Childhood behaviors of serial killers.
Helene Jegado, a domestic servant in 19th century France, must have been an impatient woman: If someone irked her, she didn’t give them many opportunities to apologize.
From 1833 to 1841, at least 36 people — the vast majority of them employers or boarders who had the poor judgment to reprimand her — wound up dead from arsenic poisoning. Because of her devout and sincere nature, authorities routinely ruled The Pious Poisoner out as a suspect. In 1851, when she hastily declared her innocence without actually being accused, The Pious Poisoner was arrested and convicted of at least three murders. A year later Jegado’s neck met the guillotine.
Jegado’s first victims included a priest and her own sister.
![ramirezdahmerbundy:
Man in the electric chair at Ohio State Penitentiary, 1901 - Ohio, the second state to adopt electrocution, was proud of its humane choice of execution and issued souvenir cards of the procedure. In this image, a condemned man is strapped into the chair with the executioner standing at the switches, ready to pull the levers. With the passage of time and some mishaps, each execution technique was advanced, as minor flaws were corrected. Some very early executions had the hands of the condemned in a bucket of water. In its final form, the person is usually shaved and strapped to the chair with belts across his chest, groin, legs, head, and arms (some prisons place a strap over the mouth and nose and use a blindfold); a metal skullcap-shaped electrode is attached to the scalp and forehead over a sponge moistened with saline; and an additional electrode is moistened with conductive jelly and attached to a portion of the prisoner’s leg that has been shaved to reduce resistance to electricity. This creates a closed circuit. After the condemned is prepared, the warden may again read the death sentence, then he signals the executioner to pull a lever, sending a 15 to 30 second jolt between 1,000 and 2,000 volts into the condemned. The current surges and is then turned off, at which time the body relaxes and the doctors check to see if the inmate’s heart is still beating; intermittent jolts of electricity are given until the heart stops. The problem most viewers have found with electrocution isthe tremendous effect visual on the body: the prisoner is often fried in the process. At the end of the procedure, the body temperature can reach over 140 degrees. The audience reacts poorly to blistering skin and bursting, boiling blood vessels. United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan offered the following description of an execution by the electric chair:
“… the prisoner’s eyeballs sometimes pop out and rest on [his] cheeks. The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool. The body turns bright red as its temperature rises, and the prisoner’s flesh swells and his skin stretches to the point of breaking. Sometimes the prisoner catches fire… Witnesses hear a loud and sustained sound like bacon frying, and the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh permeates the chamber.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m722zamDfK1r13gsho1_500.jpg)
Man in the electric chair at Ohio State Penitentiary, 1901 - Ohio, the second state to adopt electrocution, was proud of its humane choice of execution and issued souvenir cards of the procedure. In this image, a condemned man is strapped into the chair with the executioner standing at the switches, ready to pull the levers. With the passage of time and some mishaps, each execution technique was advanced, as minor flaws were corrected. Some very early executions had the hands of the condemned in a bucket of water. In its final form, the person is usually shaved and strapped to the chair with belts across his chest, groin, legs, head, and arms (some prisons place a strap over the mouth and nose and use a blindfold); a metal skullcap-shaped electrode is attached to the scalp and forehead over a sponge moistened with saline; and an additional electrode is moistened with conductive jelly and attached to a portion of the prisoner’s leg that has been shaved to reduce resistance to electricity. This creates a closed circuit. After the condemned is prepared, the warden may again read the death sentence, then he signals the executioner to pull a lever, sending a 15 to 30 second jolt between 1,000 and 2,000 volts into the condemned. The current surges and is then turned off, at which time the body relaxes and the doctors check to see if the inmate’s heart is still beating; intermittent jolts of electricity are given until the heart stops. The problem most viewers have found with electrocution isthe tremendous effect visual on the body: the prisoner is often fried in the process. At the end of the procedure, the body temperature can reach over 140 degrees. The audience reacts poorly to blistering skin and bursting, boiling blood vessels. United States Supreme Court Justice William Brennan offered the following description of an execution by the electric chair:
“… the prisoner’s eyeballs sometimes pop out and rest on [his] cheeks. The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool. The body turns bright red as its temperature rises, and the prisoner’s flesh swells and his skin stretches to the point of breaking. Sometimes the prisoner catches fire… Witnesses hear a loud and sustained sound like bacon frying, and the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh permeates the chamber.”
Paraphilic Bondage in sex crimes
It is very important when profiling a sexual predator to know how to tell the difference between simply restraining a victim with bindings, or paraphilic sexual bondage.
Restraining a victim by tying her up, gagging her, etc. can simply be a necessary part of the commission of the crime.
Paraphilic bondage represents part of the offender’s fantasy, and recognizing his behaviours for what they are will give you insight into his personality and help you create a profile. Excessive bindings often represent paraphilic behaviour and fantasy - for ex. not just the wrists are taped together, but the tape proceeds all the way up to the elbows. The two most important things to note at a crime scene are:
- neatness (ex. there will not be a gag just shoved in her mouth, the offender will have taken the time to fold the gag neatly and tie it just right)
- symmetry (ex. bindings on one side of the body will reflect the bindings on the other side - if one wrist has a cord neatly wrapped around it three times, the other wrist will also have a cord wrapped neatly around it three times)
Neatness and symmetry of bindings will tell you that you have a Ritualistic Offender - this offender is deeply engulfed in fantasy and will likely be highly organized. You will find pornographic material in his home or vehicle which will reflect his fantasy. He will have multiple paraphilias. He probably has a compliant victim (a wife, or prostitutes that agree to act out fantasies with him - they will give great insight into his mind if you find him!) He will likely take pictures or videos. He may write extensively in journals about his fantasy and/or crimes. This is the most difficult offender to catch, and is probably the most likely to get away with his crimes.
“I tell you I don’t care how many screams you hear, I don’t care how many anguished cries … death is a million times preferable to ten more days of this life. If you knew what was ahead of you, if you knew what was ahead of you, you’d be glad to be stepping over tonight.”
The People’s Temple was a cult lead by a man named Jim Jones. Jones originally set up his church in San Francisco, California, but there was so much outside interference since they were in a hugely populated area. To make his followers more withdrawn, he arranged a settlement village in Guyana—a small country on the northern coast of South America. For months, Jones attempted to negotiate a mass exodus of his Jonestown followers to the Soviet Union but once Jones had killed a U.S. congressman and a reporter who had come to investigate Jonestown, he claimed that the Soviet Union would not take them. Rather than have his cult torn apart, Jones arranged a mass suicide. However, many of the followers were forced to take the poison at gunpoint, making the incident a case of murder as well. 909 followers, including Jones himself and nine others in the nearby city and airstrip, died from poison in this 1978 mass suicide. Two hundred seventy-six victims were children.
Joseph Vacher was a twenty-eight-year-old vagrant when he was charged in 1897 for the murder of a seventeen-year-old shepherd boy. The victim had been strangled and afterward his abdomen had been cut open. Vacher confessed to eleven previously unsolved homicides that had occurred in different parts of France between 1894 and 1897, and was suspected in fifteen more. In 1893 Vacher had been discharged from military service after displaying confused talk, persecution mania, and threatening language. The same year he wounded a girl who had refused to marry him and then shot himself in the head. He survived his suicide attempt, which left him deaf in one ear and with facial paralysis, and was confined in an insane asylum. He was declared “cured” and released on April 1, 1894. On March 20, 1894, he strangled a twenty-one-year-old woman, cut her throat, tore out a portion of her right breast, trampled upon her abdomen, and had intercourse with the corpse. In November he strangled a thirteen-year-old girl and in May 1895 he murdered a seventeen-year-old girl. In August he strangled and raped a fifty-eight-year-old woman; and shortly afterward he cut the throat of a sixteen-year-old girl and attempted to rip her abdomen open. In September he killed a fifteen-year-old boy, cut off his genitals, and sexually assaulted the corpse. Traveling through France, he killed women, girls, and boys, by either cutting their throats or strangling them. He mutilated and violated their corpses, taking away with him their genitals. On August 4, 1897, Vacher attacked a woman gathering pine cones but she successfully resisted him, shouting for her husband and children. They overpowered Vacher and took him into custody. Vacher was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for indecent assault, but during his incarceration he wrote the authorities with a confession to the murders. Although Vacher insisted he was insane, a panel of psychiatrists pronounced him sane. He was executed in December 1898.
The Murder of Dimebag Darrell
On December 8, 2004, Darrell was shot dead onstage while performing with Damageplan at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio. The gunman, Nathan Gale, shot Darrell three times in the head using a 9mm Beretta 92FS handgun; the third shot killed him instantly. Gale continued shooting, killing three others and wounding a further seven. Gale fired a total of fifteen shots, stopping to reload once and remaining silent throughout the shooting.
Early theories of motive suggested that Gale might have turned to violence in response to the breakup of Pantera, or the public dispute between Darrell and Pantera singer Phil Anselmo, but these were later ruled out by investigators. Another theory was that Gale believed Darrell had stolen a song that he had written. In the book, A Vulgar Display Of Power, several of Gale’s personal writings, given to the author by his mother, suggest that the gunman was not angry about Pantera’s breakup or a belief that Pantera had “stolen songs”; instead, the documents suggest that Gale’s paranoid schizophrenia caused delusions that the band could read his mind, and that they were “stealing” his thoughts and laughing at him.
Willie Bosket had committed over two thousand crimes in New York by the time he was fifteen, including stabbing several people. The son of a convicted murderer, he never knew his father but revered him for his “manly” crime. Just before he was sixteen, his crimes became more serious. Killing another boy in a fight, he then embarked upon a series of subway crimes, which ended up in the deaths of two men. He shot them, he later said, just to see what it was like. It didn’t affect him. He knew the juvenile laws well enough to realize that he could continue to do what he was doing and yet still get released when he was twenty-one. He had no reason to stop. Yet it was his spree and his arrogance that brought about a dramatic change in the juvenile justice system, starting there in New York. The “Willie Bosket law,” which allowed dangerous juveniles as young as thirteen to be tried in adult courts, was passed and signed in six days. Willie went on to commit more crimes, although none as serious as murder, and ended up with prison terms that ensured that he would spend the rest of his life there.
