between good and evil by roger l. depue & susan schindehette

Author:roger l. depue & susan schindehette
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, psychology
ISBN: 9780759513273
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2005-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

If there was one area that fascinated me about homicidal sexual predators, it was how key fantasy was to their development and the evolution of their crimes. In time, we began to understand the mechanism. A little boy begins to have fantasies of violence. He might kill small animals or a family pet. Then, as he approaches adolescence, he begins to become sexualized. The pleasure that he finds in violent fantasies becomes entangled with pleasurable sexual fantasies. He may masturbate a dozen times a day, or more, while he fantasizes about violence. If violent tendencies become intertwined with the sexual urge at an early age, in later years it is impossible to untangle them. Once sexuality is destroyed as a means of expressing love, that capacity is, in all likelihood, gone forever.

And over time, the fantasy grows into action. Especially in crimes of sexual predation, the presence of fantasy is key. A rapist breaks into a home, approaches the bedroom, sees the victim in bed. Stands there, considering it. The longer he stays, the greater the risk of being seen, caught, or surprised. But he will risk it all the same. Because it’s worth it to him. Enjoying the anticipation is worth heightening the risk. He stands by the side of the bed, looking at her. He may softly stroke her hair, muse about precisely how he will wake her. Imagines the look in her eyes. This is all part of the ritual, which is what these crimes are really about.

Still, though the fantasy is always perfect, the crime never is. Too many things can go wrong. She becomes terrified, screams, defecates in fear. So each commission of a crime marks an enlargement of the fantasy, and a further perfection of it. How can he do it better next time?

I’d seen graphic proof of just how strong those fantasies could be. Even in prison, predators continued to cling to them. Deprived of the ability to act out their crimes, they did the next best thing. They nurtured them, talked about them with cell mates, replayed them, over and over, in their heads. James Odom, a convicted serial rapist, once recalled how he first met the man who would become his partner, James Lawson, Jr., when both were incarcerated at a state mental institution in California. The two spent hours making elaborate plans to rape, mutilate, and eviscerate women. “We’d fantasize so much that at times I didn’t know what was real,” Odom said.

Another killer, Danny Rolling, convicted of murdering five students in Gainesville, Florida, went so far as to write a kind of handbook describing how to stalk and murder a victim. It contained drawings, remarkably realistic depictions of slashed breasts, torture, and bizarre types of physical restraints, and other violent offenders passed them around to each other as entertainment, like so many cartoons.

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