Overtired and under arrest

Are serial killers crazy or lazy? Dave Jory takes a stab at the conundrum.

Serial killers fascinate me. I watch all the true crime shows, and anytime there is a serial killer on the loose I always monitor their progress on the news. I love the nicknames they're given. Applying a serial killer nickname is kind of like the porn star name game, where you take the name of your first pet and the name of the first street you lived on. For a serial killer it's the city they work in and the method of death they prefer. Like ‘The Suffolk Strangler’. Simple, really. Almost as descriptive as Spot Cumberwell.

And while I don't defend what serial killers do, I do think they are often misunderstood. Last week I watched a TV show about a serial killer who was dumping bodies in a forest. Like so many serial killers, this guy wasn't digging graves for his victims: he was just covering them up with tree branches and leaves.

The psychiatrist on the show insisted that by not burying the bodies properly, this serial killer actually 'wanted to get caught'. That's ridiculous. Nobody wants to get caught doing anything - I don't care how crazy you are.

I think that by failing to dig adequate graves, the message this guy was sending was, “I don't want to get caught, but I really don't want to dig a six foot hole.” Serial killers are just like the rest of us. They're lazy. If you've just killed someone, surely the last thing you want to do is three hours of hard labour digging a six-foot deep hole. You'd probably just want to go home, have some dinner, and watch TV.

I guess what I'm saying is, serial killers are people too. Not everything they do can be reduced to some deep psychological motivation. But I guess if you're a psychologist, no one is going to pay you to go on TV to say, “By observing the crime scene, we can see that we're clearly dealing with a killer who was either very tired, or just afraid of a bit of hard work.”