Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (43 page)

I have fantasies about mass murder —whole groups of select women I could get together in one place, get them dead, and then make mad, passionate love to their dead corpses. Taking life away from them, [from] a living human being, and then having possession of everything that used to be theirs—all that would be mine. Everything.

A small proportion of serial killers, though no less deadly, are driven to murder by psychosis (a break with reality), hallucinations (seeing or hearing things not there), and delusions (immutable false ideas). It is estimated that for every 10 sadistic sexual psychopathic killers, there is one psychotic serial killer. Richard Chase, “the Vampire of Sacramento,” murdered six persons and drank their blood in order to replace his own, which he delusionally believed was turning to powder. David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” murderer in New York City, said he was tormented by howling voices and mad fantasies. Investigators were told that he had been commanded to kill by his demonic neighbor, 63-year-old Sam Carr, a semiretired owner of a local telephone answering service. Berkowitz may have raised this notion as a ruse during his trial and may not have been truly delusional during the murders, whereas Richard Chase was very deranged.

Generally, in psychotic serial killers, clear sexual motives and fantasies are absent or play only a minor role. These individuals are not serial sexual killers because sexual fantasies do not motivate them. That is evident from studies of the crime scenes that they leave behind. Whereas the crime scene of the serial sexual killer has been characterized as organized and ritualized, the crime scene left by a psychotic serial killer is recognizably disorganized and shows palpable evidence of his or her inability to think rationally.

It is possible for killers, driven by sadistic sexual fantasies, to kill without attempting penetration of their victims or without performing any overtly sexual acts with the victim. The
sexual
in the serial sexual killer refers to the presence of sexual fantasies that drive them to kill, not to sexual activity that may or may not occur before or after the victim’s death. Most killers, however, demonstrate a pattern of escalation. In the beginning, just the death of the victim may be sufficient to gratify some key elements of the killer’s sadistic sexual fantasies. Later on, in their series of killings, additional and more bizarre and baroque elements may enter into the murders.

After they are caught, most serial killers proclaim their innocence to the bitter end. John Wayne Gacy, for example, maintained his innocence despite overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that he had killed at least 33 men. Gacy was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994, after spending more than 14 years on death row. Some serial killers seek to exculpate themselves by pleading insanity. Insanity is a legal construct that does not correspond well to psychiatric definitions of mental disorder. There is often an imperfect fit between legal and psychiatric concepts and terminology. In the courts, a criminal defendant may be quite psychotic (that is, out of touch with reality) but still may not qualify for an insanity defense. Jeffrey Dahmer’s counsel described his client as a “steam-rolling killing machine” that was out of control, a man on the track of madness. The prosecution, however, depicted Dahmer as a cold, calculating murderer who carefully planned his crimes and covered up their traces. Generally, in order to be relieved of criminal responsibility in the courts, the accused must suffer from a mental disease or defect that substantially interferes with the accused’s ability to distinguish right from wrong or to conform his or her conduct to the requirements of the law. These requirements vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In a few states, the insanity defense has been abolished altogether.

The law presumes that criminals choose to commit crimes rationally and of their own free will and therefore are deserving of punishment. Some offenders, however, are so mentally disturbed in their thinking and behavior that they are considered to be incapable of acting rationally. Under these circumstances, and with an eye toward fundamental principles of fairness and morality, civilized societies have deemed it unjust to punish a “crazy” person. Additionally, the punishment of a person who cannot rationally appreciate the consequences of his or her actions thwarts the two major aims of punishment: retribution and deterrence.

Neuroscience is confirming what psychiatrists have always known, that total free will is a fiction. Free will is a controversial notion, influenced by philosophical, political, cultural, religious, social, and psychological factors, as well as medical ones. For example, some bad choices are based on faulty brain circuitry and neuronal activity. These neural defects in turn may arise from childhood trauma, head injury, substance abuse, deprivation, genetic defects, or other causes. When psychiatrists examine the individual and the circumstances, they may discover that free will played a minor role or no role in the individual’s choices and actions.

The Dahmer case displayed for a wide audience the mine field of legal sanity and insanity, and of making a forensic psychiatric diagnosis of the condition of such a murderer as Jeffrey Dahmer. Respected forensic psychiatrists testified for both sides. The prosecution experts found that Dahmer was not suffering from a mental illness that prevented him from distinguishing right from wrong, and that he could control his behavior. The defense experts disagreed, saying that in their opinion, Dahmer was indeed seriously mentally ill. His paraphilia, in their opinion, approached psychotic proportions. Furthermore, he could not control his murderous impulses even when he wanted to do so.

It was true that Dahmer had struggled hard against his aberrant sexual impulses in the 7 years that elapsed between his first and his second killing. Because Dahmer was able to plan his murders, and to systematically dispose of the bodies, the jury was convinced that he did have the ability to control his behavior. All the testimony bolstered the theory that, like most serial killers, Dahmer knew what he was doing and knew right from wrong. Finally, the jury did not accept the defense that Dahmer suffered from a mental illness to the degree that it had disabled his thinking or behavioral controls.

Most juries are outraged by the violent crimes of serial killers and seek to punish the killers severely, sometimes even when they are offered irrefutable evidence of severe mental illness present in the killer. For example, in order to convict, juries may seize on the evidence that the murders were planned, even though the accused did not know that what he or she was doing was wrong because of a severe psychosis. The fact that murders may be planned in exquisite detail does not necessarily mean that the perpetrator appreciated the wrongfulness of his or her acts. In these cases, the juries invariably find the killers to be bad rather than mad, even though the commonsense view of the killers’ outrageous behavior is that it is “crazy,” that is to say, mentally deranged. Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences, or about 950 years in jail without the possibility of parole. On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death in a prison bathroom by another inmate.

In the case of Dahmer, experts agreed that one way or another, he should never be released from an institution—whether it was a jail or a confining psychiatric institution. This agreement reflects the common view, too, that such killers ought never to see freedom again. In fact, psychopathic sexual sadistic murderers are not treatable by any current psychological therapy or medicine. Proof of that comes from such cases as that of Edmund Kemper. As a huge 15-year-old, Kemper murdered his grandparents, was declared insane, and was committed for an indefinite period to the Atascadero State Hospital in California. Five years later, after his model behavior and psychological insights convinced the authorities that Kemper was ready to return to the outside world, he was released in the care of his mother. Three years after his release, he murdered eight more people, including his mother, before voluntarily surrendering. He has since told interviewers that he knows he must be kept incarcerated in one form or another because if he is not, he will kill again. Similarly, more than a year after Jeffrey Dahmer’s trial and conviction, he admitted, “I still do have those old compulsions.” Even 17 years after committing the Son of Sam murders, David Berkowitz still maintained to interviewers the belief, whether delusional or fabricated, that it was others in a satanic cult, and not he, who had killed on the streets of New York.

Some psychotic killers may experience a remission in their mental illness through medical treatment and thus escape the demons that pushed them to murder. Serial sexual killer psychopaths cannot escape their own murderous fantasies. While they are incarcerated, however, these psychopathic killers are affable, eager to please, helpful—and always manipulative.

Lost Childhoods and the Fantasy Inferno

The sad fact is that serial sexual murderers are created in their early childhoods, probably before the age of 5 or 6. Some experts say they are born killers; others assert that they develop into killers through their teens and young adulthood. In either case, a troubled environment only enhances inherited lethal tendencies. In an important FB I study that interviewed in depth 36 incarcerated serial killers, there were many findings that offer some insight into these killers’ psychological development. Almost half of the biological fathers of these men left home before the boys were 12 years old. The absence of a solid male role model is a significant fact in their development as killers. But the presence of a father in the house is no guarantee of normality. For these boys, the presence in the house of a cruel, insensitive father may be worse for them than having an absent father. The fact remains that the vast majority of boys from troubled homes and backgrounds do not become serial killers. Moreover, in the midst of a caring, loving family, it is unlikely that a child will consistently prefer fantasy to real life.

But serial sexual killers do choose fantasies that are related in varying degrees to their uncaring, unloving families. Most serial killers experienced severe physical and sexual abuse as children. John Wayne Gacy was terrorized by a harsh, alcoholic, disciplinarian father. Gacy was sickly, overweight, unathletic, dreamy, and imaginative. As a young child, Gacy was sexually abused by a neighbor and by a family friend. His father whipped him with a belt kept expressly for that purpose and heaped on him a merciless barrage of emotional abuse. He never lost an opportunity to express disappointment in him, calling him “dumb” and “stupid.” At around age 5, Gacy began to suffer from a form of psychomotor epilepsy (seizures with multiple sensory, muscular, and psychic components) for which he eventually was prescribed phenytoin and phenobarbital. As a preadolescent, Gacy became progressively more dependent on the mood-altering highs of his medication. His father expressed contempt for the son’s illness, thought the boy was malingering, and accused his wife of pampering him. He warned his wife that John was “going to be a queer” and heaped scorn on his son by calling him a “he-she.” Years afterwards, when he was killing his 33 victims, Gacy referred to them as “worthless little queers and punks.”

Ted Bundy was an illegitimate child. His father’s identity remained a mystery. The family situation was distinctly abnormal for that era, and his maternal grandparents created a cover story to hide Ted’s illegitimacy. The grandmother suffered from recurrent depression that sometimes required electroshock treatment. Bundy’s grandfather was an inflexible perfectionist given to easy verbal abuse and to the occasional physical abuse of cats, dogs, and his wife. Ted later denied that the grandfather or anyone else had physically or sexually abused him in his childhood.

Ted Bundy’s own morbid tendencies were apparent from the time he was 3. When he was that age, and his Aunt Julia was 15, she later recalled, she woke up one morning to find little Ted lifting the blankets from her bed and quietly sliding in a butcher knife next to her. “He just stood there and grinned,” she said of the incident. “I shooed him out of the room and took the implement back down to the kitchen, and told my mother about it. I remember thinking at the time that I was the only one who thought it [the incident] was strange. Nobody did anything.”

In grade school, Bundy’s innate intelligence was recognized, but the reports home about his good grades were invariably accompanied by notes from his teachers about the need for control of his ferocious temper. In junior high, still an excellent student, Ted was active in the Boy Scouts and continued to go to church regularly with his family. A female high school classmate remembered him as attractive, well dressed, and very well mannered. However, beneath such a facade of normalcy, Bundy was sneaking out of his home at night to peep on women as they undressed. It was part of his compulsive masturbating. Later on, during his high school years, Bundy shoplifted expensive clothes and ski equipment. He was picked up twice by the police on suspicion of burglary and auto theft, but nothing came of it. And so, beneath the all-American boy image, the psychopathic predator continued to develop, and so did his murderous fantasies.

As Bundy did, most serial sexual killers progress through an escalating series of antisocial acts before they begin killing. Such people do not simply wake up one morning to discover their monstrous identity. Considered odd since childhood, and habitually isolated socially, those who become future serial sexual killers turn inward and incubate sadistic sexual fantasies. The fantasy inferno raging within their minds throws off symptomatic sparks that assume the shape of compulsive masturbation, transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, and other deviant acts.

During their childhoods, a number of serial killers also develop the triad of behaviors made up of bed-wetting, fire-setting, and cruelty to animals. Richard Chase displayed the full triad. David Berkowitz set, by his own admission in his journals, 1,411 fires. He also tortured and killed small animals. One early victim was his mother’s parakeet, which he stealthily fed cleaning powder over a period of weeks until the bird dropped dead.