves as in the case of Spain's Manuel Blanco Romasanta who murdered 13 women and children and a male victim. Romasanta himself claimed that he would transform into a werewolf when he killed.
