Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ It is a rare murderer who writes notes, letters or poetry to the press, although a surprising number do write to authorities: the Zodiac Killers, both the New York and the California one; the Son of Sam; and Jack the Ripper, to name a few,” Eriq continued. “They do so for a simple reason: they must convey their feelings about their kills- conquests-to someone. Is it safer to vent such feelings in a bar with buddies or to write authorities and taunt police? Either way, the phenomenon reveals the killer’s need to tell the world what he has done, to validate it, because he craves validation, and in this perverse validation there comes a twisted absolution. It underscores the killer’s original need to first control and then destroy other living beings, in order to convince himself and the world that he is better than the role life has meted out for him, that he isn’t a hapless nobody, that he is in fact somebody, somebody with an identity. The killing becomes a vicious circle so as to cyclically codify and warrant his own bloody identity: / kill… therefore I am. I kill therefore I am a killer… therefore I kill… thus, I become a more efficient killer… therefore I kill again… and again kill…

“ Law enforcement authorities count on this need for self-actualization, which causes men locked in cells to spill their guts to strangers in lockup with them. Writing letters that claim responsibility for brutal murders is another cry, not so much for help in most cases as a cry for recognition, a cry that shouts, ‘Look at me! I did it, and I’m somebody important for having done it.’

“ Jessica, nodding the whole time, agreed. “The thinking isn’t far removed from that of an assassin who kills merely for the purpose of seeing a picture of himself in the newspapers, or to be able to say that he’s become one with his god as a result of fulfilling his god’s wish.” Because of Jessica’s keen understanding of this and the killing mind, she squarely sided with the prosecution whenever the blood and DNA evidence was overwhelming. Given the Night Crawler’s liking for the pen, and Eriq Santiva’s genius, Jessica looked forward to a case which might prove extremely interesting while also proving or disproving some of Santiva’s theories regarding “hand- reading,” as he liked to call it.

Santiva reached from his seat to take her hand in his, guiding her fingers to one of the letters on the killer’s words. “Touch it. Feel it. See it?”

“ See what, exactly?”

‘ The small clubs at the ends of many of the letters. See here and here, at the bottoms and tops of the long letters.”

“ What exactly do you mean, clubs?”

“ The little caveman clubs.”

“ Oh, you mean how the author has allowed the ink to swell into a bulb at each end?”

“ Yes, precisely what I’m driving at-like the bulb at the root of a hair follicle. You see, this man… this supposed killer didn’t passively allow the ink to run there. It wasn’t passive. His hand pressed hard as hell at those points. This indicates great aggression, pent-up anger, rage released through the ink and pen. See here and here, and over here?”

Suddenly she saw little clubs all over the page where before she hadn’t noticed. He continued, guiding her forefinger like a marker on a Ouija board. ‘ ‘Take a close look at his lowercase Ds.”

Together they located a number of lowercase Ds. “What’s so remarkable about his Ds?” she wondered aloud.

“ Well, you do see the pattern, the similarity between every lowercase D, don’t you?”

“ Yeah, they all slant drastically far to the right. But what’s the significance?”

“ It’s what we call the ‘maniac D.’ See how violently slanted they are, leaning at an acute right angle toward the next word? See how far to the right it goes from the center line of the words on the sentence plane?”

He had told her about center, top and lower lines, saying each was a plane. Everyone’s handwriting followed a center line; some people dipped below their personal center diagonal excessively, and those with wild, swooping lower- plane letters, while not necessarily sexual deviants, were highly charged sexual beings. Those who spent most of their writing energy in upper regions, above the center line, were more interested in mental games, money, domination and winning. Aberrant behavior was shown in shaky, enigmatic loops and swirls on letters at either upper or lower regions. Those who maintained an even keel, staying close to the center diagonal at all times, were both better at control and more even-tempered and rule-conscious, and perhaps less sexually inclined. A shaky hand which had no control or patterns whatsoever might be that of a madman or a seriously ill person, or a person suffering from cerebral palsy or some other nervous disorder. He demonstrated via a quick forgery of Richard Nixon’s handwriting when he was at the pinnacle of his career how “in charge” and brash the man was; showed her a forgery of his name during his near impeachment that demonstrated how incredibly deteriorated the handwriting had become; and ended with a reconstructed, steadier Nixon signature upon his becoming an unofficial delegate to China. The emotional differences were startling and revealing.

It appeared the Night Crawler was all over the scale, swooping high, showing intelligence and creativity, and then dipping low below the center line, showing deviances of all sorts, his hand sometimes erratic, sometimes calm and controlled but always aggressive, harsh, brutal.

“ Whoa, you’re losing me a bit here,” she complained now and again as Eriq painted a picture of both the value of the analysis and the character of the killer as seen through his writing, saying that handwriting clearly mirrored the condition of the mind, that it was as good as or better than having a look into a man’s soul through the eyes.

Jessica began to see the pattern Eriq called the maniac D. “Oh, yeah… I see what you mean by the Ds now. Each D leans or points directly across at the word following?”

“ Like a spear, an attack, isn’t it?”

“ ‘ Maniac D.’ Just how scientific is that term, Chief?”

“ Jack the Ripper, in his notes to the White Chapel Vigilante Committee and authorities in 1888, used clubs and the maniac D. That’s how scientific it is. And we see it time and again with violent offenders behind bars.”

She looked again at the clubbed ends and the strange, violent Ds. “I take your point. What else does his handwriting tell you, Eriq?”

“ Tells me he’s a jumble, a complex SOB. Creative, ingenious perhaps, certainly an above-average IQ, which-”

“ Suggests a Ted Bundy type? Suave, smooth, lures his victim in and snares her in that instant when her guard is completely down?”

“ Could well be, but if so, it’s an act; likely a well- rehearsed and polished act, but an act all the same. This guy’s full of phobias and problems. Likely the product of a broken home; likely a failure at most everything he’s touched; likely working at some menial job somewhere which he regards as far below his natural talents.”

“ You can tell all that from his handwriting?” She could not completely keep the skepticism from filtering into her voice.

“ Well, I combine the handwriting analysis with what we also know of profiling, of course. It’s in the combination that I sometimes get startlingly lucky results.”

“ Sometimes?” she replied sarcastically. Much of Santiva’s work was chronicled, much of it now standard reading for FBI Academy personnel. His work in both document investigation and handwriting analysis had caused his star to rise meteorically, due to his extraordinary success rate at pinpointing killers through trace evidence and profiling techniques which were applied to victim and killer alike to create a matrix for murder.