Serial Experiments Quotes

Behavior reflects personality. The best indicator of future violence is past violence. To understand the "artist," you must study his "art." The crime must be evaluated in its totality. There is no substitute for experience, and if you want to understand the criminal mind, you must go directly to the source and learn to decipher what he tells you. And, above all: Why + How = Who.

pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity—the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he’s got her.

If you can not grasp the consciousness-altering experience that real mastery of these disciplines proposes, of what value is your participation?

showed him some of the gruesome crime-scene photos we worked with every day. I let him experience recordings made by killers while they were torturing their victims. I made him listen to one of two teenage girls in Los Angeles being tortured to death in the back of a van by two thrill-seeking killers who had recently been let out of prison. Glenn wept as his listened to the tapes. He said to me, “I had no idea there were people out there who could do anything like this.” An intelligent, compassionate father with two girls of his own, Glenn said that after seeing and hearing what he did in my office, he could no longer oppose the death penalty: “The experience in Quantico changed my mind about that for all time.

The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don't remember the events of the book very well--or even all the principal characters. But mostly the 'portrait of a truly beautiful person' that dostoevsky supposedly set out to write in that book. And I remember how Myshkin seemed so simple when I began the book, but by the end, I realized how I didn't understand him at all. the things he did. Maybe when I read it again it will be different. But the plot of these dostoevsky books can hold such twists and turns for the first-time reader-- I guess that's b/c he was writing most of these books as serials that had to have cliffhangers and such. But I make marks in my books, mostly at parts where I see the author's philosophical points standing in the most stark relief. My copy of Moby Dick is positively full of these marks. The Idiot, I find has a few... Part 3, Section 5. The sickly Ippolit is reading from his 'Explanation' or whatever its called. He says his convictions are not tied to him being condemned to death. It's important for him to describe, of happiness: "you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it." That it's the process of life--not the end or accomplished goals in it--that matter. Well. Easier said than lived! Part 3, Section 6. more of Ippolit talking--about a christian mindset. He references Jesus's parable of The Word as seeds that grow in men, couched in a description of how people are interrelated over time; its a picture of a multiplicity. Later in this section, he relates looking at a painting of Christ being taken down from the cross, at Rogozhin's house. The painting produced in him an intricate metaphor of despair over death "in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of this Being." The way Ippolit's ideas are configured, here, reminds me of the writings of Gilles Deleuze. And the phrasing just sort of remidns me of the way everyone feels--many people feel crushed by the incomprehensible machine, in life. Many people feel martyred in their very minor ways. And it makes me think of the concept that a narrative religion like Christianity uniquely allows for a kind of socialized or externalized, shared experience of subjectivity. Like, we all know the story of this man--and it feels like our own stories at the same time. Part 4, Section 7. Myshkin's excitement (leading to a seizure) among the Epanchin's dignitary guests when he talks about what the nobility needs to become ("servants in order to be leaders"). I'm drawn to things like this because it's affirming, I guess, for me: "it really is true that we're absurd, that we're shallow, have bad habits, that we're bored, that we don't know how to look at things, that we can't understand; we're all like that." And of course he finds a way to make that into a good thing. which, it's pointed out by scholars, is very important to Dostoevsky philosophy--don't deny the earthly passions and problems in yourself, but accept them and incorporate them into your whole person. Me, I'm still working on that one.

We believe that, despite a possibly cruel temperament and an impetuous nature that she followed throughout her life, Madame Delphine Macarty Lopez Blanque Lalaurie was not a serial killer, a sexual sadist or a perpetrator of bizarre medical experiments. She was a willful, spoiled, beautiful Creole socialite whose temper led her down the path of infamy.

She didn’t die for lack of trying; she died because cancer is a serial killer.

The women I write about have to fight for what they want, sometimes against forceful odds It's a kinetic experience, an intense ride.

Essentially all serial offenders experience trauma in childhood that leaves them unable to form normal emotional and psychological connections with other humans.

Just about everyone I've ever interviewed has told me that by doing something or other--recovering from cancer, climbing a mountain, playing the part of a serial killer in a movie--they have learned something about themselves. And I always nod and smile thoughtfully, when really I want to pin them down: What did you learn from the cancer, actually? That you don't like being sick? That you don't want to die? That wigs make your scalp itch? Come on, be specific. I suspect it's something they tell themselves in order to turn the experience into something that might appear valuable, rather than a complete and utter waste of time. In the last few months, I have been to prison, lost every last molecule of self-respect, become estranged from my children, and thought very seriously about killing myself. I mean, that little lot has got to be the psychological equivalent of cancer, right? And it's certainly a bigger deal than acting in a bloody film. So how come I've learned absolutley bugger all? What was I supposed to learn? I've found out that prison and poverty aren't really me. But, you know, I could have had a wild stab in the dark about both of those things beforehand. Call me literal-minded, but I suspect people might learn more about themselves if they didn't get cancer. They'd have more time, and a lot more energy.

Small wins do not combine in a neat, linear, serial form, with each step being a demonstrable step closer to some predetermined goal,” wrote Karl Weick, a prominent organizational psychologist. “More common is the circumstance where small wins are scattered … like miniature experiments that test implicit theories about resistance and opportunity and uncover both resources and barriers that were invisible before the situation was stirred up.

Traditionally, most murders and violent crimes were relatively easy for law enforcement officials to comprehend. They resulted from critically exaggerated manifestations of feelings we all experience: anger, greed, jealousy, profit, revenge. Once this emotional problem was taken care of, the crime or crime spree would end. Someone would be dead, but that was that and the police generally knew who and what they were looking for. But a new type of violent criminal has surfaced in recent years—the serial offender, who often doesn't stop until he is caught or killed, who learns by experience and who tends to get better and better at what he does, constantly perfecting his scenario from one crime to the next. I say "surfaced" because, to some degree, he was probably with us all along, going back long before 1880s London and Jack the Ripper, generally considered the first modern serial killer. And I say "he" because, for reasons we'll get into a little later, virtually all real serial killers are male.

If you’re asking the schools to be the answer, you’re also asking a lot. If you take a kid from a bad background and expect the overburdened teachers to turn him around in seven hours a day, it might or might not happen. What about the other seventeen hours in a day? People often ask us if, through our research and experience, we can now predict which children are likely to become dangerous in later life. Roy Hazelwood’s answer is, “Sure. But so can any good elementary school teacher.” And if we can get them treatment early enough and intensively enough, it might make a difference. A significant role-model adult during the formative years can make a world of difference. Bill Tafoya, the special agent who served as our “futurist” at Quantico, advocated a minimum of a ten-year commitment of money and resources on the magnitude of what we sent into the Persian Gulf. He calls for a wide-scale reinstatement of Project Head Start, one of the most effective long-term, anticrime programs in history. He doesn’t think more police are the answer, but he would bring in “an army of social workers” to provide assistance for battered women, homeless families with children, to find good foster homes. And he would back it all up with tax incentive programs. I’m not sure this is the total answer, but it would certainly be an important start. Because the sad fact is, the shrinks can battle all they want, and my people and I can use psychology and behavioral science to help catch the criminals, but by the time we get to use our stuff, the severe damage has already been done.

...for Taggart, learning the reality of abortion for the first time was shocking. “Even if it’s done right, it’s barbaric,” he told us. “I’m no holy roller, but if you see the way they actually have to do it, it’s barbaric.” The learning experience was one shared by Wechsler, Pescatore, Wood, and the rest of the team.

The past, present and future are not three different places, they are a single happening, here and now. When you live this moment profoundly, you experience time not serially but simultaneously not as three , but one. You then wake up to the fact that mystics have known since the dawn of time, that this moment is eternity.

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.

it is not exact or relevant to say “I experience” or “I think.” “It” experiences or is experienced, “it” thinks or is thought, is a juster phrase. Experience, a serial course of affairs with their own characteristic properties and relationships, occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves.

Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.

One final note here: you’ve probably noticed that whenever I mention serial killers, I always refer to them as “he.” This isn’t just a matter of form or syntactical convenience. For reasons we only partially understand, virtually all multiple killers are male. There’s been a lot of research and speculation into it. Part of it is probably as simple as the fact that people with higher levels of testosterone (i.e., men) tend to be more aggressive than people with lower levels (i.e., women). On a psychological level, our research seems to show that while men from abusive backgrounds often come out of the experience hostile and abusive to others, women from similar backgrounds tend to direct the rage and abusiveness inward and punish themselves rather than others. While a man might kill, hurt, or rape others as a way of dealing with his rage, a woman is more likely to channel it into something that would hurt primarily herself, such as drug or alcohol abuse, prostitution, or suicide attempts. I can’t think of a single case of a woman acting out a sexualized murder on her own. The one exception to this generality, the one place we do occasionally see women involved in multiple murders, is in a hospital or nursing home situation. A woman is unlikely to kill repeatedly with a gun or knife. It does happen with something “clean” like drugs. These often fall into the category of either “mercy homicide,” in which the killer believes he or she is relieving great suffering, or the “hero homicide,” in which the death is the unintentional result of causing the victim distress so he can be revived by the offender, who is then declared a hero. And, of course, we’ve all been horrified by the cases of mothers, such as the highly publicized Susan Smith case in South Carolina, killing their own children. There is generally a particular set of motivations for this most unnatural of all crimes, which we’ll get into later on. But for the most part, the profile of the serial killer or repeat violent offender begins with “male.” Without that designation, my colleagues and I would all be happily out of a job.

According to a 2000 New York Times study of 100 "rampage" mass murders, where 425 people were killed and 510 injured, the killers: 1. Often have serious mental health issues 2. Are not usually motivated by exposure to videos, movies, or television 3. Are not using alcohol or other drugs at the time of the attacks 4. Are often unemployed 5. Are sometimes female 6. Are not usually Satanists or racists 7. Are most often white males although a few are Asian or African American 8. Sometimes have college degrees or some years of college 9. Often have military experience 10. Give lots of pre-attack warning signals 11. Often carry semiautomatic weapons obtained legally 12. Often do no attempt escape 13. Half commit suicide or are killed by others 14. Most have a death wish (Fessenden, 2000)

In redemption we reconcile things to the way they were supposed to be. We become dependent and give up our independent stance before God and others. We give up trying to control things we cannot control and yield to and trust God’s control. Also, we regain control of what we were created to control in the first place, which is ourselves. We regain the fruit of “self-control.” We give up the role of playing judge with ourselves and others by giving up judgmentalism, condemnation, wrath, shaming, and so on so that we are free to experience ourselves and others as we really are. So, by not being God, we are free to be who we truly are and allow others to be who they truly are as well. We stop redesigning life and making new rules and instead live the life God designed us to live. For example, God designed marriage, but humans rewrite the rules to make cohabitation or serial monogamy a new design with disastrous consequences. In redemption we begin to do it God’s way.

I ASSURE you that I am the book of fate. Questions are my enemies. For my questions explode! Answers leap up like a frightened flock, blackening the sky of my inescapable memories. Not one answer, not one suffices. What prisms flash when I enter the terrible field of my past. I am a chip of shattered flint enclosed in a box. The box gyrates and quakes. I am tossed about in a storm of mysteries. And when the box opens, I return to this presence like a stranger in a primitive land. Slowly (slowly, I say) I relearn my name. But that is not to know myself! This person of my name, this Leto who is the second of that calling, finds other voices in his mind, other names and other places. Oh, I promise you (as I have been promised) that I answer to but a single name. If you say, "Leto," I respond. Sufferance makes this true, sufferance and one thing more: I hold the threads! All of them are mine. Let me but imagine a topic say... men who have died by the sword-and I have them in all of their gore, every image intact, every moan, every grimace. Joys of motherhood, I think, and the birthing beds are mine. Serial baby smiles and the sweet cooings of new generations. The first walkings of the toddlers and the first victories of youths brought forth for me to share. They tumble one upon another until I can see little else but sameness and repetition. "Keep it all intact," I warn myself. Who can deny the value of such experiences, the worth of learning through which I view each new instant? Ahhh, but it's the past. Don't you understand? It's only the past!

Two other highly vocal FMSF Advisory Board members are Dr Elizabeth Loftus and Professor Richard Ofshe. Loftus is a respected academic psychologist whose much quoted laboratory experiment of successfully implanting a fictitious childhood memory of being lost in a shopping mall is frequently used to defend the false memory syndrome argument. In the experiment, older family members persuaded younger ones of the (supposedly) never real event. However, Loftus herself says that being lost, which almost everyone has experienced, is in no way similar to being abused. Jennifer Freyd comments on the shopping mall experiment in Betrayal Trauma (1996): “If this demonstration proves to hold up under replication it suggests both that therapists can induce false memories and, even more directly, that older family members play a powerful role in defining reality for dependent younger family members." (p. 104). Elizabeth Loftus herself was sexually abused as a child by a male babysitter and admits to blacking the perpetrator out of her memory, although she never forgot the incident. In her autobiography, Witness for the Defence, she talks of experiencing flashbacks of this abusive incident on occasion in court in 1985 (Loftus &Ketcham, 1991, p.149) In her teens, having been told by an uncle that she had found her mother's drowned body, she then started to visualize the scene. Her brother later told her that she had not found the body. Dr Loftus's successful academic career has run parallel to her even more high profile career as an expert witness in court, for the defence of those accused of rape, murder, and child abuse. She is described in her own book as the expert who puts memory on trial, sometimes with frightening implications. She used her theories on the unreliability of memory to cast doubt, in 1975, on the testimony of the only eyewitness left alive who could identify Ted Bundy, the all American boy who was one of America's worst serial rapists and killers (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991, pp. 61-91). Not withstanding Dr Loftus's arguments, the judge kept Bundy in prison. Bundy was eventually tried, convicted and executed.

Know Yourself: Are You a Freezer, Flyer, or Fighter? How avoidance coping manifests for you will depend on what your dominant response type is when you’re facing something you’d rather avoid. There are three possible responses: freezing, fleeing, or fighting. We’ve evolved these reactions because they’re useful for encounters with predators. Like other animals, when we encounter a predator, we’re wired to freeze to avoid provoking attention, run away, or fight. Most people are prone to one of the three responses more so than the other two. Therefore, you can think of yourself as having a “type,” like a personality type. Identify your type using the descriptions in the paragraphs that follow. Bear in mind that your type is just your most dominant pattern. Sometimes you’ll respond in one of the other two ways. Freezers virtually freeze when they don’t want to do something. They don’t move forward or backward; they just stop in their tracks. If a coworker or loved one nags a freezer to do something the freezer doesn’t want to do, the freezer will tend not to answer. Freezers may be prone to stonewalling in relationships, which is a term used to describe when people flat-out refuse to discuss certain topics that their partner wants to talk about, such as a decision to have another baby or move to a new home. Flyers are people who are prone to fleeing when they don’t want to do something. They might physically leave the house if a relationship argument gets too tense and they’d rather not continue the discussion. Flyers can be prone to serial relationships because they’d rather escape than work through tricky issues. When flyers want to avoid doing something, they tend to busy themselves with too much activity as a way to justify their avoidance. For example, instead of dealing with their own issues, flyers may overfill their children’s schedules so that they’re always on the run, taking their kids from activity to activity. Fighters tend to respond to anxiety by working harder. Fighters are the anxiety type that is least prone to avoidance coping: however, they still do it in their own way. When fighters have something that they’d rather not deal with, they will often work themselves into the ground but avoid dealing with the crux of the problem. When a strategy isn’t working, fighters don’t like to admit it and will keep hammering away. They tend to avoid getting the outside input they need to move forward. They may avoid acting on others’ advice if doing so is anxiety provoking, even when deep down they know that taking the advice is necessary. Instead, they will keep trying things their own way. A person’s dominant anxiety type—freezer, flyer, or fighter—will often be consistent for both work and personal relationships, but not always. Experiment: Once you’ve identified your type, think about a situation you’re facing currently in which you’re acting to type. What’s an alternative coping strategy you could try? For example, your spouse is nagging you to do a task involving the computer. You feel anxious about it due to your general lack of confidence with all things computer related. If you’re a freezer, you’d normally just avoid answering when asked when you’re going to do the task. How could you change your reaction?

As she explained to her students, patients often awoke from very bad illnesses or cardiac arrests, talking about how they had been floating over their bodies. “Mm-hmmm,” Norma would reply, sometimes thinking, Yeah, yeah, I know, you were on the ceiling. Such stories were recounted so frequently that they hardly jolted medical personnel. Norma at the time had mostly chalked it up to some kind of drug reaction or brain malfunction, something like that. “No, really,” said a woman who’d recently come out of a coma. “I can prove it.” The woman had been in a car accident and been pronounced dead on arrival when she was brought into the emergency room. Medical students and interns had begun working on her and managed to get her heartbeat going, but then she had coded again. They’d kept on trying, jump-starting her heart again, this time stabilizing it. She’d remained in a coma for months, unresponsive. Then one day she awoke, talking about the brilliant light and how she remembered floating over her body. Norma thought she could have been dreaming about all kinds of things in those months when she was unconscious. But the woman told them she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and had a habit of memorizing numbers. While she was floating above her body, she had read the serial number on top of the respirator machine. And she remembered it. Norma looked at the machine. It was big and clunky, and this one stood about seven feet high. There was no way to see on top of the machine without a stepladder. “Okay, what’s the number?” Another nurse took out a piece of paper to jot it down. The woman rattled off twelve digits. A few days later, the nurses called maintenance to take the ventilator machine out of the room. The woman had recovered so well, she no longer needed it. When the worker arrived, the nurses asked if he wouldn’t mind climbing to the top to see if there was a serial number up there. He gave them a puzzled look and grabbed his ladder. When he made it up there, he told them that indeed there was a serial number. The nurses looked at each other. Could he read it to them? Norma watched him brush off a layer of dust to get a better look. He read the number. It was twelve digits long: the exact number that the woman had recited. The professor would later come to find out that her patient’s story was not unique. One of Norma’s colleagues at the University of Virginia Medical Center at the time, Dr. Raymond Moody, had published a book in 1975 called Life After Life, for which he had conducted the first large-scale study of people who had been declared clinically dead and been revived, interviewing 150 people from across the country. Some had been gone for as long as twenty minutes with no brain waves or pulse. In her lectures, Norma sometimes shared pieces of his research with her own students. Since Moody had begun looking into the near-death experiences, researchers from around the world had collected data on thousands and thousands of people who had gone through them—children, the blind, and people of all belief systems and cultures—publishing the findings in medical and research journals and books. Still, no one has been able to definitively account for the common experience all of Moody’s interviewees described. The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death? Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientific evidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others,

the person’s ego needs to feel threatened by some event which causes a psychological imbalance. The psychological gain he receives from the murder is the restoration of the mental homeostasis, and of course most of them also experience sexual gratification.

Serial killers do experience cooling-off periods during which they either willingly refrain from murder, or they are incarcerated and unable to commit murder, or they move to another place where they carry on undetected.

The experience I had had when I interviewed Agmatir started to haunt me. During the numberless hours before daybreak, I would wake from nightmares. I was physically exhausted. Allowing a serial killer to enter your mind and allowing his perverted sexual fantasies to cloud your own psyche causes mental damage which can become permanent.

CAST: Gertrude Berg as Bessie Glass, operator of a hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Joseph Greenwald (1935) as Barney Glass, her husband. Josef Buloff as Barney, 1953–54. WRITER: Gertrude Berg. House of Glass was quickly created by Gertrude Berg after the initial cancellation of her popular serial, The Goldbergs. She took the setting and characters from her own life: her father had run such a place in the teens, giving her experiences with waiters, bellboys, cooks, and guests from all walks of life. The character of Barney Glass was an almost literal lift from her father. The stories she wrote were the stories she remembered, and “where there were unhappy endings I added happy ones. … The radio hotel always solved its problems with a laugh.” But it couldn’t beat Burns and Allen, its competition on CBS, and it faded after eight months.

It is clear that the various personalities I am seeing are quite different from one another. The physical changes are startling. I have come to know Missy, Jo, Renee, and Joan Frances well and am no longer surprised by the move from one personality to another. In fact, I experience each of them as different from the others in the same way as my other patients are different from one another. Although they share the same body, they are not the same and do not wear the body in the same way. It may be more accurate to say that the various personalities share the same physical space in a serial manner. Their descriptions of their parents have virtually nothing in common. Renee even denies that they are her parents. She doesn't claim different parents. She doesn't claim any at all, saying that she is "a creation of this entity alone.

A Phillips serial (in contrast to the jerky, obvious, and corny melodramas of the Hummerts) usually contained just one main scene in each installment, peopled by only two characters. Her scenes were sparse, the settings lean, the people clear without the endless repetition of names that filled a Hummert soap. Phillips was the first serial writer to effectively blend her soaps. Her popular Today’s Children was phased out of its first run in 1938 by having its characters sit around the radio and listen to The Woman in White, which replaced it. When three of her soaps were scheduled consecutively and sponsored by General Mills in 1944, Phillips expanded this idea of integrated storylines. The major characters of the resurrected Today’s Children drifted through The Guiding Light, and mutual visits with The Woman in White were also common. Ed Prentiss, who was then playing Ned Holden of The Guiding Light, was used as a “master of ceremonies” for the hour, a guide through the intricate framework of the three soaps. The fourth quarter-hour was filled with nondenominational religious music, Hymns of All Churches. At one time during this period, Phillips was considering breaking the traditional lengths, running stories of ten to 20 minutes each rather than the precise quarter-hours. After a season of this experimenting, the block was dismantled, and The Guiding Light went into its postwar phase. In the earliest phase, it followed the Ruthledge family. The Rev. John Ruthledge had come to Five Points two decades before, establishing himself and his church as the driving force in the community. This had not been easy. Five Points was a “melting pot of humanity,” as Phillips described it, with Poles, Slavs, Swedes, Germans, Irish, and Jews living in uneasy proximity. As one character described it, it was a neighborhood of “poverty, gossipy neighbors, sordid surroundings,” with “no chance to get ahead.” Ruthledge had run into stiff neighborhood opposition, but now he was accepted and even beloved. His Little Church of Five Points had become popularly known as the Church of the Good Samaritan:

Ruthledge himself was the guiding light, the good Samaritan. He had a daughter, Mary, who grew up without a mother. Helping him raise the child was a kindly housekeeper, Ellen. Then there was Ned Holden, abandoned by his mother, who just turned up one night; being about Mary’s age, he forged a friendship with the little girl that inevitably, as they grew up, turned to love. They were to marry, but just before the wedding Ned learned that his mother was convicted murderess Fredrika Lang. What was worse, Ruthledge had known this and had not told him. Feeling betrayed, Ned disappeared. He would finally return, crushing Mary with the news that he now had a wife, the vibrant actress Torchy Reynolds. Also prominent in the early shows was the Kransky family. Abe Kransky was an orthodox Jew who owned a pawnshop. Much of the action centered on his daughter Rose and her struggle to rise above the squalor of Five Points. Rose had a scandalous affair with publishing magnate Charles Cunningham (whose company would bring out Ned Holden’s first book when Ned took a fling at authorship), only to discover that Cunningham was merely cheating on his wife, Celeste. In her grief, Rose turned to Ellis Smith, the eccentric young artist who had come to Five Points as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” Smith (also not his real name) took Rose in to “give her a name.” The Kransky link with the Ruthledges came about in the friendship of the girls, Rose and Mary. In 1939, in one of her celebrated experiments, Phillips shifted the Kranskys into a new serial, The Right to Happiness. The Ruthledge-Kransky era began to fade in 1944, when actor Arthur Peterson went into the service. Rather than recast, Phillips sent Ruthledge away as well, to the Army as a chaplain. By the time Peterson-Ruthledge returned, two years later, the focus had moved. For a time the strong male figure was Dr. Richard Gaylord. By 1947 a character named Dr. Charles Matthews had taken over. Though still a preacher, and still holding forth at Good Samaritan, Ruthledge had moved out of center stage. The main characters were Charlotte

I think it's important to underscore here that when they realized they couldn't stage a successful abduction without being resisted or at least witnessed, they left without having committed their intended crime. Both men were mentally ill, and in Lawson's case, a pretty good argument could be made for criminal insanity. Yet when circumstances did not favor the success of the crime, they refrained from committing it. They were not under such a compulsion that they were compelled to act. So I will say it again for the record: in my opinion and based on my experience, the mere presence of a mental disorder does not let an offender off the hook. Unless he is completely delusional and does not comprehend his actions in the real world, he chooses whether or not to hurt someone else. And the truly bonkers ones are easy to catch. Serial killers are not.

In review, here are my top best practices for hiring great leaders: Know everyone’s profile. Whether you use DiSC, Meyers-Briggs, or something else, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to find great leaders who fill in your gaps and get them into the right roles. Look at past experience. Do they have what it takes—experience and mindset—to 10X your business? No ambiguity allowed. Put everything on paper. Don’t rely on verbal agreements or trust your memory. Build SMART goals into the expectations for their role and connect those with rewards. Keep away from the yea-sayers. You need people who can challenge you and push things to find the best direction. Hire leaders with similar core values. While personalities, strengths, and skills should be complementary, core values must be in alignment as the glue to hold things together

At this stage of the process, your X factor isn’t optional. It’s a must-have in order to really scale. Companies that can’t figure out their X factor may experience early success but then eventually flatline, and as we’ve already established, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.

You need to love your idea. There’s a lot to be said about loving your idea. Startups tend to be a roller coaster, so when you are weighing different ideas, my advice is to go with the one you love most, because love is what will sustain you through the low periods and give you the motivation to keep going. As long as it’s an idea you love, you will be committed to see it through when you might otherwise be tempted to quit too soon. In my experience, loving your idea is also key in leading others to love your idea too.

Furthermore, in my experience, loving your idea is key because it can often lead to helping others love your idea too. Enthusiasm is contagious, but authentic enthusiasm is even more contagious, which can come in very handy whenever you’re pitching to a potential investor, recruiting a new business partner, or hiring that hard-to-get key employee.

have found three very simple ways to do this in my own startups: Recognize greatness. When people are recognized for their hard work, they feel truly cared for and seen. Learn who they are and who they want to become. Simply put, know something about your people beyond the skills and experience on their résumé. What are their hobbies and interests? What gets them excited? And, most importantly, what are they looking for? Where do they want to take their career, and how does the startup fit into that? Focus on their continuous development. When you know who people are and where they want to be, then you can look for ways to develop them in that direction. For example, let’s say that you hired a part-time bookkeeper, but you learn they really want to be a CFO one day. You can look for a project to delegate to them and say, “Would you be open to developing a budget for this?” In that way, you’re helping them gain the skills they’ll need as a CFO.

Simon Sinek’s take on this is that “you don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.” And I agree. People can gain skills and experience and people can be taught, but you can’t make someone have an entrepreneurial attitude. That has to come from love of the idea and the pursuit itself.

But I will go a step further. Not only are many true serial killers perfectly capable of functioning in society, and not only are their actions usually not the product of childhood abuse, in my experience many of them grew up in circumstances that were the exact opposite. Many of them, to put it lightly, were spoiled rotten as kids. They had every advantage and opportunity in life and came from a psychological position far closer to extreme entitlement than victimhood. They kill because they want to. They kill because they sexually get off on it. They kill because, to them, killing is fun.

I looked for years, but I couldn’t find Buffalo Bill. Instead, I kept encountering defendants who were pretty much exactly the same as the serial rapists I had been prosecuting in Sexual Assault for the previous four years. Instead of sad, lonely outcasts, serial rapists tend to be arrogant, narcissistic, cruel, and entitled. They typically have jobs, steady relationships with consenting sexual partners, no shortage of academic ability, and social success. In my experience, most of them have no misconceptions regarding their moral compass. They know their actions are wrong—they just don’t care.

I didn’t tell anyone what happened. There would have been too much explaining to do. Nonetheless, it was quite an experience.

He would drill holes into the skulls of his living victims, then inject hydrochloric acid or boiling water into the frontal lobe area of their brains. When these experiments failed to achieve the desired result, Dahmer simply dispatched the unfortunate victim,

I’m not going to your place with you,” I tell him. “I don’t know you. You’re a stranger. You might be a serial killer.” “I might be. But isn’t fucking a stranger on your list?” He’s got me there. “It is, but you’re not exactly selling me with the serial-killer shit.” “I’m not a serial killer, I promise.” “Said the serial killer before he slit my throat open.” He throws his head back, laughing loudly. A smile pushes onto my lips. His laugh is incredibly contagious. Why am I so bothered if he is a serial killer? So I die a little early. At least I’d get to experience cunnilingus before I do. I’m kidding. Sort of.

That’s why people who seek out group flow often join startups or work for themselves. Serial entrepreneurs keep starting new business as much for the flow experience, as for the additional success.

In some ways this was Goethe’s greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where “the real joints of nature” are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine “imagination, observation and thought in the act of language.

I've talked about how important it is for us to be able to step into the shoes and mind of the unknown killer. Through our research and experience, we've found it is equally important—as painful and harrowing as it might be—to be able to put ourselves in the place of the victim. Only when we have a firm idea of how the particular victim would have reacted to the horrible things that were happening to her or him can we truly understand the behavior and reactions of the perpetrator.

We have no fitting label for individuals like Henley whom predators target to convert into helpers. They’re not the same as the victims they help to harm, but they’re also not the same as the primary predator. They occupy a fuzzy middle ground. They’re often chosen merely because they’re young, vulnerable, weak, needy, or compliant and therefore easy to manipulate. Since society tends to view them as equal offenders, especially when they do heinous things, researchers haven’t fully studied their unique experiences. Yet dissecting how individuals who’d never considered killing someone might do so under certain influences can reveal ways to protect future potential candidates. Corll had two known apprentices, both immature teenage boys. At Corll’s behest, they learned to abduct, guard, murder, and bury other boys.

I shook my head. My mind was wandering too far afield. All that might happen. A serial killer might be thinking of where his victims were buried just at the moment I was listening to his thoughts. But in my extensive experience, people seldom thought, “Yes, I buried that body at 1218 Clover Drive under the rosebush,” or, “That money I stole sure is safe in my bank account numbered 12345 in the Switzerland National Bank.” Much less, “I’m plotting to blow up the XYZ building on May 4, and my six confederates are . . .

the simple likelihood of drawing a connection between a dream and a waking experience dwindles with temporal distance from the dream. At this point, it is hard to say if there is any kind of probability curve defining some temporal sweet spot when you are likeliest to identify a waking experience relating to a prior dream. This is one of the many, many open questions that we need armies of precognitive dreamworkers with fat dream journals to help figure out. While the bulk of my precognitive hits occur within about three days of a dream, it is not uncommon to find hits up to a couple weeks after a dream, as well as at yearly intervals (we will discuss calendrical resonances in more detail later). Dunne recommended returning to your dreams up to two days afterward and thereafter discarding dream records. He lived before word processors, and since no one would have the time to check all their dreams on an indefinite daily basis, he felt you had to set limits to make your search most effective. In our day of computer files, it is easy to keep permanent, detailed dream records—they no longer take up space—as well as to search them electronically and potentially perform other kinds of analyses if you are really hardcore. But it remains the case that nobody has the time to compare their entire dream journal, which may grow a bit each day, to their entire life, every day. You can see how that could begin to consume one’s life! You have to make compromises. Revisiting your dream records from the previous three days for a minute or two each evening is minimally sufficient. EMINENT COMPANY In taking the J. W. Dunne challenge, you will be in some brilliant and eminent company. Some of the most influential writers of the mid-twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, were powerfully inspired by Dunne’s book, and some undertook his experiment. Most fans of Tolkien’s fantasy epics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings don’t realize that the timeless worldview of his Elven races was based largely on the serial-universe cosmology developed by Dunne on the basis of his dream experiences.4 So far, no dream diary has emerged among Tolkien’s papers that would prove he carried out Dunne’s experiment systematically, but his friend C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, probably did. Lewis hints as much in a posthumously published novel called The Dark Tower, which is partly devoted to Dunne’s ideas.

The ideal, of course, is to hire an executive with past experience at a blitzscaling start-up that has already dealt with the challenges your company currently faces. This is why investors have more confidence in serial entrepreneurs. One of the major advantages that companies in Silicon Valley enjoy is generations of rapidly scaling companies that have produced a rich supply of executives with blitzscaling experience. Yet even if you can’t land an ideal candidate, second best is to hire a manager who has previously worked with successful executives in a very rapidly growing company, or an executive who earned her executive experience at a larger or more traditional business but who also worked at a blitzscaling start-up at another time in her career.

Behavior reflects personality. The best indicator of future violence is past violence. To understand the “artist,” you must study his “art.” The crime must be evaluated in its totality. There is no substitute for experience, and if you want to understand the criminal mind, you must go directly to the source and learn to decipher what he tells you. And, above all: Why + How = Who.

In most cases, people’s unique traits and values are difficult to recognize, let alone appreciate, in an initial encounter. There are just too many things going through our minds to fully take in what makes that other person special and interesting. People’s deeper and more distinctive traits emerge gradually through shared experiences and intimate encounters, the kinds we sometimes have when we give relationships a chance to develop but not when we serially first date.

most hunters are inadequate types, but in my experience, if you have an inadequate type to begin with, one of the ways he might try to compensate is by hunting or playing around with guns or knives.

To understand the “artist,” you must study his “art.” There is no substitute for experience, and if you want to understand the criminal mind, you must go directly to the source and learn to decipher what he tells you.

When I say misfit, I’m talking about the fact that some of us just never found a way to fit in at all, from the get-go, all through our evolving lives, including in the present tense. I’m talking about how some of us experience that altered state of missing any kind of fitting in so profoundly that we nearly can’t make it in life. We serially flounder, or worse, we drown in our inabilities or mistakes, or even worse—since I’m old enough to understand that sometimes some of us don’t make it at all—we give up. Love and peace to the star stuff that carries those misfits we have lost too soon.

You might entertain the notion that this concept of the Shadow is somewhat antiquated. After all, we live in a much more rational, scientifically oriented culture today. People are more transparent and self-aware than ever, we might say. We are much less repressed than our ancestors, who had to deal with all sorts of pressures from organized religion. The truth, however, might very well be the opposite. In many ways we are more split than ever between our conscious, social selves and our unconscious Shadow. We live in a culture that enforces powerful codes of correctness that we must abide by or face the shaming that is now so common on social media. We are supposed to live up to ideals of selflessness, which are impossible for us because we are not angels. All of this drives the dark side of our personalities even further underground. We can read signs of this in how deeply and secretly we are all drawn to the dark side in our culture. We thrill at watching shows in which various Machiavellian characters manipulate, deceive, and dominate. We lap up stories in the news of those who have been caught acting out in some way and enjoy the ensuing shaming. Serial killers and diabolical cult leaders enthrall us. With these shows and the news we can always become moralistic and talk of how much we despise such villains, but the truth is that the culture constantly feeds us these figures because we are hungry for expressions of the dark side. All of this provides a degree of release from the tension we experience in having to play the angel and seem so correct.

We never have before us pure individuals, indivisible glaciers of beings, nor essences without place and without date. Not that they exist elsewhere, beyond our grasp, but because we are experiences, that is, thoughts that feel behind themselves the weight of the space, the time, the very Being they think, and which therefore do not hold under their gaze a serial space and time nor the pure idea of series, but have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity—a perpetual pregnancy, perpetual parturition, generativity and generality, brute essence and brute existence, which are the nodes and antinodes of the same ontological vibration. And if one were to ask what is this indecisive milieu in which we find ourselves once the distinction between fact and essence is rejected, one must answer that it is the very sphere of our life, and of our life of knowledge...It would be naïve to seek solidity in a heaven of ideas or in a ground of meaning—it is neither above nor beneath the appearances, but at their joints; it is the tie that secretly connects an experience to its variants.

The motive is settled deep within the unconscious psyche, and the serial killer is unaware of this. By ‘irresistible compulsion’ I do not mean that serial killers have absolutely no power over the urge to kill. Many of them experience the urge as an external force taking control of their own will and forcing them to commit murder, a force they perceive they cannot resist.

Loners probably experience life at a more profound level than the self-consciously gregarious who know nothing of individuality, or who lack the courage to go their own way.

I think it is more than chance. It also tells me that if we want to avoid going extinct, we have to realize we're already at war with an enemy that's master genetic engineering and is conducting trillions of experiments every second, figurig out new ways to kill us.

I think it is more than chance. It also tells me that if we want to avoid going extinct, we have to realize we're already at war with an enemy that's master genetic engineering and is conducting trillions of experiments every second, figuring out new ways to kill us.

A French woman, upon spotting Picasso in a café, approached the great master and insisted that he make a quick sketch of her. Graciously, Picasso obliged. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the woman his work of art and she gushed, ‘It’s perfect! You managed to capture my true essence with just one stroke. Now how much do I owe you?’ ” I cut in dramatically, “ ‘Five thousand dollars,’ said Picasso.” Carter frowned heavily. “Are you telling the story or am I?” “Go onnnn,” I said with exaggerated courtesy. “Picasso informed the woman that she owed him fifty thousand francs. And the woman was furious. She said to Picasso, ‘It only took you a second to draw it!’ To which Picasso responded, ‘Madame, it took me my entire life. It was my fifty years of serial preparation and fifty years of perfecting my unique talents and fifty years of honing my experience plus the five seconds that produced this sketch.’ ” “Nice story.” “You see,” Carter continued complacently, “it takes years and years of study and practice to build expertise in any profession. And with that knowledge comes the appearance of ease and the perception that what’s being asked is—oh, no big deal. But, it is a big deal.

Mr Dickens’s monthly serial entitled The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account

We never have before us pure individuals, indivisible glaciers of beings, nor essences without place and without date. Not that they exist elsewhere, beyond our grasp, but because we are experiences, that is, thoughts that feel behind themselves the weight of the space, the time, the very Being they think, and which therefore do not hold under their gaze a serial space and time nor the pure idea of series, but have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity—a perpetual pregnancy, perpetual parturition, generativity and generality, brute essence and brute existence, which are the nodes and antinodes of the same ontological vibration.

Algo debía de haber en el agua de Japón durante la década de los 90’s, para que obras del calibre argumental y filosófico de Neon Genesis Evangelion o Serial Experiments Lain viesen la luz en tan corto período histórico.

According to the FBI, there are two categories of serial killer keepsakes: the “souvenir” and the “trophy.” The first presumably serves the same function that a statuette of the Eiffel Tower does for a tourist who has just vacationed in Paris—it reminds the killer of how much fun he had and allows him to relive the experience in fantasy until he can do it again. Trophies, on the other hand, are analogous to the mounted moose head or stag antlers that a hunter might proudly display over the fireplace—prideful evidence of the killer’s lethal skill.

That we are rational agents—that a great many of our actions are not merely the results of serial physiological urges but are instead dictated by coherent conceptual connections and private deliberations—is one of those primordial data I mentioned above that cannot be reduced to some set of purely mechanical functions without producing nonsense. That a number of cognitive scientists should be exerting themselves to tear down the Cartesian partition between body and soul, hoping to demonstrate that there is no Wonderful Wizard on the other side pulling the levers, is poignant proof that our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities.

a good profiler, who truly wants to understand the serial killer, must have been prepared by life experiences before he or she can dare to venture into the abyss. A person who has led a protected life will not survive.

I cannot easily discuss my feelings with others, because I do not want to draw them into the abyss with me. When I do not have a serial killer in my mind I live a normal life, but when I interrogate a serial killer I dive into the blackness of his soul. I am familiar with his feelings of emptiness, loneliness, depression, death, omnipotence and fear. I dive deeply to get a grip on his torment. I often hold his hands when I talk to him and then on a mental plane I seem to swim back up through the darkness into the light, dragging him with me. When I break the surface, there is light. That is the moment when I have to adjust from being the empathetic psychologist to being a cop. It is very difficult not to drown and to remain balanced and the dive often affects me for months after the arrest. I hardly ever get time to work through this experience because I usually go straight from one case to the next.

One does not have to be raped to acquire empathy for a rape victim. I did not have to kill to understand why others do, but I had to go through some harrowing experiences in order to understand.

Serial killers experience the power over life and death as omnipotence. Since they have little control over their own lives and feelings, they become addicted to the omnipotence that control over someone else’s life gives them. Therefore, they will kill repetitively. It restores the mental imbalance they experience whenever their self-worth is challenged.

To draw up a profile one needs extensive knowledge of the social sciences, including psychology, criminology and ethnology, as well as experience and a gut feeling.