PETER SOTOS – PURE #2
Year: 1984
Format: Photocopied zine
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Style: True-crime collage / transgressive writing / media appropriation
Contents include: Ted Bundy, Robin Gecht, the Ripper Crew, Walter Rauff, Larry Eyler, Dennis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe, the McMartin Preschool case, Klaus Barbie, Gerald Stano, Christopher Wilder and related press coverage
Content note: Murder, sexual violence, child abuse, antisemitism, torture and victim photographs
Pure #2 is bookended by two kinds of institutional cruelty.
At one end are medical illustrations cataloguing wounds produced by burning, cutting and homicidal strangulation. The images come with numbered captions and the cold descriptive confidence of a textbook. A damaged human body has been transformed into evidence from which the observer is expected to learn.
At the other end is a photograph of a restrained laboratory animal beneath the title PURE and the date 1984. A caption states that test animals undergo torture without anesthesia and are often left to die slowly and painfully. The image resembles a protest leaflet, but it also functions as the zine’s final piece of shock material. Compassion and spectacle occupy the same rectangle.
Between these two pages, Pure applies a similar process to murder victims, survivors, children, war prisoners and the people who harmed them. Bodies become examples. Faces become illustrations. Suffering becomes material arranged for inspection.
The issue’s visual style is remarkably plain. Most pages consist of typewritten paragraphs surrounded by broad white margins. Newspaper clippings are pasted into the text. Photographs appear as grainy black-and-white blocks, often degraded until eyes and mouths become dark holes. Section titles are printed in heavy stencil letters that resemble military cargo markings, police-property labels or warnings sprayed across machinery.
PURE.
ON TOP.
LUSTMORD.
RIPPER.
KLAUS BARBIE.
The design creates a crude authority. It suggests that these pages contain facts extracted from official files, even when the writing has moved far beyond reporting and into admiration, fantasy, insult or sexualized invention.
That movement is the central mechanism of the zine.
Pure begins like a newsletter updating readers on recurring characters. Ted Bundy has attempted another escape. Robin Gecht and members of the Ripper Crew have received sentences. A suspected murderer remains under investigation. Nazi fugitive Walter Rauff is discussed alongside contemporary American killers. Announcements preview the subjects planned for future issues.
This resembles the front section of a fan magazine.
The audience is assumed to remember the names from the previous installment. A killer’s imprisonment, appeal, escape attempt or new interview becomes another development in an ongoing serial. The issue does not need to reconstruct each case carefully because criminal celebrity has already supplied personalities recognizable enough to return like television characters.
Bundy receives especially favorable treatment. His violence is described in detail, but the writing repeatedly returns to his intelligence, confidence and refusal to confess. His denials are reproduced at length, followed by language presenting him as an extraordinary living example of genius.
The victims demonstrate what he could do. Bundy demonstrates who he supposedly was.
This hierarchy appears throughout Pure #2. Perpetrators are granted psychology, habits, preferences, philosophies and distinctive identities. Victims are commonly granted a name, age, photograph and a description of what was done to them. One person receives an interior life. The other becomes the surface upon which that life is demonstrated.
The issue does not hide this imbalance. It celebrates it as strength.
The early pages also reveal how readily the zine mixes different historical scales. Walter Rauff, associated with the machinery of Nazi mass murder, appears in the same running news section as individual sexual killers. The distinction between genocide, serial murder and criminal assault is flattened into one general category of men who escaped ordinary moral limits.
History becomes a ranking of predators.
This creates a misleading kind of equality. A war criminal involved in bureaucratic extermination and a murderer acting from private appetite may both produce suffering, but they operate through different structures. Pure is not interested in those differences. It is interested in the aura produced when someone exercises power over life and death.
The criminal’s power is treated as the meaningful continuity.
The first long feature, “ON TOP,” pairs Larry Eyler and Dennis Nilsen. The title establishes the desired relationship before the article begins. Someone must occupy the dominant position. Someone else must be physically and narratively beneath him.
The section begins with biographical comparison, press reporting and descriptions of the men’s crimes. Gradually, the voice changes. The language becomes pornographic and taunting, addressing an imagined victim directly while turning violence into a scene of masculine mastery.
There is no typographic signal announcing this transition.
The same typewriter font carries journalism, quotation, editorial commentary and invented fantasy. The page does not distinguish evidence from performance because their contamination is the intended effect. A newspaper supplies authority. The writer supplies appetite. The victim’s body joins them together.
Photographs reinforce the transformation. Nilsen and Eyler appear in recognizable portraits, custody photographs and press images. The reproductions are poor, but their faces remain stable enough to become emblems. They can be compared, named and studied.
A small map listing recovered bodies turns death into geography. Each point is numbered. The landscape becomes an index of one man’s reach.
The accompanying victim pictures are arranged almost like school portraits or employee photographs. Young faces sit inside rectangular borders while the writing beneath them describes injuries in mechanical detail. The format resembles a yearbook whose organizing institution is murder.
This is one of the zine’s most effective and repellent visual strategies. The victim photographs preserve ordinary appearances: haircuts, sweaters, shy smiles, faces expecting a future. The text beneath destroys that ordinary time. Each person is reorganized around the last violent event of his life.
Pure does not restore the person behind the photograph. It increases the distance between the photograph and what followed.
The Nilsen material repeatedly reproduces his own explanations of killing, disposal and emotional detachment. He is permitted to describe methods, sensations and private reasoning. The victims cannot answer except through photographs and forensic summaries.
The murderer becomes his own critic.
This is often presented as access to a forbidden mind, but access is not neutral. Giving a perpetrator pages in which to explain himself can create the impression that his actions contain a difficult philosophy requiring interpretation. Methodical cruelty begins to resemble intellectual depth because the person who committed it has been allowed to keep talking.
The victim’s silence then appears to confirm the murderer’s importance.
Pure’s writing intensifies this imbalance by congratulating offenders for control and ridiculing weakness in the people they attacked. The language repeatedly divides the world into masters and disposable bodies. Strength is defined as the ability to impose suffering. Vulnerability is treated as an invitation for contempt.
This worldview calls itself unsentimental, but it is saturated with sentimentality about power.
The powerful man is imagined as complete, free and self-authored. The victim is denied complexity because complexity would interfere with the fantasy. Pure does not eliminate emotion. It redirects emotion almost entirely toward admiration of control.
The “LUSTMORD” section on Peter Sutcliffe changes the visual rhythm. Women’s faces appear one or two at a time beside names and dates. The article proceeds victim by victim, including women who survived and describe lasting injuries, fear and social isolation.
The title is German for sexual murder, but its large stencil lettering turns the term into a brand. It does not read as a clinical category. It reads as the name of a movement, record label or weapon.
The women are at least named. Their faces remain visible. Their testimony occasionally interrupts Sutcliffe’s mythology and reveals damage that continued long after an attack.
But the surrounding narration continually reclaims them.
Descriptions of clothing, bodies and injuries are sexualized. The text shifts from documentary summary into imagined degradation. Survivor statements are placed beside language that treats their terror as fuel for the killer’s legend.
Naming does not guarantee recognition.
A name can be another catalog entry. A photograph can become another collectible image. A quotation can be chosen because it increases the intensity of the scene rather than because the speaker deserves to be understood.
The section’s largest graphic simply says RIPPER beneath a photograph of a man holding a tool. This is pure criminal branding. The individual offender has been replaced by the mythic occupation. The word carries Jack the Ripper, newspaper sensationalism, sexualized killing and the fantasy of a figure moving invisibly through public space.
On the following pages, a tabloid headline announces “My night of terror, by Tracy.” The survivor’s experience is packaged as first-person entertainment. A reader is promised proximity to fear through the most dramatic night of someone else’s life.
Pure did not invent this transaction. The newspaper already created it.
The zine’s method is to remove the newspaper’s thin layer of civic concern and push the same material toward open appetite. Mainstream reporting says that the public must know. Pure suggests that the public simply wants to see.
That is one of its more convincing criticisms.
It is also how Pure excuses itself.
The fact that newspapers already exploit suffering does not make a second exploitation innocent. Recognizing a marketplace while opening another stall inside it is not the same as leaving the market.
This becomes unavoidable in the lengthy section concerning Raymond Buckey and the McMartin Preschool allegations.
A smiling adult man is presented beside rows of children’s portraits. The children’s photographs resemble school pictures, clipped from newspapers and arranged into a collective field of innocence. Their names and ages remain visible. Several images show children crying or being comforted by adults.
The contrast is engineered to produce maximum emotional force.
The writing then abandons even the unstable distinction between crime reporting and fantasy. It places explicit abuse into an imagined scene and uses children’s terror as material for sexualized narration. The language does not protect the children by condemning the imagined offender. It imitates and expands the offender’s viewpoint.
This is the point at which the argument that the zine merely exposes media voyeurism becomes least persuasive.
The pages do not simply reveal how adults construct stories around children. They create another adult story and force the children’s photographs to illustrate it.
A later clipping reports a not-guilty verdict and shows the preschool location. That factual uncertainty does not cause the zine to reconsider the preceding narrative. The lack of conviction becomes another provocation, another reason to enjoy the possibility that forbidden acts occurred beyond proof.
Truth is less useful to Pure than suspicion.
Suspicion permits unlimited invention while retaining a connection to real names and faces. The zine can borrow the intensity of reality without accepting the evidentiary limits reality imposes.
The section ends by promising future material involving still more offenders and children. The serial structure returns. Human catastrophe becomes editorial continuity.
The Klaus Barbie feature widens the issue again, moving from private sexual murder to state torture, occupation and genocide. The heavy heading gives his name the same typographic importance previously granted to “LUSTMORD” and “RIPPER.”
Barbie’s history is summarized through his position in the Gestapo, his postwar escape and testimony from people tortured under his command. Photographs show officials, prisoners and emaciated bodies. The subject is no longer a solitary murderer constructing a secret world. It is an administrator working inside an institution designed to produce suffering.
Pure should be forced to change its understanding of power here.
Instead, it absorbs state terror into the same erotic hierarchy.
Testimony describing torture is repeatedly followed by the phrases “male resistance” and “female resistance.” These small labels operate like ratings attached to each account. The person’s endurance is measured against gender, while Barbie remains the examiner whose actions reveal whether the body passes or fails.
The historical victim becomes a contestant.
This is a grotesque transformation because resistance under torture is not a performance offered for the observer’s admiration. Survival, collapse, silence and confession occur under conditions engineered to destroy choice. Reducing those responses to masculine or feminine strength repeats the torturer’s fantasy that suffering exposes a person’s essential worth.
The zine condemns weakness using the standards established by the person inflicting pain.
The images of concentration-camp prisoners and officials deepen the problem. The photocopier gives each photograph the same gray texture. Uniform, face, corpse and testimony become interchangeable components in the layout. The scale of organized extermination is compressed into another illustrated profile of a powerful man.
Barbie becomes the main character of the pain he administered.
The following section announces Gerald Stano with a heading so aggressively misogynistic that it tells the reader exactly how the women inside will be treated. Before any victim is named, the female body has been reduced to a sexual target.
Stano is shown in a plain press portrait. His crimes and statements are summarized, then transformed into more invented scenes. The text claims access to his private appetite, but it is impossible to know where Stano’s documented words end and the editor’s fantasy begins.
This indistinction is not evidence of closeness to the criminal mind.
It is evidence of editorial power.
The writer can attribute any level of desire, contempt or excitement to the offender and then present the resulting voice as the natural language of violence. The criminal becomes a mask through which the author may speak without fully owning the speech.
The victims again appear through small portraits, often smiling school or family photographs. Their ordinary expressions are placed beside language determined to humiliate them. The page makes their prior lives visible only so the violence can feel more complete.
The final major section turns to Christopher Wilder. Here the materials reveal how easily mainstream glamour culture can join the crime archive.
Wilder appears in photographs as a prosperous, socially functional man. The text emphasizes money, homes, cars and his ability to approach women through promises connected to modeling and photography. His victims and survivors are shown in yearbook pictures, family photographs and posed images reflecting aspirations toward fashion, beauty or public visibility.
The camera becomes part of the trap.
A young woman’s desire to be photographed, modeled or recognized is rewritten after the crime as evidence of vulnerability. The same culture that teaches women to value visibility can later blame them for being approached through it.
Pure does not challenge that trap. It exploits both sides.
It reproduces attractive photographs and then describes the body’s destruction. Beauty is treated as something that increases the criminal’s pleasure and the publication’s impact. The victim’s appearance becomes another reason the story is worth printing.
This is criminal celebrity built from stolen glamour.
The issue’s closing pages return to Nazism. A photograph of uniformed men sits above the PURE logo and a quotation expressing indifference toward whether other people live comfortably or perish, provided they are made useful to a ruling culture. Beneath this appears an announcement for Pure #3 and a forthcoming video compilation.
The transition is breathtakingly cold.
A statement about enslavement and annihilation becomes promotional atmosphere for the next product.
The zine does not place an advertisement beside atrocity accidentally. It understands that atrocity creates the emotional charge through which the publication can identify itself. PURE is printed beneath the uniforms almost like another insignia.
The final animal-testing image extends this system beyond human victims but does not resolve it. It may suggest that cruelty travels across species, institutions and accepted forms of scientific authority. It may also be one more shocking picture selected because shock gives the object identity.
The absence of stable compassion makes every apparent ethical gesture uncertain.
Pure #2 can exist because nearly all of its raw material had already been produced by respectable institutions.
Medical publishers classified wounds.
Police photographed suspects and crime scenes.
Newspapers created serial-killer personalities.
Reporters collected survivors’ fear.
Courts generated testimony.
Tabloids sold terror.
Historical archives preserved perpetrators’ faces.
Television transformed accusation into public drama.
The zine did not discover an underground world hidden from culture. It assembled the culture’s existing products and changed the captions.
The photocopier made that assembly inexpensive. Typewritten pages, newspaper clippings and stolen photographs could be reproduced without permission, sent through a post-office box and sold to an audience too small for conventional publishing to recognize.
The object required no advertiser, legal department or editor willing to accept responsibility.
It only required a maker, a copier and people curious enough to request the next issue.
Pure also belongs to an economy of escalation. Once an underground publication defines itself through forbidden material, each new issue must travel farther. Yesterday’s scandal becomes today’s house style. The reader grows familiar with one level of violence and is promised something more exclusive, more explicit or less defensible.
The advertisements for later issues reveal this mechanism openly.
The zine is not merely reporting obsession. It is maintaining a subscription to it.
Pure #2 is visually primitive but conceptually precise. Its plainness allows it to move between official evidence and private fantasy without changing clothes. The same typewriter describes a sentence, quotes a survivor, praises a murderer and invents an assault. The same photocopy grain covers perpetrator and victim. The same page makes documentation and pornography appear to belong to one continuous archive.
That continuity is the zine’s argument.
Its failure is the belief that revealing contamination excuses adding more.
Pure exposes the way public culture turns violence into information and information into entertainment. It then turns that exposure into another form of entertainment, one granting the editor even greater freedom than the institutions being criticized.
The issue continually asks which person is on top.
Its answer is not ultimately Bundy, Nilsen, Sutcliffe, Barbie, Stano or Wilder.
It is the person controlling the page.
