Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [56]
“For most of the repeat offenders we have come to know as serial killers, fantasy plays an enormous role. Often, their very identity represents a kind of fantasy: Ted Bundy, the concerned citizen, political activist, and loving friend; or John Wayne Gacy, the community organizer, Rotary member, and friendly clown who performed at children’s parties. These were facades created to hide a darker personality the offender wishes to keep hidden from society.”
He paused to let this sink in and drank from a bottle of Evian water on his desk. Lee thought Nelson looked tired, the lines under his blue eyes deepened. He leaned against the desk again and crossed his arms.
“R. D. Laing said that the more identity is fantasy, the more intensely it is defended. Doesn’t that make sense? If you know who you are, then there’s no need to defend against an attack—real or imagined—because you’re secure in your knowledge. But even though the subject knows on some level that his false self is unreal, the alternative is unthinkable: not just death, but complete annihilation.
“The subject can’t see that maybe his false self could be replaced by a real, authentic one. His tragedy is that he can’t see what lies beyond—to him it appears to be an endless void in which he wanders like a zombie, a creature ostracized from human society, doomed to walk the earth, empty eyes staring vacantly out of a face with no mind, a body with no soul.
“And so he defends this false identity with all the ferocity of a lioness fighting to save her cubs—because his instinct for self-preservation tells him to.”
Ms. Davenport raised her hand. “So are you saying in effect that with these people, there’s ‘no there there’?”
Nelson smiled. “Pithy as usual, Ms. Davenport.” He turned to the rest of the class. “Ms. Davenport here has summed up my whole complex theory in a few words—but essentially, she has it. The shell the offender constructs for the outside world is no more ‘real’ than the fantasy life he lives in private.”
He leaned forward, and his face was very earnest, almost vulnerable. “Most of us take our identities for granted. You, Ms. Davenport, for example. Let’s say you’re the first child, the smart one, the organizer, efficient and responsible. Your mother and your siblings could always count on you, and you knew that about yourself before you remember having language. Knowing this about yourself gave you a certain sense of security in the world.”
Ms. Davenport blushed, a deep purple that spread from the base of her neck to the thin blue veins on her forehead.
Nelson continued. “I don’t know anything about Ms. Davenport’s family, of course. But let’s just say she had a younger brother who was the family clown, the funny one, a little irresponsible maybe, but he could always make people laugh, and that gave him some security, a sense of who he was.
“My point is that we all take these things for granted—by the time we can verbalize who we are, we already have a sense of it from the way other people relate to us, and the way we relate to them.
“But for the person who goes on to become a serial offender, this is not the case. He is lacking a basic sense of who he is, and consequently has a sense at times of being nobody at all. He feels impotent and powerless. So he creates a fantasy world that is that exact reverse of what he perceives to be reality: a world in which he is omnipotent, is all powerful, and has total control over others. This control most often involves violent sexual fantasies—again, the exact reverse of what he perceives on another level as reality: total rejection of him by women (or men, if he is homosexual).
“Jeffrey Dahmer cut off his victims’ heads and put them in his freezer so they wouldn’t leave him. That level of desperation is directly related to the level of rage these criminals express against their victims—who are often substitutes for people in their lives who did in fact harm them. So, for example, a vicious killer of women could be acting out rage toward his emotionally