The minds of murderers

 Michael –Alternate Tuesdays

Guess who...

The crime reading and writing community obviously has a deep interest in what goes on in the minds of murderers – what are their motives, is the crime opportunistic or carefully planned, do they have favorite locations, weapons, approaches?

In most real cases, the killing is on the spur of the moment, motivated by anger or possibly by mental and physical abuse where the victim finally snaps. Those cases don’t make interesting police procedurals. The connection between the victim and the killer is usually apparent or quickly discovered. Once the motive is established, and remembering that the attack was unplanned, it’s easy to identify the prime suspect and join the dots. However, premeditated murder (at least in fiction) is usually planned quite carefully. The motive may be more obscure – money, love, hate, revenge, silence. The murderer will take trouble to avoid discovery and, perhaps, try to engineer an alibi. He or she will choose the time and place. They will know what sort of things the police will look for and try to avoid those using information from CSI and all the other true crime series flooding the streaming services. Now the detective has a challenge worth reading about.

The writer’s job is to make the villain believable, and to do that one needs to understand what’s going on in their mind. What is the real motive? How do they react to it? How do they think about it? How do they plan? What will they do when they’re caught? In a sense one needs to profile the character. If that’s not done well enough, the reader will exclaim, “He’d never do that!”, and the fictional dream will be lost.

So how does one approach that? Well, it’s actually reverse profiling. Create and understand the bad guy’s psyche, then deduce the behavior that would follow from it. It’s hard work to do that first step. One has to get into the mind of the murderer. One may even have scenes in the book from his point of view. And sometimes those may be unpleasant for the reader (and the writer) even if they are necessary for the story and character development.

It even looks human...

But what about when the mind of the murderer is really far away from anything the writer can conceive? I’m not talking about aliens in science fiction. (With a few exceptions, the aliens are either horrors or their minds work similarly to human minds. Otherwise, how do we relate to them as characters?) I’m thinking of psychopaths who perform grotesque murders apparently almost at random. How do you get into the mind of a murderer so removed from anything your own mind can understand? How believable would be a scene from such a character’s point of view?

John Douglas at the time of the book

Probably most readers of this blog will know the story of how the FBI started profiling serial killers by interviewing them in prison. John Douglas and Mark Olshaker told the story in their book Mindhunter. Douglas faced the same sort of questions, albeit with much higher stakes. Could one develop a good enough picture –physical and psychological – of the killer to be able to predict his behavior (it is almost always a “he”) and what physical and family attributes such a killer probably had. The book was dramatized in a Netflix series of the same name. The most fascinating parts of the series are the selection of interviews with serial killers based on the transcripts of Douglas’s actual interviews with them in prison. Despite stomach-churning crimes, these men are convincing in a way that few purely fictional characters are. The experiences that Douglas had with them enabled him to develop the art of criminal profiling and spread it through seminars to law enforcement. 

Kemper at the time of his arrest

The scenes with Edmund Kemper are particularly intriguing and he seems to be accurately portrayed in the Mindhunter series. A sociopathic killer who was known as “the coed killer” shot his grandparents as a boy, murdered and dismembered six young girls, and battered his mother to death with a claw hammer. He towers six foot nine inches with a weight to match. Yet if you knew nothing about him and met him in the street, you would describe him as well-spoken, intelligent and friendly.

Their technique consisted of sitting down with the convicted killer and asking questions about his background and his crimes. Kemper, in particular, loved to talk about himself and what had motivated him. As he told the story, his motive became believable if not understandable. If you have a psychopathic character, maybe pretend he's been caught, sit him down in prison and interview him the way Douglas did. If he can't convince you of the sense his actions make to him, it's unlikely the reader will be convinced either.

Although we’ve had quite a few pretty nasty bad guys in our books, we’ve never had a chapter from the point of view of a psychopathic serial killer. The closest we’ve come to a serial killer is the witch doctor in Deadly Harvest who kills, or orders killed, people for the black-magic potions that he sells at high prices to rich clients. But like “ordinary” serial killers, power is his real motivation. There is no section of the book from his point of view. He is hidden, unknown, we see his effects on other people, but not from the man himself. Some further evidence of how his mind twisted is revealed at the end, but not by him. In this case, less is more.

He is much like a serial killer. Apart from some clues to the sorts of people he chooses, there is no connection between him and his victims for the police to follow. Also, his clients are rich and powerful people, possibly even within the police. No case could be more daunting to a detective. Unless that detective has his or her own axe to grind as is the case in Deadly Harvest.

We agonized over that witch doctor. Had we managed to create a believable villain? Would people outside Africa be able to relate to the fear that even well-educated local people might hold for such a person? Apparently, we did a good enough job to impress the reviewers and even bag a place on the shortlist for an ITW thriller award for the year.

In our new book we have a different sort of bad guy. He may not have started life as a sociopath, but he’ll get there by the time we’re finished!