Spree Killers and Their Surprisingly Female Fan Base

Sitting at his desk in his home in Kent, Darwin considered a recently acquired specimen of an unusual orchid from Madagascar. White, with an unusually long (12-inch) nectar spur, this flower allowed Darwin to predict the existence of another creature as yet undiscovered.

Some people (who should know better) refer to scientific accounts of behavior that invoke evolution by natural selection as "just-so stories." They should think harder about Darwin and his orchid. Well, they should think harder about a lot of things—such as what comparably explanatory alternative they are offering—but I’ve banged that drum loudly enough elsewhere. Back to the orchid: You see, it was white—the only color that a nocturnal creature has a chance of interacting with, and the unusual arrangement of the nectar—an attractive food source, implied a creature with a hugely long tongue, and the ability to hover, so as to be able to collect it.

Twenty years after Darwin had deduced (that is not too strong a word for it) its existence, Darwin’s Hawkmoth (xanthopan morganii praedicta) was eventually found. Such a beautiful display of the predictive power of understanding how evolution works in practice is tougher to find in humans–but we tried to emulate my intellectual hero with regard to something rather less beautiful but no less subject to the laws of biology.

A few years ago, we analyzed the horrible phenomenon of spree killings–the mass murder of at least five people (typically strangers) in public spaces, almost exclusively by male protagonists. We showed that the perpetrators could be meaningfully divided into (at least) two classes of perpetrators. The younger ones were typically school refusers with histories of mental illness, lacking relationships–on a road to reproductive nowhere.

We’ve subsequently found that they often leave manifestos in which they bemoan their lack of success in the world, especially with women. They might get killed in the course of their spree but were much less likely to die in the process than the older type. These latter ones typically had jobs and relationships (but were in the process of losing either or both). They did not have a history of mental health issues beyond those typical of the general population. The younger ones (average age 21) were on the road to reproductive oblivion. The older ones (average age 43) were in danger of losing it all. Interestingly these are the ages at which men are beginning to acquire status (or the dawning realisation that they might never do this) or to start a downward spiral of losing it.

Status is, of course, the key to male reproductive value. "Status" is not just one thing, of course: What makes someone high status to one might be anathema to others. Here’s the thing: There exist women for whom murdering others raises your status in their eyes, and they are not shy about admitting it:

"I would bang Wayne Gacy. Why? Because he has an impressive body count. Would I find him attractive if he was just a petty thief? Hell no. Edmund Kemper is not commercially attractive in any way, but I’d still f-ck him ten ways til Sunday." —A self-identified fan of spree killers from our study

The existence of the younger type of spree killer, with their self-conscious notoriety seeking, sometimes expressed in manifestos, and surprisingly high level of self-awareness about their likely continued lack of success with women implied that their actions might have an audience. And there are there to be found, as the above quote illustrates.

Hybristophilia is the technical term for those (almost exclusively women) who fetishize criminality. But spree killing (and serial killing) is not mere criminality. It is among the most taboo of behaviors (often involving murdering children, for instance) imaginable. It is worth bearing all this in mind because some of the commentators on spree killings imply that it is a phenomenon of little import, given the relatively low risk of dying.¹

As obviously callous as this view is to victims and their families, this sort of high-minded, corpse-counting, consequentialism also neglects such facts as what the effect of a generation raised to see school as a place of fear and threat–where wearing bulletproof backpacks may be considered acceptable for toddlers–might be doing to mental health. That is in addition to the fact that spree killing does not exist in isolation and is not even particularly associated with easily understood patterns of mental illness. Spree killers do not just drop from the sky. Our species has been producing these behaviors (now made even more deadly by guns) since records began.

Some of these facts have not gone unnoticed by behavioral scientists. For example, the Swedish forensic psychiatrist Sten Levander is on record as saying that the highest concentration of extremely beautiful women is to be found in the visiting room at Kumla, Sweden’s supermax prison. And Ogas and Gaddam, in their superb analysis of internet pornography, made the following point:

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It turns out that killing people is an effective way to elicit the attention of many women: virtually every serial killer, including Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and David Berkowitz, has received love letters from large numbers of female fans

Are these hybristophiles just foolish young girls who have confused the concepts of taboo-busting "bad boy" and "celebrity" in a pathological fashion? The answer is more complex than it first appears. In our recent paper in Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, we analysed their online fan sites in terms of themes in their fantasies, self-created art, and other artefacts.

Once again, as with the spree killers, there were two distinct types. The first, and by far the most common, showed little distinction–in terms of their fantasy lives, between a typical One-Direction fan. Their art was wish-fulfilling, with themes of redemption. There was another, darker type, however. They focused much more on killing themselves, with sadistic glee at the victims' pain and fear. And they expressed no reformation desires for the objects of their fetish–on the contrary, they expressed a desire to join in.

And they, like some of the spree killers, were remarkably self-aware. People struggle to make sense of this because they want, so desperately, for these sorts of abhorrent behaviors to be some obvious result of an easily censored media input or an easily labeled pathology. Answers are not going to be so easy, alas. And they will not let human nature off the hook.