Haunting

The BTK Strangler, otherwise known as Dennis Rader, has pleaded guilty to numerous counts of murder (10) today. He came off as arrogant of sociopathic. Who else could do the kinds of things he did for kicks?

It's weird to have someone in custody for the infamous crimes. Just recently, the Green River killer was finally brought to justice after brutalizing women for years. He turned out to be truck painter and married father of three (?) Gary Ridgway. Apparently, like Jack the Ripper, he was "down on whores".

SPEAKING OF WHICH....

I am currently reading (finally!) "The Cases that Haunt Us" by John Douglas and Mark Oshaler. This team has brought us such true crime classics as "Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit", which is a real page-turner and shows us how Douglas, the first FBI profiler, was able to track down demented monsters.

"Cases that Haunt Us" is about just that- the crimes that obsessed the public and demanded answers but often those answers were in dispute. Case in point: Jack the Ripper. Now there's a character who inspired fear, hate and mostly speculation. Who was he? Was he really a member of the royal family? Was he a doctor or a butcher?

According to Douglas, none of the above. He was simply a man obsessed with his fear and hatred of women and their sexual power over him. He was also morbidly fascinated with the inner workings of the human body. So even if comics depict him as some sort of worthy opponent to the Batman, in reality he was a coward who preyed on society's most vulnerable and even had to approach them in a blitz-style attack from behind in order to overpower them. More sophisticated criminals will find a way to lure victims to them, the way the Zodiac killer did with his first.

I don't want to spoil the whole book, plus I haven't finished it yet, but let me just say that I am grateful Douglas spent considerable time describing "Jack"'s victims. I cried over their pathetic lives. PS- Jack the Ripper, according to Douglas and his expert criminal behavioral analysis, is not a name the killer would have ever come up with so the first "Jack" letter- the one where he is "down on whores and shan't quit ripping them" is a hoax (though not a modern one- it was mailed to the police back then probably by some weird prankster). The real killer, however, was probably the one who wrote the "from hell" letter. Interesting, huh?

The saddest case of all that this book probably deals with is the JonBenet Ramsey case because for years Douglas has maintained the parents could not have done it and now that there is a new investigation underway, they have finally been cleared through DNA. I think it is horrible the way they were wrongly accused and lost all their money and now Pat Ramsey has had a reoccurance of cancer. May God help them.

On a lighter note (sort of), as I read about Lizzie Borden, the woman who was accused of hacking to death her father and stepmother in a New England town in 1892, I was shocked and appalled by these words from the author: "Lizzie was in a bind. She yearned to move out and live in a socially prominent manner. But she certainly couldn't do that on her own...The real hope was marriage, but she was thirty-two, so that didn't look likely..." EGADS! I am thirty-two! In other words, I'm a spinster like Lizzie Borden! An old maid!

Now that's tragic.