Milwaukee Murders -- Sado-Sexual Killers Not Far Removed From `Normal' Folks

Few news events can convulse a fretful populace like serial murder. And when the acts are coupled with mutilation and sexual predation, as is alleged in the Jeffrey Dahmer case in Milwaukee, many people naturally recoil in defensive denial.

We reconcile ourselves to the horror of the crime by reassuring ourselves that such "unthinkable" events are anomalies, unique byproducts of incomprehensibly diseased minds.

But the unhappy truth, experts say, is that the killers are disturbingly close to normal. "They are not crazy, not psychotic, not mentally ill in the classic sense," said Shawn Johnston, a California forensic psychologist who has spent 12 years providing court-appointed evaluations of criminals. "True, they're incredibly egotistical and self-centered. But they know what they're doing and they like it."

Even so, it would be comforting to think that such crimes result from capitulation to irresistibly powerful perverted desires - by persons for whom no other form of sexual release is possible.

But no. In sado-sexual killings, "the payoff is erection and orgasm, but it is not the (killer's) exclusive means of gratification, merely the favorite choice," said forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz of Newport Beach, Calif. The urge is no different in intensity from the desire a man may have that his sexual partner wear black lingerie - no more, no less.

"This is the most difficult thing for the public to understand. It's not an uncontrollable urge." In fact, Dietz said, "to be a successful sexual serial killer, you have to be in very good control of your impulses." Many, he says, have an IQ much higher than that of the average criminal.

The frequency of such occurrences appears to be increasing, according to a spokeswoman for the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.

Dietz agrees: "No one today would dispute that there were far more cases in the '80s than the '60s." In fact, many social scientists believe society may actually be encouraging such criminals.

Sexual serial killers are almost always white males in their 20s and 30s who torture their victims before killing them, usually by fairly intimate means, since part of the erotic satisfaction lies in observing the suffering. In a study of 130 victims, for example, Dietz found that 58 percent had been strangled, whereas less than one-fourth had been shot.

As a rule, they hold their victims captive for 24 hours or more, Dietz said, and require a variety of sexual acts. "Over 50 percent of them record the offense in some way," he said, "such as video or audio tape or diaries," and 40 percent "keep personal items belonging to their victims . . . jewelry, shoes, photo IDs and the occasional body parts" for "memento value." Serial killers tend to be avid collectors of pornography, guns, sexual paraphernalia and the like, Dietz noted. Afterward, the bodies are carefully concealed or destroyed.

"The similarities one encounters are mind-boggling," Johnston says. Even when the criminals are separated by decades or centuries "their modus operandi is remarkably similar." Take, for example, Jack the Ripper and Ed Gein, who liked to skin his victims and served as a model for characters in both "Psycho" and "The Silence of the Lambs".

Psychologist James Breiling, who studies sex offenses for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), warns that "it is dangerous to generalize at all. This is an area in which we really don't know much." Especially tricky, he said, is trying to extrapolate from childhood or adolescent behavior into adult malfeasance.

At a minimum, Dietz said, two conditions are necessary to produce a sexual-serial killer: a psychopathic personality and a highly developed sadistic tendency.

The former is in ample supply. According to studies done for NIMH, about one in 20 urban males is psychopathic - that is, lacking normal inhibitory feelings of guilt or remorse and operating outside familiar social or moral constraints.

As for sexually sadistic urges, there is no definitive complex of causes. John Money of the Johns Hopkins University medical school, who specializes in sexual abnormalities, suspects genetic or neurological reasons, or both, for the way normal predatory and aggressive impulses of mammals "jump the tracks and get tied to erotic arousal. In the brain, the pathways that regulate these extremely basic behaviors are very close together, clustered in (a part of the brain's limbic system) no bigger than a green pea."

Behavioral studies have turned up other potential patterns. Among them, Johnston said, are the three "early indicators of sadism: bed-wetting, torture of animals and fire-starting."

He also said there is "well-documented research that the autonomic nervous system of a violent individual is more sluggish, that they actually produce less adrenalin than the rest of us. That's incredibly important for understanding their sense of thrill or excitement. They literally require a more intense degree of stimulation." Many sexual serial killers were abused sexually or physically as children.

"What probably matters most," Dietz says, "is what they start to think about when they masturbate - the intentional pairing of certain imagery with sexual pleasure."

The highly popular "slasher" and horror movies incessantly exploit precisely that combination. On the screen, "the baby sitter starts to take off her bra," Dietz said, "which makes the kid in the audience get sexually excited. Then Jason comes in and decapitates her."