Whoever Fights Monsters

by Robert K. Ressler

  Monte began life as an Rh baby who required a complete blood transfusion, but was afterward healthy, though always small for his age. His parents fought for several years before they divorced. He claims he was exposed to marijuana and alcohol by his older siblings before he was seven. His first recorded antisocial behavior came at age nine, when he and several other boys were caught by the school principal while writing obscene words on the sidewalk. There were problems in the home, as well. His mother and new stepfather were spending a lot of time by themselves, leaving the children to supervise one another, and then arbitrarily punishing them if something went wrong. In our interview, Monte repeatedly claimed that his stepfather didn’t know how to raise children, having been away in the military for much of his adult life. He would buy things for his new stepchildren, attempting to purchase their love, but did not know how to relate to them in other ways. Monte was still just nine years old when he took out his early anger on a cousin, shooting at him with a BB gun that his stepfather had bought for him. After the incident, his stepfather smashed the gun and then beat Monte with the barrel. Monte felt he and his sister were responsible for the breakup of his mother’s second marriage, which came when he was twelve. That year, back in Virginia, he broke into an apartment and stole some property; at age thirteen, he was charged by the police with driving without a license; and at fourteen, with burglary, larceny, car theft, and two rapes. Monte Rissell was quite advanced in his deviant behavior by his early teens, but the escalation of this behavior replicates the development of many murderers.

  Another murderer of women had antisocial tendencies that surfaced early. Premature at birth, the man was the last of four children of a Mobile, Alabama, family that was both poor and abusive. The story of his having been in an incubator for nine days became a family legend, as did the tale of an apparent seizure a few months later, during which the man believed he “died and was revived.” During his first six years, he slept in the same bed with his mother, and for twelve years after that, he slept in the same room with his mother, in a separate bed. This was done, the mother later claimed, to protect her from the advances of the alcoholic father. She treated her son as if he was quite special—but also abused him. She was strict with her four children, at times hitting them with an electrical cord; additionally, she left them daily in the care of her mother, who beat the children if they disobeyed. The man’s two older brothers quickly left the family when they graduated from high school, and after they were gone, the mother, the grandmother, and the sister used the man to ward off the drunken father, encouraging the boy to hit the father to keep him away from the mother.

  In school, the boy’s performance was spotty, and a principal wrote in a report that he was often “lost in fantasy,” a description seconded by his sister. At puberty, he gained and then lost thirty pounds, and was openly vitriolic toward his mother. She reports that he would become violent because he wanted two hot dogs instead of one, or because he was unable to have chocolate syrup on his ice cream. He stole female underwear, and spied on his sister in the bathroom. In a later autobiographical statement, the murderer wrote, “I was a freak in others’ eyes.… I chose to swallow the insults.… I was a dog who got petted when I used the paper.” At age thirteen, he started to snatch purses and became involved in gang fights. His family continued to protect him, however. At age sixteen, he was charged with snatching the purse of an elderly blind woman and attempting to assault and rape her fourteen-year-old niece. During the time that these charges were being investigated, another elderly woman in the community who talked to the boy about his “wrongdoing” was shot in the head and killed. The physical evidence pointed to this boy, but the father lied about his whereabouts at the time of the murder and the mother hired a lawyer, and he got all the charges dismissed. (Many years later, after conviction on other murder charges, the killer admitted that he had shot the woman.)

  Two years after these incidents, the killer completed high school and enlisted in the military, in effect leaving parental supervision and intervention behind him. Within a month of his induction, he was charged with the attempted murder of a young woman, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years in military prison. While in that system, he again received support from his mother, who instigated appeals to congressmen and attempts to reverse the conviction on technical grounds. After serving seven years, and over the objection of some mental-health professionals who had tried to treat him and were re-buffed, he was paroled in the care of his mother.

  He soon married a divorced woman with several children, who reported that relations between them were somewhat normal at first, though marred by strange incidents. When she said she was depressed over the actions of her ex-husband and wanted to commit suicide, the new husband said he would kill her and started to suffocate her with a pillow. At other times, especially when he had been drinking, he would threaten to crush her skull if she did not leave him alone. She also noted, with horror, that he had killed a pet rabbit by bashing it against a post, covering himself with blood. The turning point in their relationship was the birth of a daughter, after which his behavior became erratic and he isolated himself from his wife and their child. Shortly thereafter, and within two years of having been paroled, he began a series of rapes, murders, and mutilations of several women, choosing those who were clerks in convenience stores. Caught in connection with the third one, he confessed to the others.

  Potential murderers became solidified in their loneliness first during the age period of eight to twelve; such isolation is considered the single most important aspect of their psychological makeup. Many factors go into fashioning this isolation. Among the most important is the absence of a father. When there’s no father or father figure present for an eight- or ten- or twelve-year-old boy, this is embarrassing for the child in front of his peers. He begins to avoid friends, to avoid situations in which father-and-son teams are usually present, such as Little League or the Boy Scouts. His preadolescent sexual activity, rather than being connected to other human beings, starts as autoerotic. More than three-quarters of the murderers we investigated began autoerotic sexual practices as preadolescents; half reported rape fantasies occurring between the ages of twelve and fourteen; more than 80 percent admitted to using pornography, and to tendencies toward fetishism and voyeurism. Again, we must realize that many boys grow up in homes without a father and do not turn into sociopaths; but for the ones who do become sociopaths, the eight-to-twelve period is critical. Investigation often leads back to just this time, and the set of circumstances in which the father figure is absent, as the period when bizarre behavior began.

  When Ed Kemper was ten, after his parents’ divorce, he returned home one day to find that his mother and older sisters had taken his belongings from his second-floor room and moved them into the basement. His mother, Clarnell Strandberg, was greatly respected at the university, where she worked as an administrator, for her concern for the students; at home, she was a terror, continually belittling Kemper, telling him he was responsible for all the shortcomings in her life. She told him that she had banished him to the basement because he was so large that he was making his adolescent sisters uncomfortable. Shortly afterward, Kemper, a big hulk brooding alone in a windowless room, began to have murderous fantasies.

  As the psychologically damaged boys get closer to adolescence, they find that they are unable to develop the social skills that are precursors to sexual skills and that are the coin of positive emotional relationships. Loneliness and isolation do not always mean that the potential killers are introverted and shy; some are but others are gregarious with other men, and good talkers. The outward orientation of the latter masks their inner isolation. By the time a normal youngster is dancing, going to parties, participating in kissing games, the loner is turning in on himself and developing fantasies that are deviant. The fantasies are substitutes for more positive human encounters, and as the adolescent becomes more dependent on them, he loses touch with acceptable social
values.

  Jerome Brudos, at twelve and thirteen, began to abduct girls his own age or younger at knife point and take them into the barn on the family farm. There, he would tell them to disrobe, and then he would photograph them but do nothing else, since he was not sexually aware enough to go further. Then he’d lock them in a corncrib and go away. Minutes later, he would reappear in the barn with his clothes changed and his hair combed differently, unlock the corncrib, and announce to the girl that he was Ed, Jerry’s twin brother. He would profess horror that Jerry had locked her in there, and say, “He didn’t hurt you, did he?” The girl would explain that Jerry had taken pictures, and “Ed” would locate the camera and destroy the film in it, then say, “Jerry’s been in therapy; we have him in psychological counseling. This is going to set him back a lot. Please don’t tell my parents or anyone about this.” The girl would acquiesce. Later in life, Brudos put advertisements in campus newspapers asking for women to come and model shoes and hose for him. When they arrived for appointments in his motel room, he would abduct and murder some of them, then hang them in his garage and photograph them, either nude or in various outfits (and especially shoes) that he had put on the dead bodies.

  The key to these murderers, if there is one, lies in the unremittingly sexual nature of their deeds. To a man, they were dysfunctional sexually; that is, they were unable to have and maintain mature, consensual sexual experiences with other adults, and they translated that inability into sexual murders. Not everyone who is unable to participate in kissing games becomes a sexually dysfunctional adult. It’s also important to recognize that having a good adult sexual relationship does not imply only heterosexual activity. There is such a thing as a successful homosexual relationship that is normal when looked at from the standpoint of encompassing two people who care for each other. Those killers in our sample who were homosexual were also dysfunctional in this regard, unable to maintain long-term relationships, showing a decided preference for bondage, torture, and sadomasochism in their short-term partnerships. Nearly half the murderers reported to us that they had never had a consenting sexual experience with another adult. As important, all the murderers knew they had not had normal relationships, and they resented not having them; it was this resentment that fueled their aggressive, murderous behavior. Richard Lawrence Marquette picked up a woman in a bar; they had known one another slightly during their childhoods. At his residence, according to his later confession, he was unable to perform sexually; the woman ridiculed this inability, so he killed her and chopped her up in small pieces. Incarcerated for thirteen years for this murder, and then released, Marquette picked up two more women in similar circumstances, tried and failed to have sex with them, and killed them, too, before being apprehended and returned to prison.

  Adolescence in these troubled youngsters was dominated by increasing isolation and “acting out” behavior, with lots of daydreaming, compulsive masturbation, lying, bed-wetting, and nightmares as concomitants of the isolation. There was more opportunity at this stage for antisocial behavior. Instead of being in the house or yard all the time, the youngster was now in school, on the streets, away from the home. Cruelty to animals and to other children, running away, truancy, assaults on teachers, setting fires, destroying the property of others and their own property—these overt acts began in adolescence, though the mind-set that generated them was present earlier but had been below the surface because the child had been controlled in his home environment.

  Many of the murderers were intelligent, but they did not do well in school. “I failed the second grade because I was uneducable,” one murderer told us. His parents wanted to take him out of school to work on their farm, “but then I skipped the third grade because I passed the second grade and went on and excelled in many areas and dropped out in others. I excelled in math but couldn’t spell.” Their spotty record in school was a pattern that carried over later in life. Most were incapable of holding jobs or living up to their intellectual potential. They were not successful employees, and were fired often, involved in disputes at the workplace, and had continual problems with authority. They had the intellect necessary for skilled jobs, but most of them were employed in menial capacities. When they went into the military, as about 40 percent did, most of them received less than honorable discharges.

  Just as there had been very little love in the family environment, there was also a lack of stimulation or encouragement to achieve within the family (and the school). Their energy became directed to negative outlets. In school, they were either chronically disruptive or subdued and withdrawn to the extent that no one paid them any attention.

  “I felt guilty of having those thoughts [toward family],” Rissell told me—after years of listening to psychologists and picking up their jargon—“and submerged them and built up lots of hostility, and then it gets off into fantasy.… They should have noticed it at school, so excessive was my daydreaming that it was always in my report cards.… I was dreaming about wiping out the whole school.”

  School systems as well as families fail these children. Too often, confronted with a problem child, a school system does not get him to counseling, or, if counseling is done, it does not address the significant issues in his life, especially including those pertaining to the dysfunctional home. If a teacher says, “You ought to look at Joe, he has problems,” the school system is unable to properly examine Joe’s life, unable to get at the root of those problems in the home, unable to move other bureaucracies, such as the social services system, to the point where these could interrupt the downward spiral to salvage the child. Moreover, since the damage to the child is emotional, it is not easy to reach. These above-average-intelligence children find ways to disguise and conceal their mental wounds until they are covered over with thick scar tissue.

  Many people survive enormous difficulties in childhood and don’t grow up to murder. However, when the problems of childhood are reinforced by added neglect in the school, the social services system, and the neighborhood, they steadily worsen. In a situation where you find a distant mother, an absent or abusive father and siblings, a nonintervening school system, an ineffective social services system, and an inability of the person to relate sexually in a normal way to others, you have almost a formula for producing a deviant personality.

  I am often asked why I don’t discuss female serial killers. Only one female has been arrested and accused as a serial killer—Aileen Wuornos in Florida. Although there may be others, my extensive research has not come across them. Women do commit multiple murders, of course, but they tend to do so in a spree, and not sequentially, as is the pattern with the men I am discussing. Do the psychological impairments that characterize the men also describe the personalities of violent women? Frankly, I don’t know; such research remains to be conducted. Serial killers are mostly male, white, and in their twenties or thirties at the time of their murders.

  The ability to initiate, maintain, and develop good interpersonal relationships begins in childhood and is reinforced in the preteen years. But if it isn’t there at the beginning and is not positively reinforced in those preteen years, by the time a boy reaches adolescence, it’s almost too late. Although the “acting out” behavior may not be murder or rape, it will be some other sort of demonstration of dysfunction. People whose childhoods have been deeply impaired do not go on to wholly normal lives; they become the alcoholic mothers or the abusive fathers who create home environments that perpetuate the cycle of abuse and make it highly likely that their children will become offenders. Dysfunctional adults produce a hothouse environment in which criminal fantasies and behavior are nurtured, to the detriment of their children and of society.

  There are always points of intervention, ways to retard the offending behavior of the potentially dangerous child who has had a bad life up to, say, twelve years of age. A new and loving stepfather or a teacher or a Big Brother might enter the picture and exert a good influence. Psychological counseling might get at the heart
of the problem and move the child away from the path leading to deviant behavior.

  An important aspect to note here: Where there’s some intervention at this stage, the child who has been rescued may go on to disappoint the family, be truant, not respond overtly to the better environment; but as an adult, he might never offend, at least not to the extent of committing abductions, rapes, and murders. Someone on the track toward antisocial behavior can be retracked only so far; the chances are that he will become a largely dysfunctional adult. For him to be reshaped and return completely to normal behavior is unlikely.

  That means that when these murderers are caught and incarcerated, the prognosis for their rehabilitation is extremely poor—because, after all, their problems have been developing since their childhoods. These are men who have never known how to relate properly to other human beings; it is not likely that such a fundamental interpersonal skill can be taught in prison. They have to be reeducated in how to be human beings who care for other human beings as individuals. To turn angry, resentful, aggressive men into sensitive people who can fit well into society is almost an impossible task.

  Recently, one man who was in prison for repeated child molestation described quite graphically just this inability to change his behavior. In his fantasies for years, he had had sex with underage boys, he said; in prison, despite attempts by the authorities to turn his mental affections toward adults—even toward male homosexual adults—his daydreams and autoerotic play always centered on boys, and he knew it would stay centered on them forever, whether in prison or out.

  * * *

  Most previous researchers into the mind of the murderer thought that the roots of violent behavior were in childhood trauma—a boy who had been assaulted at age six would grow up to rape women. But not all of the rapists or murderers we interviewed had been assaulted during their childhoods. My research convinced me that the key was not the early trauma but the development of perverse thought patterns. These men were motivated to murder by their fantasies.