Micki Pistorius: Profiling The Serial Killer and the Mass Murderer

In this episode of 'Not to Forgive, but to Understand,' we sit down with Micki Pistorius, psychologist, author, and profiler. She initiated the Investigative Psychology Unit in the South African Police Service in 1994 and profiled more than 30 serial killers. Her autobiography Catch me a Killer has been turned into a television series. Follow her on

https://mickipistorius.co.za/
https://www.patreon.com/MickiPistorius
https://www.youtube.com/@MickiPistoriusProfilerOnRecord

You can watch Micki's interview with Sabah titled on "Genocide and Serial Killings: Are there similarities?" on her Patreon link here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/genocide-and-are-109684512?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_share

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation that challenges our conventional understanding of perpetrators.

Transcript

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Now Dominic Ongwen was taken about the age of ten that is in the latency phase. It is possible. I think his father was a schoolteacher. Then he had a positive role model in his father. But the atrocities that he was subjected to by sitting on the bodies of people that they had killed or rolling in their blood, or etc. Would have eradicated all the signs of conscience. This is Not to Forgive, but to Understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Micki Pistorius is a psychologist, author and profiler. She initiated the investigative psychology unit in the South African Police Service in 1994 and profiled more than 30 serial killers. Her autobiography, Catch Me a Killer, has been turned into a television series. Please enjoy our conversation. Hi, Micki. It's lovely to have you here today. Thank you, Sabah. Thank you for having me. Micki- You're a very special guests to us because especially because I'm in Mauritius at the moment. And so this is going to be a special edition. You are very special as a person, too. I think what interests all of us today, I'm sure our audience is very interested in finding out what I'm also very curious about, which is what are the commonalities between your area and our area of study, which is you are an established serial killer hunter, the first in South Africa, and you did your PhD based on that. And you went into the depths of Freudian psychology to basically extract the theories that you then put into practice in your workplace. Now what I'd like to start off with is based on our conversation is what would you think is a common misconception about the serial killer that you wished everybody knew? Sabah, I thank you for the question because I think one of the myths that we need to debunk is in television series and in movies and often in books, it's more in the fictional serial killers are depicted as these Marvel comic book superheroes, you know, which they are definitely not. And they are often depicted as alienated or extremely over organized, you know, etc.. And what I particularly don't like is the the synthetic sensationalism that is woven, you know, all around them, which definitely they're not. They are born from parents. They are not spawned by aliens that parents, like you and I do, which makes one think what went wrong with ordinary parents and how are we bringing up our children today? Serial Killer are all for the most of them ordinary men. They not mentally ill. Less than 1% of them are actually mentally ill. The rest of them are not. They buy groceries, they go to church, they drive a car. Some of them are married and have children. You wouldn't know if your neighbor is serial killer. And that is the problem that I have with them being depicted as these super ultra heroes or the epitome of evil, you know, because they're not. And as long as that is out there, people will fail to recognize that their neighbor could be a serial killer. We've just had the case in Nairobi where an alleged serial killer was caught, Collins Kalusha and just been arrested last week in June. And his neighbor said, you know, but they just never knew then that it could be him. And that's often the reaction that you get. Neighbors and family cannot believe that this is actually the serial killer. So that's something I'd like to debunk. They are very ordinary people that do horrible things. I think it's great that you point this out because as I mentioned earlier, this is something similar in genocide studies where in profiling, in actually getting to the depths of who the typical perpetrator is, we realize that the perpetrator is ordinary and he's just like you and me. So the psychological distancing that we do in terms of, you know, seeing that a perpetrator or criminal is different from us, we even currently in the news, we treat Netanyahu as being purely evil or we say he's a psychopath and, you know, he's satanic. These words actually don't do us any benefit. They do express our emotions and what we feel about what's going on. But when we use these objectives and labels, we tend to make that person look extraordinary when in fact he's very ordinary. Even the label, of satanic, I mean not all of them are Satanists. Some, of the serial killers that I've worked with were Methodist priest, Methodist ministers, you know. So definitely not. It's just a little bit too easy to say the devil made me do it. You know, I've written several articles about that, so it's definitely not a case of getting away with the devil made me do it. Yeah, definitely not. Evil is something we can discuss about, you know? There's no label or even psychopaths. Not all serial killers are psychopaths and not all psychopaths or serial killers. You know, those are just personality disorders. Some of them do have personality disorders like schizoid personality or borderline, etc., but not all of them, you know. So we have to be very careful to label them just with with the psychological diagnosis or even like satanic or vampire or etc. That belongs to fiction. It has nothing to do with reality. Absolutely. And I think the other question I have is I think our audience would also be puzzled at this point and in wondering what's the connection between serial killing and genocide. I mean, both involve killing that at the very basic, but we're talking about different types of premeditation. So at a very simple level, say, comparing murder to genocide or mass killing doesn't make much sense because technically when there is a murder, the premeditation is very different from when there is genocide. And usually in a case of murder, it's a one off event. Or it could happen. Maybe a few times, but it's not the same as in the case of genocide, where, for instance, you can have a genocidaire, who is a desk murderer. Who’s somebody operating from behind his desk and planning all the killing through other people who work for him. Or, for instance, you can even have even if somebody is involved directly in the act of killing in a context of a genocide, it is over a long period of time. And that's the reason why there's been this resistance to introduce anything that we have learned about murder in the context of criminology, in the context of genocide. But here I'm just wondering off the top of my head, do you think as a person working in that field of understanding the serial killer, do you think that we can have maybe a serial killer be introduced in the context of genocide? And be one of the types of genocidaire that we have out there because we so far profile different types of genocidaire with different motives. Could there be a serial killer or would somebody with those tendencies who slips into that whole pool of the different types of perpetrators we have singled out so far? I think let's start with what they have in common. Well, as you say it, obvious that they killed. All right. Now, mass murderers in general kill many people. And I think that's what they have in common as well. But so would mass murderers. So with spree killers. You know, they kill many people over a period of time. And usually strangers not like, you know, passion, murder, etc., where the victim is known. So it's usually strangers over a period of time. But now, if we go into more detail, I think your genocide perpetrators are known, you know, we know who they are, even a mass murderer, that is that is an event within certain hours. Like somebody going to school, shooting, shooting. That would be a mass murder. And it's one time. But, you know, many multiple murders, a spree killer could be over a period of time. But they're also known. Now. I think the difference with the serial killer, one of the differences is they are insidious. It is done in secret and the victims are not killed. It's a one by one. They might kill couples and usually it's a one by one by one over a period of time in secret. And we don't know usually who they are until we start investigating. And I think that is a big difference between them. And I even think in the motivation they could be similarities, but they are also differences, particularly in the serial killer. Micki, I have another question specifically connected to your knowledge of behavioral psychology and my research on Dominic Ongwen. So Dominic Ongwen was a child soldier who was abducted at the age of ten. Why he was going to school, he was abducted by the LRA, by the Lord's Resistance Army that was headed by Joseph Kony. And as a consequence he was made to go through various rites of initiation, which were very gruesome. For instance, he was made to murder people and roll in their blood. He was made to, you know, eventually when he became a member of the LRA, he abducted and killed other people in turn. And later on in time, this is when he was in his forties. He was tried by the International Criminal Court, by the ICC. And now my question to you is, with respect to the evidence that was brought up now in that trial and we're talking about the trial stage and the appeal stage evidence was brought up to show that a boy at that age, at the age of ten, doesn't have a PFC, a prefrontal cortex that is very developed. Now, we all know that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for everything to do with your emotions and your self-control and therefore has a big impact on your decision making. My question to you, therefore, is along the lines of how do you situate Dominic Ongwen at that age? And with respect to what you know of behavioral psychology in terms of figuring out his legal responsibility in the matter? So I think you're covering a wide range of topics. I think we look at neuropsychology and we will look at psychoanalysis and we'll look at a little bit of behavioral psychology. And if we go back to what you asked originally, if we look at Greek history now, the Spartans had a history and this was thousands of years before Christ, where they would take their young Spartan boys from their mothers round about the age of six. And then these Spartan boys would be brought into a school which would be called agoge, and they would divide it by ages into groups. So from the age of about 6 or 7 to 12, these were called the paides. And then from 12 to 19 they were called the paidiskoi. And then from from about 22 to 30 they were called hēbōntes. So those were all different groups. So they were taken from the mother and they were in the school, which was sort of a very harsh bootcamp, and they would train to fight with each other and they were not given enough food, and they were barefoot, etc. It was very harsh. So that already happened. They knew that was the age that they should take the boys. And if you go through that history, it happened to the Persians and it happened to the Maoris and it happened to the samurai, etc., through the ages, that was the time when you take the boy from the mother. Now, years later in the late 19th and early 20th century, whatever we have, Freud, Sigmund Freud considered the father of psychology. Now Freud has this developmental theory, the psychosexual developmental phases. So he said between the ages of 0-2, that is the oral phase. 2 to 4 is the anal phase 4 to 6 is the Oedipus phase, another little bit of Greek mythology working in them. And then from 6 to 12 is the latency phase and then after that, from 12 to 14 age they call it the genital phase. Now in the latency phase from 6 to 12. That is just about the age when children go to school. So at school they learn to share with other children. They learn compassion, they learn to socialize. They learn that everything is not about their immediate gratification of their needs. It is extended and it is encouraged. If you share your sandwiches with other people and you can't eat just when you want, you have to wait to break all of that. That is also the end of the Oedipus phase, which according to Freud the little boy fell in love with the mother and he was scared of the father. But he decides, now you want to identify with the father figure. Now the father figure traditionally, as well is the one that goes out and owns the money. And he has the values of society. Of course, today it can be the mother as well. So the values of society is then imprinted in the boy, and that is when conscience starts to develop, which Freud called the superego. So when we have socializing in school and identifying with a positive father figure which is the conscience and compassion, and this is the time when they take the boy soldiers because they do not teach them compassion. Now Dominic Ongwen was taken about the age of ten that is in the latency phase. It is possible. I think his father was a schoolteacher. Then he had a positive role model in his father. But the atrocities that he was subjected to by sitting on the bodies of people that they had killed or rolling in their blood, or etc. Would have eradicated all the signs of conscience. And he now I think there was another person called Vincent Otti or somebody that was his role model. So he has this negative killer role model with whom to identify. Now that is the part of psychoanalysis. If we look at neuropsychology, there is evidence that if children are bullied, ostracized as young children, that there is structural damage to the I think the cingulate cortex of the brain. And that is the part of the brain which helps you as the ability for you to develop a moral code and compassion. Now that is damaged already in the brain, either in the bully himself or in the victim. And in these this elements of being ostracized, being bullied, and other children do not want to associate with a victim in fear of they might also be bullied. So people do not realize when there is bullying or children or being ostracized or rejected that it already has an impact on the brain, measurable impact on their brain. You know, there's lots of studies that you can have a look at just to see that. So that is where neuropsychology comes in. And then a little bit of behavioral psychology. This was quite interesting to me as well. You know, I read some of the research and it says there’s always a triangle. The cingulate cortex is the part of your brain that has to keep the balance between what you do, what you think and what you feel. And they are all three connected. So I often sometimes ask people of the three, which is the most important. Women often say your emotions. Men often say what you think, but the real answer is your actions, your actions will determine and what you think about it and what you feel about it will follow your actions. And exactly the case of boy soldiers can be they do not take six year olds and rationalize their ideology with them. They don't. So they give them a gun in the hand and they make them shoot. And then because the the cingulate cortex has to keep the balance. And this also happened in the Holocaust, You know, where people rationalize, that the victims are not really human. So I feel nothing for them. So they know this when they indoctrinate these children, the action of it is going to be the stronger which and then they can kill their parents without feeling anything about it. Now, in the case of serial killers as well, they act out and then there is a sexual gratification, which is a bit of behaviorism. It's a reward, positive reinforcement of the actions. So it is definitely true that if we look at the brain, the brain I always describe as a three story building, so your in your cellar, you would have your your generators and your lift operators and it is big machinery that has to do with movement. So that is the medulla and the pons in your reptile brain, breathing, walking etc. You don't really think about it unless something goes wrong. And then in the middle of your brain, if you should open it up, don't do that, it’s messy. If you open up your brain that the limbic system in the middle there you have different functions as well. Now, one of that is the amygdala, which is your emotional center. You have the hippocampus, which is more or less for memory, the thalamus, which is your senses, you know, the hypothalamus is hormones. And then your top brain, that is your executive brain that is that is the your prefrontal cortex. Now, in your prefrontal cortex, you also have different offices. You have your beta prefrontal cortex, which could be your your risk evaluator. This is determining long term consequences. The medial prefrontal cortex is your PRO, how do I compete with other people? Or your self-image now, the self-image of the company. Then you have the dorsal prefrontal cortex, which is your chief CEO. With a child, Freud said, all children are born with an id. Your eight is your your impulses and your basic instincts. And it's like a baby. It wants them gratified now and immediately. And it's pleasure driven roundabouts and it cannot communicate, cannot talk like a baby. And about the age of two children can develop and they can start moving now your middle brain your limbic system, what is called the ego. The adult part is starting to differentiate yourself from your parents. You start walking, you have your own, personality is forming. And then around about the age of six. Now remember, your ego can mature all through your life and believe me, we can still have matures that are very immature adults, as we both know that in any case it develops and then your super-egos. That is your conscience that sort of develops, as I said, by the age of six, that is your parents who says no to everything. So the ego has a very difficult job. It has to negotiate between the demands of the id and the super ego and reality outside. And an ego can be in the serial killer’s case dominated by the id. It is not strong enough to keep the id. From acting out, in control and that is way of their sexual gratification of that. So it's a whole complex thing, but it makes sense. I'm not so sure about the ego and super ego of the the genocide perpetrators, but as you said in the beginning, definitely there is there is damage to the brain and that has been shown. And if you look developmental, both of the serial killers and the genocide didn't develop a conscience as the should’ve because they were taken away. And then you get the trauma as well, which is added to that. I just thought about this. With the serial killers there would be a sexual gratification for them to murder. But because it develops through fantasy, you know, the serial killer has a certain fantasy and which it acts out. So if something happens in reality that upsets them or threatens the weak ego in our fantasies, we are all in control. We are the directors. Nobody is a fantasy of yourself as a loser. Please. Okay. But the serial killer take it further. They are like, God, that omnipotent because they literally have the hands, their hands around the throats of somebody, somebody's life. And this is in their hands. That is a godly feeling. So when in reality something happens and their ego is threatened and they get fired or they get rejected or whatever, but act put the fantasy on the crime scene to feel godly and in that sense, they restored the homeostasis. Of feeling good about themselves. And there's a sexual gratification because there is sense of stimulation which they are added to that which makes it stronger. Now, I'm just thinking that that your genocide perpetrator would also have, you know, damage and they might not be. There are rewards I know with the boy soldiers as well if they perform well they are being rewarded with female company. So there is that that can work for that. Also as they move up the ranks and they get higher ranks, there is a reward, there is a social reward. People are looking up to them. So they their horrific atrocities are being rewarded socially. The reward circuitry actually is very much pegged to all the actions that they do and in the way it greatly explains how they become more intense in their actions over time. But I think you've also pointed out something that I find very useful to the study of genocide, where, you know, you spoke about the distinctions between thinking, doing and feeling, and you spoke about the predominance of doing over the two others. Right. Of feeling. Yeah. I think very much of the fact that when we are thinking of legal responsibility in the context of child soldiers like Dominic Ongwen or anyone else for that matter, we often overlook the gamut of causal factors which are involved. So when you see that just taking a gun and placing it in the hand of a child soldier who has never killed before, who has never shot before by doing he’s learning and by doing, he's going to then later rationalize whatever he has done in terms of the acts of murder or the acts of or the crimes that he has committed. And I'm also thinking about how in the context of a genocide, very often just having access to a weapons around in a place facilitates the process of doing wrong. And at the same time, I'm also thinking about, you know, how these situational factors prompt people. As we know based on the study of Zimbardo and Milgram, although these have been questioned to a great extent. But the underlying thought remains, that we are very much affected by situational factors. And that's what you're talking about, isn't it, when you're speaking about the predominance of doing over thinking and feeling? In a sense, yes. I'm thinking about about the Stockholm Syndrome as well. Where there's an identification now, again, with a super ego. It depends on the development of the superego. You know, some people might be in that situation, but they still don't do it. There might be guns around, but they still don't do it, you know. So I think one thing that we should also say, if you look at culpability, I've often been sort of attacked by the media because I said that I understand serial killers. And I think the same way that maybe you've encountered that as well. But understanding them does not mean that we condone them at all. And how can a maths teacher teach people about maths if she doesn't understand it? You know, my job often when I testify in court and I'm sure yours will be too, we have to explain this phenomenon to the judge or the judges or the panel. We cannot explain it if we don't understand it. So understanding what happens is not necessarily an excuse or condoning it. It is factors that they need to take into consideration. You know that we line before them. And I'm very grateful that I'm not the judge here. I'm just an expert witness. And I have to take it and in their expertise, make a judgment on it, you know, But it is a piece of the puzzle that we give, but we don't because we understand the behavior and we explain the behavior, it's not so that we excuse it. Sometimes, you know, there are cases where there was mitigating circumstances, you know, in a normal murders etc. Not in a serial killer case, definitely not. And I often say, like normal people, we can often say despite or because of you know, we can say I'm a failure because my parents, etc., or we can say I'm in success despite, you know, when you become an adult, you can make your own decisions. But I do agree when there's a sudden impairment in your brain functioning because your top brain just never connected, because all your energy was taken as a child by surviving and the child would often identify with a negative role model because it's a form of of survival. And I think they're also, you know, we can bring in the active passive role reversal theory of Freud. And Freud said children master something that was done to them by doing it to others. So they were the passive victim. They identify with the active aggressor and that way they relieve being being the victim in a serial killer's mind. You would say, if I am the one killing, then that means I am not the one suffering, you know, being abused. Now a case was Stewart Wilkin, who was a South African serial killer. He's in prison at the moment. He was also a cannibal and etc.. Now he killed sex workers and he also killed little boys like himself. So he even went back and committed necrophilia with the bodies of these little boys. And they represented himself. So he was there reenacting. He also killed his own daughter, but he was reenacting sodomizing the boys. What was done to him in order to master it. Now, interestingly, when he was incarcerated, the prison authorities called me because he was hallucinating terribly. And and they asked me, he called for me. So I went and he said he's being persecuted by the, you know, the souls of especially his daughter. So now when he's in a cell and he doesn't have access to victims, he's again reverted back to the role of the passive, you know, the passive victim. So that's just interesting to me how that can happen. So culpability, I'm not legal expert. That's luckily up to the judges for them in their expertise and their wisdom to decide I'm just there to testify and to give them more information on a very complex topic Although we've tried to make a clear distinction between génocidaires and say, serial killers, I think what I remember now is the reading of this book called Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum where he talks about all the various theories or all the various ways in which we have tried to explain how Hitler came to be the way he is. And I think even you must be aware of all the theories we have about Hitler's childhood and all the stories come up with about his relationship with his mother, his relationship with Eva Braun and his relationship with the closest people in his family and how they were the pathological nature of this relationship already probably. And explained whatever he turned into later on in life. And I think furthermore, I'm also thinking about Adorno's F-Scale which was another sort of like a a tool devised to come up with the different sort of criteria that leads someone to become fascist by nature, to make a person authoritarian by nature. So what I'm thinking about here right now is the importance of all of these psychological theories that we've for some time now actually probably put a way in profiling génocidaires, but how relevant they are. And I think speaking to you, for me bring that up, Micki, I am curious as to whether you have anything to tell us about, you know, what you have gained as experience as a serial killer hunter over all of these years and what advice you would give us after having spoken to me, especially and learned about, you know, the basic premises that occupy the minds of people who are studying genocide. I think I must give credit where credit is due. I never really hunted them. I profiled the detectives, hunted them, but I, I was a member of the South African police service, you know, and my rank was equivalent to a full colonel. And we worked together now. So I wasn't an external person being brought in. I was a police officer working with them. And I established the investigative psychology unit in the South African police, which was very new. And I trained them. So we had a very good working team effort. You know, they answered them. I told them this is the profile and I would interrogate some of them, etc.. And that's the theory behind it. I think one thing that that is quite important to me is, you know, whether should serial killers be out on parole, you know, and I have a problem with that. One of the serial killers in South Africa that killed 22 boys, well, he was only convicted of one, but he was recently paroled. Now my point is, remember I said it's based upon a fantasy that they act out and I use the example in one of my articles of the Marquis de Sade and the Marquis de Sade later in his life was in prison for long periods of time. And that was when he wrote some of these best novels. And that was a way that he could express. This need is by writing. Okay. And his fantasies. They became more tweaked and in detail, you know, as he went ahead. And I imagine incarcerating a serial killer for about 20 years. So these fantasies will brood in his mind and they will become more sophisticated. But he doesn't have access to his victims. Now, what's helped in the development part of the development of becoming a serial killer was the fact that he was ostracized, rejected as a child. People pointed fingers at it. Now he's known his name is known. Now we let him out after 20 years in the community, in the prison as well. They do form other communities. They are a community of outlaws. Although they were rejected, they form a community. They do make friends. They even have love relationships. They teach. They function for 20 years. That is their community and sort of their family. That they form and they are accepted. Nobody in there because they’re an angel they all did something wrong and they're accepted and they have hierarchies and etc., these are whole communities going on in prison. Now we let him out. So first of all, he's now back in a community where he will be stigmatized, as you said, and he will be ostracized and people will again point fingers at him. I doubt that his ego has grown so strong in prison that he's had therapy and development and all of that. Many of them say that they've been reformed and they found religion in secret. Well, good for them. But now they get out and people are not that forgiving and then ostracize and then point fingers. So their ego is, again, in a weakened state. They have access to victims. The fantasy has been brewing for decades. How long do they think is it going to take for them to act and answer it now? Now, the majority of serial killers do act out. They kill again and I mean, I can go through many case studies in South Africa, worldwide. They acted it out again. So why would we give a serial killer a second chance at life and we're giving somebody else a possible first chance at dying? One victim is one too many. And there's this very high probability that they would kill again. You know, while I think with your with you with your genocide, I'm not necessarily I don't think they might become involved. And if they've been incarcerated for 20 years, I would say in genocide again, chances are less that they will kill again. And chances are perhaps depending on where they stay, you know, they might find a quiet spot on earth where they can stay, you know, during in South Africa, we had what was called the third force. So this was a unit that operated covertly for the government killing people, you know, etc.. And one of their leaders was was incarcerated for many, many years. And he was out on parole a while ago. I've never met him personally, but he's leading a quiet life, somewhere you know well, this cannot really happen with the serial killer. People would not forgive him and allow him to lead a quiet life somewhere. Thank you, Micki. It's interesting how when you speak about a very different field of study, I realize that the common aspects that you share with my area of study where, for instance, here I'm thinking about the effect of ostracism on génocidaires. Who are already charged, accused, convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, among many other things. And I think of the effect in the aftermath of them on their psychological state and how, for instance, they behave in the aftermath of all of that and how they basically bear the consequences of being ostracized by the community at large because it's a fact that the moment there is such a label on you, there will be very important repercussions when it comes to how society, how the people closest or not even closest, just society in general will behave towards you. So I think that should also be another area of study where we could analyze how, for instance, you know, perpetrators maybe self-fashioned basically, you know, change the things that they say about what they've done before in line with the effects of ostracism on them and their psychological being in the aftermath of being charged. Thank you very much, Micki. Thanks for being here. And I thank you very much for answering all our questions. And good luck to you. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. And I'm very glad that we connected. And I hope that we can work together in future and add our pieces to the puzzle in research. Thank you very much. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guest, Miki Pistorius. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe. And stay tuned for more discussions.