We just had Elliot Rodger’s rampage in Isla Vista, and we’re now seeing another horror story from Waukesha, Wisconsin, in the form of two 12-year-old girls who stabbed another 12-year-old child, supposedly to benefit a supernatural entity known as “Slenderman.”
Slenderman is an entirely fictional creation of recent vintage:
He is Slenderman, a menacing, faceless specter in a dark suit — sometimes portrayed with octopus-like tentacles — known to haunt children and those who seek to expose him. He was born in 2009 in an online forum for people who enjoy creating fake supernatural images.
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To be clear, the origin story of the monstrous character (sometimes referred to as The Slender Man) in no way urged readers to kill to earn his favor. But Slenderman has undergone hundreds of permutations online in his five-year existence.
If you want to learn more about Slenderman, you can Google him up as easily as I can, but the details aren’t really very important. Although someone studying the psychology of the would-be killers might find it interesting to explore their beliefs about Slenderman in some detail, I doubt that the specifics of the legend are an important part of the cause of this violence.
For one thing, these kinds of killers — serial killers, spree killers, thrill killers — are often a bit confused about the world. Something may have inspired them, but they often seem to get more out of their inspiration than what’s actually there. Back in the late 1980’s a pair of young men named Raymond Belknap and James Vance shot themselves in some sort of suicide pact. Belknap died immediately, but Vance lived for three years afterward, and he claimed they were inspired to suicide by lyrics in some Judas Priest songs. The thing is, he remembered stuff from the lyrics that just wasn’t there. In his book The Gift of Fear, author Gavin de Becker recounts some confusion by Vance when it came to the lyrics:
The group Judas Priest did not create James Vance, of course, but in a sense, he created them. When he was asked about a particular lyric, “They bathed him and clothed him and fed him by hand,” he recited it as “They bathed him and clothed him and fed him a hand.” So he had done more than just react to the songs; he had actually rewritten them, taken a lyric about someone being cared for and turned it into something about cannibalism. Even his admiration was expressed in violent terms. James said he was so enamored of the band that he would do anything for them, “kill many people or shoot the president through the head.” He told lawyers that if the band had said, “Let’s see who can kill the most people,” he would have gone out and done something terrible. In fact, the band said no such thing, and he did something terrible anyway.
Another example is John Hinckley Jr., a disturbed young man who became obsessed with actress Jodie Foster after seeing her in the movie Taxi Driver. After stalking her for a while at Yale University, where he was unable to make any meaningful contact, he eventually decided that his best chance to impress her was to make some spectacular gesture, and on March 30, 1981, he opened fire on President Ronald Reagan and his entourage outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., wounding Reagan and three other people. Needless to say, Hinckley’s stated intentions were not grounded in reality, and his assassination attempt did not actually impress Jodie Foster, nor did anyone blame her for his actions. He was just crazy.
A few years before that, serial killer David Berkowitz shot 13 people in New York over a period of several months. When he was captured, he claimed to have killed his women victims because his neighbor’s dog was a demon that had demanded a blood sacrifice. As with Hinckley, the craziness of his motivation was immediately apparent, and nobody actually blamed the dog. Further, some criminal psychologists believed Berkowitz made up the whole “dog made me do it” story to lay the groundwork for an insanity defense, or maybe just to mess with investigators. And depending on how you interpret some of his statements, Berkowitz may also have tried to convince investigators that he was part of a team of murderers, some of whom were still at large. There’s no evidence for that, though.
Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” carried out a 17-year campaign of mail bombings that claimed 26 victims, three of them fatally. Based on a 35,000-word “manifesto” he sent to newspapers, he appears to have been attacking people involved in technology our of some concern for the dehumanizing effects of industrial society. Like Berkowitz, Kaczynski also seems to have wanted to convince people he had confederates: The manifesto was written in the first-person plural and refers to something called “Freedom Club,” but there is no evidence of involvement by others.
Confessions should generally be taken with a grain of salt. In 1984, a white man named Bernhard Goetz shot four young black males on a commuter train. When captured, he claimed it was self-defense (which held up in court), but he also said that after shooting each man once, he walked over to one of them, told him “You don’t look so bad, here’s another,” and shot him again. At the trial, however, it turned out that each man had been shot only once, and most witnesses said that all the shots were in rapid succession. No witnesses heard him say the “here’s another” line. He had apparently invented a story that made him seem like more of a badass.
Confusion abounds. Some killers claim to be getting back at bullies, but when investigators interview their acquaintances, it turns out they were bullies themselves. Some killers try to manufacture higher purposes for their crimes, such as leading revolutions against real or imagined oppression. Others spin their crimes to make themselves seem less pathetic and more cool and in control. Still other killers try to evade punishment by denying all involvement with the crime or blaming someone else, including the victim. On the other hand, something like 20% of all post-conviction exonerations include false confessions to the crime.
So while it’s important to consider a killer’s statements about his crimes, it’s also important to keep in mind that what he says may be delusional, incoherent, self-aggrandizing, manipulative, or an outright lie. This is obvious when the killer’s explanation is clearly nonsense — involving Slenderman or talking dogs — but just because the killer’s explanation is banal and ordinary doesn’t mean it’s accurate. And just because his explanation is crazy doesn’t mean he’s crazy in the most obvious way.
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