“Who lives in your neighborhood?” Psychologist and true crime expert Emma Kenny asks “The Serial Killer Next Door: Chilling True Stories of the Killers Hidden Among Us” (Mobius).
“Maybe a friendly postman or a businessman in a sharp suit? These are faces you recognize, these are ‘normal’ people like you or me. But deep within this normality may be hidden a frightening anomaly.
“Because within some of these seemingly normal souls are desires so deep that it is almost impossible for most of us to understand them.”
“The Serial Killer Next Door” revisits the stories of 15 notorious mass murderers, ranging from more familiar ones like Ted Bundy to others like Dorothea Puente, who murdered nine elderly and disabled residents of her boarding house in Sacramento California. and Jerry Brudos, the ‘Shoe Fetish Slayer’ from Salem, Oregon. Kenny writes, “Uncovering the mind of a serial killer requires patience to delve into the darkest depths of human nature.”
From the beginning, the book is graphic and distressing in equal amounts.
The story of David Parker Ray, the so-called “Toy-Box Killer”, is an example of this. A sexual molester and serial killer, suspected of more than 60 murders beginning in the 1950s and ending in the late 1990s, Ray spent his entire life chained in a windowless and soundproof trailer at his home in Elephant Butte, NM. Before that, they kidnapped women and took them under their control. Unimaginable abuse for months at a time.
Many died, their bodies filled with cement so he could throw them into a local reservoir or river, knowing they would never float to the surface.
Those who survived were “given a cocktail of drugs to induce confusion and amnesia,” Kenny writes. “This will ensure that they will be unable to turn Ray in to the police.”
The full extent of Ray’s depravity was revealed in 1999 when 22-year-old Cynthia Jaramillo escaped from his clutches. “Their innocuous-looking trailer turned out to be a horrific prison of torture,” says Kenny. “The story of David Parker Ray is a frightening reminder of how deep humanity can sink.”
Like all the killers featured in the book, David Parker Ray had the same apparently common characteristics that allowed him to hide in plain sight. “Ray was known within the community as a humble man who held a full-time job and was respected as a mechanic. He also had a clean record,” says Kenny.
Kenny argues that it is this ordinariness that makes his crimes all the more shocking. “How can one understand the coexistence of mediocrity and cruelty?” she asks.
Take former soldier Israel Keyes, who took his own life in prison while awaiting trial for a series of gruesome murders across the country between 2010 and 2012. He was quiet and introspective, Kenny writes. , , The polite guy who said hello when you brought in your morning newspaper.”
But what these killers have in common is “power gained through physical and psychological pain and humiliation.”
Kenny says, it is on the one hand a means of promoting low self-esteem and on the other hand a way of avoiding or erasing memories of a difficult background, which usually includes abuse, violence and ,Deep seated ‘fear of rejection’ on the other,
This is certainly the case with Eileen Wuornos, who murdered seven men and is considered America’s first female serial killer. His childhood was affected by violent sexual abuse at the hands of family members and he tried to commit suicide six times before his murder spree began in 1989.
Kenny writes, “Her life was the epitome of a horror story from conception to her death by lethal injection on October 9, 2002, when she was just 46.”
Indeed, when Wuornos (played by Charlize Theron in the 2003 Oscar-winning film “Monster”) was hanged in October 2002, one of the last things she said was: “I deserve to die.”
Kenny also revealed how many serial killers do not fit the stereotypical notion of what a mass murderer might look like.
Tamara Samsonova, for example, was a “small and fragile” 68-year-old grandmother who, nevertheless, killed her occupant and the woman with whom she later lived, dismembering their bodies, suffocating their lungs. Before eating it and scattering the remaining pieces. The area around her home, Fruzensky District of St. Petersburg, Russia.
Now Samsonova, 77, is in custody as police investigate 14 other possible murders, including that of her husband. ,“Elderly women are rarely considered capable of heinous crimes,” Kenny writes.
“This underestimation, combined with the lack of highly suspicious behavior, created a perfect smokescreen.”
This is further proof, if necessary, that you can never tell what your neighbors may be doing behind closed doors.
By the end of the book, as Kenny concludes, “You may look at yourself a little more closely, listen a little more carefully, and wonder: Do I really know who’s next to me? Does he live?”
