It’s an age old question: what influences a person’s
character? Is it nature or nurture? In a new book released this
week Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist who has interviewed
over 80 murderers, adds her own slant to the question. We are a nation currently obsessed with serial killers. Every
new drama programme seems to be an off-shoot of Cracker, Prime
Suspect,or the like. The popularity of CSI is what made Channel 5
respectable, so popular in fact that it spawned CSI Miami, and
CSI New York. The latest film to depict the life and times of a
serial killer, Monster, was a hit with critics and audience
alike. With its detailing of the minds and behaviours of some of
the world’s most horrifying serial killers, no doubt
Morrison’s book will hit the bestseller lists. So, what is this morbid fascination with complete inhumanity?
There is something of the car crash phenomenon in it. We are
compelled to watch something tragic, something out of the
ordinary. We are drawn to view death, in all its gruesome forms.
Perhaps it makes us feel more alive, more grateful for life.
Someone stuck in the rut of mundanity can tell themselves that no
matter how much life sucks, at least they haven’t been
dismembered and buried under someone else’s porch. It’s
a life affirming thing. But even more compelling is the desire to make sense of
something so completely senseless. How can members of our own
race be capable of such evil acts? How is it that people,
possibly people we know, can take actions which revolt against
every moral, ethical, and emotional code that we follow?
It’s like watching a freak show, a version of the circus
displaying the Elephant man, the bearded lady, the Siamese twins
joined at their skulls. They are like us but unlike us, part of
the same species but seemingly a different strain of the race.
Serial killers distinguish themselves by the horrific nature of
their behaviour. Yet they still look like us. While television shows mainly focus on the killing rather than
the killer, films such as Monster invariably draw upon the
killer’s history, their invariably extreme childhood abuse
and severe mental anguish, in an attempt to begin to explain
their actions. We don’t like things we can’t explain;
they are more dangerous, less controllable and by that reasoning,
less preventable. This is the appeal of the nurture argument. If
it can all be put down to life circumstances, then maybe we can
undo it, even catch it before it’s too late. If we take more
care of our young people, our abandoned, rejected, neglected,
then perhaps they won’t grow up to do obscene things. The
argument against this, of course, is that while killers, without
exception, have suffered abuse in their lives, only a very, very
small minority of abused youngsters grow into killers. This is a
point made by Morrison, who’s firmly on the side of Nature.
She suffered serious abuse in foster homes as a child. If abuse
was the link in serial killers “then why are not all abused
children serial killers?” She writes, “I was physically
abused. I am not a murderer.” It’s certainly a good point. Perhaps while abuse is a
necessary factor, it is not a sufficient one. Morrison believes
that the cause is purely nature; that the killer’s addiction
to killing stems from a genetic anomaly. More specifically, she
contends that there is a fault in the hypothalamus – the
section of the brain that regulates emotions and moods. She also
draws attention to role played by chemicals in the body, such as
oxytocin and vasopressin, which instigate emotions. The idea that evil behaviour stems from nature, some kind of
chemical imbalance, appeals because it sets such people apart
from the rest of us. ‘They’re crazy’ we’re
reassured; no one we know could possibly act like that. Watching
the activities of serial killers on television is one thing.
Thinking they might live next door to us is quite another.
Thinking they might sleep next to us is inconceivable. Yet, as
Morrison points out, most serial killers have families. This, she explains, is precisely because of the very normality
of it: “Most serial killers rarely abuse those very close to
them because the very idea of a wife and kids is part of a
structure that keeps them ‘normal’”. Nor do they
look particularly crazy on the outside. The Yorkshire Ripper, for
example, spent hours grooming himself and, like many others, was
polite, even charming, on first meeting. It is scary to us that
we may not be able to identify a resident evil residing close to
us. Morrison doesn’t know exactly what it is inside the brain
that drives serial killers, but she believes that with the
advances in medical testing we one day will. This is the reason
that she keeps the brain of notorious killer John Wayne Gacy (who
killed 33 young men and buried them under his house) in her
basement, in the hope that it will prove useful in future medical
research. Morrison likens serial killing to drug addiction. While
interviewing the Ohio killer Michael Lee Lockhart (who murdered
and eviscerated 20 women) she had a breakthrough of
understanding. She asked him about his first victim; what led him to kill for
the very first time? He told her how he had got up late in the
morning, and while in the shower: “It hit me. I had to go
out and get me one.” “That was the one sentence that
made everything gel,” according to Morrison. “In my
psychiatric practice, I treat drug addicts. I know when they need
their drug, they have to get it and nothing else exists. The
drugs for people like Lockhart are the people they murder. They
are addicted to killing.” Perhaps one day we will be able to
identify a gene that drives people to compulsively kill. We will
isolate and treat it. One can only hope. But we should not let
our search for this make us overlook the less obscene, but more
prevalent, abuses that continue unabated in our world.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004
Into the Minds of Serial Killers
