Michael Knox Beran: The Psycho — and Us

[Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author, most recently, of Pathology of the Elites: How the Arrogant Classes Plan to Run Your Life.]

If the past is any warrant for the future, the story of Jared Loughner will soon be transmuted into television crime drama, in a “ripped from the headlines” episode of one of those now numerous shows that deal largely with psychos and the detectives who try to catch them.

That so much of our entertainment should dwell so fixedly on the psycho is puzzling. If bloodshed has long been a preoccupation of art, from slaughter in the House of Atreus to slaughter in Glamis Castle, the shedders of blood have typically been portrayed as having comprehensible, if evil, reasons for killing — revenge, jealousy, ambition, the whole spectrum of motive passion. The psycho, by contrast, has none of these tragic motives for hurting a particular person. His anger or lust either is random in its trajectory, and icily dispassionate, or is dictated by the necessities of an idiosyncratic personal mythology that makes sense only to him. The psycho is in this respect a new phenomenon, or at any rate new to art, Poe being the first to take it up in stories like “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “There have been murderers throughout history,” I wrote in NR last summer,

but the phenomenon of the lone psychopath intent on cruelty as well as bloodshed seems not to have been remarked until the 1860s, with the murders committed by Dumollard in Montluel and Lyons, by Joseph Philippe in Paris, by Frederick Baker in England, and by Gruyo in Spain. These were followed by the crimes of Vincenzo Verzeni in the Bergamasco region of Lombardy in the 1870s, the Austin Axe Murders in Texas in 1884 and 1885, the Whitechapel Murders attributed to Jack the Ripper in 1888, and the Vacher Murders in France, which began in 1894.