Are You a Serial Killer?

John Wayne Gacy, being gay and in the closet, was already practiced in the art of pretending when he decided to become a serial killer. He was married, ran a KFC franchise and had kids, but even then there were rumors of homosexuality. He created a role for himself, a part in a play where he was the upstanding pillar of the community on the outside, but inwardly somebody else. At this time in American history (the late 1960s), homosexuality was regarded as being socially deviant, so much so that it was rarely even spoken about except in innuendo and with euphemisms. Seeing himself as a deviant, a pervert already, according the morality of the day, may have made the leap to life-taking seem easier. If you believe that you are already a monster for being gay, then it makes no difference if you add other crimes to it or not, you are still a monster. He may also have been working out homophobia and self-hatred, seeing the murder of other gay men as somehow redemptive.

You have to be proficient at leading a double life. This is not for everybody. Like dismembering a corpse, it takes work. You need to be able to pretend to be normal, to know how normal people are, even while you hunt them and fantasize. You have to accept your inner monster to be able to hide it. You can’t hide something unless you know it’s there, you can’t know that it needs to be hidden until you know exactly what it is. You need to be intensely aware of what the killer inside you can do.

Keeping shameful secrets hidden is a skill and you are not likely to get away with one murder, let alone several unless you are practiced in it.

Like Gacy you would need to have issues going all the way back to your childhood. If you are an adult, you probably already know deep inside you what you can do. They don’t have to be big issues like abuse, just big to you. Things that get singled out in your memory. For Gacy it may have been his father calling him a “sissy”, perhaps a reference to early signs of his homosexuality. Young Gacy may have come to hate himself for his desires as a result of paternal abuse. Any event that brings about hatred and bitterness could be a possible starting point. It has to be hatred so great that it cannot be kept to yourself. You have a compulsion to vent on other people, to transfer your self-hatred to others. If you are a candidate then you can probably think back to a point where you developed an animosity towards yourself or some other group of people.

You have to be compelled. Meaning that you are obsessed with doing it the way an addict is obsessed with his drug of choice, constantly thinking about it, longing for it, looking forward to the next high. Murder is too risky, too much trouble, with consequences that are too great for anyone to commit it half-heartedly. Imagine the point at which a killer first decides to kill. To move from being, for all appearances, normal, to being what everybody around you would consider monstrous, has to be possibly the biggest shift of someone’s life. It stands to reason that if Gacy could have controlled his impulses, with all that he had to gain early in life, he would have. The same goes for Ted Bundy. You have to be a slave to your desires to become their kind of monster.