Dennis Rader, AKA the BTK killer, an acronym for Bind, Torture, Kill, murdered 10 people around Wichita, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. To many who knew him, he looked like your average family man. He had a wife and two children, held ordinary jobs and was heavily involved with his local church, eventually becoming president of his congregation. When he was arrested in 2005, people who knew him struggled to reconcile the man they knew with the horrific nature of his crimes.
Ed Gein, whose crimes helped inspire fictional killers in films including Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, was described by the judge who tried his case as a “mild, meek appearing little man.” Yet, while he was regarded as eccentric and a bit odd, few would have guessed that he was secretly digging up bodies from graveyards and making furniture and other objects from human remains. Gein was also responsible for the murders of Mary Hogan and Bernice Worden.
So, this brings us to the focus of this article. Why does the appearance of normality hiding something disturbing terrify us so much?
We could begin by exploring the fact that many of the people who knew Rader and Gein had no idea what they were really doing. Think about it. They likely interacted with these two on a pretty regular basis while thinking no further than perhaps that one of them, Gein, was simply that odd man who lived nearby.
It is more comforting to believe that we can directly see danger around us. But killers can have the ability to compartmentalise that unimaginable part of their lives tremendously well. Rader went from his final known murder in 1991 to his arrest in 2005 without killing again, despite continuing fantasies. After his arrest, he admitted that he had already picked out another potential victim and had been thinking about killing again.
The other frightening thing is that we like to believe we are good judges of character. It hurts our ego when we find out that isn’t always the case. But that is, perhaps, the most trivial part. It can also make us wonder whether we could fall into one of their traps. That can strike us to our core.
What is actually one of the most interesting things to me is that perhaps the compartmentalisation required to get on with their “normal” lives might not have been entirely an act. At the end of the day, they were human beings like every one of us. Although that can be difficult to comprehend, they still needed connections with other people as well as structure in their lives.
Perhaps the two sides were genuine. At least to a point. Responsibilities and obligations still needed to be fulfilled, and some of their participation in ordinary family or community life may have been genuine too. Not all of it necessarily had to be faked.
We tend to like putting things into neat categories for simplicity’s sake. But human behaviour is too complex for that. There is a lot of nuance. And that nuance is maybe one of the most fascinating things of all when it comes to trying to figure out human nature.
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