Rewriting all the books on serial killing

[Cain]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/russell-williams-the-killer-hiding-in-plain-sight/article1762519/

For all the horrifying variety of their specific crimes, most serial killers tend to have one thing in common: they operate near the margins of society.

And then there's Colonel Russell Williams.

"We're going to have to rewrite all of the books," said Elliott Leyton, author of the landmark study of serial killers Hunting Humans. "None of the serial killers I know of have been pilots for the Queen. None of them were photographed working with the prime minister or the minister of defence. None of them achieved the kind of high functioning position he did. He's a complete anomaly."

While most murders are committed by individuals facing chronic unemployment, with no education and a tendency toward drug and alcohol abuse, Dr. Leyton said serial killers are usually somewhat better off, coming from a working class or lower-middle class families.

But Col. Williams was not just scraping by, he was a senior ranking officer in the Armed Forces and was base commander of CFB Trenton at the time of his arrest.

"There's never been anything remotely resembling this," Dr. Leyton said. "The position he occupied in society is so central and so significant. He was on the margins of being a big shot and obviously knew how to carry off the whole charade."

It's not entirely unprecedented for serial killers to have jobs or be well regarded within their communities. Dr. Leyton points out that there have been a handful of murderous physicians, including Harold Shipman, who was convicted of 15 British murders in 2000 but is suspected of committing more than 200.

In the United States, Dennis Rader, known as the BTK strangler (so named in reference to his technique of "bind, torture, kill") was convicted in 2005 of killing 10 people in Kansas decades earlier. A married father of two, he worked for the City of Wichita and served on the council of his church for years before his arrest. He too had a fetish for women's underwear, often stealing them and wearing them himself, and served in the U.S Air Force for four years.

But Dr. Leyton said the small number of serial killers makes it impossible to draw any conclusion about their professional affiliations.

To understand what drove Col. Williams's actions or allowed him to rise to such a high rank in the military, he said more information is needed about his early life.

Most academic study of such criminals theorizes that people who go on to be serial killers are raised in homes with tremendous physical, sexual or verbal violence, where young people learn to anesthetize themselves against the feelings of others.

"They feel nothing for other people. Other people just become objects to relieve your long-suppressed rage and objects of your sexual fantasies," Dr. Leyton said.

Robert Pickton was raised in this kind of environment, he noted, before being convicted of murdering six Vancouver women.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to understand or question serial killers usually ends after they confess, he said, as Col. Williams did in his guilty plea on Monday.

"What we don't know is anything about him prior to the panty raids," Dr. Leyton said. "Until we learn something serious about him, all we know is that he's a bizarre anomaly."

You can find out more about David Russell Williams via Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Russell_Williams

I can't say this entirely surprises me.  I've suspected for a while that some kinds of political violence are little more than cover for these kind of impulses and drives, only that most people who go via the political violence route tend to die rather quickly, because their compulsions and needs cause them to make mistakes that more strategically minded terrorists, militia leaders, special forces guys etc do not make OR that their training and experience gives them the necessary skills to avoid detection when indulging themselves in some off-duty killing and rape, meaning their crimes fall under the "never solved" heading.  Presumably there are examples from other professions as well, though I've never looked into it quite that far.

Still, it is very interesting to have some confirmation of the possibility of a high-functioning serial killer.  Getting his family background is going to be the most important part.  So far, that has proved quite reliable in identifying potential serial killers and it may be helpful in identifying other high-functioning serial killers, especially if we can find some kind of anomaly in William's upbringing.

[Golden Applesauce]

I'll find the link later this afternoon, but IIRC one of the major problems in criminology is that you only get to study the people who get caught.  The people who get convicted of anything tend to be poorer, have slightly lower IQ, and are more likely to be racial minorities.  This could mean that criminals are mostly drawn from the lower socioeconomic strata ... or for an alternative but much scarier interpretation, that criminals from elite backgrounds are able to operate without getting caught.  There was an interesting paper on an interview with a friend of a Three Nine Society member who claimed that as part of running a drug smuggling operation, he had killed a dozen (dozens?) of people, then retired from violence and is living a perfectly normal life.

[Cain]

Yeah, lack of evidence is going to major problems in crimes of this type.  Any criminal capable of functioning well in society is going to play havoc with any attempts to catch them - hell that's why terrorists in general are so difficult to catch, they are perfectly sane and usually middle class or better, in socioeconomic status (the many recent failures seem to be because the smarter ones have been caught by reliance on technological methods and linking them to already known and captured terrorists, and their spaces in the ranks are being filled with much less capable individuals, drawn from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and who are usually much less intelligent).

It's also one reason we usually don't consider terrorists to be a kind of serial killer - because they are so mentally stable.  I generally adhere to this theory, but I am interested in the evaluation of Williams, because there are certain key similarities between some forms of terrorism and ritual killings, which overlap with some serial killings, and he may provide some insight into this overlap, or at the very least more data to compare and analyze.