Although many people imagine a piece of the serial killer’s fantasies—such as the need to control or dominate another—their fantasies are not directed toward obtaining an orgasm at the cost of another person’s life. Most people cannot derive intense sexual arousal by hurting another person. Nor are they psychopaths, totally devoid of conscience or empathy for others. The serial killer’s sadistic sexual fantasies begin where most people’s conscious fantasies end. The serial sexual killer’s path is not a stroll through the garden of everyday cruel thoughts and feelings. Rather, the serial killer’s fantasies relentlessly take him across a nightmarish mental landscape into the valley of death.
In their attempt to rationalize the murders they commit by stating that others have similar wishes but are afraid to act on them, serial killers do make an unintended point that tells us something about other people. There are many spouses and children in the world whose minds are raped and murdered sexually, and who in other ways are sadistically brutalized by their partners or parents. These cases never find their way to a court, to the authorities, or even into the headlines. Even when the outcome is not physical murder, all sorts of depredations and sadistic sexual acts are regularly perpetrated on unwilling but trapped victims. All over the world, every day, spouses and children are treated with utter contempt, used as objects solely for the pleasure of someone else, plundered, and thrown away. Although most victims do not die at the hands of their exploiters, they are mentally murdered, and often behind very respectable doors. The individuals who sadistically abuse and exploit—mind-rape—others are disturbingly ordinary, some are exemplary citizens, and they come from all walks of life. Some are our neighbors and, to varying degrees, some are ourselves.
Beyond Fantasy: Biology, Addiction, and Destiny
Beyond every deviant thought lies a deviant molecule, some say. But what causes the brain to act in a deviant manner? Do serial killers inherit their monstrous behaviors? Are their strong, aberrant sexual fantasies fueled by powerful, genetically determined aggressive and sexual drives? Are the genetic factors present at birth enough to condemn an individual to a life of lust and murder? Jeffrey Dahmer’s father, Lionel Dahmer, writing in his book A Father’s Story, fatalistically observes, “As a scientist, I further wonder if this potential for great evil also resides deep in the blood that some of us fathers and mothers may pass on to our children at birth.” What about head injuries or the presence of covert or overt neurobiologic disorders—do these play a significant role in producing violence? For example, preliminary studies have found high levels of the elements cadmium and lead in the hair of some serial killers. Other research reveals significant differences in the brain chemistry of murderers compared with normal control subjects. How about mental injuries, for instance, those produced by parental deprivation of care, by physical or sexual abuse of a child? It is quite possible that bad experiences may cause bad brain chemistry. Jeffrey Dahmer’s history revealed no physical or sexual abuse in his childhood. Could he have been a victim of aberrant genes?
As stated earlier, most serial sexual murderers were abused as children. Some forensic experts believe that being the victim of extreme child abuse ultimately causes the abused person to identify with his or her abuser. This accords with reports from sadistic sexual murderers that they became highly sexually excited by the fear they saw in their victims’ faces. Some serial killers inflict terror, pain, and helplessness on their victims as a means of obtaining empowerment and mastery over their own terrifying child abuse experiences.
A most common attitude among serial killers is contempt for their victims. Bundy felt no compassion for his prey. In fact, he appeared genuinely surprised that such a fuss was being made over the murder of these “girls,” or that their families would mourn their losses so deeply. “What’s one less person on the face of the earth?” he shrugged, and derisively referred to his many victims as “cargo” and “damaged goods.”
We know from other research that abused children tend to grow up with strong feelings of self-contempt. Treated with contempt in their childhoods, they frequently experience a depreciated view of themselves and others. Severely abused individuals often complain that they feel emotionally dead. Child abuse may lead the person to massive repression of all feelings as a means of continued survival. This finding is pertinent to the ways in which serial murderers interact with their victims. Hating themselves, they view others with equivalent contempt. To the serial sexual murderer who uses his victim solely for the purposes of his own orgasm, the victim has no inherent value as a human being. Dennis Nilsen observed with inhuman detachment that the weight of a severed head when picked up by the hair was far heavier than one would imagine. The ever-present deprecation and humiliation of self that the perpetrators transfer to their victims may make it easier for serial sexual murderers to carry out their sadistic behaviors. In their actions of controlling, torturing, and killing a victim, murderers briefly relieve themselves of profound self-contempt. Moreover, it may be that only intensely sexually sadistic exploitation of their victims brings serial sexual killers out of an emotional deadness to life, temporarily allowing them to feel calm and relaxed. A number of serial sexual killers reported feeling “normal” for a period of time after committing a murder.
The fact that most serial killers escalate their level of killing over time has given rise to the suggestion that an addiction model may explain some things about their behavior. In Gacy, Kemper, Chikatilo, and Bundy, the killing pace not only quickened over time, but dramatically increased near the end as they spun out of control. “A compulsive obsession with doing what I was doing overpowered any feelings of revulsion,” Dahmer told a psychiatrist. “I was dead set on going with this compulsion. It was the only thing that gave me satisfaction in life.” Dennis Nilsen plaintively confessed, “I wished I could stop but I could not. I had no other thrill or happiness.”
As in the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, what happens to these murderers is that Mr. Hyde gradually takes over. It becomes harder and harder to bring back the kinder, gentler Dr. Jekyll. In many of these cases, the last, escalating phase was accompanied by drugs, alcohol abuse, depression, and utter depravity. As their devilishly deviant acts soared, the murderers experienced a concomitant, rapidly descending spiral in their personal lives and in their care of their own persons. The pattern overall followed that of a drug addict’s descent into a living hell.
Serial sexual murderers also seem to follow that pattern in becoming addicted to the high they experience from the murders. They require ever more frequent “fixes”—that is, richer doses of sexually sadistic murder—to maintain that high. Dahmer agreed that the high was “almost addictive: it was almost a surge of energy I would feel.” Kemper described it in a similar way: “The spilling of blood was not the point. What I wanted to see was the death, and I wanted to see the triumph, the exultation over the death. It was like eating, or a narcotic, something that drove me more and more and more.” Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, described a similar experience, saying that killing prostitutes did for him “what drugs do to a junkie.”
I believe that a biological theory of the behavior of serial killers is suggested by analogies from animal research into the phenomenon of kindling. Kindling is a word that is usually associated with the starting of fires, and a phenomenon analogous to fire starting is assumed to happen in the brains studied in this research. It was found that intermittent electrical stimulation of the brain has the effect of altering brain excitability to the point where repeated stimulation produces seizures. Over a period of time, the brain becomes more and more sensitive to this stimulation, until seizures are kindled spontaneously. In human beings, this model has been applied to explain the escalation of mood disorders over time, particularly manic-depressive disorder. What we think happens is that in vulnerable persons, repeated stressors may induce an initial, minor depression that soon remits. Subsequent life stressors produce progressively more severe cycles of depre
ssion. But later, life stressors produce a full-blown depression, and this takes longer to fade. Over time, manic-depressive symptoms appear more and more frequently. The mood-cycling progresses until the appearance of depression or manic phases seem to come about spontaneously, without obvious stressors being present. Each subsequent episode becomes more and more intractable to treatment.
Neurobiological disorders are amazingly common among criminal defendants. In one study, 15 death row inmates were chosen for examination. Evidence of neuropathology was not a criterion for selection. In each inmate, the researchers found evidence of severe head injury and neurological impairment. Other research, however, shows that there is no necessary connection between brain injury and violence, and no certain connection proven between other types of brain disorders and violence. Yet some of the serial sexual murderers have had such disorders and injuries. John Gacy had a form of psychomotor epilepsy as a child. Arthur Shawcross, another serial killer, had, in addition to his psychiatric disorder, psychomotor seizures related to temporal lobe damage.
My own speculation is that the kindling concept may have applicability to serial sexual murderers, although its ability to explain the mental life and behaviors of these murderers is unproven. Because of the escalating pattern of killings, the relief that some murderers feel after the killing, the quickening of the cycle, and the out-of-control feelings, the kindling model seems to fit. This is particularly true if the killings are understood as an aspect of recurrent depression or of manicdepressive disorder. It may be that some serial killers have an unrecognized, aberrant, or atypical form of mood disorder. One forensic psychiatric expert who examined Ted Bundy made the diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis and attributed his murders to “uncontrollable manic rage.”
Of course, that is only a theory, and no one really knows what complex of factors causes a person to become a serial sexual killer. There are tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of children who are abused each year, but there are only 50 to 200 serial killers among us. We can classify serial killers into sadistic psychopaths or necrophiles. This may help us identify them and sometimes help us to catch them before they kill more people, but if truth be admitted, all explanations of the genesis of the serial killer are woefully inadequate. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals must avoid becoming either “mindless” or “brainless” in their approach to understanding serial killers and the darker side of human behavior. The mindless mode dismisses psychological factors, whereas the brainless view rejects biological determinants of human behavior. Mind and body are inextricably one. In the meantime, we can perhaps better tolerate our state of ignorance concerning serial sexual killers by recalling the wisdom in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?”
Jeffrey Dahmer demonstrated that the human mind is difficult to fathom, extremely plastic, and almost infinitely pliable. The capacity to fantasize is quintessentially a human experience. In fantasy, we can become anyone we choose, go anywhere, do anything. We can go forward or backward in time. We can love or hate anyone we want. Any imaginable (or unimaginable) wish can be indulged. And nobody need be the wiser. In considering Dahmer, we are reminded once again that the most important sex organ is the brain. Through fantasy, it can find almost anything sexually exciting—Dahmer was sexually aroused by the internal body sounds of his victims.
A few things can be said with certainty: serial sexual murderers have not been thoroughly studied genetically, medically, or psychologically. When the explanation for their actions is finally complete, it will turn out that their behavior can be traced to some combination of nature and nurture. Facilities and money do not exist for any project to study serial killers in a thorough way, so what we are left with is informed speculation based on the best data available. Dr. Park Elliot Dietz believes that serial killers are produced by the “right” genes in combination with the wrong parents. Asked to imagine what it would take to create another Bundy, Gacy, or Kemper, Dr. Dietz suggested:
Start with an abusive, criminal father and a hysterical, alcoholic mother; torture the boy as erotically as possible; have the naked mother spank him and sleep with him until age 12; bind and whip him regularly; have the mother sexually arouse him and punish him for his erections; let the mother appear promiscuous while condemning prostitutes; leave detective magazines and bondage pornography around the house for him to find; and encourage him to watch Rrated slasher films and violence against glamorous women.
But for the genetic and parental luck of the draw, might you or I have become a serial killer? Yet as a practicing psychiatrist, I have been greatly impressed by patients who have been dealt a very difficult, if not impossible, hand by life. Nevertheless, these people have assumed full responsibility and have led productive and meaningful lives. A patient with a severe manic-depressive illness who was married and ran a successful business once told me, “Doc, it’s not the cards you’re dealt, it’s how you play them.” Becoming a serial killer, to some extent at least, is exercising a choice.
Ted Bundy, in his last days, made apocalyptic pronouncements against pornography, saying that it was responsible for his excesses. He opined that men progress from soft-core porn to hard-core, sadistic, bloody porn, to rape and serial murder. Dr. Dietz does not subscribe to this simplistic though popular “domino theory” of pornography addiction being the cause of serial murder. The cause lies far deeper, in the childhood that has been spent before the boy ever sees a pornographic magazine or video. Dr. Dietz observes:
Paraphilia almost never originates after adolescence, and psychopathy never does. No sprinkling of images, however deviant, can render an otherwise normal man either paraphilic or criminal. The leap from fantasy to action has much to do with character and the vicissitudes of life, and little or nothing to do with the objects of desire.
Perhaps Heraclitus had it right when he stated that character is destiny. The serial sexual killer’s character is one so firmly formed that it fashions his destiny. We who live with a few of these killers in our midst can only hope that our destinies do not cross. But we cannot escape our human destiny. There is a bit of the sadist, the psychopath, the killer in all of us. The basic difference is that the character-driven destiny of bad men is to consciously do what good men are destined to unconsciously dream.
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Character and Destiny
The Making of Good Men and Women
A man’s character is his fate.
—Heraclitus
Recently, one of my colleagues, an innovative thinker, posed to me the following question: Why do good men and women not act on their destructive dreams and fantasies? As is his habit, my colleague inverted the theme of my book and challenged me to examine the issue from a diametrically opposite position. The question is provocative, but I think it presumes too much—that we don’t act at all on our darker impulses. Actually, good men and women manage to keep their dreams and their dark impulses under reasonable control, though not under perfect control. As I have said earlier in this book, there are no saints among us.
Based on my experience as a psychiatrist, I have found that in our lives we live out complex and powerful fantasies about ourselves and the world. Our choice of partners, the work we do, the friends we seek, the possessions we acquire, the way we dress, the cars we drive, all reflect both conscious and unconscious fantasies that we have about ourselves. One of my patients would destroy in a rage possessions of his that he felt were not perfect. He could not abide any aspersions being cast on the image of himself as perfect.
Why good men dream what bad men do is governed by environmental, biological, and genetic factors that carve our character early in life and drive our destiny. We are just beginning to appreciate the
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importance of the genetic determinants of behavior. Lionel Dahmer’s account of his own murderous dreams provides a chilling hunch that ge
netics played a significant part in his son Jeffrey’s killings. Although we have learned a great deal, our understanding of human behavior is still limited. Much remains shrouded in mystery. A goal of this book is to stimulate a deeper interest in our good and bad behaviors.
As I have observed in earlier chapters, serial sexual killers are relentlessly and compulsively driven to kill by intense sadistic sexual fantasies. Their victims are only the means to a thrilling orgasm. In contrast, the mainstream fantasies of good women and men are lifeaffirming and generally enabling of others, no matter how dark the tributaries and side streams of their fantasies. Gary Ridgway, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and other serial sexual killers took the lives of people for their own psychopathically selfish ends. Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa dedicated their lives to improve the lot of others— but even Mother Teresa, we now know from her diary and letters, was tormented by doubts and dark thoughts.
Most people who are considered “good” live their lives at various points along a broad spectrum between the extremes of good and bad. All of us, if we remained unsocialized, would act as bad men do—in antisocial ways. Feral children, those who have grown up in the wild, bereft of human warmth and care, behave more like animals than like human beings. That our nature is unregenerate is a tenet of many religions, reflected, for instance, in the concept of original sin. As Job sat on his dung heap, he observed, “Yet man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.”
As a psychiatrist who has sat and listened to patients for more than 45 years, I have been unable to answer the question, “What do people really want?” Beyond the easy generalizations—money, sex, power, and the need to love and be loved—I have discovered that people are immensely complex in ways that have been unforeseeable to me as well as to themselves. What do people really want? I have found in patients the most unimaginable desires, and patients have uncovered needs and conflicts they never imagined.
Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior Page 35