tabulation of violence we have examined in this book) has been in decline. In the 1980s, when serial killers were a pop sensation, there were 200 known perpetrators in all, and they killed around 70 victims a year. In the 1990s, there were 141, and in the 2000s, only 61.225 Those figures may be underestimates (because many serial killers prey on runaways, prostitutes, the homeless, and others whose disappearance may not have been reported as murders), but by any reckoning, no more than two or three dozen serial killers can be at large in the United States at any time, and they are collectively responsible for a tiny fraction of the 17,000 homicides that take place every year.226
Serial killing is nothing new. Schechter shows that contrary to a common view that serial killers are the product of our sick society, they have splattered the pages of history for millennia. Caligula, Nero, Bluebeard (probably based on the 15th-century knight Gilles de Rais), Vlad the Impaler, and Jack the Ripper are celebrity examples, and scholars have speculated that legends of werewolves, robber bridegrooms, and demon barbers may have been based on widely retold tales of actual serial killers. All that is new in sadistic killing is the name for the motive, which comes to us courtesy of the most famous serial torturer of all, Donatien Alphonse François, also known as the Marquis de Sade. In earlier centuries serial killers were called murder fiends, bloodthirsty monsters, devils in human shape, or the morally insane.
Though the florid sadism of serial killers is historically rare, the sadism of inquisitors, rampagers, public execution spectators, blood sport fans, and Colosseum audiences is not. And even serial killers don’t end up with their avocation because of any gene, brain lesion, or childhood experience we can identify.227 (They do tend to be victims of childhood sexual and physical abuse, but so are millions of people who don’t grow up to be serial killers.) So it’s conceivable that the pathway to serial killing can shed light on the pathway that leads ordinary people into sadism as well. How can we make sense of this most senseless variety of violence?
The development of sadism requires two things: motives to enjoy the suffering of others, and a removal of the restraints that ordinarily inhibit people from acting on them.
Though it’s painful to admit, human nature comes equipped with at least four motives to take satisfaction in the pain of others. One is a morbid fascination with the vulnerability of living things, a phenomenon perhaps best captured by the word macabre. This is what leads boys to pull the legs off grasshoppers and to fry ants with a magnifying glass. It leads adults to rubberneck at the scene of automobile accidents—a vice that can tie up traffic for miles—and to fork over their disposable income to read and watch gory entertainment. The ultimate motive may be mastery over the living world, including our own safety. The implicit lesson of macabre voyeurism may be “But for the swerve of a steering wheel or an unlocked front door, that could have happened to me.”228
Another appeal of feeling someone’s pain is dominance. It can be enjoyable to see how the mighty have fallen, especially if they have been among your tormenters. And when one is looking downward instead of upward, it’s reassuring to know that you can exercise the power to dominate others should the need arise. The ultimate form of power over someone is the power to cause them pain at will.229
Nowadays neuroscientists will slide people into a magnet to look at just about any human experience. Though no one, to my knowledge, has studied sadism in the scanner, a recent experiment looked at the diluted version, schadenfreude.230 Male Japanese students lay in an MRI machine and were asked to put themselves in the shoes of a schlemiel who longs for a job in a multinational information technology company but earns mediocre grades, flubs his job interview, warms the bench in his baseball club, ends up with a low-paying job in a retail store, lives in a tiny apartment, and has no girlfriend. At his college reunion he meets a classmate who works for a multinational corporation, lives in a luxury condo, owns a fancy car, dines at French restaurants, collects watches, jet-sets to weekend vacation spots, and “has many opportunities to meet girls after work.” The participant also imagines meeting two other classmates, one successful, one unsuccessful, whom the Japanese researchers assumed—correctly, as it turned