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

by Robert I. Simon

  Like politics, most serial killers are local. A notable exception is Ted Bundy, who traveled through a number of states during his killing spree. Serial killers generally prowl within a specific area. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, collected his prey from the red light districts of Seattle and Takoma and along Pacific Highway South.

  It is much easier to live in a community and hide in plain view than to be a newcomer who attracts attention and thereby risks detection. Changing locations also requires adjustments to the killer’s tried and true methods of stalking victims, thus increasing the likelihood of apprehension.

  The most seemingly normal and prosperous of outward lives was that composed by John Wayne Gacy. As a serial sexual killer, he raped, sodomized, tortured, and strangled to death 33 young men. He did this while running a prosperous construction business, marrying twice, and becoming a public benefactor. The acute phase of his killings began about 7 months before his second marriage and continued through that marriage and afterwards. The gregarious Gacy buried most of his victims in the basement of the home where he lived with his wife and entertained their friends. These burials, with Gacy’s use of the house as a cover for horrible activities, were a perfect metaphor of his dual life.

  Gacy was active in community projects and belonged to several civic organizations. He was voted the local Jaycees’ outstanding member for 1967. As a member of the Jolly Jokers Club, Gacy created the character of Pogo the Clown, and as Pogo he traveled to hospitals to bring cheer to sick children. As director of the Polish Constitution Day Parade in 1978, he was photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter. In referring to his antics as a clown—and perhaps to more of his other activities—he once said, “A clown can get away with murder.”

  When Gacy had victims alone in his home, he would ply them with alcohol and drugs and show them heterosexual and then homosexual porn films. He would immobilize them by tricking them into participating in handcuff and rope tricks. He would then strangle them to death, but slowly, tightening and loosening the ligatures many times in order to prolong the victim’s agony and his own sexual pleasure.

  In the movie about Gacy, To Catch a Killer, Gacy was played by actor Brian Dennehy. In a television interview about the role, Dennehy candidly admitted, “I learned about a part of myself.”

  Theodore Robert “Ted” Bundy, who killed 35 women, and possibly more, had an almost perfect cover. His mother considered him to be an ideal son. His political friends considered him to be on the fast track in the legal profession, heading toward being a future governor or senator. His girlfriends found him to be a woman’s romantic dream come true, an attentive, tender lover who sent flowers and wrote love poems. He was engaged to marry at one point. At another time, he was dating one woman and killed 24 others, all of them strangers to him. His girlfriends did not satisfy his intense, predatory impulses. Most of them were unaware of those impulses, although at least one of them became aware of some of his desires for deviant sexual practices.

  Bundy and Gacy used their covers to lure victims. Gacy attracted some young men with promises of jobs in his construction business, whereas Bundy lured women by smooth talking, and also by feigning an injury. With his arm in a cast, he would get them into his car, or to some isolated spot, and then bludgeon them with a short crowbar concealed in the removable arm cast. While the women were unconscious or semiconscious, he would then commit gross sexual acts, including anal assault. Bundy bit various body parts, sometimes biting off a victim’s nipple or leaving bite marks on her buttocks. He killed the victims by strangulation. Bundy mutilated and decapitated their bodies and severed their hands with a hacksaw. He would leave the bodies in secluded spots and return to them after several days to commit necrophilic acts such as ejaculating into the mouth of a disembodied head.

  More Bad Than Mad?

  Serial sexual killers are sadistic sexual psychopaths. They are males, mostly white males, and of at least average intelligence. Some have demonstrated superior intelligence.

  Sadistic . Sexual. Psychopaths. Each of these descriptive terms is important. Psychopaths have deviant personality and character flaws. They are detached from others. Their relationships with people have importance to themselves only insofar as these relationships provide them with pleasure; otherwise, they discard people like trash. Psychopaths’ consciences are deformed or essentially absent—they are unwilling to restrain their antisocial aggressive and sexual impulses.

  In serial sexual killers, the sexual and aggressive drives are fused together at an early age. Among sexual murderers, sadists are those who derive intense sexual pleasure from inflicting suffering upon a live victim. Some of these killers record the terrified screams of the tortured victims and play them back later for renewed pleasure. Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, known together as the Hillside Strangler, would strangle women while having sex, bringing them back to life over and over again to heighten their own orgiastic ecstasy. Once the women had been strangled to death, they were no longer of interest to the cousins, who dumped them unceremoniously along hillsides in the Los Angeles area. Because both men also carried on plentiful sex lives during the period that they were committing their murders, it is clear that sex alone was not the motive for the murders. Sadism played a large part in it.

  As with some other serial killers, Bianchi was fascinated by police work and wanted to join the Los Angeles police force. He even inserted himself into the Hillside Strangler investigation, asking the police to show him some of the sites where the women had been found. It is actions like these that permit us to understand that, unlike some psychotic killers, serial sexual murderers do know right from wrong. The perception that their sexually aggressive impulses are irresistible is an incomplete explanation of their behavior; instead, serial killers choose not to resist these impulses in their continuing quest for thrilling orgiastic pleasure. Even those serial sexual killers who claim to be compelled to kill by the sheer force of their deviant drives know what they are doing and that what they are doing is wrong. But they choose to do it anyway for the sexual gratification. Among human beings, knowing what is right does not necessarily lead to doing the right thing. It is necessary to want to do the right thing. Often we do not want something because it is good. It is good because we want it.

  Serial sexual killers are always sadistic, sometimes necrophilic, often both. They all obtain sexual thrills from the hurt and terror they produce in their victims and from the total power they wield over their victims, alive or dead. In psychiatric terms, these killers are psychopaths who have a paraphilia. Paraphilias are characterized by acting out, or being distressed by, recurrent intense sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies that involve either nonhuman objects or the suffering and humiliation of oneself or of children or other nonconsenting persons. A psychopath who does not also have a sadistic paraphilia might not kill; he or she could be satisfied with perpetrating various scams. And the sadist who is not a psychopath might confine his or her sexual desires to fantasy or to acting out the sadistic impulses with the aid of a consenting masochistic partner. So, too, the necrophile who is not a psychopath might be content to have sex with dead bodies that he digs out of a graveyard or with bodies that he works with in a mortuary. The disordered core of the serial sexual murderer requires that he have a lethal combination of psychopathy and sadism or necrophilia.

  Edmund Emil Kemper II I was a necrophilic killer. Such killers usually murder their victims quickly to obtain the object of their desire. The victim may be spared a slow, agonizing death. The necrophilic killer’s sexual desires begin with the victim’s death and are kindled by the dead body. Kemper wished to procure a dead body for his purposes, and later, after being imprisoned, he was quite clear about his intentions. “I’m sorry to sound so cold about this, but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I had to, I had to evict them from their bodies.” It was as though he was a landlord, getting rid of an unwanted
tenant. Kemper also said,

  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 committi
ng 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.