The Aura of Evil

At last the sniper killers seem to have been caught. If so, they can thank themselves for having given the police one clue too many by directing their attention to an earlier crime in Alabama.

If they are tried and convicted in Maryland, they may face stern justice indeed: life behind bars, free room and board, all expenses paid by the taxpayer, including the monthly fee for cable television.

What drove the pair to these ghastly crimes? When it was assumed that only one man was committing them, he was often called a “psycho” or “madman.” These words were meant more as insults than diagnoses; in our age everyone is an amateur psychiatrist, and even when we mean to curse each other we impulsively reach for the language of abnormal psychology.

But that language, to the extent that it means anything at all, seems inappropriate when applied to partners in crime. How likely is it that two people should suffer from the same derangement? Why assume they share some mental illness? Doesn’t that really exculpate them by implying they couldn’t help what they did? Shall we offer them an insanity defense?

When John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, you’ll recall, he was consigned to a mental institution rather than a prison because the court ruled that the state bore the burden of proving not only that he had done the deed, but that he was sane when he did it. Since Hinckley had stalked the president by way of courting Jodie Foster, this proved a tall order.

Still, Hinckley knew what he was doing. He was sane enough to plan and execute an act he fully understood would be condemned by society, and he managed to penetrate the heavy defenses that surround the most important man in the United States. And he got the notoriety he wanted, if not the girl.

Likewise the sniper killers got their notoriety. Their crimes have won publicity around the world. They’ve no doubt enjoyed the dark glamour of the mysterious, cop-taunting serial killer, the aura of Jack the Ripper. Like Jack, they struck with terrifying unpredictability, creating the kind of fear once inspired by the diabolical and seeming invulnerable to detection and capture. They too awakened primitive fears of an omnipotent evil around us.

Jack was never caught, as far as we know, and his preternatural aura endures to this day. It’s almost as if he’s still at large in the shadows of London. He may have claimed as few as five victims, but his legend is immortal, because he got away with his crimes.

Had he been captured, his aura would have evaporated and he would have been forgotten fairly soon. He would have been seen for what he no doubt was — a miserable little man with an odd grudge against prostitutes, of no particular interest, and certainly no criminal genius. The mistakes that led to his arrest would have underlined his mortal fallibility. A month after his apprehension, Londoners would have been yawning and wondering what all the fuss was about. And by the way, he would have been hanged.

Now, we can assume, the sniper killers will be out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Their aura of evil will vanish as we see them in their true dimensions. The petty details of their lives, as they emerge, will make them appear not mysterious, but humdrum and contemptible. And not even very intelligent or skilled at their grisly work. Professional snipers have already expressed disdain for their marksmanship. Hannah Arendt’s apt but overused phrase “the banality of evil” will be endlessly repeated in the days ahead.

In short, this will probably turn out to be a rather disappointing pair of villains. The great villains of crime fiction are thrilling, larger than life, like Professor Moriarty, Dr. No, or Hannibal Lecter. Often they possess a scientific genius that could have made them millionaires had they gone straight; but they are supermen who despise bourgeois success. We can’t help feeling a furtive admiration for them, even as we shudder and root for Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, or — egad! — Jodie Foster to foil them.

But in this case we are almost sure to discover that we’ve been terrorized for weeks by a pair of losers, whose only talent was for deadly cheap shots, and whose lives would have remained merely sad and obscure if they hadn’t turned to thrill-killing. Let’s hold the depth psychology.

Joseph Sobran