From an outlook reflecting the classical view of criminology, or rational choice conception, the following is from research entitled, Murder Mind Matrix, or why people kill other people. Briefly, a person kills because it serves their selfish carnal interests. In the long run, it’s up to the criminal to alter his or her lifestyle and change the choices he or she makes. Criminal behavior has more to do with the willfulness of personal deception than what many might think society does to the criminal. Most often, like so many of the rest of us, criminals prefer to indulge in the justification of their own self-righteousness. Murder mindset is willful.
Once again, if you pay close attention, you find a similar pattern of characteristics, regardless of their background, neighborhood or parental dynamics. Typically, like the immature juvenile who sees themselves as the center of the universe, the criminal enjoys lying, evading, and otherwise skimming over any facts that disagrees with his or hers. Often, we forget that the criminal is very calculating and in control of the pursuit of an illicit objective. Instead, there’s a tendency to focus on the outcome of a particular incident and not the totality of the criminal personality involved. By doing this in a very narrow sense, people find it easier to explain why someone committed a crime as “impulsive” and “irrational”. This of course is false.
Albert Fish graced, or rather disgraced, the World with his presence and eventual murderous psychosis, on the 19th. May 1870 in Washington D.C.
He was placed in an orphanage when he was five years of age, and was a witness to many perversions. He’s said to have reported that “That place ruined my mind.”
When he was seven, he went to live with his mother, but there are no reports as to whether or not she abused him. He had the misfortune of falling out of a tree and seriously injuring his head. This led to episodes of dizziness and severe headaches.
However, so far as anyone knows, it wasn’t until 1910, at age 40, that he committed his first murder. His victims were children, because he found them easy targets.
His killing sprees began in earnest in the 1920’s, when he travelled from state to state, working at odd jobs, thereby having the freedom to enjoy his murderous and disgusting hobby. He was arrested on numerous occasions for child molestation, sending obscene mail and being mentally ill. Now, this latter condition of arrest baffles me. Was he deemed mentally ill because he molested children, or was he arrested for mental illness on a separate charge? There’s enough stigma attached to mental illness today, let alone back then.
During his periods of incarceration, he would sometimes fly into fits of anger and developed the alarming habit of screaming out that he was Christ and that God told him to kill. After such admissions, why was there apparently no investigation? So many young lives could have been saved if he’d been put away for good. Nevertheless, it seems that no-one did look into these admissions; perhaps they thought that they were merely the ravings of a lunatic.
One of his more notorious ventures took place in 1928, when he went to see a family by the name of Budd. It would seem that his murderous psychosis was taking him over completely by that time. He offered the younger boys jobs, and probably fondled them, but his real wish was for their daughter, Grace. He invented a niece, and asked Grace’s parents if he could take her to the child’s birthday party. They agreed – and never saw their daughter again.
The causative factors are not cosmically predetermined, instigated by the devil, or genetically triggered. On the contrary, murderous behaviors are extreme expressions of the complexity human selfishness. In the basic rubric of investigative fundamentals, the “who” begins the process of analyzing who had what to gain from the killing experience.
Along with who and what, where and when, with why and how, are the pathways to a rudimentary level of understanding the consciousness of choosing bad behaviors.
Regardless of all the “experts”, you may never know the ultimate answers as to why one kills another. The killer will tell you what you want to know, and you’ll believe what you need to believe. He or she keeps the rest buried deep inside. Overly credulous, mainstream criminality “explanations” remain reflective of primeval superstitions. Instead of demons, we now have the “crime gene” as excusatory predispositions for “biological” rationalizations in murderous mitigations.