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The whole country seemed to be engulfed by an epidemic of pedophiliac homicides: a “sex crime wave” as the newspapers called it.
“Horbachewski’s love for his three daughters was so
great that he shot them to death to save them from sex degenerates.”[2]
It ended with the widespread belief that the nation’s high schools and colleges had become
the hunting grounds for a virtual army of mass-murdering “killer kids.”
mass hysteria, typically ignited by a handful of shockingly similar crimes that happen in rapid succession.
her head caked in gore,
Just seven weeks before Einer Sporrer’s murder, on February 4, Ossido had lured a twelve-year-old girl, Elinor Knapp, into the back room of his barbershop and assaulted her. Arrested for rape, he was indicted on the lesser charge of impairing the morals of a minor and released on $2,500 bail pending his trial. It was not Ossido’s first arrest for crimes involving young girls. In 1931, he was convicted of “misconduct towards a minor” and spent eighteen months in Elmira Prison. In 1935, he had been fined $10 on a disorderly conduct charge for molesting a young girl on the subway.
Sal’s Barbershop at 293 Irving Avenue, almost directly across the street from the Sporrer residence.
After entering a plea of “not guilty” on his behalf, Martin then launched into a remarkable diatribe in which, among other things, he denounced the defendant as a filthy “beast,” called for his sterilization, and suggested that Brooklyn was crawling with homicidal pedophiles.
This defendant is concededly a menace to the community, and one who should have been kept out of the community. We should have different laws for dealing with men of this type, and institutions where we can put them away and keep them. Under the law as it stands, if they are brought in for a sex crime
against a child, all we can do if they are found guilty is send them away for five years. What happens? They come out and go right back to attacking children. They are not insane, but they are just beasts with a dirty, nasty trend in them, and irresponsible in their actions toward children. Men of this type should not only be kept out of the community in some institution, but they should be sterilized if necessary.
Legislation should be introduced and institutions established that would make the community safe from men of this type.[9]
At roughly the same time—around 3:00 p.m., Monday, March 22—a white hearse drew up in front of the butcher shop at 266 Irving Avenue. Two men—the undertaker and one of his assistants—stepped out from the vehicle, removed a small white casket from the rear, and carried it upstairs to the Sporrer apartment. There, in the small living room filled with floral tributes from family, friends, and sympathetic strangers, it would lie until the following day, when the little victim of the “monstrous sack slayer” (as the tabloids had dubbed Ossido) would be interred in the Most Holy Trinity Cemetery.
WHY?????
Robert Rasmussen, a confessed rapist recently overheard boasting of having “killed three people”;
“a low-grade moron and sadistic degenerate” with an IQ of 65.
“advised against putting little girls outside in sunsuits, to deter molesters who might be inspired by the sight of bare skin.”[46]
Asked if he had “planned to commit the crime,” Marks shook his head. “It was impulse,” he said. He “had been reading about the Ossido case,” and when he ran across little Paula on the street, “something urged me to go ahead and do the same thing.”[49]
Since Elmore’s release the previous August, the New York Daily News reported, his daughter had taken to sleeping at night with the light on “for fear that her father might molest her.”[56]
For much of the summer of 1937, the sex crime panic raged mostly in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago (where the preferred term for the perpetrators was not “sex fiends” or “sex maniacs” but “sex morons”).[61]
Even the staid New York Times, famed for its high-minded avoidance of anything that smacked of sensationalism, found itself publishing so many articles on the subject—143 in 1937 alone—that it had to create a new “Sex Crimes” subject heading in its annual index.[65]
Casting about for the causes of the sex crime wave, self-appointed guardians of public morality came up with the usual suspects.
loss of religious belief among the young,
Prohibition repeal,
And, of course, there was that predictable scapegoat, the popular media: smutty motion pictures, obscene newsstand magazines, and indecent Broadway plays like Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, about a pair of female schoolteachers accused of lesbianism—a
Burlesque shows, which flourished during the Great Depression as a cheap form of entertainment for working-class men, became a particularly juicy target for moral reformers. Previously decried as tawdry hangouts for “dissolute men,” they were now condemned as active breeding grounds for homicidal degenerates.
From flapper-era jazz to early rock and roll to 1990s heavy metal, American pop music has been denounced as the cause of everything from rampant promiscuity to juvenile delinquency to Columbine-style mass murder. So it was predictable that, at the height of the sex crime panic, swing was condemned as the source of the supposed epidemic.
swing music “is far more harmful than obscene songs because the lust grips the listeners before they realize it.” With such sinister recordings as Benny Goodman’s “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump” working their corrupting effects on millions of unwary listeners, it was hardly surprising that sex fiends were overrunning the country.
Nine months later, in September 1939, Adolf Hitler’s troops marched into Poland. World War II had begun. Stories about an epidemic of pedophiliac rape-murders would vanish from the news, as America confronted a threat infinitely graver—and far more real—than the largely imaginary “wave” of sex crimes.
