Douglas, John - The Anatomy Of Motive: The FBI's Legendary Mindhunter Explores The Key To Understanding And Catching Vi by Douglas John

Author:Douglas, John [Douglas, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1999-08-11T07:00:00+00:00

Well, there you have it. Amazing, isn’t it? A couple of notes may help clarify the situation.

List was an accountant, a CPA, seemingly a perfect profession for this timid, mild-mannered Milquetoast of a man. He was apparently a very good one—he always knew where he stood with numbers; everything was either right or wrong, black or white. But he kept losing jobs. I could see a guy like this getting promoted to higher managerial positions, where he just couldn’t hack it because of his peculiar personality. Reportedly, after List lost one job at a bank, he would spend the workday reading in the commuter train station rather than confess to his family that he’d been fired from another position. He had so little insight into his own professional weaknesses that he once took a job selling life insurance, even though people who knew him said he couldn’t look another person in the eye. So that became another failure in his life.

He grew up an only child under the domination of a strict religious mother who, while not physically abusive, would not let him get dirty or do the things other boys did, and always made sure to keep him on the straight and narrow. His father was in his sixties when John was born and apparently didn’t exert much of an influence. When John got to be a teenager, he was not allowed to dance. Even his mother Alma’s own church pastor said she was being excessive. And that was the way John grew up. He was able to marry Helen Morris Taylor, a beautiful woman whose first husband, a dynamic man, the diametrical opposite of John, had been killed in the Korean War. They had one daughter. Helen also had syphilis—which John didn’t know—apparently contracted from her first husband. The disease would grow progressively worse during the marriage, Helen would suffer from atrophy of the brain, which made her more and more mentally dysfunctional and alcoholic. List was afraid she had already had too much of a negative effect on the children. Patty wanted to become an actress. In John’s religiously rigid, carefully ordered mind, that was the road to hell, or more likely, only one of many. He was also concerned that she had expressed interest in witchcraft and might have tried marijuana.

Even though Helen and Alma did not get along well with each other and John resented the strictness of his upbringing, Alma was living with them because she had supported them to the tune of about $200,000, which John had gone through in an attempt to make ends meet and support the large eighteen-room house that was so important for his self-image and public image.

Many, if not most, of the killers I’ve studied and interviewed have, while admitting their actions, found someone else to blame—a mother, a wife, a boss, a political conspiracy, society in general—whoever or whatever fits into their own emotional context. List’s context—the way he saw himself and the world around him—was that

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