‘And that,’ Dr Weir said, ‘is the problem.’
Dr Weir knows exactly what she’s doing with her Lizzie Borden house picture and her funky lapel pins. (Others in her collection include Hey! Ted Bundy isn’t hot! and Talk true crime to me.) She puts things like Psycho, The Stranger Beside Me and The Silence of the Lambs on the module reading list for a reason. They reel the students in. Once Dr Weir has them in her class, she can proceed to tell them the truth: that everything they think they know about serial killers is wrong.
‘It’s fine to be fascinated by serial killers,’ she tells me in her office after the lecture. ‘I am myself, obviously. They are fascinating because even though they look just like the rest of us, they do things the rest of us would never, ever do. But they are not especially intelligent. They don’t outsmart authorities. You know David Berkowitz? Son of Sam? They caught him because he got himself a parking ticket at the scene of one of his crimes. They are boring, ordinary, failures of men – not always men, of course, but predominately – who can’t even manage to live, love and process their feelings in a world where the rest of us have all managed to master it by the time we’re in our teens. These are no dark magicians. They have no special skills. People seem to forget that we know their names because they got caught. In fact, the only remarkable thing about them is what they took from the world: their victims. It’s their names we should know.’
I met with Dr Weir primarily to try to get an answer to one of my most burning questions: why did the Nothing Man stop? How had he been able to? Or was it more likely he hadn’t stopped at all but instead had moved or changed his methods or died? After her lecture, I was beginning to suspect that the answer wouldn’t be the one I was expecting – and I was right. When I finally asked my question after more than an hour in her company, Dr Weir shrugged her shoulders, held up her hands and said, ‘The boring truth is that he probably just stopped.’
She told me about a symposium the FBI held back in August 2005, which brought together more than a hundred experts in the field of serial killings. Catching serial killers presents a special kind of challenge for law enforcement but, again, probably not for the reasons you might think. Serial killings are exceptionally rare, accounting for less than one per cent of all homicides in any given year, but because of the public’s endless fascination with them, they draw the most publicity. A hugely disproportionate amount of it, which thrusts investigations into the spotlight from the get-go, which in turn amps up the pressure on police to make progress, fast.
But because serial killings are so rare, there’s relatively little scientific data available about them. The general public get their serial killer info from Hollywood movies, Netflix and the Crime section of their local bookshop, and that’s okay, because the general public are only looking for entertainment. The problem is that, consciously or unconsciously, rank-and-file police officers get their serial killer info from the same place – and that’s not okay because they’re looking for the actual perpetrators. This FBI Serial Killing Symposium was an attempt to correct some of the most pervasive myths and misconceptions surrounding serial killers and equip law enforcement with the actual facts.
Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators, the 2008 report on the symposium, lists the most common misconceptions about serial killers:
– Serial killers are all dysfunctional loners
– Serial killers are all white males
– All serial killers travel and operate interstate
– All serial killers are insane or are evil geniuses
– Serial killers cannot stop killing
In fact, serial killers are often married with families, have jobs and are involved in their community. The racial diversification of serial killers tends to match that of the population in which they operate. The vast majority commit their crimes in a defined geographic area or ‘comfort zone’. These offenders may suffer from debilitating mental conditions or personality disorders, but they are not insane, and as a group they display the same range of intelligence as the general population. Serial killers often stop killing long before capture due to changes in their lives that reduce triggering conditions such as stress – a new, better marriage, for example – or because they find a substitute in another activity. Dennis Rader, for example, also known as BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill), murdered ten people between 1974 and 1991 but wasn’t captured until 2005. He was a married father of two, had served in the military, had a job in local government and was a leader at his church.
Another possibility, Dr Weir said, is that serial killers stop because they simply ‘age out’. Unlike other sexually motivated crimes such as paedophilia, it is exceptionally rare for a sexual homicide to be committed by someone over the age of fifty. Perhaps when these killers reach their half-century, they find testosterone levels have depleted to such an extent that their drive to kill just fades away, if not dissipates entirely.
‘When we talk about serial killers stopping,’ Dr Weir told me, ‘the key thing to remember is that we are almost never talking about compulsive acts. Some of what Hollywood tells us about these offenders is actually correct. They do plan and prepare. They wait until they have the opportunity and then they make a choice to commit the act. They’re not walking about gripped by some overwhelming compulsion to kill, like some kind of crazed, blood-thirsty animal. They’re not out of control. They don’t have to do it, they want to. There’s a big difference between drive and compulsion. So as they get older, and tired and slower, it’s entirely plausible that they just stop wanting to kill people. In the same way I once used to want to party all night but now that I’m five minutes from fifty, I’m desperate to be in bed by ten. It’s not sexy, it’s not Hollywood and it’s not very dramatic – but it’s almost certainly the truth.’
I asked Dr Weir what she thought the Nothing Man might be like, based on what she knew of his crimes.
‘God,’ she said, ‘don’t even get me started on so-called’ – she made air quotes with her fingers – ‘profiling. But I will say this: he’ll be boring. Boring and ordinary and unremarkable. He may have friends, but not many who really like him. His marriage won’t be great. He won’t be really good at anything and he’ll probably have some mind-numbing, unfulfilling job. As in, he won’t be curing cancer. Essentially, except for the fact that he’s raped and murdered people, he won’t be much of anything at all. The Nothing Man is an exceptionally apt name for a serial killer, Eve. When you find him, you’ll probably be shocked at just how much of nothing he really is.’
When we think back on our lives, we tend to shape our memories into neat, linear narratives with beginnings, middles and ends. As Joan Didion wrote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing here: telling my story so that I can live, so that I can have more of a life in the future than I have had in the past. Starting at the beginning, tying everything up neatly at the end.
But when you are trying to find a killer and a publisher is waiting for you to deliver the manuscript of your book and you haven’t found him (yet), you have no choice but to put ‘THE END’ in an arbitrary place of your choosing. I’m going to put it here. But this isn’t the end. Our search goes on. I’m typing these words at my desk while four feet away, a very tired Ed rubs his eyes and squints at the screen of his laptop. It’s almost midnight but I know neither of us will be quitting anytime soon.