Free Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators by Carol Anne Davis

rate so they had to be examined by clinicians, something which deeply embarrassed him. By 12 he was having sadistic fantasies about torturing his classmates and burning down his school.
    His sense of inferiority deepened when it became clear that his younger brother had a high IQ and his older brother was street smart. Believing himself unable to compete, he locked himself away in his room playing heavy metal music for hours at a time. Contrary to popular belief, this music tends to calm down its listeners, who feel that the bands understand them.
    Professor Jeffrey Arnett interviewed dozens of such teens for his book Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation and found such music ‘purged their angst’.
    But it was going to take more than a few tunes to relieve David’s loneliness and inferiority complex, so by secondary school his sadism had deepened. He was one of only two boys 65
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    who watched what they believed was a snuff video in which people were extensively tortured, probably the well-known fake snuff movie Faces of Death . He also began to self-medicate by inhaling glue.
    At 16 he got drunk with a few friends and vandalised a building in Aldershot. He was so drunk when his mother came to the police station that she was afraid to take him home to his father, and instead sat with him for several hours in the car.
    A year later he and his older brother assaulted a neighbour, and Copeland was given community service. In the same time period he began to have sexual fantasies in which he was a powerful SS officer who enjoyed raping numerous female sexual slaves and torturing men.
    His parents asked him if he’d met a nice girl yet and, paranoia possibly setting in, he believed that they thought he was homosexual. He began to carry a knife when he went out at night and wondered what it would be like to use it on a gay male. Though heterosexual male sadists prefer to hurt girls and women, they will single out boys and men if these are easier targets. Their strongest motive is to cause pain and fear, so any sentient partner will do. Animals are the third category targeted but they are less desirable as, though they can show signs of suffering, they obviously can’t respond verbally to the sadist’s commands.
    In 1995, David’s mother left his father. Apparently this didn’t affect 19-year-old David very much as he’d seen his parents grow apart for many years. He remained living with his father, sometimes signing on and sometimes doing casual labour work. The two men continued to argue interminably.
    The following year Copeland was pleased when a bomb exploded at a rock concert in Atlanta after the Olympic Games.
    He later admitted that he was excited by the suffering.
    At 20 he moved into a bedsit close to his work, a move which increased his loneliness and isolation. He began to neglect his 66
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    personal hygiene, one of the many signs of depression and low self-esteem. Once a month he visited a prostitute, always choosing a different woman. He wanted to ask them to tie him up but he didn’t have the courage and settled for vanilla sex. Ashamed at his own shyness, he constantly thought about suicide, though fantasies of drugging girls and doing what he wanted with them would temporarily cheer him up.
    At 21 he joined the British National Party with its keep-Britain-white ethos, and suddenly had meetings to go to and a social life. Later he joined a religious movement called Christian Identity which identifies the chosen race as white. Now Copeland was no longer the girlfriendless semi-literate man without a purpose – instead he was the chosen representative of an omnipotent deity.
    Unfortunately a belief in this deity didn’t quell his sadism and he began to collect photographs of bomb amputees, war atrocities and mutilated murder victims. He was