PETER SOTOS – PURE #1
Year: 1984
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Format: Photocopied/typewritten zine
Editor and writer: Peter Sotos
Contents include: Robin Gecht and the Ripper Crew, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Josef Mengele, Joseph Vacher, John Wayne Gacy, Larry Eyler, Dean Corll, and a preview of Dennis Nilsen
Style: True-crime appropriation / transgressive writing / media collage
Content note: Racism, antisemitism, misogyny, murder, sexual violence, child abuse, torture, forensic imagery, and photographs of victims
The cover of Pure #1 offers almost no explanation. A tightly cropped photograph shows dark, roughened fingers touching or holding an object whose exact identity is difficult to stabilize through the heavy photocopy grain. Beneath it, PURE is sprayed across the white page in military stencil letters.
The image could belong to a medical file, police exhibit, industrial-safety manual, or damaged pornographic photograph. It has already lost enough visual information to become suggestive rather than documentary. Whatever the original picture contained, the photocopier has converted it into a blackened texture of skin, pressure, and contact.
The title claims the opposite condition.
“Pure” implies that something has been filtered until all foreign matter is removed. Yet the zine is constructed entirely from contamination: newspaper clippings, photographs, quotations, criminal histories, courtroom material, racist abuse, sexual fantasy, political propaganda, and descriptions lifted from public reporting. Nothing inside it is pure in the ordinary sense.
Purity here means the removal of restraint.
The opening statement makes that intention explicit. It rejects humanist and feminist criticism, ridicules moral outrage, and presents people as predatory animals whose violence should be studied without sentimentality. The zine announces that it will not place compassion, social explanation, or political protest between the reader and the material.
A quotation attributed to Joseph Goebbels supplies the page’s governing idea: humanity remains animal beneath its respectable surface.
This is not merely an introduction to the contents. It is an attempt to control how every later objection will be interpreted. Anyone appalled by the pages can be dismissed as dishonest, sentimental, or frightened of human nature. Cruelty becomes realism. Empathy becomes avoidance.
The argument protects the zine before it begins.
At the bottom of the page is a Chicago post-office-box address, a note requesting contact and distribution help, and a small photograph labeled as an axe-murder victim. The manifesto, mailing information, and dead body occupy one sheet. An argument about truth becomes a practical invitation to join a circulation network.
Pure does not emerge as an isolated scream. It wants readers, correspondents, distributors, future issues, and an audience large enough to keep the material moving.
The first substantial section is titled DOGS.
The heading transforms a slur into a department name. Its letters are large, rigid, and stenciled, giving contempt the visual authority of an official classification. Beneath it, a quotation from de Sade provides cultural permission for the pages that follow.
The section begins with a Black woman identified as Beverly Marks, a witness in the Robin Gecht trial. Her life is summarized through racist and misogynistic language before the writing abandons any pretense of reporting and turns her into the central body in a fictionalized sexual assault.
A newspaper photograph of Gecht appears midway through the narrative. The image gives the accused man documentary reality while the woman becomes increasingly invented.
This is one of the issue’s basic transactions. A real person’s name, race, occupation, and courtroom role are borrowed from public information. Those facts lend authority to an imagined scene. The fantasy then overwhelms the person from whom the details were taken.
The zine does not simply describe dehumanization. Its writing performs it.
Beverly is reduced to racial caricature, anatomy, and appetite. Gecht is granted method, intention, and control. One person becomes a surface. The other becomes the organizing intelligence of the scene.
The section’s hatred is so extreme that it may initially appear intended to expose the violent fantasy of a racist offender. The page provides no stable distance supporting that interpretation. The narration savors the same power it might supposedly be criticizing, and its final contempt is directed toward the imagined victim rather than the worldview that has consumed her.
The photograph of Gecht near the section’s conclusion makes him look almost restrained compared with the writing erected around him. His face is small, ordinary, and bounded by a rectangular frame. The prose gives him a far larger presence than the image could provide alone.
Pure helps manufacture the monster it claims merely to observe.
A sideways newspaper clipping follows, presenting Gecht and the Ripper Crew through the familiar language of criminal investigation. Several suspects appear in identification photographs beneath a headline involving a “Manson-like mastermind.”
The clipping performs respectability. It has columns, bylines, quotations, and the visual organization of journalism. Pure uses that borrowed credibility as a platform from which it can travel into fantasy and return whenever documentation becomes useful again.
Newspaper fact and invented sadism are not separated into different sections. They authenticate one another.
The next major heading, LUCAS & TOOLE, resembles the logo for a partnership. Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole are presented almost as a performing duo or criminal company whose expanding claims promise material for continuing coverage.
The article reproduces reported confessions and allegations involving numerous murders across different states. Toole receives a large portrait, while the text accumulates victims, methods, locations, and grotesque statements. The quantity itself becomes part of the spectacle.
The reader is asked to marvel at scale.
Then come photographs of children: Marie, Caroline, and Susan. Their faces are arranged as a vertical memorial or missing-person display. Each photograph carries a short caption identifying absence, death, or an unresolved fate.
These faces interrupt the criminal statistics. A child’s haircut, expression, and clothing restore ordinary life for a moment. The portraits were created before the children became entries inside a murder narrative. Their original purpose was familial, institutional, or investigative. Pure repurposes them as evidence of the killers’ reach.
The photographs do not defeat the offenders’ mythology. They enlarge it.
A victim’s face can humanize a case, but it can also become the trophy through which an offender’s reputation is measured. The zine’s surrounding language continually directs attention back toward what Lucas or Toole allegedly did, thought, or claimed.
The men receive pages. The children receive captions.
This arrangement reaches a more deliberate intensity in the section titled KIDDIE TORTURE.
The heading eliminates any ambiguity about the editorial attraction. A phrase referring to the abuse of children has been transformed into a bold visual product, large enough to dominate the page before any individual child appears.
The writing opens by calling child abuse a pleasure and then celebrates Ian Brady and Myra Hindley as disciplined masters of cruelty. Their crimes are not introduced as social or psychological disasters. They are presented as demonstrations of imagination, control, and commitment.
The Moors murders supply Pure with nearly everything its editorial system desires: recognizable offenders, photographs of missing children, grieving relatives, recorded evidence, sadistic mythology, and the opportunity to turn intimacy into coercion.
Marie Payne is introduced through a small portrait. Her parents’ suffering is described, and an image of the clothing she wore when she disappeared is reproduced under the heading “vital clues.” The clothes are arranged without a body: jacket, tights, shoes.
The empty outfit is one of the most affecting images in the zine.
Clothing normally carries the shape, movement, and habits of its wearer. Here each item lies flat, converted into evidence. The person has vanished, leaving objects that can be photographed, classified, and circulated.
The accompanying prose immediately attempts to occupy that absence with fantasy. Instead of allowing the clothes to remain connected to Marie’s life and her family’s search, the writing imagines what an offender might have done with them.
Evidence becomes costume.
A photograph of the Payne family follows. Four people sit together waiting for news, their expressions suspended between hope and knowledge. The caption describes them as haunted by fear. This is not an anonymous category called “victims.” It is a household being altered in real time.
Yet the family’s grief is used to praise the offender’s power. The text treats a parent’s inability to escape imagined scenes of a child’s suffering as another achievement belonging to the killer.
This reveals the zine’s most consistent moral theft.
The pain experienced by survivors and relatives is transferred to the perpetrator’s account as evidence of his greatness. The offender receives credit not only for the original violence but for every life disturbed afterward.
Grief becomes part of his authorship.
The Lesley Ann Downey sequence pushes this arrangement further. A school photograph is placed beside a second image of a child in costume. Below, a parent describes seeing police photographs and reacting with horror.
The page briefly permits the mother’s voice to establish the distance between the child she knew and the evidence shown to her. That distance should belong to the family. Pure takes possession of it.
Several pages reproduce a transcript of the recording made during Lesley’s abuse. The typography is plain and administrative. Names are followed by colons. Pleas, instructions, interruptions, and ordinary fragments of speech are organized like dialogue from a stage play.
This is documentation at its most morally unstable.
A transcript can preserve evidence, support prosecution, and prevent denial. Detached from those functions and printed inside a zine celebrating the offenders, it becomes something else. The reader is invited into a room whose victim repeatedly asks to leave.
The transcription removes the child’s actual voice but preserves the structure of coercion. The silence created by print can make the material easier to continue reading than the original recording would be. The page becomes both barrier and delivery system.
Pure treats access as value.
The writer praises Brady’s control and interprets the child’s pleas through the offender’s supposed mastery. A small picture of Lesley’s mother appears near the conclusion, visually reduced to a footnote beneath the lengthy transcript.
Brady and Hindley then receive full-page portraits.
Their faces become icons after the victim’s voice has been consumed. Brady stares from a formal photograph. Hindley’s famous police portrait appears next, its high-contrast hair and downward gaze already hardened into one of British crime reporting’s most recognizable images.
The photographs demonstrate how criminal celebrity simplifies a human face into a logo.
Lesley’s portrait identifies a child whose life was taken. Hindley’s portrait identifies an image reproduced so frequently that it can stand for an entire category of evil. Pure relies upon that recognition while pretending to oppose conventional moral response.
The offender is more visually famous than the victim. The zine does not correct the imbalance. It depends upon it.
The middle of the issue becomes a sequence of heavily degraded images. Bodies, wounds, and dark photographic masses are copied until their details nearly disappear. Some pictures are so blackened that they stop functioning as clear evidence and begin resembling abstract textures.
This degradation produces an aura of forbidden authenticity.
The pictures look as though they have traveled through police files, underground exchanges, poor machines, and multiple generations of copying. Their damage implies scarcity and access. A cleaner reproduction might expose the plainness of the source. The ruined image feels secret.
Photocopy loss becomes aesthetic gain.
The Nazi section begins with an openly antisemitic page ending in an announcement of “Nazi triumph.” The writing piles slurs, historical figures, concentration camps, and fantasies of domination into a long paragraph that treats extermination as the ultimate expression of power.
This is followed by images associated with Josef Mengele’s experiments. Photographs of marked or damaged legs are captioned as evidence of his “genius.”
The word is not incidental. It reveals Pure’s equation of originality with the ability to harm without moral restraint.
The doctor becomes an artist. Human bodies become his medium. Historical atrocity becomes proof that imagination can operate beyond ordinary limits.
This is the same structure previously applied to serial murder, now expanded to institutional violence. The zine does not distinguish meaningfully between a private sexual offender and a physician working within a genocidal state. Both are admired for control over vulnerable bodies.
The historical system surrounding Mengele almost disappears.
Antisemitism, bureaucracy, medical institutions, military occupation, forced imprisonment, and state murder are compressed into the legend of one exceptional man. The scale of the Holocaust is used to intensify an individual criminal personality.
History becomes a personality cult.
A later page places Adolf Hitler’s portrait above a quotation and swastika. The arrangement resembles a devotional card, political poster, and scrapbook page at once. The symbol occupies more space than the text, supplying immediate visual force where argument would require effort.
The zine’s appropriation of Nazi imagery is not analytically complex. It is attracted to the historical maximum of authoritarian power and extermination because these images arrive preloaded with social prohibition.
Displaying the symbol becomes a substitute for developing an idea.
The section also demonstrates the weakness of Pure’s claimed realism. Its manifesto rejects moral consolation and pretends to examine humanity without illusion, but its perpetrators are extravagantly romanticized. They are geniuses, libertines, artists, beasts, and masters.
This is not cold realism.
It is sentimental hero worship directed toward domination.
The Joseph Vacher feature, titled LUSTMORD, shifts into nineteenth-century history. A formal portrait shows Vacher seated in a chair, dressed respectably and holding a hat. The image belongs to a world of stiff poses, painted backdrops, and long photographic exposure.
The heading turns him into a genre before the text begins.
A chronology follows, listing alleged victims, dates, ages, methods, and injuries. The format resembles an official case summary, but its repetition converts human lives into installments. Each entry provides another variation upon the same spectacle.
The list produces numbness and escalation simultaneously.
The individual names appear, but the relentless structure makes them interchangeable. Date. Age. Sex. Location. Injury. The reader begins anticipating the next item with the same motion used to scan a catalog.
At the end, Vacher receives another portrait and a notice promising Peter Sutcliffe in the next issue.
The section does not conclude with the victims or Vacher’s death. It concludes with editorial continuity.
One sexual murderer advertises another.
This is the fan-magazine logic underlying Pure #1. Offenders return as features, previews, updates, and future attractions. The zine builds a roster. Each name becomes a franchise capable of supporting photographs, quotes, timelines, and further issues.
The criminal archive becomes programming.
Medical photographs follow the Vacher section. Bodies are shown on examination tables with captions identifying injuries and forensic findings. The layout is borrowed from textbooks or official reports, where such images may have investigative or educational purposes.
Inside Pure, their function changes.
The photographs no longer lead toward diagnosis, prosecution, or prevention. They form a visual bridge into John Wayne Gacy, another recognizable offender whose face and mythology have already been mass-produced.
Gacy first appears in a clown suit outside his home. Balloons, striped fabric, painted features, and brickwork surround him. The image has become famous because it offers an irresistible contradiction: children’s entertainment beside concealed murder.
Pure needs the clown image because it performs mythology instantly.
The costume turns the case into horror iconography. It allows the publication to move from human crimes toward a figure who seems designed for folklore. The clown is not just a job or costume. It becomes evidence that evil enjoys disguise.
Photographs of recovered bodies and evidence markers follow. The Cook County medical examiner is shown identifying remains found beneath Gacy’s home. These images should return the story to physical reality: excavation, decomposition, identification, families waiting to know.
The text instead uses them as the foundation for another sexualized offender fantasy.
Once again, documentation is asked to certify invention.
A photograph proves that bodies were recovered. The prose then fills the inaccessible interior of the crimes with imagined dialogue and desire. The authority of the photograph leaks into material the photograph cannot establish.
Pure wants the freedom of fiction and the force of evidence simultaneously.
Larry Eyler enters through dense reporting about unidentified bodies, rural locations, police suspicion, and his public image. Two photographs show him as mug shot and courtroom figure. The text then announces that Pure can “celebrate” his work despite inadequate media coverage.
The word “celebrate” removes the final shelter of neutral documentation.
Pure presents itself as the publication willing to supply attention when newspapers have failed to make an offender sufficiently visible. This is not exposure of criminal celebrity. It is a bid to become its specialist press.
Dean Corll receives one of the issue’s longest closing sections. His portrait is followed by a photograph of Wayne Henley and David Brooks, then pages recounting the Houston murders in increasingly explicit language.
Corll’s suburban respectability becomes central to the image. He was known as the “Candy Man,” a local adult connected to families and young people through work and neighborhood familiarity. The ordinary face and domestic surroundings are treated as camouflage concealing an elaborate private world.
Pure is fascinated by compartmentalization.
The offender appears conventional in public and absolute in private. The split suggests a freedom from coherent identity: one man can occupy social life while secretly constructing another system with different laws.
This fantasy of the divided man is essential to the zine’s admiration. He is imagined as more complete because he can use normality as an instrument.
The boys and young men he harmed are described mainly through what was done to their bodies. Their lives before Corll scarcely appear. Henley and Brooks receive photographs, names, motives, conflicts, and narrative roles because they participated in the offender’s world.
Proximity to criminal agency grants identity.
The murdered remain plural.
The section ends with Corll’s death after Henley turns against him. Even this reversal is treated less as an escape from violence than as the dramatic conclusion of a closed male system. The victims’ families and communities remain outside the zine’s field of interest.
A final page displays John Wayne Gacy again, accompanied by an evidence marker and the discovery of remains. Another page promises Dennis Nilsen in Pure #2 beneath a large portrait and quotation.
The first issue therefore closes by creating appetite for the second.
The zine began with a statement rejecting conventional morality and a request for distribution. It ends with another offender advertised as upcoming content. Between those points, the object has transformed murder, torture, family grief, historical atrocity, and forensic documentation into a serialized publication model.
The final degraded image is almost unreadable. A face or damaged head emerges from black photocopy noise, with white areas burned out and features breaking apart. The picture has reached the point where information and texture can no longer be separated.
This is the visual destination of Pure #1.
A person enters the copier and emerges as atmosphere.
The issue is often most revealing where it believes itself strongest. It claims to strip away hypocrisy and sentimental lies, but its worldview depends on an enormous fantasy: the fantasy that domination is the most truthful form of human existence.
Every source is bent toward that conclusion.
A parent’s grief proves the offender’s reach.
A victim’s fear proves his control.
A corpse proves his power.
A political system of extermination proves the genius of an individual.
A newspaper clipping proves the reality of a fantasy.
Nothing is permitted to demonstrate tenderness, solidarity, courage, survival, confusion, accident, or resistance unless those qualities can be placed beneath the person causing pain.
The zine does not reveal human nature. It selects one relationship within human life and declares it the whole species.
Its title begins to make sense within that restriction.
Pure means a world purified of reciprocity.
No one owes another person recognition. No context limits appetite. No history complicates the icon. No victim retains an interior life capable of opposing the narrator’s use.
The result is not freedom from ideology. It is a rigid ideology in which the person who controls the page inherits the authority of every killer printed upon it.
Pure #1 is valuable as an artifact because the machinery remains exposed. The source clippings have not yet been integrated smoothly. The typewritten pages retain corrections and uneven spacing. Photographs float inside large white areas. Future issues are advertised openly. The Chicago address sits near the beginning.
The publication has not yet acquired the denser archival polish of its successors.
Its appetite is visible before style fully disguises it.
The issue can be read as an attack on respectable true crime, which pretends to honor victims while repeatedly selling perpetrators. It can be read as an exposure of how journalism, police documentation, family photographs, and historical records become raw material for spectators.
But Pure does not stand outside that economy.
It creates a smaller, harsher marketplace in which moral concern has been removed from the packaging while the same names, faces, bodies, and grief remain for sale.
The stencil title says PURE.
The pages underneath show what had to be removed to make that claim possible.
