Again, my name was mentioned! I'm shocked! Me? Serial Killers? Where did this connection come from? 😀
Actually, Charles Manson doesn't interest me a whole lot. I just consider him a looney. Vlad The Impaler sort of ruined it for all the others. He had people impaled through her assholes/genitalia, and left them to die, impaling themselves upon their own weight. I've heard things like he used to drink his enemies blood, and had a virtual forest of impaled heads around his castle. Beat that.
I have read of a torture sentence where the person's skin was sliced into ribbons attached at the feet and then they were pulled by a yoke until they tripped on their own skin. I read of that being an Asian Indian thing, but I can't verify it.
What is verified is the breaking wheel, the brazen bull of Perillos, execution by elephant, water torture (one form involved filling the stomach with water and then hitting it with a hammer), thumb screws, garottes, crucifixion, the Judas chair (similar to what you described, see
http://www.gospelgrace.com/romancatholicism/inquisition/inquisition25b.jpg ) and of course bastinado, not fun kinky bastinado but gruesome, harmful bastinado. And probably dozens of others that I don't know about. I once read of a prison guard in Saddam's Iraq forcing a woman to squat on a broken Coke bottle until it filled with blood. And of Khmer Rouge soldiers cutting open a pregnant woman (nothing unique about that).
We read of stuff like this, be it from our ancestors or from modern sociopaths, and can't fathom it and of course we pass judgment on them. I think that, even at the height of torture in history - whenever that might have been - there have always been those who did not approve. There were supposedly huge cheering crowds at wheel-breakings and such, but there have always been pacificists. Today the pacifists have more political power, and maybe they're the majority in most places, but I don't think there's anything unusual or mysterious about the fact that many individuals are still drawn to do nasty stuff.
I think that as long as we consider them inhuman and qualitatively unlike ourselves we will never understand their compulsions - understand as in understand, not as in sympathize - and so never be able to stop their crimes. We are all still brutal animals, but most of us learn to redirect our aggressions into relatively harmless things.
