Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

26

Sometime during the routine academic years, I took part, late one night, in one of those senseless conversations that people have when they’ve had just enough to drink to lose their embarrassment at talking utter nonsense. The others taking part have long been forgotten, the proposer of the theory a mere shadow. But the subject was fate – and the possibility of parallel universes.

Just suppose, the argument had started, that reality forked, like a road, every time you made a major decision. Because you generally have two choices, this would cause a split in the universe, an option between broad and narrow roads.

Because difficult decisions were often made on a fragile balance of possibilities, in which the minutest of minute reasons could disturb the knife-edge equilibrium.

And supposing you and your world continued in both realities, together with all the others you had already created with your choices. In each parallel existence, you lived with the results of your decision.

It was an amusing game, a quasi-intellectual exercise, a rich resource for the writer of science fiction, but it haunted me for years.

Especially after Baby Marnewick so suddenly intruded into my conscience again.

It began with two articles in the same issue of Law Enforcement about the budding disciplines of the profiling and “signature” identification of serial killers in the United States. One was by the director of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, the other by a senior detective in the office of the public prosecutor in Seattle, Washington. (Both contributors would later become legendary in their own right.)

On a professional level, the contents of the articles were revolutionary and dramatic: a criminological leap that eventually narrowed the gap between applied psychology and practical policing. But for me the experience of reading them was far more personal than academic because the facts, the modus operandi, the examples on which both articles based their arguments, were a blueprint of the death of Baby Marnewick. They made our dead neighbor rise up out of her grave, shook loose the memories and paraded them in front of my consciousness with a fanfare.

It made my life’s predictable path take an unforeseen direction.

And now I’ll have to lecture you because in the subsequent years I learned that the emotions that serial killers unleash often lead to false perceptions and popular views that are seldom rooted in reality.

The first thing one must understand is the difference between serial killers and mass murderers. The former are the Ted Bundys of this world, tragically damaged people who kill one victim after another in more or less the same way. They are, almost without exception, men, their targets usually women (unless they are homosexual, like Jeffrey Dahmer) and their most important psychological motivation is a total inability to make an impression socially – although I say this with great hesitation because, by trying to put it in a nutshell, I’m as guilty as the mass media of generalization and one-dimensional explanation of a far more complex phenomenon.

In contrast, mass murderers are those who will climb into the bell tower of a university and start shooting wildly. Or such a killer may be a White Wolf who does the same on a street corner – in contrast to the repeated, planned stalking of single, helpless victims by the serial killer.

Mass murderers are the shooting stars of daylight who, in one moment of flaming evil, swing Death’s scythe, are usually quickly caught, and finally leave innumerable questions unanswered.

Serial killers are the covert comets of the dark firmament who follow their path of destruction time and time again – prowlers, thieves of the night. Their crime is a show window of power, of the complete domination and humiliation of their victim, pathetic attempts to take revenge for the killers’ total lack of normal, healthy social and sexual interaction.

And Baby Marnewick’s dossier was a classic example, a perfect fit for the serial killer’s psyche.

If the views and theories of the two articles were true, it meant that Baby Marnewick’s murderer was identifiable, because the two authors had presented conceptual models of likely perpetrators, their behavior and lifestyle: often unattractive, usually single men with an inferiority complex, who lived with a domineering or promiscuous female parent and had an appetite for positions of power, such as might be found in the police or the Defence Force, but who usually lived on the edge of the law-and-order world, as security guards, for example. They were users of pornography with the emphasis on bondage – and variations on the theme.

Predictable, identifiable. Catchable.

It also meant that Baby Marnewick hadn’t been the first or the only victim of her murderer. Serial killers are entrepreneurs, according to the authors of the theory, who become more efficient with every murder, more self-confident, and for whom each success opens up new vistas of deviant behavior, of dominance and control and humiliation. The Marnewick case, as I recalled the details – only too well – suggested an efficient, progressive, established operator.

I read the articles over and over again, relived my own shame at the wooden fence, resurrected my unanswered questions with a clarity that surprised me. The newfound knowledge effortlessly blew away the thin layer of memory dust that the years since my youth had laid over the episodes.

I wondered about it. If I could remember everything so easily, so clearly, it meant that Baby Marnewick had been a psychological albatross around my neck, a cancerous growth in the psyche that had spread its toxins unseen through my body. Was that the reason for my inability to commit myself, or merely a contributing factor? What other areas of my existence had it soiled? I brooded on all of it.

I was also stimulated professionally. I analyzed the implications for the procedures of policing, the influence this would have on all investigative methods, the duty we had as a department to inform the executive arm of law and order of the new insights.

But overriding it all was the urge to act, to reveal the past, to identify and expose the guilty, to bury the ghost.

And the one thing the academic world had taught me was how to plan a task, how to measure each action against the available knowledge, how to take each step on the firm ground of the proven so as not to sink into the quicksand of wild theory.

Step one would be to immerse myself in the subject.

For two weeks I worked on a document that would serve as a proposal for my doctoral thesis, and it was only after rewriting it any number of times that I took it to Professor Cobus Taljaard. Academically he was a man of great integrity and equilibrium, and I knew the step I wanted to take onto the new terrain had to be thoroughly motivated. But the potential also existed for us to be copioneers, academic discoverers from the backward Third World who might (like Chris Barnard) give this scorned corner of Africa a place in the sun. On our terrain and with humility, we might find acceptance, acknowledgment, and a piece of the criminological limelight.

For that reason it didn’t take the professor long to approve the proposed doctoral thesis – and, more important, the research visit to the United States.

Two months later I packed my bags and began the journey that I believed would lead to the murderer of Baby Marnewick.