And Sudden Murder

At a U.S. Navy hospital not long ago a 31-year-old chief petty officer suddenly broke off a casual conversation with a nine-year-old girl, grabbed the child by the throat, choked her and held her under water in a nearby tub until she was dead. Charged with murder, he at first denied the crime with such apparent sincerity that he fooled a lie detector. Later, remorseful, he confessed, but insisted that he could not remember the beginning of the attack, had just "suddenly discovered himself" strangling the girl.

Last week, with the case of the murderous petty officer as his text, the Menninger Clinic's Dr. Joseph Satten offered the American Psychiatric Association an explanation of a phenomenon that has long baffled both courts and psychiatrists. Most murderers fall into one of two neat classes: the legally sane, who have an understandable motive such as robbery, and the legally insane, such as the paranoid who kills his imagined persecutor. But now and then there appears a third type --the man who kills without apparent motive, yet appears sane before and after the crime.

To Psychiatrist Satten and his Topeka research team, it seemed that the murderous petty officer--listed in their records as "Thomas"--had temporarily and partially lost consciousness and suffered a kind of personality detachment. This jibed with Thomas' own statement: "I knew I was doing it, but it didn't seem like me. It was like watching myself doing it." In three other cases of sudden and apparently motiveless murder, the Topeka researchers got the same story of men blacking out and then seeming to be spectators at their own crimes.

Dredging the killers' pasts, Dr. Satten and his colleagues discovered that all had histories of being bad actors--getting into fist fights that would have ended fatally if others had not intervened, etc. At these times they displayed superhuman strength; it took seven men to restrain one who fought like this. Yet all were preoccupied with fears of being, or being considered, "sissies."

All four killers had something else in common: as children they had been exposed to unbridled violence between parents and other adults, as well as to frequent brutal whippings. And all had suffered emotionally from loss or separation of parents. As a result, argued Dr. Satten, they had become "predisposed to severe lapses in ego control," were incapable of counting to ten before acting, but lashed out impulsively and instantaneously.

The doctors' most damning discovery: "Three of these four murderers had conveyed their fears of losing control to legal officials or psychiatrists before the murders. The warnings were disregarded."

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