A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

who were never reported missing or whose bodies were never found—the number could be much higher. There are numerous theories for why some people start killing compulsively, but no single theory comes close to explaining the phenomenon adequately. Psychiatric disorders are obviously a tempting explanation, though it has been pointed out that getting away with murder is not particularly easy, and anyone who is too severely impaired is probably not going to remain free for very long. Severe sexual dysfunction afflicts many serial killers—some cannot achieve an erection with a living person, for example—but that simply begs the question of how that condition arose in the first place. There is one common element to many serial killers, however: suffering. Nearly half of all serial killers experienced physical or sexual abuse as children, and an even greater proportion were exposed to psychiatric problems, alcoholism and criminality in their family. Violence and sexual abuse are particularly effective at triggering the sort of reactions in children that are later expressed as sadism; the child withdraws into himself, pretending the abuse is actually happening to someone else, and eventually develops a deep capacity for fantasy and denial.
    That fantasy life can then become the nucleus for a lifetime of violent sexual revenge.
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    THE MOTHER-HATE theory about the Boston Strangler that was popular for the first few murders abruptly stopped making sense at five thirty on the afternoon of December 5, 1962, when a young nurse named Audri Adams arrived home at her apartment on Huntington Avenue in Boston. Adams opened the double-locked door and saw one of her roommates, a twenty-one-year-old black woman named Sophie Clark, sprawled on the living room rug. Clark was a student at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology who had returned home early that afternoon to write a letter to her fiancé in New Jersey. She had three stockings twisted tightly around her neck and a gag forced into her mouth, and she lay exposed in the middle of the living room with her bathrobe fully opened and her legs spread apart. She had put up enough of a struggle for her glasses to be broken and her bra torn apart, and she had also been raped. Police investigators found a semen stain on the rug next to her.
    The letter to her fiancé, who was supposed to visit a few days later, lay unfinished on a table. The letter mentioned that it was two thirty in the afternoon and that the weather was bad and that she was going to cook liver with onions and gravy and mashed potatoes for dinner. Apparently her young man hadn’t written in a while, because Sophie also said that she hoped he wouldn’t take that longto write again. The next sentence started with “I,” and that was it. At some point after two thirty, she put down her pen and never picked it up.
    Sophie Clark broke the pattern; she was young, she was black, she lived with other people, and she’d been raped. Psychologically the murder of a young woman presented a problem to police investigators: Why would a man driven by “mother-hate” suddenly kill and rape a young woman? Did he start out raping young women, graduate to killing older women, and then put the two crimes together? Or did he overcome some crippling insecurity with the older women that now allowed him to face sexually intimidating young women? Though psychologically tidy, that theory suffered the flaw that serial killers almost never change groups; if they start out killing children or old women or teenage boys, they rarely deviate. The alternative theory, of course, was that there were now two sexual predators in Boston. One focused his rage on older women but was psychologically—or physically—unable to rape them; the other probably started out raping young women and then was goaded by newspaper headlines into trying a killing of his own.
    The Clark murder, however, did provide the