Robert Tanenbaum - Falsely Accused

Marlene broke in. “Yeah, okay, three types-and what I’m asking is, is there, do you have some way of, like, taking some data from the guys-appearance, activities, how they do the stalk and so on- that would let you decide which type they are?” She took a notebook and a pencil out of her jacket pocket.

Malkin thought about Marlene’s question, staring up at a corner of the ceiling and knotting her brows in an appropriately professorial manner. At length she said, “For what I think are your purposes, the answer is no. That is, the typology isn’t firm enough to use as the basis for a predictive model. We’re talking about a much broader population than we are for, say, serial killers. We can look at a murder set, for example, and say with a pretty high degree of confidence, a serial killer did these and he’s going to kill again. In the same way, serials form such a small, tight group that we can make good generalizations about them: white male, twenty-five to forty, middle-class, menial work, lives alone or with Mom, and the rest of it. Stalkers, we’re talking about a much, much more ill-defined bunch of people. First of all, the act itself: what’s stalking? Driving by the old girlfriend’s house a couple of times? How many unwanted phone calls, how many unwanted bouquets do we have to have before we call it pathological? Okay, to start breaking down the problem, I developed these three groups. I don’t know if they’re organic groups or not, whether they’re different because there’s something really different going on in their heads, or whether the apparent differences are superficial. That’s because I don’t know enough about the causes and etiology of obsession. Nobody does. There’s no … natural history, no close observation over generations, like there were when biology, say, first became a real science. You could say that we’re back there where Aristotle was with nature. Some trees are pointed, others are bushy. Some animals have four legs, some two, some none. Okay, given those caveats, let’s take the slobs first. Those are her names-the reporter’s, by the way-not mine. The slob is into romance, big-time. You know what they say, in real love you want what’s best for the loved one; in romantic love you just want the loved one. The romantic construct is created in the mind, of which the actual woman is the living symbol. The construct offers unconditional, infinite love, transcendent love. It’s a substitute for religion, in fact. But the loved one is an actual woman made of meat. She has needs, a personality. Sometimes she has to withdraw from the relationship, from her symbolic role, in service of her own ego. This is a disaster for him. He can’t handle the dissonance between his romantic construct and its symbol. Why would she withdraw? he asks, and since he doesn’t see her as a real person who might have a perfectly good reason for withdrawing, such as a need to work, or child care, it must be another man who’s stealing his possession. So now we’re in Othello. The escalating violence begins; the escalation is diagnostic, by the way. Shouting, to hitting, to serious injury, maybe. So she leaves, and then the stalking starts. Continued profession of love throughout, another diagnostic. He literally would die for her, and he often does, after he’s killed her, naturally. In maybe eighty percent of these things we have drugs or alcohol involved. The good news about the slob type is that if you catch it early enough, and you get tough, and you have the right situation, you can penetrate the illusion, establish a considerate, humane relationship. The bad news is that a certain percentage of these guys will never stop until the woman’s dead.”

“Or he’s dead,” said Marlene.

Malkin seemed startled by this, as if it had not occurred to her. She nodded. “Of course. Or he’s dead. Okay, sadists. The sadist is rarer. Here the operator is not romance and jealousy, but domination. By the way, we’re not talking about consensual sexual games, which is an entirely different bunch of people, the S-M crowd. No, here we have a psychopath and his victim. Often we have a respectable citizen, a taxpayer. We have cold, dispassionate punishment, not hot rage and jealousy. You’ve been a bad girl and Daddy has to punish you. They have actual torture implements sometimes. The woman has to fetch them from the closet and so on. The rule is control, the woman reduced, once again, to an object, and since that’s the case, we don’t see quite as many homicides here. What we get is suicide; the woman can’t take it anymore, he’s stripped her so far down that she really is a nothing, and she checks out. Then he goes and gets another one, or maybe he doesn’t wait, he goes after the daughter, or somebody else. Here’s where you get your bigamists, your secret families. This guy is a narcissist too; he’ll stalk because he’s into torture, but he doesn’t want to deal with any punishment, so he can be turned aside from a particular woman, as you may well have done with your Mr. Seely. If you find a nasty kid tearing wings off flies and you take the fly away from him, he’s not going to break his neck chasing after that particular fly. He’ll get another fly that’s just as good.”

“You think they’re not as dangerous as the slobs?” Marlene asked.

“It depends. On the one hand, if you expose the dirty secret, threaten him, the guy will often back down. On the other hand, I suspect that this type shades into a heavier psychopathology and your true serials. They dispense with even the pretense of an actual relationship and move into a stereotyped pattern of stalk, torture, murder, dispose. Jack the Ripper. Ted Bundy. But that type wouldn’t come into your purview, would it?”

“I hope not,” said Marlene with deep sincerity. “And what about the strangers?”

Malkin stretched and performed an elaborate shrug. “Who knows? They’re even rarer; there’s practically no data. I think we’re looking at a variant of the slob, except the relationship is entirely in his head. Sometimes they’ll fixate on a movie star or a singer and follow her around. Or him: John Lennon. These guys are generally disorganized individuals, drifters. But sometimes not. I happen to think that a lot of rape comes out of this kind of psychology.”

“Me too,” said Marlene. “I think these guys sometimes become what we used to call ‘gentleman rapists.’ They assault the woman and then they want to make polite conversation, like they were on a nice date. Some of these guys actually have made dates with the women they raped and we grabbed them when they showed up with candy and flowers. Go figure.”

“That’s what I try to do,” said the professor, smiling. “And you’ve just had the lecture, in short form. I give a course on patterns of sexual pathology at the New School. You saved yourself ninety dollars.”

“It would’ve been worth it,” said Marlene. “I appreciate the time.” She put away the notebook she’d been using.

“And now you’re going back to your crusade?”

“Is it a crusade? Unfortunately, you can’t smite everybody who might be wicked. The law frowns on it. And by the time they’ve shown their worst, the woman’s dead. How many is it getting to be now?”

“Nationally? Between thirteen and fifteen hundred, year in and year out. Slain by their loved ones. Do you know who Simon de Montfort was?”

Marlene started. “That was from left field,” she said. “Hmm. Crusader type? Not a sweetheart as I recall.”

“No. He was in charge of the crusade that suppressed the Cathar heretics in southern France. Thirteenth century. The story is his men asked him how they could separate the heretic captives from the good Catholics, and he said, ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’”