On Knowing Murderers

On account of the curious boulevard I’ve strolled, I’ve had the opportunity to meet several murderers. Killers. People who at some point in their own lives, for myriad reasons, have taken the life of another.

(And I don’t mean to suggest that you, dear reader, need an explanation of what a murderer is. But that’s such a tremendously weighty act to have in your personal narrative that it bears articulating.)

Let me pause and see if I can get a count………. At least fourteen. The actual number is probably higher. What follows is a roundabout way of exploring what I’ve learned; for me as much as for you.

Imagine: we sit in a small theater and listen to victim’s families share their stories. The wrenching, tragic scenarios that marked the end of their loved ones’ lives. I’ve interviewed such people at length, so I’ll tell you what such a congress might be like. We would weep openly and little room will be left in our hearts for anything other than sympathetic grief and anguish. When the house lights go up, we’d be emotionally exhausted, and when we step out into the night air, onto the city streets, we would likely feel vulnerable to the evil capacity of man and madness. As we carry these feelings back to our bedrooms, into hot showers and glasses of whiskey, we might weep again and when the perpetrators come to mind, we will dispose of them beyond the threshold of our consideration, because our heart is still so full and aching.

Time passes and the pain softens. We go about our days of normalcy and every now and then one of the stories bobs up when our mind is idle and with it comes wisps of grief. (This same pattern defines the recovery of victims, except that the grief comes in all-consuming waves, and for some the drowning never stops.) All the while we guard ourselves from thoughts of the perpetrators. After all, they are safely walled away in that place of the damned where the light of compassion never shines. And that’s fine. Because haven’t they proven themselves unworthy of anything but rejection and disdain?

This tendency is natural and human. The emotional process must be rooted deep within our genetic code: keep the dangerous creatures away, at bay, on the far side of sharpened sticks, for they threaten our very survival.

Despite the what I’ve learned from knowing murderers — more on that in a moment — I am not immune from torch mob emotions and thirsting for vengeance.

For instance, two days ago I caught a story of two young men who went on a seemingly random murderous rampage. The news media called it a “spree”. As I learned of the horror they so heartlessly meted upon the innocent, I wanted the satisfaction of knowing they were gone from the planet. In that moment, I wanted them dead. I must admit there’s a parallel version of me that might see their execution through, without trial or conjecture, right there in the middle of the street while the blood of their victims was still cooling on the sidewalk. The feeling is so very real that it must be rooted deep within my own genetic code.

How we reconcile those feelings alongside our predisposition to love is a real puzzler.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that “a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions”. I don’t know how he may have applied this thought to our willingness to love, but that’s what this all amounts to. The experiences that challenged the dimensions of my own will to love didn’t start with killers. They began with another variant of social outcast, the sex worker. To prevent the divergence into another essay, I will summarize.

When I lived in Eastern Europe I came to know several men and women who worked in the adult entertainment industry — prostitutes, models, porn ‘actors’, even people that worked in chat dens. When you spend time off the beaten path in Prague and Budapest, you encounter them. And to my surprise I found few of them to be morally vapid. In fact, there was a striking normalcy among them. There was also human damage and when I came to know the connection between this damage and their place in the world, I came to know a sadness. But the takeaway was that the connection between trauma and sexually eccentric behavior didn’t diminish their worthiness of love. To the contrary, for me it expanded it.

Years later when I had the opportunity to spend time in prisons and detention centers, I did so with an open heart and a head full of curiosity. I did not intend to keep exploring the dimensions of my will to love, it just kind of happened. It was, in a sense, a scientific curiosity — this ability to study the disease under the microscope without the risk of infection — that brought me to this place. (And I refer not to the offenders as disease, but to our acceptance that people who have done awful things are not worthy of our concern.)

At this point you might be picturing some guy just itching to love the next wayward soul who walks into the room. You might even think I’m carving out a perch on some moral high ground because I’m willing to dance with the girl in the dirty dress. No, not me. I have my fears and repulsions just like you. I’m more comfortable with my peers, just like you. I sometimes avert my eyes from the hygienically repugnant street dwellers, just like you. We’re all human that way.

But my occupation mandates that I listen without prejudice. When I’m not conducting an interview, I’m often running a camera and that affords me an even better opportunity to sit and listen. I’ve come across a few sociopaths, to be sure, but more than that I’ve encountered traumatized people. I can imagine no greater horror than to be traumatized for years, only to top all that with an act of violence by your own hand, a trauma to top all others.

I’ve learned that people who have committed murder, after an intervention of years, often regard their younger self with the same fear and rejection and confusion with which we regard them. That makes it awfully tough to love yourself. But seeing these people fight for their own self-love, as an element of their healing — not just from the trauma they’ve caused, but also the trauma they were subject to — is one of the most inspirational things I’ve been lucky enough to see. And when they achieve it, who am I to say it’s wrong?

To be sure, at times mine has been a challenging road to wander. If I could share one lesson, perhaps sparing you some of the peculiar discomforts I’ve subjected myself to, it’s this:

Never believe you’ve reached the limits of your willingness to love. The capacity for compassion is one of the greatest human attributes. Exercise yours and your will to love grows. Because for goodness sake, who would want to move in the opposite direction?