Stop the Christie Murder: ABC Murders and More About Serial Killers and Profiling

As I have mentioned elsewhere, serial killers are difficult to catch. Recent events have brought home to me that although human beings are good at adjusting to reality, they expect human behavior to follow patterns/expectations. Those expectations can be frustrating. I suspect they also keep people stable and functional. 

We truly don't imagine the unimaginable on a regular basis! In fact, according to Benedict Carey, our brains are wired to forget things. We can only handle so much information and stimuli at once. And information without context or story is quickly forgotten or buried. 

Outlying behavior--sociopathic behavior--is not something people quickly recognized. 

*Spoilers*

Of course, with The ABC Murders, the entire point is that the "true" murder is hiding within a series of other murders. I don't entirely buy into this plot. The same human quality that keeps us from easily recognizing sociopathic behavior, keeps people from planning multiple murders to disguise a single murder. 

However, Christie does a fantastic job--years before FBI members tried to figure out how psychopaths' brains work--of creating a bad guy who is basically a serial killer at heart. That is, the bad guy may be a trifle too organized and cunning but he leaves the impression that he quite enjoyed the extra killings and might even have gone on to do more (he only messed up the last because he was becoming "disorganized" or panicking). 

What serial killer-like qualities does he have?

• He portrays zero remorse. 
• He inserts himself into the investigation. 
  
• He has an outsized opinion of his abilities (as mentioned elsewhere, serial killers aren't geniuses; they are simply trading on the human inability to imagine such awfulness). 
• He doesn't use a consistent approach to his killings but with the first two killings, he does seem to have a "type"--vulnerable woman who appear independent and are estranged from their significant others. 
• He settles on a method of killing when--as Christie often points out--a simple household accident would do the trick. 
• He can appear quite charming (as I mention with Ted Bundy, "charming" isn't an automatic with serial killers nor does it work like some kind of magic trick, but it is a classic characteristic). 

My investigators are no better than anyone else at recognizing sociopathy. However, with some training, they might be more suspicious of the bad guy than the police--or at least as  suspicious as Poirot. They might, consequently, be able to trail him and prevent the final killing. 

Note: I'm not a huge fan of profiling. If one reads Douglas's books, what becomes apparent is not the profiling but Douglas's willingness to try all kinds of approaches and investigation techniques alongside local law enforcement to catch the bad guys. That is, it is Douglas's outside-the-box thinking that makes the difference.

However, I do think that generation of profilers should be credited for upending an idea that was quite popular in the 1980s. I remember when parole was still considered some kind of magic cure by idealists, which led to a guy (I know his name, but I don't think evil smug people should be acknowledged) being released from prison because a bunch of New York intelligentsia were so impressed by his writing. He killed a young aspiring actor, Richard Adan, within a month. 

Profilers demonstrated how a socipathic personality can lie without regret, charm without blinking, produce all kinds of "oh, woe is me" reasons, swear to improve, and even--within the confines of the prison--behave well. Douglas comments that (1) he quite liked some of the serial killers he and others interviewed; (2) the FBI interviewers learned to attend these interviews armed with facts because the killers would lie their heads off; (3) good behavior in prison means absolutely nothing on the outside where real life, real chance, real challenges show up.

This type of common-sense profiling might have saved Richard Adan's life.