DDT - Deambulações DeMentes Teóricas 14

The Serial Killer - Part IV
sdfjslkf
I was also meticulous in covering my tracks. I was careful not to kill consecutively in the same place and in a short period of time. This country is perfect for serial killers and that is probably why we are so many here compared to other countries. It's vast, geographically varied and, most of all, desorganized. Looking from the outside one might be tempted to think of us as a united nation. Naturally, we are not. But we have to be, in order to maintain so many states together. It's something that is forced upon us. The founders of our country were extremely smart in that particular detail. How can you keep such a vast amount of land and such a heterogenous amount of people together as a nation? You brain wash them into a sense of patriotism pushed to the limit. That is one of the fundamental pilars of our power over other nations. If the people of this country were left to tend for themselves, without any rulling fathers, we would long have ceassed to be anything remotely resembling United.

However, this impression of patriotism is a very superficial one, easy to tear apart if you look at us carefully. One of the spots where you don't need to scratch the gloss much in order to see the dirt underneath, is precisely authority. There are over 40.000 different police forces opperating in this country. As you can imagine, they can't be all very well organized. In fact, they hardly communicate with eachother. Each state has its own laws and law enforcement policies. And more important, each state functions independently. For a serial killer that is heaven. It means I can kill someone on the Pacific side, travel all the way to the Atlantic coast and kill there and be sure that it will take a long time for either sides to link those two killings together. In the meantime, I will have killed some more in other states and improved my method, maybe even changed it a little bit, thus rendering the task even more intricate for the investigators.

Another thing that helps is our way of thinking. We are loners. We don't mingle too much and when we do, we choose carefully who we mingle with. We don't get much out of our comfort zone. We are not nosy. We keep to ourselves. We don't want to know. The less we know about our neighbour, the less probability of getting into trouble. This, of course, is also a bliss for any serial killer. It means we have a very wide margin to operate until anyone starts sniffing around for any reason. If and when they finally do reach the point where they smell something fishy, we're long gone.

In the decade that followed my teenage years, I must have moved about fourty times. I gained a sense of freedom that prevented me from naturally needing to stay anywhere. My victims were the only thing that would keep me in a certain place during a certain amount of time. After the killing nothing more would tigh me and I would disappear. I enjoyed this loose existence. I didn't need any attachments for I had been born without any cravings for human contact. The only contact I seeked was the one I could create during my killings. It was a sketched contact, studied, acessed, controled as in a laboratory experiment. It was an integral part of my method and nothing more. A stylistic feature, if you will.

By the time I reached 28, I had become an expert. I had killed more than 30 people, an average of 2 a year, sometimes 3. It was tough, to have to wait so long sometimes, to kill again. As I said, it was the same as asking an alcoholic to abstain for months before he could taste another glass of wine. But I was far from being stupid. And I wasn't going to risk everything I had built so far. The same way I exercised my body, so did I train my mind. I became interested in zen philosophy. The here and now. Acceptance. Be in the moment always. It also helped my killings. During the sometimes most anxious moments of the hunting, when the hunted knew it had been hunted, I was able to drown myself in that world of quietness and function at my own rythm, even if everything around me was complete chaos.

I became notorious, finally. With fame came the long last recognition I had seeked for my work. But that was also the beginning of the end of my glorious freedom. It didn't end it, but it slowed my work even more.