I've never seen anything like it. Four years towards a bachelor's in criminology, two more years to master's. Five years in Detroit PD, eighteen months of that working my beat in the worst prostitute lairs and druggie corners you can imagine. Three years in the FBI, seeing a lot of things you can't. But this... this was foreign to me.
In that time, I've seen serial killers, yeah. Not a ton of 'em, but enough to keep me off pulp fiction for life. A few of 'em we never caught, a few were already dead when we got there. I've seen every imaginable motive for killing: Sex, love, hate, drugs, money. Those I saw a lot of in Detroit. Then, with the serials, that's when you start getting what I call the "excuses".
Look, no one "deserves" to die, except maybe the assholes that kill others. But if some coked-up druggie knocks off his dealer because "I was fucked up out of my mind and I thought the bitch looked at me funny and and and also he turned into a rat person for a minute there and tried to eat me," you can sort of understand it-the guy was high on coke and hallucinated, then reacted. If someone kills the woman who she caught sleeping with her husband, you can kind of get how she got there a little bit, even if you'd never do it yourself. Those aren't reasons. There are no reasons. Those are just motives. Then again, if you're me, you're still grateful for just the motive. At least it's a starting point to understand why you'd ever take a human life outside self-defense, right?
Thing is, you get every kind of motive imaginable with true serials. None of them ever make sense to me.
"Jesus told me to do it." "Satan told me to do it." "She was a whore." "He was asking for it." "They looked like my parents and I was abused as a kid." "My alter personality did it." "I wanted to."
"I needed to."
There's one I really couldn't wrap my brain around.
The first time I heard that excuse was a man in Iowa who had killed three people, enough to be labeled a serial murderer. He was a twenty year old man who I'd like to diagnose here and now as a true psychopath. We're lucky we got him when we did; otherwise he could have evolved into... something I don't want to think about. However, that man, Harold Ross, was put to death two and a half years ago, so I'm not really concerned about telling his story right now.
The story I'm telling right now is that of a woman who is labeled in her case file as Janet Doe. She is not a victim but a killer - a female serial killer. Although I'm pretty sure she has sociopathic tendencies, she's not mentally ill in any way psychologists have been able to diagnose. She isn't even a sociopath; she can empathize with people, understand their pain. The only thing is with some people, she doesn't care.
She is not a disorganized killer or fueled by a delusion, like Aileen Wuornos. She doesn't kill for money, like the Black Widows of tabloid fame. She has no partner putting her up to this - and, frankly, I doubt she'd allow someone to tell her what to do or to act as her subordinate when she's perfectly capable of killing by herself.
She's never given any explanation for her actions to anyone - nobody has ever managed to interview her.
Except, that is, for me.
I'm not going to bother giving you the whole backstory, but a smattering of seemingly unrelated deaths had been dotting the country, literally from coast to coast. Some were clearly homicides - many of these were apparently drug-related. Some passed as accidental deaths or suicides. However, the presence of a signature alerted our team to the killer: at each death, a Tarot card was found at the scene. Among the detritus of some of the victims' lives, it was easy to dismiss-but in the death of one Bill Hawkins, it was prominently displayed next to his hand-card 0, the Fool. Bill Hawkins was a militant atheist; there was no way he'd ever own a Tarot card deck, and his death was from a shotgun wound to the gut. Hawkins, as far as we knew, was also a pacifist and owned no firearms. Then, three days later and three hundred miles away, Troy Workman died in his car of a carbon monoxide overdose. A Tarot card-3, the Hierophant-was found under his tire. Gradually, through the VICAP and INTERPOL databases, we found several other suicides and homicides with Tarot cards left at the scene-beginning in France, traveling briefly to Russia, segueing back to Poland, then to Spain, then to the USA (beginning in Maine, and the last one in Chicago). At the time that we caught onto this, we believed that the killer had only used each card in the deck once. The interesting thing was the fact that many of these victims were at the time of their deaths, or had previously been, suspects in incredibly violent crimes.
