feel Snyder nodding agreement at the end of the line. “Chase is the most likely model, I agree. What specifics of Chase’s background and signature are you thinking of?”
Roarke had spent several hours last night refreshing his memory on the details. “Most obviously, in childhood he exhibited signs of the Macdonald triad.” In law enforcement this syndrome was also known as the “sociopathy triad”: pyromania, bedwetting and cruelty to animals. Almost a given with a serial killer. “As a teenager he was already a chronic alcoholic and substance abuser, primarily marijuana and LSD. He began to demonstrate paranoid and psychotic symptoms in his early twenties that had a very specific theme: a threat to his heart or his blood. He often complained that his heart had stopped beating, or that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery. He was involuntarily committed to a mental institution at the age of twenty-five after being caught injecting rabbit’s blood into his veins. He believed he needed the blood to prevent his heart from shrinking.”
“In the institution he continued to kill birds and drink their blood, and confessed to fantasies of killing animals, but his condition improved with a treatment of antipsychotics, and in 1976 he was released to the custody of his mother, who according to him had abused him as a child. She decided he didn’t need the medication and ‘weaned’ him off it. He was caught the next year in a field, naked and covered with what was determined to be cow’s blood, but was never charged with any crime. His killing spree began shortly afterward.”
Roarke paused for breath and Snyder prompted him. “So extrapolating from Chase to the Reaper?”
Roarke looked out over the plaza and the ragged denizens of the street.
“Our killer would have been young – early to late twenties, with an unkempt appearance and most likely living with a parent or other relative or recently out of such a situation. He would have demonstrated psychotic symptoms, a history of substance abuse, and antisocial behavior. He’s sexually dysfunctional; the piquerism is his subsitute for the sex act.”
He concentrated harder as he got down to the finer details. “He has a delusion that is satisfied or quieted by the violent slaying of families, specifically. These weren’t random crimes, he chose these families, and a certain kind of family: Middle - to - upper-middle class, educated parents, several children of pre-teen to teen age, and living in smallish communities rather than cities.”
He didn’t even attempt to guess at what that delusion might be. He knew at the heart of it there was nothing poetic or metaphorical about it. The core motivation for all serial killers was the same: they got sexual release from rape, torture, pain, and murder. There was no other “why.” Trying to wrap it up in some elaborate psychological package was less than useless.
Aloud he continued, “Also it’s notable that the massacres all occurred in California towns quite some distance from each other, four or five hundred miles away.”
“And fairly equidistant,” Snyder pointed out.
“That’s true. That could get us somewhere.” Roarke considered it. It was called geographical profiling, an investigative methodology that analyzed the locations of a series of crimes to determine where the perpetrator was most likely to reside. While geographical analysis had always figured into criminal investigation to some extent, the formalized method known as geographical profiling had not been developed until two years after the Lindstrom massacre and would not have been used in compiling a profile. Roarke felt a warm rush of significance as he realized that.
Snyder was thinking aloud. “A key principle in the geographical profiling model is that offenders will generally travel only limited distances to commit crimes. Put this together with the Reaper’s very disordered mind and it’s a conundrum, these distances. To
Roarke had spent several hours last night refreshing his memory on the details. “Most obviously, in childhood he exhibited signs of the Macdonald triad.” In law enforcement this syndrome was also known as the “sociopathy triad”: pyromania, bedwetting and cruelty to animals. Almost a given with a serial killer. “As a teenager he was already a chronic alcoholic and substance abuser, primarily marijuana and LSD. He began to demonstrate paranoid and psychotic symptoms in his early twenties that had a very specific theme: a threat to his heart or his blood. He often complained that his heart had stopped beating, or that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery. He was involuntarily committed to a mental institution at the age of twenty-five after being caught injecting rabbit’s blood into his veins. He believed he needed the blood to prevent his heart from shrinking.”
“In the institution he continued to kill birds and drink their blood, and confessed to fantasies of killing animals, but his condition improved with a treatment of antipsychotics, and in 1976 he was released to the custody of his mother, who according to him had abused him as a child. She decided he didn’t need the medication and ‘weaned’ him off it. He was caught the next year in a field, naked and covered with what was determined to be cow’s blood, but was never charged with any crime. His killing spree began shortly afterward.”
Roarke paused for breath and Snyder prompted him. “So extrapolating from Chase to the Reaper?”
Roarke looked out over the plaza and the ragged denizens of the street.
“Our killer would have been young – early to late twenties, with an unkempt appearance and most likely living with a parent or other relative or recently out of such a situation. He would have demonstrated psychotic symptoms, a history of substance abuse, and antisocial behavior. He’s sexually dysfunctional; the piquerism is his subsitute for the sex act.”
He concentrated harder as he got down to the finer details. “He has a delusion that is satisfied or quieted by the violent slaying of families, specifically. These weren’t random crimes, he chose these families, and a certain kind of family: Middle - to - upper-middle class, educated parents, several children of pre-teen to teen age, and living in smallish communities rather than cities.”
He didn’t even attempt to guess at what that delusion might be. He knew at the heart of it there was nothing poetic or metaphorical about it. The core motivation for all serial killers was the same: they got sexual release from rape, torture, pain, and murder. There was no other “why.” Trying to wrap it up in some elaborate psychological package was less than useless.
Aloud he continued, “Also it’s notable that the massacres all occurred in California towns quite some distance from each other, four or five hundred miles away.”
“And fairly equidistant,” Snyder pointed out.
“That’s true. That could get us somewhere.” Roarke considered it. It was called geographical profiling, an investigative methodology that analyzed the locations of a series of crimes to determine where the perpetrator was most likely to reside. While geographical analysis had always figured into criminal investigation to some extent, the formalized method known as geographical profiling had not been developed until two years after the Lindstrom massacre and would not have been used in compiling a profile. Roarke felt a warm rush of significance as he realized that.
Snyder was thinking aloud. “A key principle in the geographical profiling model is that offenders will generally travel only limited distances to commit crimes. Put this together with the Reaper’s very disordered mind and it’s a conundrum, these distances. To
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