My Dark Places - James Ellroy [136]
POST OFFENSE BEHAVIOR
In view of the time lapse since the commission of these crimes, post offense behavior, which is often the most enlightening aspect of the analysis, will take on a lesser significance in this case. The specifics of this section will be to analyze that behavior which would have occurred immediately following the commission of these crimes.
The offender would have gone directly home or to some other safe place following these crimes. He most likely soiled his clothing and vehicle from the blunt force trauma delivered to both victims and the menstrual blood of victim Ellroy.
Having committed what he considered to be an unwitnessed murder on each occasion, the offender would not have been overly concerned or stressed for any length of time. He may have briefly feigned illness in an attempt to isolate himself and he may have called in sick the following day if he was scheduled to work. Other than this initial withdrawal, your offender’s daily routine would not have been altered significantly.
He would have avoided places he had been seen with either victim just prior to their death. These places include the Desert Inn, Stan’s Drive-ln and the Mexican restaurant he and victim Long may have gone to the night of her death.
He may have exhibited interest in television news accounts of the killings but would not have interjected himself into the police investigations. It is unlikely that he would volunteer theories about what happened. He would claim to have only vicarious knowledge of the crimes, gained through friends or the media.
Once the investigations began to wane, the offender would have been reassured that he was not seen with the victims and that he was not a suspect. He would not have felt any guilt or remorse for what he had done. These women were seen as “throw aways” and he had justified it in his mind that they were somehow to blame for making him do it. His only concern would be for himself and what effect the crimes could have on his life. By this time, he had probably forgotten most of the details of these incidents.
Unless the offender was arrested and incarcerated for some extended period of time, we would expect the offender to have continued killing, if not in this state, in others.
Carlos Avila
Criminal Investigative Profiler/Consultant
Avila thought we had a serial killer. He thought my mother fucked the Swarthy Man willingly. He hedged to a slight degree:
“It appears that the victim had engaged in consensual intercourse.”
“Whatever circumstances triggered the offender’s anger occurred after the victim had reinserted the tampon.”
Bill and I discussed the profile in general and the consensual-sex-versus-rape point in specific. We agreed with Avila’s take on the killer’s psychology. Bill went along with his serial killer conclusion. I disputed it. I conceded one point only. My mother might have been the first victim in a serial killer chain. Carlos Avila was an established criminological expert. I wasn’t. I distrusted his conclusion because it was based on an aggregate knowledge of similar criminal cases and their common pathological underpinnings. I distrusted the logical strictures and the encapsulated knowledge that prompted him to the conclusion. The conclusion undermined my basic law of murder: Criminal passion derived from long-suppressed fears brought to momentary consciousness by the unique alchemy of killer and victim. Two unconscious states dovetail and create an explicative flashpoint. The killer knows. The killer goes ahead—“It just felt like something I had to do.” The victim feeds the killer the knowledge. Female victims tap out signals in sex semaphore.