Homicidal Triad: Violence Indicator or Urban Myth?

Jan 3, 2018 15:09:06 GMT -5 @beyonder said:

I should have included Charlie Brandt because he was a radar technician for Lockeed Martin so he has Aviation links. No one suspected him, you say. I have to add him to my serial killers and aviation thread.

Can't an excuse still be an indicator? Only cult members like the ones in the Mason family would use the cult as an excuse which I would agree with. 

So the "Aviation" indicator doesn't necessarily mean the killer had a pilot's license, but simply a connection to the aviation field. That makes more sense because I can think of only two (possibly three) serial killers who were licensed pilots, though I'm sure there are more. The two that come to mind are Russell Williams in Ontario and Robert Hansen in Alaska. The third, Todd Kohlhepp, who killed women and men in South Carolina, claimed to have a pilot's license and most reports say he did, but I'm not sure there's any evidence that he was ever actually licensed.

Jan 3, 2018 20:19:25 GMT -5 @beyonder said:

Correct, Joanna. It's not necessarily licensed pilots and it's certainly not commercial pilots or Air Force pilots. Originally, Russell Williams, Robert Hansen and Robert Yates were the only ones I knew about. That's why I say Aviation and not AviatORS. 

From Kory Ryan's investigative thesis on the MacDonald homicidal triad:

[Author Constance] McKenzie found that the only triad characteristic serial murderers exhibited in their childhoods with any remarkable frequency was enuresis, which occurred 50% of the time. Ressler et al. had reported enuresis to be present in their subjects' histories 68% of the time. The other triad behaviors, firesetting and animal cruelty, were present in 6% (compared to Ressler et al.'s 56%) and 25% (compared to Ressler et al.'s 36%) of her sample, respectively.

Serial Killers McKenzie vs Ressler et al. %s
Bed wetting 50% and 68%
Fire setting 6% and 56%              
Animal Abuse 25% and 36%

Average child
Bed wetting 16%
Fire setting 1%
Animal Abuse ?

Serial killers
Bed wetting 3 x to 4 x higher than average,
Fire setting 6 x to 56 x higher 
Animal Abuse ? x higher
Combination 4/1 x 56/1? x ?/1=224x??

I knew Robert Hansen when I was living in Alaska. We went to his bakery at least two or three times a week, sometimes more. We all knew about the women who were disappearing, but because they were prostitutes, people just thought that they had moved on to some other location. No one suspected Hansen and he was killing women for at least 12 years.

How can you be sure of the percentage who wet the bed or started fires? People don't always tell the truth about things like that. I've known of boys who wet the bed and they didn't turn into serial killers.

Jan 3, 2018 15:09:06 GMT -5 @beyonder said:

I should have included Charlie Brandt because he was a radar technician for Lockeed Martin so he has Aviation links. No one suspected him, you say. I have to add him to my serial killers and aviation thread.

Do you also include Dennis Rader who was in the Air Force?

Jan 5, 2018 19:02:36 GMT -5 aprillynn93 said:

Sorry, I know I'm a little late to the conversation, but I have a story to share relating to the animal cruelty thing.

I knew of a kid from my home town of Redlands CA that went to high school with my sister (she is six years younger than me, so I had graduated by this time). He was cruel to animals. He tortured a few cats in hidoeus ways, of which I will spare you the details.

Anyway, he wound up killing one of his classmates. Behind Redlands runs the San Timoteo canyon, a very rural area with mostly ranches and farms. He kidnapped this kid from his residence, took him out there and killed him execution style. He was convicted of this crime and charged as an adult. To my knowledge, he is still in prison.

The point of this story is to say that I do think that people who are cruel to animals in this extreme at the very least have little regard for the value of life.

I'm not sure about the other aspects of these "triads", if this kid had exhibited any of those, but he certainly was an all around very bad person.

While I can't say for sure that he would have gone on to become a serial killer, I would bet that he would have killed again if he had had the chance.

It sounds like that boy was a bad seed. Parents and people who work in mental health don't want to admit it but there ARE children who are bad seeds, that are born evil and will do evil as long as they live and nobody knows why.

Jan 6, 2018 15:01:29 GMT -5 @beyonder said:

Torturers as I understand them are not classic born psychopaths because, to get anything out of torture, you have to be able to relate to someone's or something's pain. Most people think torturers can't appreciate the suffering of others. But they do. Although they may have learned to be psychopathic as well and a natural psychopath may learn to get pleasure from inflicting pain. 

I also believe people become dangerous when they have progressed to killing an animal culturally sacred to them. Dogs to some people. Birds to others for example. 

Some people just hate certain animals. For some reason, a lot of people hate cats and will kill them, kick them, or whatever, if they can get away with it, but they don't kill  or hurt other animals. I hate dogs. People who kill dogs, cats, rats, or whatever, aren't psychopaths or sociopaths or future serial killers and killing those animals is really no different than killing spiders, cockroaches, or whatever. It's just a matter of preference.

Jan 6, 2018 17:17:31 GMT -5 @beyonder said:

I agree that Animal Abuse is not proven to be of any significance even if it is around 30 percent of the sample of killers since they don't have real percentages for the entire population for comparison. If it's 30 percent of the regular population which I don't think it is, then there is no significance. It's also a judgement about what constitutes abuse. 

But gut feeling would say that it might be a relative indicator of who might be more prone to homicide and/or torture killing. There are other factors to consider but, as far as a single Indicator, that's all we're really looking for. 

I use the example of Russians being 1% of the population and allegedly 6% of the millionaires. Lets say 3 million Russians and 10 million millionaires out of 300 million. I think that's roughly 600,000 Russian millionaires or 25% of the Russian population. That says something about what it takes to be a millionaire, does it not, and is an Indicator of who would be a millionaire. Sure there's lots of exceptions (2.4 million) but it's 25% of the Russians versus 3% of the norm. So about 8 x the average. Significant. 

The problem I have with any indicator is that we don't know what the percentages are in the general population. I mean how are you going to know if your plumber, local banker, next door neighbor, and so on, abused animals, wet the bed or started fires as a child? These aren't the kinds of things people talk about. The lives of serial killers are closely scrutinized and every story someone tells about a killer's childhood, whether true or not, is pounced on by authors and psychologists and often, innocent acts are turned into something sinister.

I live in Maine and though the problem isn't as bad now as it was when I was a child, people who come here to spend the summer will often feed stray dogs and when they leave, the animals have to scrounge for food. Sometimes the abandoned dogs, which increase in number when they have puppies, will run in packs and they're a danger to livestock, pets and humans. When I was in school, I don't know of very many families who lived in the country that didn't shoot a few dogs and those doing the shooting were often teenage boys. If one of those boys had grown up to become a serial killer, someone would point to the fact that he shot a few stray dogs as an indicator when, in fact, he wasn't doing anything other boys his age in the same location hadn't done.