Читать книгу Serial Killers - Up Close and Very Personal - Victoria Redstall - Страница 8

How are you fallen from Heaven,

Lucifer! Son of the Dawn!

Cut down to the ground!

And once you dominated the peoples!

Didn’t you say to yourself:

I will be as high as Heaven!

I will be more exalted than the stars of God!

I will, indeed, be the supreme leader!

In the privileged places!

I will be higher than the Skies!

I will be the same as the Most High God!

But you shall be brought down to Hell, to the bottom of its pit.

And all who see you will despise you …

Isaiah 14:12-19

Most serial killers look like ordinary men – in a few cases, women. Joe Public, you and me. They walk the streets alongside us all. They sit next to us on the bus, train, or at a movie. They shop among us at the mall and, if you are their preferred target-type, could a serial killer be watching and stalking you now?

However, the one thing that unites this particular breed of seemingly ‘ordinary men and women’ – the one thing that sets them aside from you and me – is that they were, and are able, to undergo a process that might be termed ‘doubling’, in which an already damaged personality moulds itself and allows evil and perpetrating evil to become a part of the self.

Others may say that these shadowy, human predators, are merely moral cowards, but the extent of their brutality suggests a greater flaw than cowardice and we only learn who they are and what, hopefully, makes them tick, when they are hunted down and put behind bars.

Society is fascinated with serial killers, these often sado-sexual human predators who home in on unsuspecting targets with deadly accuracy. Like heat-seeking missiles raining down destruction time and again, each brutal homicide brings its own, unique principal impact site, leaving a devastating crater in the lives of a microcosm of society – those souls who have to live with the tragedy then clean up the aftermath as the result. Often, these secondary victims appear to be sidelined – and they are the focus of this Foreword.

When some deranged person discharges a shotgun into the face of a painter’s masterpiece hanging in a gallery, it can be repaired. Sadly, when the same happens to one of our children, the life is lost for ever. So, while the reader may have little sympathy for the killers contained in these pages, this author makes no apologies for allowing these deviant subjects to have their own say in this book. If society is to learn why they do what terrible things they do, we must listen to them and read what they have to say, as distasteful as that may seem.

But our hearts and minds must go out to the victims’ next-of-kin – the brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers of the deceased, or the children of a parent who has been lost for ever.

We must give praise, and have great respect for the scenes-of-crime officers and the law enforcement investigators for their dedication in bringing these perpetrators to justice. We must also acknowledge the work of the medical examiners who are the only people who can speak on behalf of the dead, for the deceased person on that cold slab is often able to say how they died, sometimes giving up the identity of the one who took away their life. Only the pathologist can listen and decipher the message from that afterlife.

All of these people are the unsung heroes in our society who, without complaint, and often never named, bring the killers of our children to justice.

That is all I need to say, except to thank everyone who contributed to this book in any way. Their names appear throughout the text. Thank you once again.

Victoria Redstall

Los Angeles, USA, 2011