How to tell a killer from a future president

How to tell a killer from a future president
By Jacob Weisberg
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: March 21 2007 16:47 | Last updated: March 21 2007 16:47


When reporters set out to explore the backgrounds of those accused of sensational murders, the neighbours typically claim surprise. The usual description of the suspected serial killer next door is: “He was a nice man who lived quietly and kept to himself.” The folks nearby never seem to notice that Jim the Ripper’s visitors stay for ever, that he uses his chainsaw indoors, or that his favourite music is recorded screams.

But when the same journalists are assigned to unearth the early lives of presidential candidates, they tend to get the opposite response from childhood friends and teachers. Everyone says: “We all used to joke about how Willie was going to be president some day.” Early indications of world leadership include attending school on a regular basis, having friends and playing sports.

Questioned about David Garvin, who was shot by police after he gunned down three people in Greenwich Village last week, one former co-worker offered the classical description “quiet and unassuming”. True to form, the Phoenix neighbours of Mark Goudeau, who has been charged with crimes linked to the “Baseline Killer”, described him as “a sweet, sweet guy” and a “hard worker”. Michael Devlin, accused of kidnapping two young boys in the St Louis suburbs, was “quiet” and “nice”.

By contrast, profilers digging into Barack Obama’s early days find signs of future greatness everywhere. “There was always a joke between my mom and Barack that he would be the first black president,” Mr Obama’s half-sister recently recalled. His third-grade teacher in Indonesia recalls him writing an essay for school entitled “I want to be a president” (whether in Washington or Jakarta she did not specify). Such early impressions hardly make Mr Obama unique. One of Rudy Giuliani’s school friends recalled for the Newsday newspaper: “We’d joke about it – ‘Oh there’s Rudolph William Louis Giuliani 3rd, the first Italian-Catholic president of the United States.’” A fellow prisoner of war says John McCain revealed his presidential ambitions at the Hanoi Hilton. Al Gore signalled his presidential plans from the crib.

In the case of both candidates and killers, interviewees reach for these chestnuts because they think it is what they are supposed to say. They are following a natural human instinct to take credit for seeing the future when it is good and to avoid blame for not noticing when it turns out to be bad. According to this peculiar form of hindsight bias, the great are marked early while the notorious lurk invisibly among us.

But are killers and candidates really so easy to tell apart? An obsession with publicity and getting even are only the most obvious thing Mr Giuliani and the Son of Sam have in common. Newt Gingrich and the Washington sniper John Allen Muhammad are both charismatic leaders, quick to anger and perhaps paranoid. John Kerry and the Unabomber are both loners – though with different sized cabins out west. And, of course, both politicians and killers tend to be credit hogs. Mr Gore claimed he invented the internet; the Zodiac killer, subject of a new film, took credit for murders he probably did not in fact commit.

Lately the formulas are blurring. The newer pattern seems to be for people to say they knew the oddball next door was a ticking time bomb even before he was picked up for the Carrot Peeler Massacre. An actress who appeared in one of the Village shooter’s strange independent films commented: “Of all the people I’ve known in my life, for anybody to go postal, this is the least surprising.’’ And when it comes to candidates, not one of his classmates ever seems to have marked George W. Bush as a future leader. Asked what his Andover contemporaries would have thought if told long ago that Mr Bush would one day run for president, one responded: “The reaction would have been gales of laughter.”

Let us avoid here any cheap wisecracks about Mr Bush turning out to be both candidate and killer. It is, in any case, getting harder to tell them apart from their press clippings. Of which was it said:

A) “He was a gung-ho type of person.”

B) “He was the straightest guy I knew. The most we ever did was go to a party and drink beer.”

C) “I always knew that [he] was going to do something great.”

D) He was competitive, even in fishing. “It was, ‘I caught seven fish and you only caught six’.”

E) “He was deeply competent, organised and good at what he did.”

(See answers below.)

These days, candidates and killers are even trading clichés. The thrust of the latest New York Times story about Mr Obama’s boyhood is that everyone around him did not, in fact, think he was going to grow up to be president. With his mixed-race background, Mr Obama was different from the other kids at his exclusive Hawaiian school. He did not quite fit in. Dare I say it? He was quiet and kept to himself.

Answers:

A) William Suff, the Riverside Prostitute Killer, according to a neighbour.

B) George W. Bush, according to an ex-girlfriend.

C) Andrew Mickel, convicted killer, according to a boyhood friend

D) Dick Cheney, according to a childhood friend.

E) Dennis Rader, the BTK (Bind-Torture-Kill) killer, according to a friend.

The writer is editor of Slate.com