Serial Killer Investigations by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online

prevented this from happening. Told to report to a certain classroom by 8 a.m. in February 1970, he arrived in plenty of time only to find a notice saying the class had been shifted to another room several blocks away. On arriving there, he was bawled out by the instructor for being late. He replied that he had been ten minutes early at the other classroom. Irritated, the instructor sent him to see a high official, Joe Caspar, deputy assistant of the Training Division, known as the ‘Ghost’ after the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. Caspar informed him that everyone had been sent a letter about the change of venue. Ressler replied that he hadn’t received it. He added that he had been in the army for several years and knew all about orders, both giving and receiving them. ‘I thought steam was going to come out of the Ghost’s ears as he threatened me with being kicked out of the FBI at that very minute.’ Ressler said maybe that would be best for everyone, if the FBI didn’t know how to treat new agents. Caspar gave way and told him to hold up his right hand to be sworn in, adding sourly: ‘We’ll be watching you.’
    This was typical of Hoover’s old FBI, with its ‘do it by the book’ ethos, and this would not be the last time Ressler encountered it. But it was doubly significant in that Caspar’s downright refusal to admit that he was in the wrong is also typical of the behavioural pattern of a certain type of criminal to which the majority of serial killers belong. This behavioural pattern, which will recur many times in the course of this book, may well be worth further discussion here.
    In the early 1960s, the Los Angeles science-fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt had a brilliant psychological insight that has considerable application to criminology: a concept that he called the ‘Right Man’, or the ‘Violent Man’.
    The Right Man is one who belongs to what zoologists call the ‘dominant 5 per cent’, for 5 per cent of all animals are more dominant than their fellows. This dominance is inborn. But if a person is too young to be aware of his dominance, or if circumstances have never allowed the expression of that dominance, he will feel oddly frustrated and resentful, without understanding why. Such people have ‘a chip on their shoulder’ and are inclined to be aggressive and self-assertive. His self-esteem depends upon feeling himself to be always in the right: he cannot bear to be thought in the wrong, and will go to any length to deny that he can ever make a mistake. Van Vogt also called him the Violent Man, because if you can prove that he is in the wrong, he would rather hit you in the face than acknowledge it.
    Such a person’s work colleagues may not notice his dominance, for if he wants to be liked, it is important to appear easygoing and non-aggressive. But for his wife and family he can be intolerable, for the Right Man’s determination to be absolute master in his own home may be enforced by bullying.
    Men like this, says Van Vogt, are at their worst in their intimate relations with women, since their sensitive egos make them wildly unreasonable if any disagreement arises. In one case he cites, the husband had divorced his wife and set her up in a suburban home, on condition that she remained unmarried and devoted herself to the welfare of their son. The husband was promiscuous—and always had been—but because his wife had confessed that she had not been a virgin when she met him, he treated her as a whore who had to be reformed at all costs. During their marriage he was violently jealous and often knocked her down. It was obviously essential to his self-esteem to feel himself her lord and master.
    But perhaps the most curious thing about the violent male, Van Vogt observed, is that he is so basically dependent on the woman that if she leaves him, he experiences a total collapse of self-esteem that sometimes ends in suicide. For she is the foundation stone of a tower of