The Case of the Mad Killer

You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded -- with what caution -- with what foresight -- with what dissimulation I went to work . . . Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in!

--The Tell-Tale Heart

Fictional characters like Poe's stealthy stabber have given many a whodunit fan the notion that an insane murderer is "fiendishly clever" in planning and executing his crimes. Poppycock, say two psychiatric authorities in a recent issue of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Dr. Louis Cohen, who teaches legal psychiatry at Yale, and Dr. Thomas Coffin, assistant professor of psychology at Hofstra College, riffled through the clues left by 18 psychotic murderers. Their conclusion: mad killers seem to commit their murders in a distinct pattern; there is seldom enough method in their madness to fool the dumbest flatfoot.

In choosing his victim, say Drs. Cohen & Coffin, the psychotic generally stays close to home: his wife, mother, sister or in-laws are favorites. The murder is often premeditated (one psychotic prepared again & again to kill his girl, but could not bring himself to do it when she was in a happy frame of mind; finally one night, when she was sad, he got it over with). But the crime is seldom shrewdly planned; many psychotic murderers operate in broad daylight, in public places, using any weapon that happens to come to hand. Another characteristic clue left by the mad killer is unnecessary roughness (cutting the body into ribbons or stuffing it into a drainpipe). Since the psychotic lives in a private world, he hardly ever has accomplices.*

Far from concealing the clues and making a crafty getaway, the mad murderer is usually indifferent about being arrested. Often, like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, he is anxious for his crime to be followed by punishment.

The psychotic never murders for personal gain. He has his motives, but they make little sense to anyone but himself. They also fail to meet De Quincey's standards (". . . Something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed.") Cohen & Coffin tell of a boy who hit his employer over the head several times with a hammer, stabbed him repeatedly with a hunting knife, and explained: "I just felt like doing it."

In almost every murder trial, someone raises the question: is the defendant sane? Drs. Cohen & Coffin think it might be easy to tell after a look at the crime itself; if it conforms closely to the psychotic pattern, the murderer is probably insane. If such tests became common, could a sane murderer pass himself off as a crazy man by deliberately mimicking the psychotic pattern? Not likely, think Cohen & Coffin: a murderer in his right mind has a certain hesitancy about carving up his female relatives in the town square at high noon.

* Edmund Pearson, summing up the findings of othere students of murder, concluded that society is at the mercy of any murderer who follows three simple rules: 1) show no remorse, 2) take no accomplices, 3) keep your head.

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