Gravity’s Volkswagen

Twenty-Three

The Autoerotic Beetle

The Journal of Forensic Science, Volume 18, Number 3, July 1973, reports the case of a forty-year-old airline pilot, from Corpus Christi, Texas, who killed himself with his Volkswagen Beetle. It was, as far as we can tell, an accident. It appears that the man was aiming for sexual gratification rather than death, though risk and danger were certainly part of the equation.

The unnamed man left home at 6 a.m. on one of his days off, telling his wife he was going to a remote area to practise his pistol shooting. He was found about an hour and a half later by a passing fisherman who didn’t know what the hell he’d found.

The subject was naked and dead, wearing a body harness that was attached via a chain to the rear bumper of his Beetle. The car was not moving even though it was in gear, with the engine running, and the steering wheel was tied up so that it could only move in tight, anti-clockwise circles.

The car was a 1968, 1500 model, one of the less common, though by no means rare, semi-automatic versions that has a gear lever but no clutch pedal. Once the car was in gear and running it would move slowly, relentlessly, in concentric circles. The man had chosen a wide piece of road, an area big enough to accommodate the car’s turning circle, which according to a road test in Autocar magazine, dated February 1968, would have been 36 feet 7 inches ‘kerb to kerb’.

It’s assumed that the dead man was using his Beetle as part of an arcane, highly personal, sexual ritual. Having taken off his clothes, used the harness to attach himself to the car, then set it in motion, he would have been forced to run in circles after it; a peculiarly mechanical form of submission and subservience. To end the ‘performance’ all he had to do was reach into the car, turn off the ignition, and everything would stop. Perhaps he had done this successfully on any number of previous occasions.

This time, however, by mischance, the chain connecting him to the car got caught around the Beetle’s rear axle and he’d been ‘reeled in’, brought down to the ground, then dragged round in circles, unable to reach the ignition key. Even though the chain itself had eventually brought the car to a halt, by then our man was crushed against the rear wing and was dead of asphyxiation.

There are so many ways to have sex. There are so many ways to die. To find a unique way of doing both, and one that involves a Volkswagen Beetle, has a certain bizarre glory to it, though I suspect this was of little comfort to the pilot’s widow.