Pure #3, Volume 1 has a white cover, a military-looking stencil title and a grainy photograph that initially resembles an intimate encounter. One face rises toward another. A hand touches skin. The crop removes the larger situation, leaving affection, pressure and aggression difficult to separate.
That uncertainty is the entire zine in miniature.
Pure repeatedly takes an image or document created for one purpose, removes its original frame and forces it into another. A newspaper report becomes pornography. A family photograph becomes evidence inside a stranger’s obsession. A court transcript becomes dialogue in a private fantasy. A victim’s face becomes the decoration surrounding the person who harmed her.
The title promises purity, but the contents are built entirely from contamination.
The first article begins beneath the same large stencil word: PURE. It calls Ian Brady an “absolute genius” and celebrates his continuing notoriety decades after the Moors murders. The prose is not merely interested in Brady’s crimes. It delights in the contrast between his cultivated self-image and the ordinary moral vocabulary used against him.
Brady is presented as clever, disciplined and theatrically evil. His victims enter mainly as proof that his personality deserves attention.
This establishes the zine’s first law: the offender receives complexity; the person harmed supplies atmosphere.
The pages that follow reproduce reporting about Brady, Myra Hindley and the public memory surrounding them. Photographs of children appear beside interviews and recollections from the killers. The visual difference is severe. Brady and Hindley are given speech, motivation, attitude and changing public identities. The children are fixed inside small newspaper portraits.
A portrait is normally a way of preserving somebody. Here it also becomes a way of showing how little narrative space that person will receive.
The section demonstrates how criminal celebrity works. A killer survives in public imagination because every parole hearing, interview, court decision and newspaper anniversary provides another episode. The victims remain permanently attached to the one event that ended their lives.
Pure recognizes this machinery, but it does not resist it. It feeds the person already occupying the center.
The same pattern continues through Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. Photographs identify the men, explain their movements and show the property investigated by police. Missing people appear through a family snapshot and a caption suggesting that they may have become victims. The photograph shows an ordinary domestic unit, adults and a baby gathered for a camera. Beneath it, the zine turns their possible suffering into suspense.
The family becomes a clue inside the offenders’ adventure.
That conversion is essential to Pure. A house, shallow grave, newspaper portrait or missing-person photograph does not remain connected to the ordinary life from which it came. The item becomes part of a cabinet organized around male appetite.
The captions often carry the authority of journalism, but the surrounding prose changes their function. Documentary language is repeatedly followed by admiration, sexualized invention or contempt. The reader is moved back and forth between report and fantasy until the boundary becomes difficult to locate.
This is sometimes described as confrontation. It can also be understood as laundering.
Journalism provides factual legitimacy. Police photographs provide forbidden access. The artist supplies an extreme voice. Each source makes the others appear more consequential.
Richard Ramirez is presented through mug shots, reports of his crimes and details about his public image. The zine is interested in the satanic symbols, clothing, drugs and disordered personality that made him easily marketable as the “Night Stalker.” He appears almost ready-made for an underground publication seeking signs of absolute transgression.
Yet the text also reveals the banality beneath that mythology. Ramirez’s persona was assembled from borrowed symbols, pop-occult imagery and theatrical gestures. The pentagram on the hand and devotion to Satan created a costume through which chaotic violence could appear ideological.
Pure needs that costume almost as much as the newspapers did.
A random, confused offender is less satisfying than a dark prince. The title, photographs and biographical details help manufacture coherence where the actual life may contain mostly addiction, cruelty and disorder.
John Wayne Gacy receives another kind of afterlife. The zine reproduces reporting about the legal appeals delaying his execution, his comments about public fascination, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s purchase of a portrait depicting him. Gacy complains that the media created a monster, while the page continues creating him as one.
This is one of the few places where the publication almost explains itself.
Gacy understands that notoriety can outlive the person and generate objects, museum arguments, letters, interviews and collectors. His complaints about being turned into a public monster do not erase his crimes, but they reveal that criminal identity becomes collaborative. The killer supplies the violence. Institutions supply the repetition.
Pure participates from below, producing a smaller and less respectable version of the same cultural labor.
The inclusion of Nazi fugitive Alois Brunner and reports about the “Monster of Florence” widen the scope. The zine moves easily between genocide, serial murder, sexual crime and unsolved killings because it is less interested in historical distinctions than in a general category of predatory male power.
Different forms of suffering become interchangeable chapters in one anthology of domination.
That flattening is intellectually crude, but aesthetically effective. Every case becomes another proof that the world contains men who can act without ordinary restraint. The criminals vary, but their function inside the publication remains stable. They are portals through which the reader can approach forbidden agency.
The large heading SPECK & HEIRENS introduces two Chicago murderers as if they were a comedy team, law firm or performing duo. Their names become a logo.
The pages summarize their backgrounds, crimes, imprisonment and parole histories. Photographs show the men at different ages, giving the section the appearance of a comparative case study. Yet the writing is openly contemptuous, fascinated by degradation and determined to turn suffering into verbal spectacle.
A particularly revealing sentence appears near the end of the Speck material. After describing evidence shown during a parole hearing, the writer complains that the photographs were not available for public viewing.
This is Pure’s appetite stated without disguise.
The information is not enough. The legal fact is not enough. The reader is encouraged to want the image that has been withheld.
The forbidden photograph becomes valuable precisely because somebody decided that the public should not see it. Absence creates a small vacuum, and the zine rushes to sexualize the desire for access.
That desire opens directly into the section carrying the ugliest heading in the issue.
Here the publication stops concentrating mainly on notorious murderers and turns toward the production, distribution and policing of child sexual-abuse material. It discusses changing laws, customs seizures, international mail networks, coded advertisements and collectors exchanging material.
At moments, the writing almost resembles investigative reporting. It recognizes distribution systems, commercial markets and the practical routes through which exploitative images travel.
But the zine is not conducting an investigation for the protection of children.
It describes the market from within the appetite the market serves.
One spread reproduces classified advertisements whose coded language becomes transparent in context. Requests for magazines, photographs and trading partners appear in small columns, the ordinary architecture of commerce. A buyer lists preferences. Another promises discretion. Another asks for catalogs.
The horror is partly administrative.
No dungeon is required. Abuse can move through handwriting, post-office boxes, price lists, envelopes and polite abbreviations. The market depends on the same clerical habits as any small mail-order culture.
Pure understands this ordinary infrastructure very well because Pure itself travels through it.
The zine was also assembled from copied images, printed pages, addresses and postal exchange. Its maker and the people described in the classified advertisements inhabit different legal and moral positions, but they use related machinery.
The photocopier and mailbox do not inspect intention.
One reproduced photograph forces the issue beyond the territory of provocative writing. It involves an actual child, not a fictional figure or adult performer. Its presence cannot be transformed into harmless symbolism by surrounding it with commentary.
The page records exploitation and extends its circulation.
This is the point where defenses based on artistic ambiguity become inadequate. A writer may invent a vile narrator, quote a predator or construct a text whose moral position remains unstable. An image created through the abuse of a child carries the conditions of its production inside it.
The victim does not become fictional when the photograph enters an art object.
The publication’s legal controversy cannot be separated from this distinction. Sotos was indicted in Illinois on three counts of possessing child pornography in his home. The trial court initially dismissed the possession charges on constitutional grounds. The Illinois Supreme Court reversed that dismissal in 1988 and returned the case for further proceedings, holding that private possession could be prohibited because the images are permanent records of abuse whose continued circulation compounds the harm.
The issue does not merely discuss the border between art and illegal material from a safe philosophical distance. It places itself against that border and presses.
After the market material, Pure shifts into reporting connected with the American daycare-abuse panic of the 1980s. Courtroom photographs, testimony and allegations involving teachers and ritualized acts are reproduced with minimal skepticism. The pages move through claims of satanic ceremonies, animal killing, secret rooms and organized abuse.
Many such cases became notorious for unreliable interviewing, suggestive questioning and allegations that expanded far beyond credible evidence. Pure is not interested in carefully separating substantiated abuse from panic-generated fantasy.
The uncertainty is useful to it.
A confirmed crime and an impossible allegation can produce the same charge on the page. The purpose is not adjudication. It is accumulation.
Children’s courtroom testimony is quoted, then surrounded by Sotos’s own explicitly sexual narration. The result is not a documentary account of a legal controversy. It is a deliberate collapse of evidence, accusation and fantasy into one voice.
This is one of the zine’s most ethically revealing maneuvers.
The adult writer occupies every available position. He becomes reporter, predator, spectator, juror and stylist. The child’s words enter the page, but they do not control their own meaning. They are absorbed into an adult performance designed to demonstrate extremity.
Pure frequently claims its intensity from other people’s lack of power.
The final third of the issue moves toward individual murdered children and their families. Melissa Ackerman appears through school photographs, a missing-person notice, birthday reporting and pictures of her parents waiting for news. The early pages preserve the painful uncertainty before her body was found. Her family organizes a birthday gathering while still hoping she may return.
These images briefly resist the zine’s usual gravity.
The parents have faces. Melissa has school interests, classmates, a planned cake and a place within a household. The documents restore ordinary time around her rather than beginning with the crime.
Then the prose invades.
The publication inserts sexualized speculation into the reporting, using the girl’s suffering to build another fantasy around the suspect. The movement is especially repellent because the family photographs have just established her as someone embedded within relationships.
The zine does not accidentally lose sight of her humanity. It uses the sight of it to intensify the violation.
A newspaper image titled “Goodbye, Melissa” shows her parents collapsed into one another after a memorial service. It is a photograph of grief made for public news circulation. Pure includes it inside an object whose previous pages have converted their daughter’s death into erotic verbal material.
The parents are made to mourn inside the same publication that has appropriated the reason for their mourning.
This is not simply voyeurism. It is hostile juxtaposition.
The case of Marie Payne repeats and sharpens the pattern. A photograph shows a small child standing outdoors. Later pages reproduce pictures of the man convicted of killing her, her grieving parents and the wooded area where evidence was found.
The zine’s narration again directs most of its imaginative energy toward the offender. His prior offenses, actions and fantasies are described in detail, while Marie’s life is represented by several photographs and the devastation left in her family.
The imbalance is enormous.
A little girl supplies a face, a dress, a playground moment and an absence. The man who killed her receives pages of narrative motion.
Pure may claim to expose the offender’s mind, but the result grants him the very abundance denied to the victim.
The back cover completes the mechanism. A large grainy image shows a dead woman’s head. Above it is the publication’s Chicago post-office-box address. Below it, the previous issues and their contents are advertised, followed by prices and subscription information.
Death becomes the background of a sales catalog.
The placement is almost too perfect as a summary. A body attracts the eye. The address converts attention into correspondence. The catalog converts correspondence into purchase. The subscription promises repetition.
Pure does not stand outside the market for suffering. It announces prices on top of a corpse.
This helps explain why something like Pure could exist without requiring a secret society or uniquely diseased historical moment.
The source material was already circulating. Newspapers made criminals famous. Police and courts produced records. True-crime publishing transformed violence into genre. Pornographic networks created demand for abusive material. The photocopy underground offered cheap production. Industrial and power-electronics culture rewarded confrontation. Collectors turned scarcity and prohibition into prestige.
Pure joined those systems at their seam.
Its innovation was not the discovery that culture consumes suffering. Its innovation was to discard the respectable explanation for the consumption and perform the appetite openly.
That openness has sometimes been praised as honesty.
But an honest admission of exploitation remains exploitation.
The zine may implicate the reader, yet it repeatedly protects the maker from equivalent examination. Sotos decides what is reproduced, which details are enlarged, who receives speech and whose body becomes scenery. He possesses nearly total editorial power while writing as though power belongs only to killers, police, pornographers and journalists.
The provocateur remains strangely exempt from his own theory.
Pure’s defenders can argue that the work forces readers to confront their fascination, that it destroys the moral alibi of true crime and reveals the sexual hostility hidden inside media language. Those effects are present.
The problem is that victims are used as instruments for producing them.
The child, murdered woman or grieving parent does not benefit from becoming the material through which an adult artist proves that spectatorship is corrupt. Their humiliation is repeated so that the reader and author may experience a sophisticated crisis about looking.
The crisis becomes another luxury extracted from them.
Volume 1 is therefore more damning than Volume 2 because it reveals the entire supply chain. Volume 2 concentrates heavily on criminal mythology and victim-blaming media. Volume 1 moves through celebrity murder, collector markets, illegal imagery, courtroom testimony, family grief and mail-order distribution.
It shows Pure becoming exactly what it claims to expose.
The word PURE does not mean morally clean. It describes an ambition to remove every filter between appetite and object: no empathy, no civic justification, no tasteful framing, no insistence that the reader has come to learn.
But filters are not always hypocrisy.
Sometimes they are the ethical structures through which another human being remains more than material.
Once those structures are removed, what remains is not pure truth. It is power with no obligation to the person being seen.
Pure #3, Volume 1 is valuable as evidence because it records that power with unusual clarity. It shows how journalism, pornography, crime collecting and underground art can share documents while claiming different motives. It shows how transgression becomes a market, and how a publication can call attention to exploitation while extending it.
Its most revealing image may not be any photograph of a killer or victim.
It is the post-office-box address printed above the final dead body.
Everything disturbing inside the issue eventually leads there: to an ordinary place where attention can be converted into an envelope, money and the next volume.
