Watch Him Die by Craig Robertson

Author:Craig Robertson [Robertson, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471193934
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2020-06-10T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

‘He killed her.’

Narey was taken aback by the certainty in Dakers’ voice. ‘You said he was lying at other parts. How can you be sure?’

‘Well, I can’t be sure. But I’m as sure as I can be. The whole basis of SCAN is deception detection. Now, I’m no expert on it but I’ve been rereading what I can, and I hope I’ve got a decent handle on it. At the beginning, he was using a lot of equivocation, the maybes and the mights, one of the main deception techniques. When he spoke about how he met Brianna, he used a lot of negation and was almost certainly lying or trying to keep the truth from us. He also indulged in what is known as statement partitioning, meaning he broke down his telling of the meeting with Brianna and her murder into prologue, incident and epilogue. He rushed over both the prologue and the epilogue in order to omit things but luxuriated in the incident.

‘More than that, when he talked about the crime, the act that led to Brianna’s death, he revealed unique sensory details, things we didn’t ask for and it’s unlikely he made up on the spot. So, he talked about the smell of her perfume, the taste of her skin, the way her face changed colour. These were experienced memories. These were truths.’

Narey held his gaze for a while, accepting the sense that it made.

‘Remind me never to play poker with you.’

‘Oh, I’m terrible at poker. I spend more time looking for tells from the other players than I do at my own hand.’

She breathed out hard. Exhausted from the effort of concentration. ‘So, what else have we learned?’

‘Well, it’s difficult just reading his words and not hearing them, but there’s a calmness, a matter-of-factness about what he says, that leads me to think that he’s capable of switching on and off the personality we spoke to. That’s why I got you to ask the question about there being more than one side to him. It’s likely, as you suggested to him, that he functions as a seemingly normal person, not outwardly displaying the characteristics that we’d expect from a serial killer. You’ve met the type before.’

Narey nodded. ‘Of course I have. But I’m not sure I’ve ever fully grasped how they’re able to do it.’

‘Well, often they have an ability to disassociate, to save themselves from having to deal with difficult feelings, and to compartmentalise so that they can act as different people in different situations as needed.’

‘Okay, I get that. But how?’

Dakers nodded. ‘There’s an American criminal psychologist, a friend of mine, named Katherine Ramsland, one of the very best in the business. She spent five years corresponding with Dennis Rader, the BTK killer. She says that people like Rader, like our man Marr, do what Rader called cubing.’

‘Cubing?’

‘Yeah. It was Rader who introduced her to the phrase, and it might be the best way of explaining how their minds work in terms of being able to function in society.

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