Whoever fights monsters...

Fantasy and serial murder

ALL of the murderers interviewed by the FBI, during their Criminal Personality Research Project had compelling fantasies where they could control their world.

They overcompensated for the aggression in their early lives by repeating the abuse in fantasy, but this time, with themselves as the aggressors. Fantasy is defined as a happenstance unattainable in normal life. “Normal” people learn to accept social control and moderation as limits on their behavior. The deviant person, having had very few true restraints on his behavior since childhood, believes he can act out his fantasy and that nobody will be able to stop him.

• The offender’s commitment to the fantasies deepens as he becomes a loner in adolescence, subject to the onset of puberty and sexual arousal. Aggressive, and with a feeling of having been cheated by society, he may channel his hostility into fantasies, which are characterized by strong visual components, and by themes of dominance, revenge, molestation, manipulation, and control. The other person is depersonalized, made into an “object”.
• Deviants feel the sexual urge without having learned that it has anything to do with affection.
• The cognitive mapping process is almost complete by now, It is the development of thinking patterns that affect how the person relates to himself and to his environment, it determines how the individual gives meaning to the events that happen in his world.
• He views the world as a hostile place. He becomes almost incapable of interacting properly with the outside world, because his thinking patterns are all turned inward, designed only to stimulate himself in an attempt to reduce tensions, which only reinforces his isolation: a loop has developed. The effects of his antisocial acts (i.e. cruelty to animals and other children, arson) become incorporated into his fantasies, which are pushed to a more intensively violent level.
• More retreat from society follows, and, eventually, so do more experiments with actualizing the fantasies

After rehearsals, and minor attempts at acting out the fantasy -all it really takes is a stressor for him to try and make the fantasy a reality.

Fantasy

ALL of the murderers interviewed by the FBI, during their Criminal Personality Research Project had compelling fantasies where they could control their world.

They overcompensated for the aggression in their early lives by repeating the abuse in fantasy, but this time, with themselves as the aggressors. Fantasy is defined as a happenstance unattainable in normal life. “Normal” people learn to accept social control and moderation as limits on their behavior. The deviant person, having had very few true restraints on his behavior since childhood, believes he can act out his fantasy and that nobody will be able to stop him.

• The offender’s commitment to the fantasies deepens as he becomes a loner in adolescence, subject to the onset of puberty and sexual arousal. Aggressive, and with a feeling of having been cheated by society, he may channel his hostility into fantasies, which are characterized by strong visual components, and by themes of dominance, revenge, molestation, manipulation, and control. The other person is depersonalized, made into an “object”.
• Deviants feel the sexual urge without having learned that it has anything to do with affection.
• The cognitive mapping process is almost complete by now, It is the development of thinking patterns that affect how the person relates to himself and to his environment, it determines how the individual gives meaning to the events that happen in his world.
• He views the world as a hostile place. He becomes almost incapable of interacting properly with the outside world, because his thinking patterns are all turned inward, designed only to stimulate himself in an attempt to reduce tensions, which only reinforces his isolation: a loop has developed. The effects of his antisocial acts (i.e. cruelty to animals and other children, arson) become incorporated into his fantasies, which are pushed to a more intensively violent level.
• More retreat from society follows, and, eventually, so do more experiments with actualizing the fantasies

After rehearsals, and minor attempts at acting out the fantasy -all it really takes is a stressor for him to try and make the fantasy a reality.

Ed Kemper, who would often behead his victims before raping them, said that he had a “very strong sensual drive, a weird sexual drive that started early, a lot earlier than normal.”

Yet he fantasized about dead women, not living ones. “If I killed them, you know, they couldn’t reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being … and carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll.”

The most disturbing thrill Kemper got from murder was the sexual excitement in decapitating his victims: “I remember there was actually a sexual thrill … you hear that little pop and pull their heads off and hold their heads up by the hair. Whipping their heads off, their body sitting there. That’d get me off,”he said.

James Mitchell DeBardeleben

James was a sexual sadist serial rapist and killer. He had a script that he wanted his victims to follow when he tortured them. He also cross-dressed.

According to FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood, 

“When he couldn’t get a victim, he would go on tape himself—I have these tapes—and in a high falsetto voice, go over the script that he’d force his victims to say. He used himself as a prop for his sadistic fantasies.”

Many sex offenders have a script that they want to go through with their victim. It is something they have rehearsed many times in their head, or actually acted out. Acting out fantasies themselves, when they do not have a victim, is very common for serial sex offenders. They will often dress up in women’s clothes, or the clothes of past victims. Dennis Rader (BTK) would take pictures of himself dressed up and in various bondage poses. 

Dahmer had conceived the bizarre notion of creating “zombies” who would be his live-in sex toys, obedient to his every whim. Instead of using voodoo, Jeffrey opted for a more direct approach, drilling holes in the selected victim’s skull, then dribbling caustic liquids into the wounds in an effort to destroy the subject’s conscious will. Needless to say, the weird approach to neurosurgery had a 100 percent failure rate, and none of Dahmer’s favored “patients” survived.

Dennis Rader began fantasizing about abducting women when he was in grade school. 

When he was about eight years old, he would fantasize about kidnapping Annette Funicello (one of the Mouseketeers) and taking her to the hills and “doing things” to her.

“The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself”

- Ted Bundy

The brutal, messy reality of murder never completely fulfills the power of the fantasy. In fact, it is usually a letdown, but the fantasy won’t go away — it is too deeply ingrained in the killer’s psyche. This accounts for the serial nature of lust murder.

Will it ever be possible to figure out what goes into the development of violent fantasies so that we can devise some kind of prevention?

No. That’s the short answer. The long answer is that you have all these people who have all these explanations for violence, but what they fail to consider is the individual. You could take Ted Bundy and identify every single incident in his life and say, “Wow! That makes a serial killer.” No, it doesn’t. You could take Roy Hazelwood and subject him to exactly those same occurrences, and he wouldn’t be a serial killer. Why not? Because of individual make-up and personality characteristics. The same things will impact on Bundy differently than on you or me. You have to take into account the way these factors occur, when they occur, how they occur, the combination in which they occur, and how you assess it. It’s like a molecular model. You take any one part out of that model and you don’t have the same structure. We’re never going to figure that out. The mind is the most complicated part of the human body and we only understand fifteen to twenty percent of it.

(Dr. K. Ramsland, an interview with Roy Hazelwood, FBI profiler)

Dennis Rader- Time to Fantasize

In the fall of 1973 Rader began his studies at Wichita State University. It would take him six more years of night school to earn his degree. He was a poor student, even by his own description, a chronic C minus or D level. He couldn’t spell very well and may have had a learning disability reflected in his unusually bad written grammar. In late 1973 he was let go by his employer. He found himself in a low frame of mind, unemployed, unhappy, with time on his hands. He slipped deeper into the fantasy world he had known since childhood and wanted to know what would it feel like to kill someone.

In January, 1974 Dennis Rader was in between jobs and restless. His wife worked at the VA Hospital in Wichita and didn’t like driving in snow and ice, so Dennis would sometimes drive her to and from work. He enjoyed “trolling”, which consisted of driving or walking around certain neighborhoods or school campuses where there would be women to observe. He would focus in on a good prospect and enter into his fantasy realm of bondage, torture and death, imagining what he would do to her. Bind them, torture them, kill them.

Dennis Rader divulged in court how he selected victims as he played out his sexual fantasies. During his “trolling phase” Rader would look for several potential victims, referring to them as “projects”, and begin stalking them. Multiple projects were selected so that if one did not work out, he would have some backups. Over time, Rader explained, he would start really honing in on one person he would want to become the victim.

Fantasy and Sexual Homicide

The sexual predator’s fantasy can be described as “an elaborate thought with great preoccupation, anchored in emotion and having origins in daydreams.” The thinking of these killers is dominated by fantasies of power and control. These fantasies, which often begin in childhood, are the focus of their behaviour. The killer’s fantasy is the driving element in the killer’s life. The killer is pushed to kill by his thought patterns, being essentially incited to murder by an intrusive fantasy life. He learns, and forms the rationalization in his head, early in life that violence against other humans is normal and acceptable.

Both Ed Kemper and Dennis Rader started to become enthralled in their fantasy lives while still in grade school!

The fantasy is rehearsed in many different ways, many different times by the killer before he acts on it. He is driven to find “the right victim” and to commit “the perfect crime” - one that will fit his fantasy perfectly. But the actual crime never lives up to the standard of his fantasy. The victim may not respond the way she would in his fantasy. There may be some distraction that was not there in his fantasy. The actual crime is never as good as the fantasy. So he is driven to pursue the perfect enactment of his fantasy.

He will often take something that will remind him of his crime - a souvenir - which will fuel his fantasies until his next victim. He will also likely have sado-erotic materials at home which will fuel his fantasy, and are evidence of it.

“The serial killer, much like the chronic gambler and problem drinker, is addicted to the use of fantasy”