She paused, and Walt took a moment to appreciate the dramatic effect.
“My students’ answers usually range from ‘someone crazy’ to ‘someone who likes to kill people’ or, for students who’ve already taken a psych class or two, the response is usually ‘someone with a compulsive need.’ Do you know the definition of a serial killer, Fleet Admiral?”
“Someone who needs killing,” Eric replied instantly.
Annalise blinked, nonplussed, and beside her, Jakob stiffened a little.
“Fleet Admiral, if you’d ever like to talk to someone…” Annalise began hesitantly.
“Nope. I did plenty of therapy after my wives died, and I think I damn near broke the poor guy.”
“I was sorry to hear about your wives,” Walt said softly, recalling Eric mentioning to Juliette and Devon that his wives had died. “Was it an accident?”
Eric glanced in his direction, his jaw tight. “Assassinated.”
Assassinated was an interesting word. Different from murdered. Obviously, Eric’s wives, like him, held positions of power.
Walt wasn’t sure how to respond to the fact that both of Eric’s wives had been killed, but he didn’t have an opportunity to when Eric looked at Annalise and said, “Just keep going.”
“Right. Of course.” Annalise took a breath.
Walt imagined she was putting the fleet admiral’s mental health on a back burner, but only for now.
“A serial killer is someone for whom the murder of another person fills an abnormal psychological gratification.” Annalise spoke quietly, though there was no one sitting near them. “Sometimes this is coupled with a mental disorder, other times rooted in trauma, but either way, the impetus for the killing is to satisfy a need, the same needs you or I might have, but which we satisfy in socially acceptable ways.”
“He needs to kill people and cut their heads off,” Eric said.
“Actually, the killing might be secondary. The fact that the people die may or may not be part of this person’s motivation.”
“You can’t cut someone’s head off and keep them alive,” Walt pointed out.
“Precisely. But if what you need is to remove a head from a body, the fact that they have to die for it to happen is a consequence, not the focus.”
Beside Walt, Eric flipped open his folder, spreading out the papers. Walt turned his attention back to the images on the tablet. He told himself this was just like cadaver lab. He was looking at cadaver photos. Technically, they were pictures of cadavers, but…
“You think these two were killed by the same person who killed Josephine,” Eric said. He’d laid three sheets of paper beside each other. They looked like the front page of a medical chart, except, that in addition to a smiling headshot, probably from an ID, on each page there was also a picture of the woman’s head after death. The pale slackness of death made them bear only a passing resemblance to the people they’d been when alive.
There was also a large bold note with cause of death on each sheet.
The page bearing Josephine O’Connor’s name said, “Unknown COD, Presumed Respiratory Arrest.”
Yep, not having the brain connected to the heart was a pretty sure-fire way to cause respiratory arrest.
“Possibly,” Annalise was saying, “but I’d like Dr. Hayden’s opinion.”
Walt refocused on the tablet, swiping to the next picture and then enlarging it to study the details while the rest of them continued to talk.
“Why?” Eric pulled a picture out of his folder. A woman’s body in multiple pieces, laid out like a jigsaw puzzle on a steel autopsy table.
“Why do they do it? As I said, to satisfy their need—sexual, emotional, physical, intellectual.”
“Intellectual?” Walt looked up at that.
Annalise nodded. “Britain and America have—and please take no offense, Dr. Hayden—”
“None taken, we’re a dumpster fire a lot of the time.”
“—a high number of, and therefore an extensive body of work on, serial killers.” Annalise settled in her chair, leaning ever so slightly closer to Jakob. There was something about the two of them together that made him even more certain that they were in love. However, Walt couldn’t tell if they’d acted on those feelings. They both seemed rather reserved with each other. Maybe they were just being professional in front of the fleet admiral.
“The Americans are nuts. Go on,” Eric prompted.
Walt kicked Eric under the table, and the big man snorted in amusement. Everyone showed him so much deference, Walt felt like it was his job to take the Viking down a few notches whenever possible.
“Let’s focus on the dismemberment and work under the theory that cutting up the victims is the act that satisfies the killer’s need.” Annalise pulled several papers out of her folder and spread them out, facing Eric and Walt. “The Cleveland Torso Murderer killed and dismembered at least a dozen people in Cleveland—that’s a city in America.”
Walt snickered. “My family traveled there once when I was a kid. My mama was determined to see the Great Lakes. Did you know the house from A Christmas Story is there?”
Eric scowled and pointed at the tablet. “Don’t make me shoot your eye out.”
“You get that reference but not the Star Trek one?”
“I got it. I just didn’t think it was funny.”
Annalise glanced over at Jakob, who shrugged.
“Sorry for the interruption, Annalise,” Walt said. “Please continue before Eric has an aneurysm.”
“Yes…well… The bodies in Cleveland were found in pieces, sometimes in boxes or a shallow pond or wrapped up in baskets.”
Eric stiffened at the word basket. Walt had seen the picture of Josephine’s head sitting in a basket, placed atop a cabinet in the famous Long Room of Trinity College Dublin’s library, blood dripping down the glass of the display case. It had been horrific, and Walt hadn’t even known her.
“This particular case offered potential insight into the need—the killer sent Agent Ness, the man in charge of the investigation a letter, stating,” Annalise glanced down at her notes, “‘I felt bad operating on those people, but science must advance. I shall soon astound’—spelled incorrectly a-s-t-o-n-d-e in the letter—‘the medical profession.’”
“He was using them for medical experimentation,” Eric said softly. “That could mean the rest of Josephine’s body…”
The tense silence was broken only when Annalise flipped to another page.
“That is one possibility. Another is that the dismemberment was not the focus, not the source of the need, but secondary. Józef Cyppek dismembered his victim after killing her, claiming it was in order to transport the body. But viewed through a modern abnormal psychology lens, I’d say that dismembering the victims—only one confirmed, but reports indicate that Cyppek also killed dozens of children in addition to an adult female—had more to do with dehumanizing them. He needed to dismember them, not in a defensive sense but offensive.” Annalise paused for a moment, seeming to consider how to phrase it. “If you butcher a human like an animal—remove the organs, setting aside those that are edible, removing the intestines for disposal, separating muscle from bone—you have stripped away the humanity of that person. Turned them into meat and offal.”