Ayn Rand's Ideal Man Was an Axe Murderer

Right:  Russian Jewish writer Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum), her "ideal man", axe murderer William Edward Hickman, and Hickman's 12 year old victim, Marion Parker, who Hickman kidnapped, raped and dismembered.  Hickman stated that he wanted as much publicity as the then famous child murderers Leopold and Loeb.    

From Slate.com:

The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. 

Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." 

She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough." 

From Wikipedia:

In 1928, the writer Ayn Rand began planning a novel called The Little Street, whose hero, Danny Renahan, was to be based on Hickman. The novel was never finished, but Rand wrote notes for it which were published after her death in the book Journals of Ayn Rand. In her notes, Rand quoted a statement by Hickman that "I am like the state: what is good for me is right." Rand called this "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I ever heard."

Rand wanted the hero of her novel to be "A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me."

Rand scholars Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Jennifer Burns both interpret Rand's interest in Hickman as a sign of her early admiration of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Rand also expressed sympathy for Hickman, writing, "The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'... It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal..." 

From "The Murder of Marion Parker"

The kidnapper and father met at the corner of 5th Avenue and South Manhattan Street in Los Angeles about 7:30 p.m. on the 17th.

“He pointed a gun at me and said ‘You know what I’m here for. No monkey business,’” Parker recalled later. “I said ‘Can I see my little girl?’”

Hickman pointed to a tightly tied package in the car that revealed only Marion’s head.

“He said she was sleeping,” Parker said. “I assumed she had been chloroformed.”

Parker handed over the 75 $20 gold certificates and as they agreed, Hickman drove a block down the road and pushed Marion out of the car.

Witnesses said Parker ran down to where his little girl was lying and picked her up in his arms. Then he let out a soul-shattering anguished cry of grief.

Marion was dead. The package contained just her head and torso. Her arms and legs had been chopped off where they joined her body. A wire had been wrapped around her head just above her eyes. It cut so deeply into her flesh that it left a gaping wound. Her body had been disemboweled and her entrails replaced with rags. She had also apparently been flogged to such an extent that the flesh on her back was flayed.