Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (44 page)

This was clearly hammered home with the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1992, who was charged in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with the murders of fifteen men and boys. He kept some of their body parts in his fridge, occasionally eating them. He constructed altars from their skulls while reducing the remains of their corpses in drums of acid stored in his bedroom. He attempted to transform several of his still-living victims into sex zombies by drilling through their skulls and injecting their brains with battery acid. One would think, if that’s not crazy, then what the hell is? And that is precisely the argument his attorney attempted to present. It did not work.

So what is wrong with these guys? Obviously something makes them different from the rest of us. Describing them as merely evil seems too simplistic and unscientific—after all, what is “evil” exactly? Psychologists over the last decade have been desperately attempting to evolve clinical definitions and explanations for the deeds and personalities of serial killers.

Psychotics and Psychopaths

The two concepts most often associated with serial killers by the public, press, law enforcement, and academia are
psychotic
and
psychopath.
The two terms have very different meanings.

A psychotic is someone who has
psychosis,
a debilitating organic mental illness, still not entirely understood, that can result in delusions, hallucinations, and radical changes of behavior. Individuals with this disorder are rarely violent, and very few serial killers are diagnosed as psychotic. In a study of 2,000 people arrested for murder between 1964 and 1973, only 1 percent were found to be psychotic.
¹³⁹
The psychotic’s incapacitating disconnection with reality rarely makes him a good candidate for a long career as a serial killer. Psychotics who display violence most often direct it at themselves.

On the other hand, serial killers are most often diagnosed as
psychopaths,
or another closely related term,
sociopath.
A psychopath is profoundly different from a psychotic. The psychopathic state is not so much a mental illness as a
behavioral or personality disorder.
One forensic psychiatrist described it as follows:

A morality that is not operating by any recognized or accepted moral code, but operating entirely according to expediency to what one feels like doing at the moment or that which will give the individual the most gratification or pleasure.
¹⁴⁰

Psychologist S. K. Henderson described psychopaths in his 1939 text as follows:

The term psychopathic state is the name we apply to those individuals who conform to a certain intellectual standard, sometimes high, sometimes approaching the realm of defect but yet not amounting to it, who throughout their lives, or from a comparatively early age, have exhibited disorders of conduct of an antisocial or asocial nature, usually of a recurrent or episodic type, where, in many instances, have proved difficult to influence by methods of social, penal, and medical care and treatment and for whom we have no adequate provision of a preventive or curative nature. The inadequacy or deviation or failure to adjust to ordinary social life is not a mere willfulness or badness which can be threatened or thrashed out of the individual so involved, but constitutes a true illness for which we have no specific explanation.
¹⁴¹

Psychologists theorize that psychopaths have a diminished capacity to experience fear and anxiety, which are the roots to the normal development of a conscience. Psychopaths are often very charismatic and very able at manipulating people. They are highly talented in feigning emotions while inside feeling nothing. They have no remorse for their victims and have highly developed psychological defense mechanisms such as rationalization (“She should have known better than to hitchhike”), projection (“She was a heartless manipulating slut”), and disassociation (“I don’t remember killing her”). They have a very weak realization of self and compensate for that with grandiosity and an inflated notion of entitlement—meaning that they feel that they are special and “entitled” to act above the law or morality. Most notably, psychopaths lack any sense of empathy with the feelings of others.

A psychiatric manual lists some of the primary characteristics of the psychopath, many if not all of which can be found in a serial killer: glibness and superficial charm; grandiosity; continuous need for stimulation; pathological lying; conning and manipulative behavior; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect; callous lack of empathy; parasitic lifestyle; poor behavioral controls; promiscuity; early behavior problems; lack of realistic long-term goals; impulsivity; irresponsibility; failure to accept responsibility for actions; many short-term relationships; juvenile delinquency; revocation of conditional release; and criminal versatility.
¹⁴²

While not all psychopaths are violent, they are prone to violence more than average. It is estimated that 20 to 30 percent of prison populations consist of psychopaths.
¹⁴³
But the same might be said for the populations of corporate CEOs, performing artists, and certainly for politicians. Being a psychopath alone does not make one a serial killer.

The official psychiatric term for a psychopath is
antisocial personality disorder.
The diagnostic criteria for this disorder, as described by the standard
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
4th edition (
DSM-IV
), are as follows:

1. There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by at least three (or more) of the following:
   
2. 1. failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repreatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest
      
   2. deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure
      
   3. impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
      
   4. irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights and assaults
      
   5. reckless disregard for the safety of self or others
      
   6. consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations
      
   7. lack of remorse, as indicated by indifference to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another
      
3. Individual is at least age 18 years.
   
4. There is evidence of Conduct Disorder with onset before age 15 years.
   
5. The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of a Schizophrenic or Manic Episode.
   
6. Evidence of conduct disorder onset before age fifteen.
   ¹⁴⁴
   

BIOSOCIAL INTERACTION

Generally speaking, violent psychopaths emerge out of a combination of personal social conditions and biological and genetic factors. Brain injuries can cause a psychopathic behavioral pattern; many serial killers have a record of head injuries when they were children or recent injuries prior to their beginning to kill. But this is not the
cause
of their murderous behavior—other behavioral problems are already present. Healthy people who sustain head injuries do not become killers.

Psychopaths also show abnormal balances of chemicals currently linked to depression and compulsive behavior: monoamine oxidase (MAO) and serotonin. They show cortical underarousal, high CSF free testosterone, and EEG abnormalities.
¹⁴⁵
A high level of urine kryptopyrrole and an extra Y chromosome have also been suspected as factors in the violent behavior of psychopaths.
¹⁴⁶

There is evidence that some type of congenital genetic abnormalities resulting in brain damage may be common to many serial killers. Nineteenth-century criminology tended to promote the idea of a genetic criminal type. This idea has been swept away in the twentieth century by environmental theories. Now criminology is beginning to steer a line somewhere in between the two approaches.

Forensic psychologist Joel Norris listed twenty-three types of physical characteristics of which three or more would indicate congenital genetic disorders and which he frequently found in serial killers he studied. Some of these characters included malformed ears; curved fifth finger; larger than normal gap between first and second toes; fine or electric wire hair that will not comb down; bulbous fingertips; and a speckled tongue with either smooth or rough spots.
¹⁴⁷

The prevailing theory is that there is a delicate balance between a chaotic or abusive childhood and biochemical factors that can trigger murderous psychopathic behavior. Healthy social factors can prevent a biochemically unstable individual from committing criminal acts; healthy biochemistry can protect a person with a turbulent childhood from growing up to be a killer. Violent offenders emerge when both elements are out of balance. This theory goes a long way to explain why some children with difficult childhoods do not become serial killers and not everyone with a head injury behaves criminally.

CAN PSYCHOPATHS BE TREATED AND CURED?

The problem with psychopaths is that the disorder is highly elusive—it is not a disease that can been directly traced to a single chemical, viral, or organic agent; it is a mysterious behavioral disorder whose history is buried deep in the offender’s psychology, environment, and biochemistry. It is likely that a cure for cancer will be found before psychopaths can be routinely treated and cured. Numerous serial killers, after committing their first murders and being sent to psychiatric facilities or receiving psychiatric treatment in prison, were deemed “cured” and committed more escalated series of murders after their release. Edmund Kemper, for example, murdered his grandparents at age fifteen and was released after five years to murder seven women, including his mother. (See his case study later in this chapter.) Arthur Shawcross murdered two children in Watertown, New York; served fourteen years with treatment; and then was released in April 1987. By 1990 he had murdered eleven women in the Rochester area and was captured having lunch over a corpse he had dumped several days earlier. Richard Biegenwald was released after serving seventeen years for murder and went on to kill another seven victims before being sent back to prison.

Most often, however, psychopaths cure themselves as they age. Starting from age twenty-one, approximately 2 percent of all psychopaths go into remission every year.
¹⁴⁸
The older the psychopath becomes, the more likely that he will become adjusted to society—especially in his midforties. This may account for the relatively young average age of serial killers (midtwenties) and for why some serial killers vanish without being captured or identified.

Successful treatment of psychopaths, however, is so rare that articles trumpet them in psychiatric journals with a grandeur akin to the discovery of a new planet. The
International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology
in 1999 described a “Marcel” who raped six children and, while in a psychiatric facility, raped an adult male. After undergoing therapy, Marcel has apparently been living a normal life for the last twenty years.
¹⁴⁹
In 2003, in the same journal, an article described a “Mr. X” who sought out treatment for his fantasies of becoming a serial killer. The article states, however, that Mr. X, while having some similar traits of serial killers, did not show any signs of being a psychopath when tested. The Ohio psychiatrists who treated Mr. X concluded, “This lack of psychopathy may have led him to treatment rather than to carrying out the planned homicides.”
¹⁵⁰

 Peter Woodcock (David Michael Krueger)—Thirty-Five Years of Therapy

I have read a lot of case histories in researching this book, but few compare to the story of my own hometown serial killer, Peter Woodcock in Toronto. “Crazier than a shithouse rat” may not be a highly scientific term, but it’s the only one that comes to mind. Few have heard of Peter Woodcock, who committed his first series of crimes in 1956–1957 and escapes mention in all serial killer encyclopedias and lists (which makes me wonder how many other “hometown” serial killers around the world are not catalogued by researchers).