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.