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about his or her behavior. Along this path, we shed light on our demons and discover our humanity. We may understand that dark impulses can be channeled and used to enrich and empower our lives through art, literature, humor, athletics, or simply through the sheer zest and enjoyment of the hurlyburly of life that comes from channeled aggression. In fact, much of life’s work and play involves controlling and redirecting aggressive impulses. It is a path that permits us to take responsibility for our actions by facing and acknowledging our feelings. Because it discards disabling myths and illusions, it enables us to make freer choices. It is a path that, like this book, leads through patches of darkness so we may better understand and appreciate the light. One of the greatest, most ennobling human characteristics is the ability to turn one’s mind back upon itself in a momentous act of personal discovery. We can celebrate, with the psalmist’s song of praise, that personal knowledge is “a light unto my path.”
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A Psychology of Evil
    There is no sin, no crime I could not be guilty of. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    The Serial Killer Next Door
    Why are people fascinated by serial killers? The plethora of books, movies, and television documentaries about them attests to the public’s obsession with these human killing machines. Yet compared to the number of spouses who kill their partners, or drunken drivers who commit vehicular homicide, there are relatively few serial killers: the FB I estimates that at any given time, between 200 and 500 serial killers are at large and that they kill 3,500 people a year. (See Chapter 11 for an in-depth discussion of serial killers.)
    My hunch is that people are fascinated by serial killers because of their perceived resemblance to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As with Dr. Jekyll, most serial killers appear outwardly quite ordinary, like your neighbor or mine, living normal everyday lives in which, just as we do, they fill the car with gas, hold down a job, pay taxes. Then, from behind this veneer of ordinariness, their Mr. Hyde personality, representative of the darkest aspect of humanity, jumps out to kill their victims—and to transfix us.
    Prime examples uphold the stereotype. They all hid in plain sight. Dennis Rader worked for 14 years as a security company employee, 19
    then as a census taker, and for another 14 years as an animal control and zoning employee of his Wichita, Kansas, suburb. He had been married for decades, had two grown children, was a long-term member of his Lutheran church, and had served as president of its congregation council, as a member of the zoning board of appeals, and as a Cub Scout leader. He looked harmless, neighbors exclaimed when he was arrested as the “BTK” killer in 2005, but soon he confessed to having murdered 10 people in incidents dating back to the 1970s. BTK, which he had suggested as one of the names by which he could be called, was used in taunting letters and missives to the police and the media; it stood for Bind, Torture, and Kill. The packages he sent contained dolls bound in plastic as well as graphic evidence of the murders.
    Alexander Pichuskin, dubbed the Chessboard Killer, worked as a grocery store clerk in Moscow for a dozen years before being arrested and charged with 49 murders in 2007. He had been planning, he told a court, to commit a total of 64 murders, one for each square on an imaginary chessboard.
    John Wayne Gacy was a building construction contractor, twice married, active in community projects, and a member of civic organizations. In 1967, he was voted the Jaycees’ Outstanding Member. Joining the Jolly Joker Club, he created the character of Pogo the Clown and, costumed as Pogo, went into hospitals to cheer up sick children. In 1978, Gacy was director of the Polish Constitution Day Parade in Chicago, and during the festivities was photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter. But