on Jeremiah Smith –
c.g. 97-95-6
– sat down on the bed and started studying the contents in search of anything that might lead him to the missing student.
He started with the potted biography of the killer. Jeremiah was fifty years old and unmarried. He came from a well-to-do middle-class family. His mother was Italian and his father English, both of them now dead. They had owned five draper’s shops in the city, but had given up their commercial activities some time in the 1980s. Jeremiah was an only child, and had no close relatives. Having been provided with a respectable income, he had never worked. At this point, information about him petered out. The last two lines of the profile reported laconically that he lived in complete isolation in his villa in the hills outside Rome.
Jeremiah Smith struck Marcus as a fairly unremarkable person. Nevertheless, all the conditions were there for him to become what he was. His solitude, his emotional immaturity, and his inability to relate to his fellow men all worked against any desire he might harbour to have someone near him.
You knew that the only way to get a woman’s attention was to kidnap her and keep her tied up, didn’t you? Of course you did. What were you trying to gain, what was your purpose? You didn’t take them to have sex with them. You didn’t rape them, and you didn’t torture them.
What you wanted from them was a sense of family.
These were attempts at forced cohabitation. You tried to make things work, to love them like a good little husband, but they were too scared to give you anything in return. You kept trying to be with them, but after a month you realised it wasn’t possible. You realised that it was a sick, twisted kind of relationship, and that it existed entirely in your mind. And then – let’s admit it – you were eager to put a knife to their throats. So in the end you killed them. But all the same, what you were searching for was love.
However coherent the idea might be, most people would have found it intolerable. Marcus, on the other hand, had not only grasped it but had even managed to accept it. He asked himself why, but couldn’t give himself an answer. Was that also part of his talent? Sometimes, it scared him.
He went on to analyse Jeremiah’s modus operandi. He had worked undisturbed for six years, killing four victims. Each had been followed by a lull, during which the memory of the violence perpetrated was sufficient for the murderer to keep the urge to kill again under control. When this beneficial effect faded, he started to hatch a new fantasy that led to a new kidnapping. It wasn’t a plan, it was a genuine physiological process.
Jeremiah’s victims were young women, aged between seventeen and twenty-eight. He sought them out in broad daylight. He approached them on some pretext or other, offered to buy them a drink, then put a drug in it: GHB, the date-rape drug. Once they were in a dazed state, it was easy to persuade them to follow him.
But why did the girls agree to have a drink with him?
That was what Marcus found strange. Someone like Jeremiah – a middle-aged man, far from handsome – should have made his victims suspicious of his real intentions. And yet the girls let him approach them.
They trusted him.
Perhaps he had offered them money or an opportunity of some kind. One of the techniques of luring women – much favoured by perverts and their kind – was to promise them a chance to earn some easy money, or to take part in a beauty contest, or to audition for a part in a film or a television programme. But such stratagems required a definite ability to socialise. That didn’t tally with what was known of Jeremiah, who was antisocial, a hermit.
How did you trick them?
And why had nobody noticed him as he was approaching them? Before Lara, four young women had been abducted in public places and there had not been a single witness. And yet his courting of these women must have taken time. But
c.g. 97-95-6
– sat down on the bed and started studying the contents in search of anything that might lead him to the missing student.
He started with the potted biography of the killer. Jeremiah was fifty years old and unmarried. He came from a well-to-do middle-class family. His mother was Italian and his father English, both of them now dead. They had owned five draper’s shops in the city, but had given up their commercial activities some time in the 1980s. Jeremiah was an only child, and had no close relatives. Having been provided with a respectable income, he had never worked. At this point, information about him petered out. The last two lines of the profile reported laconically that he lived in complete isolation in his villa in the hills outside Rome.
Jeremiah Smith struck Marcus as a fairly unremarkable person. Nevertheless, all the conditions were there for him to become what he was. His solitude, his emotional immaturity, and his inability to relate to his fellow men all worked against any desire he might harbour to have someone near him.
You knew that the only way to get a woman’s attention was to kidnap her and keep her tied up, didn’t you? Of course you did. What were you trying to gain, what was your purpose? You didn’t take them to have sex with them. You didn’t rape them, and you didn’t torture them.
What you wanted from them was a sense of family.
These were attempts at forced cohabitation. You tried to make things work, to love them like a good little husband, but they were too scared to give you anything in return. You kept trying to be with them, but after a month you realised it wasn’t possible. You realised that it was a sick, twisted kind of relationship, and that it existed entirely in your mind. And then – let’s admit it – you were eager to put a knife to their throats. So in the end you killed them. But all the same, what you were searching for was love.
However coherent the idea might be, most people would have found it intolerable. Marcus, on the other hand, had not only grasped it but had even managed to accept it. He asked himself why, but couldn’t give himself an answer. Was that also part of his talent? Sometimes, it scared him.
He went on to analyse Jeremiah’s modus operandi. He had worked undisturbed for six years, killing four victims. Each had been followed by a lull, during which the memory of the violence perpetrated was sufficient for the murderer to keep the urge to kill again under control. When this beneficial effect faded, he started to hatch a new fantasy that led to a new kidnapping. It wasn’t a plan, it was a genuine physiological process.
Jeremiah’s victims were young women, aged between seventeen and twenty-eight. He sought them out in broad daylight. He approached them on some pretext or other, offered to buy them a drink, then put a drug in it: GHB, the date-rape drug. Once they were in a dazed state, it was easy to persuade them to follow him.
But why did the girls agree to have a drink with him?
That was what Marcus found strange. Someone like Jeremiah – a middle-aged man, far from handsome – should have made his victims suspicious of his real intentions. And yet the girls let him approach them.
They trusted him.
Perhaps he had offered them money or an opportunity of some kind. One of the techniques of luring women – much favoured by perverts and their kind – was to promise them a chance to earn some easy money, or to take part in a beauty contest, or to audition for a part in a film or a television programme. But such stratagems required a definite ability to socialise. That didn’t tally with what was known of Jeremiah, who was antisocial, a hermit.
How did you trick them?
And why had nobody noticed him as he was approaching them? Before Lara, four young women had been abducted in public places and there had not been a single witness. And yet his courting of these women must have taken time. But
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