Free The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence by Gavin de Becker Page A

killer,” visited my home for dinner. (Ressler wrote the book Whoever Fights Monsters , the title of which comes from a Nietzsche quote I have often considered: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. For when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”) Having just read an advance copy of The Silence of the Lambs , I was discussing its fictional (I thought) character who killed young women to harvest their skin for a “woman suit.” Ressler matter-of-factly responded, “Oh, the Ed Gein case,” and he described the man who stole corpses from cemeteries, skinned them, and cured the skin in order to wear it. Ressler knew that nothing human is foreign. He had learned enough about so-called monsters to know that you don’t find them in gothic dungeons or humid forests. You find them at the mall, at the school, in the town or city with the rest of us.
     
    But how do you find them before they victimize someone? With animals, it depends on perspective: The kitten is a monster to the bird, and the bird is a monster to the worm. With man, it is likewise a matter of perspective, but more complicated because the rapist might first be the charming stranger, the assassin first the admiring fan. The human predator, unlike the others, does not wear a costume so different from ours that he can always be recognized by the naked eye.
     
    The blind eye, of course, will never recognize him, which is why I devote this chapter and the next to removing the blinders, to revealing the truths and the myths about the disguises someone might use to victimize you.
     
    I’ll start with a hackneyed myth you’ll recognize from plenty of TV news reports: “Residents here describe the killer as a shy man who kept to himself. They say he was a quiet and cordial neighbor.”
     
    Aren’t you tired of this? A more accurate and honest way for TV news to interpret the banal interviews they conduct with neighbors would be to report, “Neighbors didn’t know anything relevant.” Instead, news reporters present non information as if it is information. They might as well say (and sometimes do), “The tollbooth operator who’d taken his quarters for years described the killer as quiet and normal.” By the frequency of this cliché, you could almost believe that apparent normalcy is a pre-incident indicator for aberrant crime. It isn’t.
     
    One thing that does predict violent criminality is violence in one’s childhood. For example, Ressler’s research confirmed an astonishingly consistent statistic about serial killers: 100 percent had been abused as children, either with violence, neglect, or humiliation.
     
    You wouldn’t think so by the TV news reports on the early family life of one accused serial killer, Ted Kaczynski, believed to be the Unabomber. They told us that his mother was “a nice woman, well-liked by neighbors,” as if that has any bearing on anything. Neighbors usually have only one qualification for being in news reports: They are willing to speak to reporters. Don’t you think something more than the neighbors knew about might have gone on in that home when Ted and his brother, David, were children?
     
    Just look at a few facts about the family: The Kaczynski’s raised two boys, both of whom dropped out of society as adults and lived anti-social, isolated lives. One of them lived for a time in a ditch he dug in the ground—and that was the sane one, David, who didn’t end up killing anybody. If prosecutors are right, then the “crazy” one, Ted, grew up to become a brutal remote-control serial killer. Yet neighbors tell reporters that they saw nothing unusual, and reporters tell us the family was normal, and the myth that violence comes out of nowhere is perpetuated.
     
    I don’t mean here to indict all parents who raise violent children, for there are cases in which awful acts are committed by people with organic mental disorders, those the