Serial Killer Investigations by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

fantasy. His self-esteem is built upon this notion of himself as a sultan brandishing a whip, with a submissive and adoring girl at his feet. If she leaves him, the whole fantasy world collapses, and he is faced with the prospect of an unliveable life. Van Vogt suggests that many dictators were Right Men—Hitler, Stalin, Mao—and that their urge to dominate was based upon this need to make the world conform to their fantasy of infallibility. Since submissive and adoring girls are hard to find, particularly for men like Glatman and Meirhofer, the serial killer is choosing this extreme method to ensure that the woman conforms to his fantasy.
    A dominant person is, by definition, a person with a craving to be a ‘somebody’. And if lack of talent or social skills frustrates this urge, the result is anger, self-assertiveness, and mild paranoia. This may happen very early in the career of the Right Man, and become so much a character trait that subsequent success make no difference—it has come too late as far as he is concerned. This is why a Hitler, a Stalin, a Saddam, remains a Right Man all his life.
    Freud once said that a child would destroy the world if it had the power—which explains why Right Man criminals are so dangerous. They regard society itself as the enemy that is frustrating them, with the result that they commit their crimes entirely without conscience, with a grim feeling of justification. Society is ‘getting what it deserves’ for treating them so badly. The American mass murderer Carl Panzram, executed in 1930, declared: ‘If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.’ Panzram committed 20 pointless murders, engaged in a weird and totally illogical principle of ‘reciprocity’.
    So it may be regarded as significant that Ressler’s career as an FBI agent was nearly aborted because of an encounter with a Right Man.

    Following his FBI training, Ressler spent the early 1970s doing fieldwork in Chicago, New Orleans and Cleveland, before being transferred to Quantico in 1974, in time to participate in the profiling and capture of David Meirhofer. And here Ressler was able to observe an element that is typical of a certain kind of killer: telephoning the kidnapped child’s parents on the anniversary of her disappearance. The serial killer wishes to see himself as a ‘mover’, one who can change events. There is a need for dramatisation that leads him to scan newspapers for every item referring to his crime, and to revisit the crime scene. The German sadistic mass murderer of the 1920s, Peter Kurten (on whom Fritz Lang based his film M) regularly returned to the crime scene after the victim had been found, enjoying the horror of the spectators and often achieving a sexual climax. If investigators had known this at the time, he might well have been caught sooner.
    Ressler soon observed this central role played by fantasy in the life of the serial killer (although in fact, it would be another decade before he coined the term). He would comment later: ‘They are obsessed with a fantasy, and they have what we must call non-fulfilled experiences that become part of the fantasy and push them on towards the next killing.’
    A major step in the development of his new techniques was his involvement in teaching hostage negotiation. A large number of FBI recruits came out of the military after the end of the Vietnam War; many of them were trained crack marksmen and became involved in SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics). SWAT snipers were used to kill criminals, and heavy weapons often used in attempts to free hostages—which led to a great deal of needless slaughter. Rather than sending in SWAT teams, however, the New York City Police Department pioneered the use of bargaining by trained negotiators. This demanded an understanding of criminal psychology of the kind that obsessed Ressler. The new approach was slow to replace the old one, partly because many