The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [34]
As the people around Dexter observe his behavior, we would probably expect Rita (were she still alive) to be the first to notice when something seems not quite right. Part of the tension and drama in the developing relationship between the two came from Rita’s growing sense of unease about what was really going on with Dexter. Yet, Rita might also be the last to conclude that Dexter was lying. Give her something else to hang her suspicions on—oh, he’s using!—and she’ll grab it.
Deb is close to Dexter, too. Maybe she also has a deepening sense of foreboding about the brother who is so important to her. But she is no more eager than Rita was to add up all the clues and label Dexter a monstrous liar.
Dexter’s Cousins in Crime
In real life, there are people like Dexter who kill repeatedly over many years, yet live unsuspected among family and community. The BTK killer was one of them. BTK is the name that Dennis Rader gave himself because he bound, tortured, and killed his victims. He was married with two children and active in his church. He murdered ten people but was not caught until thirty-one years after his first kill. John Wayne Gacy was another. He was a married man who murdered thirty-three men and entombed many of them under the crawl space of his home. His wife remained clueless.
These and other psychopathic killers are Dexter’s cousins in crime. So are some other big-time miscreants who pile lie upon lie in the service of other horrible deeds—for example, perpetrators of massive Ponzi schemes that leave hundreds destitute and humiliated. What makes these people Dexter’s blood relatives (so to speak) is not so much the nature of their deeds as the character of their feelings about their crimes. They don’t feel bad about them.
Some even bask in the joy of their deceptive triumphs. An example is Clifford Irving, who landed a huge advance to write an “authorized” autobiography of Howard Hughes, a man he’d never met and knew he never would. Irving explained how he felt immediately after he confessed: “I almost wanted to cry out: ‘Sure, I did it. And I’m glad I did it. You want me to grovel? I can’t. You want me to feel guilty? I don’t. Because I enjoyed every goddamn minute of it.’” No conscience, no remorse.
Ordinary people who do have a conscience can still become big-time liars, but for them the experience is much different. Every step they take into the muddy moral quagmire of cheating and deceiving threatens to sink them ever more deeply into guilt and shame. They end up feeling dirty—and physically ill. John Dean, White House counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973, was a key player in the infamous Watergate scandal, but not a very happy one. His fellow perpetrators were sometimes exasperated by his moral misgivings. Ultimately, Dean would star in an iconic moment in American history when he exposed the “cancer on the presidency” during the Watergate hearings.
Dean described how he felt when the cover-up was in its last throes, but just before he had decided to tell the truth. His account could hardly be more different from Clifford Irving’s: “My thoughts, I realized, were no longer measured or rational. Every breath I drew in seemed cold, and the chill latched on to my thoughts and dragged them down into my stomach, then around up my spine. My cool, my detached calculation, was dissolving in fear.”
Offenders without a conscience are the most dangerous criminals because only we can stop them. Culprits such as John Dean who do feel remorse will sometimes stop themselves.
So am I tossing Dexter into the bin with the worst of the worst? Maybe not. Dexter is not a hardcore unwavering psychopath. He has grown over the course of the series. He’s started to feel something akin to real fondness and concern for other people. He’s begun to worry that—should he ever get caught—his undoing would be devastating