is one of the reasons why psychopaths remain so cool, calm, and collected under conditions of extreme danger, and why they are so reward-driven and take risks. Their brains, quite literally, are less ‘switched on’ than the rest of ours.”
I thought back to Gacy and what I’d learned from Dr. Morrison.
“Kiss my ass,” he’d said as he entered the death chamber.
Normal on the outside (Gacy was a pillar of his local community, and on one occasion was even photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter), he camouflaged his inner scorpion with an endearing cloak of charm. But it was entirely in his nature to sting you—as much as it was to convince you that he wouldn’t.
Talking the Walk
Fabrizio Rossi is thirty-five years old, and used to be a window cleaner. But his predilection for murder eventually got the better of him. And now, would you believe, he “does” it for a living.
As we stand next to each other on a balmy spring morning, poking uneasily around John Wayne Gacy’s bedroom, I ask him what the deal is. What is it about psychopaths that we find so irresistible? Why do they fascinate us so much?
It’s definitely not the first time he’s been asked.
“I think the main thing about psychopaths,” says Rossi, “is the fact that on the one hand they’re so normal, so much like the rest of us—but on the other, so different. I mean, Gacy used to dress up as a clown and perform at children’s parties … That’s the thing about psychopaths. On the outside they seem so ordinary. Yet scratch beneath the surface, peek inside the crawl space, as it were, and you never know what you might find.”
We are not, of course, in Gacy’s actual bedroom, But rather, in a mocked-up version of it that comprises an exhibit in what must surely be a candidate for the grisliest museum in the world: the Museum of Serial Killers in Florence. The museum is located on Via Cavour, a ritzy side street within screaming distance of the Duomo.
And Fabrizio Rossi curates it.
The museum is doing well. And why wouldn’t it? They’re all there, if you’re into that kind of thing. Everyone from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dahmer, from Charles Manson to Ted Bundy.
Bundy’s an interesting case, I tell Rossi. An eerie portent of the psychopath’s hidden powers. A tantalizing pointer to the possibility that, if you look hard enough, there might be more in the crawl space than just
dark
secrets.
He’s surprised, to say the least.
“But Bundy is one of the most notorious serial killers in history,” he says. “He’s one of the museum’s biggest attractions. Can there really be anything else except dark secrets?”
There can. In 2009, twenty years after his execution at Florida State Prison (at the precise time that Bundy was being led to the electric chair, local radio stations urged listeners to turn off household appliances to maximize the power supply), psychologist Angela Book and her colleagues at Brock University in Canada decided to take the icyserial killer at his word. During an interview, Bundy, who staved in the skulls of thirty-five women during a four-year period in the mid-1970s, had claimed, with that boyish, all-American smile of his, that he could tell a “good” victim simply from the way she walked.
“I’m the coldest son of a bitch you’ll ever meet,” Bundy enunciated. And no one can fault him there. But, Book wondered, might he also have been one of the shrewdest?
To find out, she set up a simple experiment.First, she handed out the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale—a questionnaire specifically designed to assess psychopathic traits within the general population, as opposed to within a prison or hospital setting—to forty-seven male undergraduate students. Then, based on the results, she divided them up into high and low scorers. Next, she videotaped the gait of twelve new participants as they walked down a corridor from one room to another, where they completed a standard demographics
I thought back to Gacy and what I’d learned from Dr. Morrison.
“Kiss my ass,” he’d said as he entered the death chamber.
Normal on the outside (Gacy was a pillar of his local community, and on one occasion was even photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter), he camouflaged his inner scorpion with an endearing cloak of charm. But it was entirely in his nature to sting you—as much as it was to convince you that he wouldn’t.
Talking the Walk
Fabrizio Rossi is thirty-five years old, and used to be a window cleaner. But his predilection for murder eventually got the better of him. And now, would you believe, he “does” it for a living.
As we stand next to each other on a balmy spring morning, poking uneasily around John Wayne Gacy’s bedroom, I ask him what the deal is. What is it about psychopaths that we find so irresistible? Why do they fascinate us so much?
It’s definitely not the first time he’s been asked.
“I think the main thing about psychopaths,” says Rossi, “is the fact that on the one hand they’re so normal, so much like the rest of us—but on the other, so different. I mean, Gacy used to dress up as a clown and perform at children’s parties … That’s the thing about psychopaths. On the outside they seem so ordinary. Yet scratch beneath the surface, peek inside the crawl space, as it were, and you never know what you might find.”
We are not, of course, in Gacy’s actual bedroom, But rather, in a mocked-up version of it that comprises an exhibit in what must surely be a candidate for the grisliest museum in the world: the Museum of Serial Killers in Florence. The museum is located on Via Cavour, a ritzy side street within screaming distance of the Duomo.
And Fabrizio Rossi curates it.
The museum is doing well. And why wouldn’t it? They’re all there, if you’re into that kind of thing. Everyone from Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dahmer, from Charles Manson to Ted Bundy.
Bundy’s an interesting case, I tell Rossi. An eerie portent of the psychopath’s hidden powers. A tantalizing pointer to the possibility that, if you look hard enough, there might be more in the crawl space than just
dark
secrets.
He’s surprised, to say the least.
“But Bundy is one of the most notorious serial killers in history,” he says. “He’s one of the museum’s biggest attractions. Can there really be anything else except dark secrets?”
There can. In 2009, twenty years after his execution at Florida State Prison (at the precise time that Bundy was being led to the electric chair, local radio stations urged listeners to turn off household appliances to maximize the power supply), psychologist Angela Book and her colleagues at Brock University in Canada decided to take the icyserial killer at his word. During an interview, Bundy, who staved in the skulls of thirty-five women during a four-year period in the mid-1970s, had claimed, with that boyish, all-American smile of his, that he could tell a “good” victim simply from the way she walked.
“I’m the coldest son of a bitch you’ll ever meet,” Bundy enunciated. And no one can fault him there. But, Book wondered, might he also have been one of the shrewdest?
To find out, she set up a simple experiment.First, she handed out the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale—a questionnaire specifically designed to assess psychopathic traits within the general population, as opposed to within a prison or hospital setting—to forty-seven male undergraduate students. Then, based on the results, she divided them up into high and low scorers. Next, she videotaped the gait of twelve new participants as they walked down a corridor from one room to another, where they completed a standard demographics
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