Xfactomorag

Sunday, August 30, 2015

A Fascination with Evil and a Penchant for Love

A Fascination with Evil and a Penchant for Love

By Morag Thorsen

Copyright

All rights reserved; No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, electronic process; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use-other than for “fair use” as brief quotation contained in articles and reviews-without prior written permission of the author.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature. In the event that you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Ignorance

Ignorance is the Curse of God:

Knowledge is the Wing wherewith we fly to Heaven.

William Shakespeare

Contents

1. Murder Most Foul

2. Family Dysfunction

3. Anger and Rage

4. Departed and Depraved Megalomaniacs

5. Evil Nazis

6. Exceptions to the Rule

7. The Real Saviors

8. Interesting Women

9. The British Monarchy

10. The Men who would be God

11. Melancholics, Cholerics, Sanguines and Phlegmatics

12. Therapy for Life

Chapter 1 Murder Most Foul

Chapter 1

Murder Most Foul

Jon Venables; Robert Thompson; Mary Bell

For those people who want to understand what exactly it is that turns a human being into a murderer, one must first learn exactly what a human being is, how a human being functions and the ways that human beings think. Unfortunately very few people throughout history have thoroughly studied and thereby fully comprehended the entire human system of thought. As a result, the entirety of human thought processes has not yet been exposed.

Reams of information has been written and recorded on the subjects of human physiology, biology and psychology, and reams of information has been written with suggestions on how to fix, repair and ameliorate those faulty human beings around us who commit acts of mayhem and murder, but the essentiality of linking all of our current information together seems to have escaped the minds of the learned experts of our time.

Disputes are rampant among the scholars, criminologists, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists who gainfully struggle on trying to understand the causes and also find the cures for murderers who use murder, rape and torture as a tool, in order to satisfy some known or unknown need within their own psyches.

There are now, and have been, experts who have contributed greatly to the wealth of human knowledge that has accrued over the centuries, and the market proliferates with carefully, well-penned books and articles covering a wide range of topics that are closely related to the physiology, biology and psychology of the human race, but the big picture is missing. The reason the big picture is missing is that in order to understand others, a person must first learn to understand his or her own self and not many people, even if they are motivated to help others, want to set aside some of their own precious time in order to make a concerted effort and to try to understand their own selves.

Most of us are vaguely aware of some underlying deficiencies in our ability to navigate through life and get what we want out of life, but basically we all believe that we’re okay and if it wasn’t for this person and if it wasn’t for that person, and if only we had more money, a better job, a better spouse or our relatives weren’t so troublesome, life would get a whole lot easier for us. We rarely take ownership of our own failings and we rarely see that the things we hate in our partners, children and co-workers are merely reflecting our own faults back to us. Our partners, children and co-workers are mirror images of our own selves; these are mirror images of our own failings. We hate what we see in other people because it is so familiar to us. The offending behavior resides deep within our personal, inner psyche and we will not own up to having the same deficiencies as those people who irritate us, those people whom we dislike or even those people whom we hate.

Even when apprehended, most murderers refuse to own their own crimes. A murderer may confess to his or her crimes but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she is willing to take ownership of these crimes. Nine times out of ten when asked the big question, why? a murderer will often respond with excuses. It was self-defense, or I don’t know why, or I had an abusive childhood, or something comes over me and I’m not in my right mind when these things happen. I plead innocent by reason of insanity. Murdering in the name of God has been happening for untold centuries; as if any genuine “God type of being” would ever need help from a comparatively puny human being, to murder anyone at all.

In actual fact those who commit murder do know why they do it. The answer to the question why, always resides deep inside the murderer’s own brain. The reasons for committing only one murder or having several killing sprees are usually the same. The reasons are overwhelming rage, lust or greed. Jealousy, envy, malice, fear or pure hatred, it doesn’t really matter to the murderer what caused his or her evil action, the murderer did it, the murderer wanted to do it and the murderer really didn’t care about the suffering of his or her victim.

The simple truth of the matter is that we all desire to have the power of life and death over other people. Murderers want to play God and who among us doesn’t want to play God? We are all guilty of wanting to play God but most of us do not stoop to committing murder. Instead we sit on our exalted, personal thrones wanting everyone around us to march to our own particular drumbeat.

We all cling to a false image of ourselves whether it is good, I’m a good person, look how much I contribute to charity; bad, it’s not my fault, I was a damaged child; or indifferent, I’m just a normal, okay kind of person and I don’t have a lot of faults. We cling to these false images because those are the crutches we lean on in order to navigate through life. Life is difficult. Life can be horribly difficult especially if you are, or have been an abused child, therefore having a mental crutch to lean on makes sense. But by the time a child has matured into adulthood, some kind of self analysis is in order.

The art of self-analysis needs to be taught by qualified therapists, as a bona fide subject in schools. Children are a lot smarter than we think and early self-analysis together with some kind of therapeutic intervention could possibly keep a child on the straight and narrow path through life. Instead we leave troubled children to forge their own way in this difficult-to-navigate world having no idea that their in-born genetic temperament is on auto pilot. In fact most adults navigate through this world not knowing that they are on auto pilot and unaware that their own inherent genetic type makes them who they are.

This genetically inherited temperament is the force that dictates who we are, what we will do and what we will become. Our temperament is influenced by the circumstances and people that surround us and interact with us from birth until death. We humans are more or less like puppets on a string and will remain like puppets on a string if we don’t endeavor to cut the strings that bind us. Like it or not, history will keep on repeating itself in our own personal lives as well as in the world at large, until we explore and finally accept that both our behavior and thought processes are dictated to us by our genetic makeup.

Leaving the analysis in the hands of a competent therapist can be problematic, because it is impossible for even the best therapist in the world to know all the facts about a person and see the whole picture surrounding that person. Only the person who needs therapy has the ability to dig deep enough in order to find out the truth about their own self and we all need some kind of therapy because we are all faulty human beings.

Many therapists merely function as paid friends to those who go to them for help, and not many therapists take the time to study the temperament types of their patients because the large majority of therapists either disregard this information and brush it aside as unimportant, or they don’t even know about the existence of various temperament types in the first place.

An interesting theory exists in the realms of human psychology (albeit this theory is not held by many professional psychoanalysts), that it takes three or more generations to produce the first schizophrenic child in a family and so the pattern is set, generating more and more schizophrenic persons in ensuing generations.

This theory is based on something called the Emotional Scale. Basically the lower you are on the human, emotional scale, the more likely you are to mate and cohabit with a person who also functions at this same, low level of emotional vulnerability. The off-spring of such a union will develop at an even lower, emotional level by virtue of having two, low level functioning parents, and the ensuing off-spring will then mate and cohabit with a partner at that same, even lower emotional level. After approximately three or four generations the emotional level of the children drops until it can drop no further, i.e. schizophrenia. These children can be highly intelligent but they are emotionally bankrupt.

It has been established that schizophrenia runs in families and therapeutic intervention is required in order to work on raising the emotional level of schizophrenic children. Teaching low level, functioning parents how to raise their own emotional level should be a vital part of the learning process. This is an area where therapy could excel and the payoff might be worth the effort especially if the therapist takes the time to study and understand the temperament types of their patients.

In order to escape the real world, schizophrenic children and adults live in worlds of fantasy, but the fantasy always goes awry. A schizophrenic, fantasy world is filled with audible voices that are really the person’s own thoughts that he or she cannot turn off. The real beings with real personalities who inhabit their space are really aspects of their own personality. A person’s personality is merely the surface layer that we present to the world at large. Personality is mostly dependent on temperament type but it is also a result of the circumstances and people that have exerted influences on that particular person over their lifetime.

Schizophrenic patients believe that other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts or plotting to harm them. They suffer from hallucinations, thought disorders, agitated body movements or catatonia which is a state of frozen stupor and immobility. In other words, schizophrenia is an extreme state of mind numbing fear that is beyond the norm. There are only two human emotions. One is “Love” and the other is “Fear.” Anger is merely an offshoot of fear.

Treatment of schizophrenia should incorporate the whole family not just the person in whom schizophrenia has its grip because schizophrenia is a family problem not an individual illness. In families where there are two birth parents and none of the children have been adopted, only two different temperament types need to be studied. In the case of an adopted child or a step parent there could possibly be three or four different temperament types involved.

Child Murderers: Jon Venables (Born 1982) and Robert Thompson (Born 1982)

Another theory based on the theory of Schizophrenia is that it can take three or more generations to create any type of extremely dysfunctional child, a child who could possibly grow up to be a murderer, a serial rapist or a serial killer. Children who become murderers before reaching adulthood, as in the case of two English boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson both aged ten, who abducted, tortured and beat to death, two year old James Bulger, are extreme cases. This awful crime took place in the Liverpool area of the United Kingdom, in February 1993.

Two year old James Bulger disappeared from a shopping center where he had wandered off just a few yards from beyond where his mother stood. After they were captured, the schoolboy perpetrators of the crime told police where to find the body, and James’s mutilated, little body was found on a railroad track miles away from the shopping center.

The two boys revealed that they had planned the whole thing; it was not a spur-of-the-moment choice to abduct a toddler; any toddler would do, and they made plans to push the toddler into traffic. Instead of pushing the toddler into traffic, they led him on a long trek to the railway tracks where they tortured the toddler until he died.

Police suspect that there was a sexual occurrence during the crime because the toddler’s shoes, socks, pants and underwear had been removed and his foreskin had been forcibly retracted. Circumcision is not widely practiced in the United Kingdom and probably the other two boys had not been circumcised either.

The boys were crafty enough to lay little James’s body across the railroad tracks in the hope that a train would splice the body and the death would be deemed an accident. A train did splice the body but the murder was found out. The two boys were unaware that the shopping mall had close circuit television and the abduction was recorded. The close circuit recording was shown on local television and that’s how the boys were found out.

Both of the ten year old torturer/murderers Jon and Robert, came from dysfunctional families. Even so-called normal families are part dysfunctional, by virtue of the fact that children born into any family at all, are by nature helpless. They become dependents automatically, imprisoned in childhood and at the mercy of the adults and older siblings around them. At one time or another all children experience the same feeling of being powerless around adults, even if those adults are acting in the best interests of the child.

The younger the child the more powerful the screams if the child’s needs are not met. When the screams of the infants and toddlers subside, children begin to be old enough to know the difference between bad behavior and good behavior in order to get their needs met. But there are some children who choose bad behavior, very, very, bad behavior.

Severely dysfunctional families exhibit many traits and they usually start out with a set of co-dependent parents; one is usually an addict or over time evolves into an addict, and the other becomes an enabler. The addict doesn’t necessarily need to be addicted to drugs or alcohol; the addiction can be to any kind of destructive or unhealthy behavior such as extra marital sex, pornography, child abuse, spousal abuse, bullying, overspending, overeating, gambling, overworking, petty larceny or even watching too much television. The list is endless because addiction encompasses any repetitive behavior that results in adverse consequences.

The family evolves into dysfunction because the other spouse, the spouse who probably suffers from low self-esteem makes excuses for and learns to tolerate the addictive behavior. Many times the enabling spouse feels that he or she has no option but to learn how to live with the addictive behavior of their partner because of having nowhere else to live and not enough money to live off, especially when there are young children to take care of. Or it can be the opposite. The enabling spouse doesn’t want to give up his or her high standard of living or the wealth that accompanies it, by abandoning the marital situation.

Another contributing factor is that to the tolerating spouse, the addictive behavior may seem to be normal because that is all they have ever known. Some families can give the appearance of normalcy, but behind closed doors all kinds of negative behavior is taking place. If a family is dysfunctional every member of that family will be unhappy, confused about their place in society, and for the most part they will suffer silently because they dare not speak out. Speaking out about family problems is taboo within the family, but it is also taboo outside of the family. Sometimes this taboo is broken when a child reaches adulthood, but by then it is too late to repair any damage that was caused by growing up in a dysfunctional family.

Many times family members believe that what they are experiencing is normal, i.e. all families are the same as their own except for those happy families that are portrayed on television or in the movies, because these families don’t seem to be real. The irony of the situation is that quite often, family members don’t even know that they are unhappy because they have little to zero experience of what it does feel like to be happy, peaceful or content.

Child abuse, sexual abuse, extreme conflict, lack of empathy, unfair treatment, vicious jealousy, complete disharmony, mean spirited ridicule, soul destroying shame; these types of behavior can be the norm in dysfunctional families but these unacceptable behaviors rarely exist at the start of the marriage, they develop slowly over the years until a crisis point is reached. The crisis point quite often occurs when a child or children of the marriage reach puberty. It is inevitable that at least one member of the family will go off the rails. But sometimes the crisis point is reached before the child hits puberty as in the case of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.

Some parents hate their children and some children hate their parents but the end result is always the same. The children who grow up in dysfunctional families are damaged for life unless there is some kind of early intervention, but how can there be intervention if the children as well as the parents don’t know that what they are experiencing is abnormal? Education is the key and the earlier it can be taught, the better it is for everyone. Children need to be taught at school what kind of behavior in a family is acceptable and what kind of behavior is unacceptable.

In the case of the murder of James Bulger, those two ten year old boys chose cunning and brutality because of the likelihood that that’s all they had ever known. They had to have learned it from the adults around them. Most certainly electronic games, movies and videos could have contributed much to the psychological misfiring in the minds and brains of the two young murderers, but nothing is ever the result of just one thing. It is always a combination of things or a sequence of events that are the causative factors.

The two boys planned the crime. They carried out their mission and for a few moments in time they must have felt some kind of exhilaration. Venables and Thompson obviously knew themselves to be stronger and more powerful than their victim, and that was what gave them a high. For a short period of time they got to play God by having the power of life or death over a two year old child. Most likely the two young murderers had grown up suffering from acts or words of cruelty and torment that were directed at them, and because of this they had learned to disregard the value of human life. But they both knew that they had done something very bad and they tried to hide what they had done. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were tried as adults and sentencing consisted of rehabilitation and confinement in a detention school for delinquents.

All reports are that the detention school provided a very good education, a high standard of living and even gave them an allowance that they could spend on their supervised shopping trips to town. Without proper therapy, punishing criminals does not rehabilitate them, but rewarding anti-social, criminal behavior does not work either unless proven, effective therapies are part of the treatment.

In June of 2001, after serving only eight years, a parole board ruled that the boys were no longer a threat to society and both Thompson and Venables were released from the detention school where they had supposedly been rehabilitated. They were released into a witness protection program with a life license, meaning that they were on probation for life.

Venables was described by his elementary schoolteachers as a boy who was repressing a great deal of hostility, and his teachers knew for a fact that he had a festering temper. Most likely Venables was a Choleric because a festering temper is one of the best indicators of a person with a choleric temperament. Venables was an attention seeker but he was also described as anti-social. His hatred of his own father and his loud, violent outbursts in court were noted by those people who were present at the trial.

This illustrates the opposing factors that can rise up in those persons who are natural born extroverts, i.e. Cholerics and Sanguines, but as the result of severe abuse, these natural extroverts can quite often regress into anti-social behavior. An anti-social, attention seeker might seem to be an oxymoron as indeed it is, and these two behaviors do contradict each other, but this contradiction always results from severe oppression.

In June of 2010, Jon Venables was returned to prison after being charged and found guilty of possessing child pornography, some of which included two year old children being raped by adults. He was only given a two year prison sentence and obviously the type of rehabilitation that he had received in the detention school, did not work.

Venables still had a festering temper and he still viewed toddlers as potential victims. As a Choleric, he did not have the same kind of cunning or deep, thinking skills as his partner in crime Robert Thompson.

Years later, social workers who were involved in the rehabilitation of these ten year old murderers, reported that the boys exhibited no remorse and acted as if the crime had never happened. They did not take ownership of their crime and refusing to take ownership of their own wrongdoings is a very strong trait among those with melancholic and choleric temperaments.

Refusing to take ownership of a wrong doing can also be observed in the other two temperament types i.e. sanguine and phlegmatic, but of the four different temperament types, Melancholics are the most vehement in their denials. Melancholics almost always refuse to admit guilt because they live in a different world from the rest of us, a world where they are consumed by self, and self is all important.

Thompson was obsessed with watching himself on the news. He was self-consumed, self-obsessed and had an unnerving ability to look straight through a person as if the other person didn’t exist. His elementary schoolteachers described him as being a very shrewd liar and a great manipulator, but he was also able to turn on the charm whenever necessary. Cholerics on the other hand have a very difficult time trying to turn on the charm because they prefer to be blunt and get straight to the point.

Robert Thompson became very close to his mother during his confinement in the detention school and was described by the social workers in the detention school as a real mama’s boy. He was able to turn on his melancholic charm and use his mother as a crutch to lean on for the duration of his confinement, but nothing is known about what happened to him after he was released.

Melancholics make the best liars, the best manipulators, the best crooks and they are generally considered to be the most self-obsessed of the four temperament types. All people have the tendency to lie, cheat and manipulate but Melancholics have an innate ability to do it with expertise and competence like no others.

In ordinary life, a Melancholic with no criminal activity can quite easily evolve into a pathological liar for the simple reason that lying comes so naturally to them that it just becomes a pattern of speech. They even lie when there is no need. But liars cannot remember their own lies and with the passage of time, a pathological liar becomes known to those people around them. Friends and relatives end up having the choice of either shrugging it off or backing away from the pathological liar.

It is a difficult thing to challenge a pathological liar because a pathological liar argues his or her own innocence with the use of more lies. But pathological liars do and can function quite well in society. This well known saying is only too true in today’s world as it relates to Melancholics. “Tell the truth and nobody wants to hear it, but tell a lie and the whole world stops to listen.”

Mary Bell (Born 1957)

Twenty five years earlier, two lesser known crimes were committed in the slums of Newcastle, but the crimes were equally horrendous, and this time around it was an eleven year old English girl who murdered two little boys, a four year old and a three year old.

Mary Flora Bell didn’t stand a chance in life; her mother was a here again, gone again prostitute, and her father was a drunkard and a petty criminal.

This little girl grew up without receiving any kind of loving support from anyone at all. She was a child who was alone in the world although theoretically she did live in a house together with her two dysfunctional parents. Relatives told a story that at one time Mary’s mother attempted to arrange an adoption for her child, and knowing that the mother really didn’t want to keep her own child these same relatives offered to take care of Mary, but nothing ever materialized to ensure Mary’s welfare.

Every child in the neighborhood was afraid of Mary Bell. As adults, some of Mary’s past schoolmates were interviewed and they told harrowing tales of what used to happen in the school play yard whenever Mary Bell was around. She used to try to choke other children, she was cruel and the children knew that when Mary Bell fixed her strange, staring eyes on them, they were in trouble. Mary Bell was a Melancholic just like Robert Thompson with his strange, staring eyes that could look right through people as if they weren’t there.

One of Mary’s past schoolteachers tells a story about noticing a red mark on a child’s face. When the teacher asked the child what had happened, it was revealed that Mary had stubbed out a cigarette on the child’s face. To his credit the teacher actually talked to Mary about the incident but the teacher was unaware that this was an indicator of future barbaric acts that she would commit.

In addition, the neighborhood children were so afraid of Mary Bell that even when she tried to choke them or stuff sand in their mouths, the children were too afraid to tell the whole story to the police, or even to their own parents.

It is easy to look back on this sad story and judge those adults who knew that Mary’s behavior was not only unacceptable, it was dangerous and the adults did nothing about it. But these people were not the cream of society. They probably had no faith in the authorities and in those days, the late sixties, teachers were supposed to teach and mind their own business.

Many although not all school administrators had very little interest in child welfare and it wasn’t unusual for a child to show up for class in dirty, threadbare, smelly, ragged clothing and for the administrators to turn a blind eye to the situation. In those days children of the slums might have had fleas in their clothing, lice and nits in their hair and may not have eaten for days, but few cared because life was tough and it was a struggle for survival of the fittest. It was an age of corporal punishment for bad behavior and not an age for psychological exploration.

Teachers and other parents knew that Mary was strange but this was 1968; the people were poor and they lived in a crime ridden slum near Newcastle in the northeastern part of England. Nobody did anything and even when police got involved, the police didn’t do anything constructive to find out what was happening to this child of the slums.

Mary’s mother suffered from depression and not only did she neglect her child, she exposed Mary to the sight and sounds of her sado-masochistic sex acts, which was the way she earned a living. The family lived in a small, two roomed house so there was nowhere for Mary to go when her prostitute mother brought the clients home. Later in life Mary divulged in an interview that from the age of four, her mother forced Mary to perform sexual acts for the clients.

It was noted by the school authorities that Mary was a disturbed, angry child. She constantly stared down other children, she was aggressive and she was cunning. Melancholic Mary Bell was evolving into a depraved murderer and nothing was ever done to address her behavior.

Mary’s first murder went unnoticed. The body of little four year old Martin Brown was discovered by a workman in an upstairs room of a derelict building. This was a time when children freely roamed the streets and it was an unwritten rule that every mother kept an eye on everyone else’s children. The children played in tumble down buildings and it wasn’t unusual for a child to disappear for hours before he or she would be missed.

The cause of death was listed as unknown. There were no marks on Martin’s body and so it was left to anyone’s guess what had caused him to die. But there were clues that were missed. Mary Bell and her friend Norma Bell (not a relative), went to the home where Martin Brown’s body was laid out and they brazenly asked Martin’s mother if they could see the body in the casket. It unsettled the mother and the request was denied, but no one gave it much thought, nobody wondered why two eleven year old girls were showing such a keen interest in seeing a dead child.

At school Mary wrote a story about Martin’s death and drew a picture. In this picture there were details that the police had not revealed to the general public, but the picture was also missed until much later after the second murder had been committed.

Mary Bell was described by those who knew her well as intelligent, sadistic, domineering and tough and it seemed to irritate her that the police couldn’t put two and two together even after she had left so many clues for them to find. Mary decided to commit another murder but this time she committed the murder right in front of a nine year old boy. The boy was considered to be slow witted, but he did manage to give a full account of what he saw and as a result, Mary Bell and her friend Norma Bell were finally arrested and charged with manslaughter.

The girls were not charged with murder because it was considered to be a total impossibility for children of that age to premeditate a murder, but of course that supposition is and always was wrong. The second murder happened when Mary and Norma grabbed a three year old boy named Brian Howell and led him to a disused wasteland where Mary strangled him to death. Not only did Mary strangle the little boy she tried to carve the initial “M” onto his abdomen.

Mary Bell wanted to be caught. She left clues for the police, she attended police conferences and pushed her way right to the front so that she could hear everything clearly, and she obviously enjoyed all the drama. The murders were not a cry for help. The murders were committed because it was Mary’s determination to be noticed by the adults around her, adults who had ignored her and who tried to push her to the side and out of everybody’s way. As a result of this neglect, by the age of eleven, Mary had become so self-centered and so self-absorbed that nobody’s life mattered to her except her own.

During the trial the two girls blamed each other but it was clear that Mary was in control and Norma was just a follower. Mary enjoyed power and like every other melancholic despot she wanted control over other human beings. She was a bully personified, just like her parents. Mary had learned well at her mother’s knee how to terrorize and subdue little children. She learned it by watching her mother subdue the clients with fake torture.

Psychiatrists observed that during the trial, Mary made no attempt to keep her emotions under tight control because the truth of the matter was that Mary had no emotions in her that needed to be controlled. She had descended to the depths of her cold, melancholic temperament and she maintained her innocence in spite of the overwhelming evidence against her. Mary was impervious, impenetrable and impregnable. She was devoid of all feelings, and she showed no anxiety at all.

Just like Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, Mary Bell the child murderer, was able to insinuate herself into the good graces of those caregivers and psychiatrists who attended to her whilst she was incarcerated. She was released after only twelve years in spite of the fact that one of the attending psychiatrists described her as a psychopath who needed constant supervision and should not be released.

Mary Bell would not take ownership of her crimes. She wrote letters to her mother stating that her mother should take the blame for everything so that Mary could be declared innocent and set free. Neither her dominatrix mother nor her drunken father ever shouldered part of the blame.

The conditions of Mary’s upbringing coupled together with various forms of abuse and an absence of any kind of loving relationship drove Mary to the wrong end of the melancholic spectrum. She embraced every negative trait that was available in the genetic makeup of a Melancholic, just like her counterparts in the adult world, the serial murderers of society. Thankfully most Melancholics do not hover at the wrong end of the spectrum which is murderous cold rage, but the case of Mary Bell shows just how easily it can happen. However a major catastrophe such as incarceration can sometimes, but not always, knock a person who resides at the wrong end of the spectrum towards middle ground, thereafter allowing them to function more like a normal person.

Child abuse is something that modern society should never tolerate but it is hard to detect and most often the detection if any, comes too late in the life of the child or the child’s victims.

Variable Spectrum of Behavior

Chapter 2 Family Dysfunction

Chapter 2

Family Dysfunction

John Wayne Gacy; Amelia Dyer; Russell Williams; Jeffrey Dahmer

Not only do congenital diseases get passed on down through the generations, inherited traits and behaviors also get passed on down through the generations and three or more generations of raging, angry people in one person’s lifeline is like a snowball rolling down a hill. The rage gets bigger and bigger until it explodes inside the human conduit, i.e. the killer at the bottom of the heap. The case of the James Bulger murder was an example of two murderous boys who landed at the bottom of the heap and Mary Bell was at the bottom of the heap with them.

The Genogram of “The Emotional/Anger Filled Scale” is a diagram illustrating a family’s relationships encompassing three generations. It is helpful in determining how each generation contributes to the end product, i.e. the troubled child, the pus filled abscess, the child who is almost predestined to evolve into a murderer, rapist or killer.

There is a difference between a killer and a murderer. A killing is based on rage or fear that rises up spontaneously, but a murder is a planned event. Most killings happen unexpectedly but murders, rapes and so called serial killings are usually well thought out, carefully planned and committed with malice and a complete disregard for the sanctity of human life.

The name serial killer is a misnomer. Serial killers are actually serial murderers. A serial murderer usually commits murders one at a time, in a series of events with a passage of time between each murder. By comparison a mass murderer commits one act of murder on many people at the same time, and it is almost always a planned event.

Some people believe that children can be born evil. Not really! Children can be born into a lifeline of rage thereby predestinating the child into total loss of sensibility, and that loss of sensibility can lead to the child committing evil acts. Any intervention would need to start at a very early age whereby both the child and each individual family member is taught how to raise his or her own angry emotional level up from that bottom rung on the ladder to a higher place.

A Genogram can be used as an effective tool to help determine the way in which a murderer evolves, but it is only effective if the therapist who makes use of this tool is able to elicit some semblance of truth out of the various family members. This can be an impossible task if the family members are strangers to the truth as most people are when recounting their own specific tale of woe. Recollections of past events by those who were involved in these past events are oftentimes more subjective than objective. Family members invariably join ranks in order to protect the family image but perseverance can pay off if a diligent effort is made by a family therapist using non-judgmental techniques.

When pressed, most adults are only too ready to pour forth about the sins of their parents if the listener is a sympathetic and understanding therapist, and although one person’s truth can be another person’s lie, therapy can make use of subjective truth as a means of determining how each person views and understands the world around him or her.

It is not unusual to encounter parents who stand firm in their belief that they have never abused their own children, but the same children feel that they did suffer all kinds of parental abuse, both physical and emotional. When questioned, parents tend remember all the good things they did for their children but children from dysfunctional families grow up to remember all the bad things that parents did to them.

Many of the families from which these murderers spring are as anxious for answers about the crime or crimes as the criminologists are. It might even be a relief for a murderer’s relatives to find out that it is a generational thing and no one person in the family is ultimately to blame.

Psychologists are only too ready to blame bad parenting skills for the woes of the children but bad parenting is only partly to blame. The sins of the parents come from the sins of the grandparents that come from the sins of the great grandparents, and so on. Anger escalates on down through the family tree but the question now needs to be answered, where does all that anger really come from and how it is generated and escalated into murderous rage?

The answer is that anger is an offshoot of fear and fear is part of everyone’s genetic component. Our ‘flight or fight’ responses have become corrupted to the degree that we humans fear each other. We project our own emotional fear on to others and this in turn leads to angry outbursts, enormous conflict and in worst case scenarios, murder most foul.

Poverty and lack of education are often major contributors to dysfunction in the family but dysfunctional families exist at all levels of society. they can be observed among the rich as well as among the poor. Dysfunctional families might be educated or uneducated and these families can be found in every country around the globe regardless of race, creed or religion. Dysfunctional parents produce dysfunctional children but one child usually stands out as being more dysfunctional than the others.
Not all children in a dysfunctional family grow up to be murderers. There is a play upon a play at work. Each child that is born or adopted into a dysfunctional family subconsciously chooses a part to play just like an actor on a stage. It is not a case where each child consciously chooses the part that he or she will play because birth order, temperament type, level of intelligence, natural abilities and even physical appearance determine the part that each child will unwittingly play in the game of life.

The most destructive part a child can play within the family is the abscess, often referred to in psychiatric circles as the scapegoat, the problem child who takes on blame and exhibits all the ills of the family. The abscess is blamed for everything so that the rest of the family can absolve themselves of all responsibility for the awful family conditions. The parents don't know how to handle this problem child and the parents themselves are unaware that their own dynamic has produced this child, a dynamic that has traveled on down through their generations to take root in their own unfortunate issue.

The Abscess

The abscess should be viewed by the medical establishment as symptomatic of the disease that has affected the whole family just as a rash is symptomatic of a disease called the chicken pox. Treatment should be an attempt to cure the disease, not just dry up the abscess. This child is the one that is destined to have a very troubled life unless there is some kind of early intervention. But not all problem children turn into murderers, there are other mitigating factors involved in the life history of a murderer.

The other children in dysfunctional families take on well scripted roles, parts that they play as if the script had already been written for them, as indeed it was. Studies of families with alcoholic parents have shown that this is a formula that evolves consistently in the children of alcoholics. The more children that are born into one family, the more parts there are to be played.

The Caretaker

Next comes the caretaker, the good child who tries to take care of the weaker parent and sometimes even tries to take care of the whole suffering family. This child takes on a parental role usually to one, but sometimes to both parents when the parent or parents slide down into the role of helpless child. The role of caretaker continues on into adulthood because it becomes a way of life and if the caretaker can’t find other people to take care of, he or she will replace people with animals. This is the reason some people fill their houses with stray cats or dogs, they have a need to fulfill that established role of caretaker.

The Clown

Some families manage to produce a clown. The clown tries to make light of every problem that arises. He or she often is the source of jokes designed to hurt or shame other members of the family but in general the clown is viewed as a harmless individual because the clown manages to make other people laugh. Psychologists quite often refer to the clown as the mascot and what a relief it must be to have a mascot in the family, unless of course the mascot is playing two parts at the same time and ends up being one of the most hated serial murderers in America. This dual role can be studied in the case of John Wayne Gacy who was well known as the killer clown.

John Wayne Gacy (1942-1994)

John Wayne Gacy was an American serial murderer, torturer and rapist who was convicted and put to death for the rape and murder of thirty three boys and young men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. Gacy liked to perform at children’s birthday parties and he divulged to the authorities that he sometimes dressed up as his alter ego ‘Pogo the clown,’ when he sexually assaulted and strangled his victims. The clown who made children laugh turned into the clown who made his victims scream in terror.

John Gacy had a melancholic temperament. He grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father who often accused Gacy of being a mama’s boy. Gacy’s attorney described him as an intelligent man who was etremely accusatory and it is true, Gacy blamed everybody for everything, but he never ever blamed himself. Even after confessing to the crimes, Gacy refused to take the blame for them.

Years before he was found out to be a serial murderer, Gacy was described by doctors as having an anti-social personality disorder, but psychiatric experts who testified for the defense at his murder trial, believed Gacy to be a paranoid schizophrenic. A paranoid schizophrenic is a person who has lost touch with reality and suffers from delusions and or hallucinations.

In the case of John Gacy the pendulum swung to and fro as regularly as the pendulum on an old grandfather clock, but he wasn’t paranoid and he wasn’t schizophrenic because he knew exactly what he was doing. The face that Gacy presented to the outside world was that of a normal, successful, business man but behind that facade lay trouble. He was a clever man who planned his crimes well and he had a natural ability for thinking through his devious plans, from start to finish to ensure that nothing would go wrong.

According to Gacy’s younger sister, her brother was a good man. He was very kind to his mother and two sisters and tried to take care of them when he was growing up. At home Gacy actually played the role of caretaker, and ‘Pogo the clown’ was the alter ego he donned when he was with children and when he was with his young victims. The clown was the evil twin and the caretaker was the good twin, twins that resided in just one body. This sounds like a Jekyll and Hyde story but it is not fiction. The temperament type that can so easily and quickly change their own behavior from one extreme to another is the Melancholic. Other temperaments can also change their behavior from good to bad but it is usually the result of a slow buildup. The Melancholic is able to change character in a flash and the Melancholic does it better than the other three temperament types.

Although Gacy was abused and ridiculed quite regularly by his alcoholic father, he broke down and sobbed when prison officials informed him of his father’s death, but he showed no remorse when discussing the torturous deaths of his many victims. He confessed that he enjoyed the orgasm he experienced at the moment of strangulation.

Gacy committed his first murder in 1972 and was executed in May of 1994. It was lust gone mad inside the brain of a depraved, self consumed, melancholic pedophile and what drove him to ruin was the suffering he endured under his abusive, name-calling, alcoholic father. Gacy murdered his victims in order to achieve orgasm, a fleeting sensation of sexual power that he had become addicted to.

The Exploiter

Next on the list of play actors in the family is the exploiter or opportunist. These people are easily recognised as the cutthroats of the business world and they tend to rise to the top of their professions by stepping on other people. As these children grow up in their miserable dysfunctional, family settings, they learn the art of watching and waiting for each and every opportunity that may arise wherein they can use a situation or person towards their own advantage.

The exploiter is so manipulative that he or she can even mastermind a situation to play out wherein people get hurt or damaged in some way, but the end result is payload for the mastermind and they really don’t care if the other players get wounded along the way.

If you have worked alongside an exploiter, you may find that your efforts and achievements go unrewarded for the simple reason that your co-worker has taken credit for them. An exploiter is always looking for the main chance. He or she is constantly on the alert, waiting for a hapless victim to walk into his or her arena where it is a foregone conclusion that the exploiter will win every round. This brings us to Britain’s worst ever serial killer, the British, Victorian angel maker, Amelia Dyer.

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer (1837-1896)

Amelia Elizabeth Dyer was responsible for the murders of approximately two to four hundred new born babies and the discovery of these murders sent multiple shock waves throughout nineteenth century England. The baby murders were committed for the sole purpose of financial gain. They were murdered because there weren’t enough potential, adoptive parents to go around, and they were murdered because it was less expensive to starve a baby to death than it was to keep it alive.

To Amelia Dyer this was a business, it was the way that she earned enough income to support herself, and it was a lucrative business because there were lots of unwanted babies in nineteenth century England.

Dyer advertised her services to unwed women who found themselves pregnant with nowhere to go. These pregnant women paid the baby killer for room and board until after the baby was born, and since most of these women were the working class, poor of England, they always had to return to the work force minus their babies in order to survive.

For an extra fee, Amelia Dyer provided additional care for the infants until they could be farmed out. Melancholics are incredibly good actors; they are adept at portraying themselves as kind and caring people, but in the case of Amelia Dyer she was really an unkind, cold natured exploiter. Many so-called administering angels are really quite nasty people and often have ulterior motives, i.e. financial gain, power over others or they need a victim to abuse and feel superior to.

After the mothers departed from Amelia Dyer’s boarding house, the uncaring, icy, cold natured woman doped the babies with an opium-laced syrup in order to keep them subdued, and then she left them to die of starvation.

After a while, the melancholic, baby killer decided that this murder method was taking too long so she resorted to smothering the infants because smothering was very fast and she didn’t even have to waste money on dope for them. This was total exploitation of desperate, unwed mothers and it was also exploitation of helpless, dependant infants. It is reported that this forty year old creature of death also pawned the baby clothing that the mothers had provided, just to make a little extra money on the side. It was just as easy to murder naked babies as it was to murder clothed babies.

Dyer was the youngest of five children and she did not grow up in poverty. She was educated, grew up somewhat pampered and actually expressed a great love of literature and poetry. Lots of people love literature and poetry but Melancholics in particular are known to have a greater than normal, passionate love for literature and poetry. This is their way of connecting to people at an ethereal level, way above the level they believe, of ordinary mortals who don’t have the same, profound sensitivity to beautiful prose. In a strange way they are correct. Melancholics do have a natural appreciation for the finer things in life and many of the world’s greatest Bards had melancholic temperaments.

As the result of a typhus infection, Amelia Dyer’s mother became mentally ill and thereafter was subject to fits of lunacy. The pampering of the only daughter in the family stopped, and while she was still a child, Amelia was tasked with nursing and caring for her lunatic mother until the day her mother died.

Although she was forced to act as a caretaker, Amelia Dyer functioned better as an exploiter although her care taking experience did in the end serve her well. Later in life, in order to try and get out of jail, Dyer used her experience as caretaker to her lunatic mother to mimic lunacy in herself and she did eventually get out of jail.

Amelia Dyer was an addict. She was addicted to Laudanum, a tincture of opium which was the same substance that she administered to those unfortunate enough to be placed in her child care centre. She signed a confession pleading insanity but was hanged in June of 1987. It is interesting to note that Amelia Dyer did not murder her own baby daughter.

From studying her facial expression in old police photos, and from the established accounts of her cold hearted, utterly depraved, self serving trade in babies, it seems to be the case that Amelia Dyer did indeed have a melancholic temperament.

The Golden Child

Occasionally some dysfunctional families manage to produce a golden child, a hero or an overachiever who provides self worth for her or himself and the family. These children have a mission in life and that mission is to bring the dysfunctional family up out of the doldrums, but the mission usually fails. In rare cases the overachiever is sometimes willing to provide monetary relief to the defunct underachievers left behind, but the overachiever soon gets tired of supporting the family. In the mind of this golden child the family is supposed to love and respect him or her, and that is something that the other family members will not do.

The parts that are psychologically assigned to each child in the family continue on throughout adulthood and many of these golden children can sometimes rise to great heights of success in society. More often than not a golden child will manage to keep on the straight and narrow path throughout life, but in rare cases the golden child can descend into deep depravity as in the case of David Russell Williams, a former Colonel in the Canadian Air force.

David Russell Williams (Born 1963)

Colonel David Russel Williams was a highly decorated, accomplished, military pilot who used to be in charge of one of Canada’s largest and busiest military airbases.

Russell Williams as he was called, was born to English parents who emigrated to Canada and then subsequently divorced each other when Williams was only six years old. But in his youth, Russell Williams who had a melancholic temperament, did not seem to suffer any negative repercussions at all as a result of his parents’ divorce. He was able to shrug it off and he went on to become an accomplished student earning a degree in economics and political science. This seemingly, well rounded, young man had many interests, photography being one of them. Williams was also an outdoor man who liked to go fishing, play golf and keep physically fit by jogging almost daily.

Russell Williams was at one time described as a shining, bright star of the Canadian military but nobody knew then that he was using his photographic skills in order to take lurid photos of his victims, his trophies, and also photos of himself dressed in women’s underwear. Nobody knew then that he used his daily jogs for the purpose of tracking down potential new victims to star in his ritualistic rapes and fantasies.

Williams’s criminal activity started out with breaking and entering then he graduated into forcible confinement and rape. After a while the rapes escalated into both rape and murder. He used to break in to houses in order to steal underwear from young girls, the youngest being only nine years old. He also stole lingerie from the homes of those young women whom he had been stalking.

After his capture and confession, police found the stolen items of underwear hidden in an house in Ottawa that Williams shared with his wife. He was a melancholic perfectionist and as a perfectionist everything had to be in order, i.e. the stolen items were neatly categorised, catalogued and carefully lined up in neat military fashion.

Sometimes Williams lay down on the beds of those he stole from, dressed in the bras and underpants that he planned to take with him when he left, and then he masturbated as he took photographs of himself performing the dirty deed. Altogether there were ninety two fetish related burglaries committed by the Canadian Colonel.

After the fetish related burglaries escalated into non-penetrational, sexual assaults, David Russell Williams used his camera to take thousands of photographs of not only himself but all of his victims as well. The terrified victims were ordered to dress in underwear and pose in a sensual manner so that Williams had trophies to take home with him. Williams was a master of control. It was power over women that he was seeking and the underlying force in him was rage that was directed against young, attractive women who reminded him of his young mother when he was a child.

The two murders that he committed were instrumental in his capture and he was sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty five years before being eligible for parole. When asked the question why, Williams replied, “I don’t know why and at this stage it really doesn’t matter why.”

It definitely matters. We want to know the reason why, so that intervention techniques can move into the twenty first century and help to prevent future atrocities like these from happening. Life is short and it goes by quickly. Is twenty five years imprisonment enough for such a degenerate cad? This self serving melancholic pariah still receives his $60,000 a year pension from the Canadian military.

Not much is known about Williams’s childhood and he doesn’t fit the category of abandoned child even if he spent some of his high school years at a boarding school. In actual fact it was Williams who cast off his twice divorced mother and younger brother, for reasons unknown. But since the basic reason for casting off any family member is either fear or anger, most likely he cast off his family in anger, and the clue to the reason for his anger resides in his fetish for dressing in women’s underwear.

Williams was a transvestite and this proclivity towards dressing like a woman was a gigantic threat to his career. The Canadian Colonel’s public image was that of a macho man. He was a man who was supposed to exemplify the heights of manhood. He was supposed to be strong, vital, dependable and courageous.

According to reports, Williams’s mother was a stunningly beautiful woman and Williams was obviously trying to emulate his beautiful mother. The victims who were all young and attractive, were proxies for his mother and he enjoyed watching them suffer because he had an Oedipus complex that had gone to extremes.

An Oedipus complex happens when a child becomes fixated on the parent of the opposite sex. Williams wanted to emulate his mother because he loved the female side of her, but he also hated her and wanted to punish her at the same time.

It is possible that Williams fantasised often about having sex with his mother and that was what he was doing when he dressed up in lingerie in order to make himself look like a woman. When he masturbated he was having sex with himself but he was also using himself as a stand-in proxy for his mother. This was a case where both male and female sexual roles were being played out using just one flesh body that was his own.

Once again the pendulum of a Melancholic was swinging, swinging back and fro from the north pole to the south pole but never resting at the middle. Psychiatrists viewed Williams as an enigma. He wasn’t typical of an abused child and even though his mother was twice divorced, there had been some positive male input in Williams’s life. It didn’t seem as if he grew up in a dysfunctional family but that’s because he was a golden child, and who would ever have guessed that a family that could produce a high achiever like himself could ever be labelled dysfunctional. In televised, police, interrogation interviews Williams exhibited the deliberate, slowed down, speech patterns and deliberate, unemotional, facial expressions of a Melancholic man who was very much in control.

The Shadow

The shadow or the lost child has a particularly tough time growing up in a dysfunctional family. The shadow develops a deep seated fear of all authority figures due to having been bullied not only by the parents but by the other siblings as well. Although he or she tries very hard to become invisible, necessity forces the lost child to reappear out of the shadows in order to get sustenance and to have a place to sleep.

On the other hand a shadow child can also evolve in a family where there is just total neglect and not very much bullying; but there is little in the way of nurturing, and the child just seems to fall through the cracks. Nobody is there to provide any kind of emotional support and a child growing up in this kind of environment can evolve into a monster just like Mary Bell.

There are only two human emotions, one is fear and the other is love. Anger is an offshoot of fear; it rears its ugly head in the oddest ways and sometimes it is difficult to tell what emotion is dominant in those who have melancholic or phlegmatic temperaments because their ability to control their speech and stay silent covers a multitude of sins.

A fearful, shadow child will grow up to become a fearful, angry adult, albeit a silent, fearful, angry adult. It is even possible for those with choleric and sanguine temperaments to grow up as silent, fearful but angry adults because they have learned as children that it is safer to be silent around adults than to express any vocal complaints. But Cholerics and Sanguines will always have angry outbursts amidst their silences because they do not have the same ability to control their speech as the other two types.

The shadow tends to be a runaway and the shadow will run away from conflict or, if running away becomes impossible, the shadow will push away those people in adult life who seem to threaten his or her existence. Someone who is a natural born extrovert but who functions like a shadow inside the family unit, can easily change into an introvert over time.

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (1960-1994)

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was an American serial murderer who was known as the Milwaukee cannibal. He was a melancholic introvert and he grew up lonely, solitary and silent. At school he was noted for being shy, quiet and reserved and was generally viewed by the other students as an outcast, a creepy person whom they didn’t want to get too close to.

Dahmer was neglected by his parents who eventually divorced. This serial murderer led a solitary existence and he started self medicating with alcohol at an early age, much like his mother who self medicated with prescription drugs.

Dahmer committed his first murder at the age of eighteen although he confessed that he first considered committing murder two years earlier. After this first murder he masturbated over the naked corpse. Later on in life and after his arrest, Dahmer confided to the authorities that didn’t like having sex with live, naked boys because as he so blithely reported, “They moved too much.”

Dahmer wanted his sexual partners to be motionless therefore at a certain junction in his life he decided to render them motionless the way he knew best. The youths were first drugged and then after a sex act was performed on the drugged body, Dahmer murdered them using a strangulation method.

This repulsive cannibal who ate some of the victims’ body parts told authorities that he fantasized about being in control so that he could have dominance over his homosexual lovers, but the only way he could achieve this was to kill them. He viewed human bodies as objects of pleasure not as living, breathing people who were entitled to live out their lives anyway they saw fit.

This notorious melancholic, American serial murderer who also had a history of indecent exposure to women and children, fantasized about having sex with corpses, and eventually he developed into a full blown necrophile. Not content with being able to have sex with corpses, Dahmer cut up the bodies, stripped them of their flesh, masturbated into their skulls and then he preserved some of the body parts, especially the genitals, in acetone. Worst of all, he confessed to the police that he had eaten some of the body parts including hearts, livers, biceps and thighs.

Dahmer knew the reason for his gross indecency, he knew why he kept body parts all around him and he knew why he had eaten his victims. He was lonely and he wanted to have people around him but he just couldn’t stand to be in the company of live people so he kept company with dead ones.

It was all about what Jeffrey Dahmer wanted. It was all about what Jeffrey Dahmer needed and it was all about his lust, power, dominance and control. Dahmer was no shrinking violet; he was a devious, manipulative, self serving, self consumed, melancholic necrophile and he loved himself so much that he felt he deserved to have his human comfort any way he chose.

It is interesting to note that at the moment of capture, Dahmer said, “For what I did I should be dead.” Did that mean that he owned his crimes? No. He blamed his own incessant desire for these crimes as if that desire was a separate entity from himself. In January of 1992 he pleaded guilty but insane, to fifteen counts of murder. At the moment of his capture Jeffrey Dahmer should have said, “For what I did I should be strangled and my corpse should be thrown to the wild dogs.”

One prosecution, mental health expert described Dahmer as calculating and cunning, but another mental health expert for the defense, described him as friendly, courteous, humorous and charming and many people would suppose that one of these experts had to be wrong. But the experts were not wrong. A melancholic serial murderer can exhibit all of these characteristics because they can so easily travel from one end of the melancholic spectrum to the other depending on whom they are conversing with.

Dahmer was sentenced to sixteen consecutive life sentences and spent the first year in solitary confinement due to fears for his safety. Even prison inmates shuddered at the thought of sharing space with a necrophile who also practiced cannibalism. One of these prison inmates did eventually bludgeon Jeffrey Dahmer to death.

Cannibalism

Cannibalism has always reared its ugly head in the histories of primitive cultures around the globe, and it is believed that the practice of eating one’s enemies is still happening today in some African countries. But we have one famous account of cannibalism that took place in modern times. In October of 1972, Uruguayan Air Force, flight number 571 crashed in the Andes mountains. Faced with starvation, sixteen survivors of the crash decided to eat the dead bodies of the other passengers, bodies that had been preserved by the freezing snow.

It is interesting to note that society did not condemn these acts of cannibalism because cannibalism is deemed by many to be acceptable for the purpose of survival. We cannot judge unless we have at one time been in the same situation where the choice was to either eat human flesh or starve to death.

Cannibalism is outlawed in most countries and in the United States the crime of cannibalism is viewed as desecration of a corpse. In the case of Jeffery Dahmer his motive for eating human flash was not to prevent starvation, it was to give him utter and complete dominance over the mind, body and soul of his victims.