Serial Killers

[oggbashan]

I'm not too surprised. He was a professional, doing a job. His total job was to protect allied soldiers. He wasn't a killer, per se, just a guy doing a very dangerous job and doing it well.

From your description, I presume his medals were what they call in the US, 'jockstrap medals.' JS medals are issued for meritorious, secret service and not publicized so that the other side doesn't maybe try for a bit of delayed revenge.

The UK didn't have such things in WWII. We have now for SAS troops who are never identified except post mortem.

He could wear his medals openly and did at Rememberance Day parades. He wouldn't explain how or why he got them. His fellow veterans could have found out if they had wanted to, but they respected his privacy - until his obituary was published. At his funeral he was honoured by a large congregation of veterans and locals.

Og

 

[epiphany65]

Here ya go.

Richard Kuklinski, THE ICE MAN, murdered 200 men for the Mafia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kuklinski

I heard an interview on the radio awhile back with the author of this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Ice-Man-Confessions-Contract-Killer/dp/0312349289
Of you're interested in Kuklinski and life inside the mafia, it seems like it would be an excellent read, although I haven't read it. Hearing about what he did to some of his victims almost nauseated me.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

EPIPHANY

I read the book once and am reading it again. The latest edition has additional gory material.

Yep! Richard was special.

 

[xssve]

*L* Of course he's mentally unstable by definition, because he kills people. Would you consider him sane if he killed people and didn't slip up? Would that make him a sane serial killer? Is there such a thing? If there is, then anyone might be a serial killer and there's no sense trying to profile them.

If they're all insane, then there's no telling what they have in common except their insanity, and there's no sense in trying to profile them.

It really depends on your definition of sanity, which can vary quite a bit depending on a lot of variables, but to simplify it, healthy mammals tend to inherit traits that inhibit excessively violent behaviors towards other members of the same species, and the reason for this is simple, if you are a violent individual, chances are excellent that you will be maimed or killed yourself eventually by simple virtue of the victim defending him/herself, thus those individuals most prone to violent behavior essentially select themselves out when their breeding potential is reduced due to injury or death.

This reduces overall group fitness, as the strongest members are continually being maimed or killed.

Instead, the more successful members of most species evolve ritualistic behaviors in order to avoid extreme violence: they butt heads, in one way or another, usually over the opportunity to mate with one or more females, and one or the other ritualistically submits, which removes the motive for the violence to escalate, the "winner" one then gets first shot at passing on his/her genes, while the "loser" may simply develop another strategy, subterfuge, etc. and group fitness is enhanced overall - i.e., the "loser" may be physically weaker but can prevail if he/she is a little smarter.

Healthy humans behave in exactly the same way most of the time, even boxers hug or shake hands after doing their level best to beat each others brains out for the half hour.

Since, however, much of our behavior is motivated or influenced by abstract concepts: wealth, power, prestige, etc., and the abstract value systems involved with achieving and maintaining these things, and we have abstract value systems that suspend the rules of intraspecies violence under certain conditions, war, or police intervention for example, which is abstraction of the underlying defensive mechanism that inhibits indiscriminate violence - we have sanctioned violence, if you will, for which we furnish a system of socio/cultural permissions.

Naturally, this another debate entirely, i.e., the ethics of sanctioned violence, and it's always healthy to question what sort of violence is being sanctioned, by whom and for what reason - the Mafia hitman is, for example, engaging in sanctioned violence, it has goal, a social purpose, and even if we don't consider that purpose legitimate, we call him a killer, not a ghoul.

A serial killer operates outside any sanctions or system of sanctions, against all mammalian inhibition - he/she has placed themselves outside of common humanity - we are social animals, and you cannot do that and be entirely sane by a simple taxonomic definition, as it cannot result in anything other than eventual termination of your breeding privileges, to put it mildly.

Just my point. Nothing in common. Their motives might be similar, because one's motives for doing something are always similar to anyone else's (you take out the garbage because it smells, you scratch because something itches), but their personalities have nothing in common.

They're psychopaths by definition. Other than that?

Again, these individuals appear mainly motivated by a need to express their personal power by exercising the power of life and death over others - usually because they have no other personal power or otherwise feel prevented from getting any. They often start young, and often begin by torturing small animals - the "genius" serial killer, the Hannibal Lecter, is extremely uncommon, probably non-existent.

I can't think of any one of them you would call a genius, they tend to be very fucked up people, as you might imagine, and they usually aren't caught sooner because the whole notion is so alien to the average human mind.

Even soldiers have to be practically brainwashed in order to get them to pull the trigger, and they often don't until somebody actually starts shooting at them - the rest is mostly pure survival instinct.

For some reason however, we, as a culture, seem to be fascinated by the thought of the psychopathic genius - the truth, I'm afraid, is altogether more banal.

Properly sublimated, they may end up becoming politicians or the CEO's of major corporations, where the line between sanction and psychosis is often harder to separate.