It is often said that most people have a dark side, although there are some darker than others. Not everyone, for example, manufactures bowls with women's skulls, upholsters chairs and makes masks with human skin or retains several amputated noses of remembrance. Things like this, and worse, were what the police found at Ed Gein's farm, considered one of the worst serial killers of recent decades.
His story is the one that Serious Assassins opens, a book in which the Alicante novelist Blas Ruiz Grau reviews the trajectories of some of the wildest psychopaths in history, including Ted Bundy , Edmund Kemper , Zodiac or the Spanish Manuel Delgado Villegas , known as the Arropiero.
And it does so with a close and colloquial tone, as if it were a conversation from you to you with the reader. "The issue is already too hard in itself and does not need ornaments to make it more crude," says the author. "I like to do it that way because I think that in this way I pay more attention than if I had put an omniscient narrator. Those deaths have occurred, those psychopaths have existed and their acts are there. I limit myself to telling it naturally, sometimes with irony , but always with respect. If I can do something more crude, I think I should try it. "
Already in the prologue, Ruiz makes an important point: psychopath is not necessarily synonymous with murderer . "In fact, those who come to kill are a minority within psychopathy. I think that the most scary is the integrated psychopath, the one who lives among us. He enjoys hurting, manipulates, lies and doesn't care who is ahead to reach a specific end, "he says. And the fact that most are men has a genetic explanation: "The morphology of the male brain is different from that of women and makes them more predisposed to violence."
Many psychopaths are also "masters of disguise" , difficult to locate because they know how to appear to be normal people. "We have the case of John Wayne Gacy , who went down in history as the silly clown: an active member of the community, a tireless worker, always willing to help his neighbors ... And he turned out to be one of the bloodiest murderers," he explains. Ruiz
Ted Bundy, on the other hand, was trying to pity his possible victims to attract them , taking for example a cumbersome sling and a pile of books that he dropped right at the moment he crossed one of them. Singer Deborah Harry , a member of the Blondie group, also tells in her autobiography how she was about to be kidnapped by Bundy in New York, who offered to take her to a club, and managed to escape 'in extremis' from her vehicle.
A myth that does not hold, according to this author from Alicante, is that of serial killers as super intelligent people. "The worst murderer we have had in Spain has been the Arropiero, with 48 deaths that are known. He never managed to learn to write his name and did not know or hold a conversation. Even so, he eluded Justice for a long time and when at the end he was arrested, he was only accused of two deaths ... But his ego led him to confess the other 46 ".
Psychopathy, Ruiz emphasizes, "is not a disease. Now much is said about the Joker movie, but its protagonist is not a psychopath, but a psychotic, a person suffering from a mental illness. For that there is treatment, medications, re-education. .. For a psychopath, no. The only way to stop being so is dead or held. There is no cure for that. "
In his opinion, "the cinema has contributed dangerously to fostering the fascination for serial killers . You have to show reality, without bleaching them. That's why I like Mindhunter, the Netflix series. It doesn't try to soften Edmund Kemper's crimes, it shows what he did and what he thinks motivated him to do it, but he does not try to justify it by implying that society had mistreated him so that in the end he empathizes with him. "
The book has cost him a year of work and whenever it has been possible, he says, he has tried to approach the main source. "In the case of the United States, I was looking for the district where the police were who investigated it, I wrote to them and, very kindly, in most cases they answered me by passing me all the information I asked them without any problem. With the Arropiero I had it easier: I went to the direct source in the Port of Santa María. "
Of all the killers who walk through his book, the one that causes chills to the author is Miyuki Ishikawa . "She was a Japanese midwife. After World War II, Japan was on the side of the defeated and was devastated. And she believed that her way of contributing to her country was to kill newborns. She left them to starve or drown in their own tears. although the worst thing is that it became a business with the participation of her husband and another doctor. It took my sleep many nights because I have a small child too and I don't understand that barbarism. "
When making the selection for the book, some illustrious monsters such as the Son of Sam or the Vampire of Düsseldorf have been left out. "I did not want to make an encyclopedia, but a fun book to show that everyone has their unique characteristics. I wanted there to be a balance between the best known as Ed Gain, Edmund Kemper or Ted Bundy, and other more unknown ones like Miyuki Ishikawa, Moses Sithole or Garavito. I've left many, yes, and possibly someday portray them, "he concludes.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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