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three words seemed to characterize the motivations of every one of our offenders: Manipulation. Domination. Control.
They are all predators, and all grew up without forming trusting bonds with other human beings during their formative years.
On one of his court-mandated visits to a state psychiatrist following his release from Atascadero, Ed Kemper had the head of his latest victim, a fifteen-year-old girl, in the trunk of his car. During that particular interview, the psychiatrist concluded he was no longer a threat to himself or others and recommended that his juvenile record be sealed. That’s why I don’t trust self-reporting.
We were interested in how behavior indicates criminal intent and perpetration, and how that behavior correlated to the thinking of the perpetrator right before, during, and after the commission of the crime.
But I always start from the same premise, one that I taught throughout my years with the FBI: Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
One of the hallmarks of narcissistic, borderline, and sociopathic personalities is the unwillingness to assume personal responsibility for anything. It is always someone else’s fault.
I cited the case of Arthur Shawcross, known as the Genesee River Killer, in Rochester, New York. He killed two children—a boy and a girl. He was sentenced to twenty-five years to life and was paroled on good behavior after fifteen years. Then he started targeting prostitutes and murdered twelve women before he was caught. The details changed and so did the victims, but his prey still consisted of vulnerable, easy-to-approach individuals. I didn’t want to see a repeat of Shawcross here.
In our research, there is a strong correlation between domineering mothers and men who grow up to be predators. Though the vast majority of those with such mothers do not grow up to be offenders,
of those who do, the domineering mother constitutes a significant influencing factor.
Bill is a composite of three actual serial killers—Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, and Gary Heidnick, all of whom we studied in great detail at Quantico.
JOSEPH KONDRO WAS BORN MAY 19, 1959, IN MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN, TO A NATIVE American mother from the Chippewa tribe who already had six children and didn’t feel she could care for another. She gave him up at birth and he was adopted by John and Eleanor Kondro, a white couple in Iron River, Michigan, where he grew up, before moving to Castle Rock, Washington. John was an aluminum worker for Reynolds Metals. Kondro later said his parents considered adopting him a mistake.
On the afternoon of May 15, 1985, just before Kondro’s twenty-sixth birthday, eight-year-old Rima Danette Traxler was on her way home from St. Helens Elementary School in Longview, Washington, a city of about 35,000 on the Columbia River in Cowlitz County.
Hemlock Store for a cup of coffee, and then drove out to Marthaller’s Log Yard to look for a job.
When the detective asked if Yolanda had ever been in a car with Kondro before that, she said he had taken her, Kara, and his daughter Courtney swimming and camping along the Toutle River, up Interstate Highway 5. It had been cold, and they’d stayed only one night.
think if a young boy already has certain kinds of psychological issues or incipient antisocial personality disorder, the knowledge that he has been given up or “rejected” by his biological parents can fuel feelings of hostility, authority conflict, and negative behaviors.
One of the things that is interesting and pretty consistent among serial predators is that two emotional concepts are constantly warring within them. One is a feeling of grandiosity and entitlement. The other is a deep-seated and pervasive sense of inferiority and inadequacy.
Predators may look and sound and often act like we do, but they don’t think like we do. Their logical process is completely different.
Third, Kondro reaffirms for us that a casually violent personality—one capable of ripping a phone out of the wall, breaking household objects in a fit of rage, or leading a domestic partner to seek a restraining order—is by definition capable of a heightened or intensified level of violence. Because as we say, “Behavior reflects personality.”
already been
