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Cargando... Psychopathpor Dr. Katherine Ramsland
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H. H. Holmes was a central character in Erik Larson's hugely successful The Devil in the White City, which is planned as a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Holmes is commonly viewed as a real-life Hannibal Lecter, a devious and cunning serial killer. Holmes used the persona of a successful doctor and entrepreneur to draw untold numbers of young women to his three-story Chicago hotel to experiment on before killing them. He would often deflesh the corpses to sell the skeletons to medical schools. Holmes enjoyed trying out methods of murder and watching his victims die. Scientists from his era believed Holmes' brain would unlock the secret of his perversity, but he denied them the chance to find out. Today, neuroscience allows us to unlock the brains of sadistic psychopaths, so we can better understand what his brain - if dissected - would have revealed. We can research killers to decode Holmes's vile behavior. From Psychopath: "After the girls died, he'd enjoy viewing 'their blackened and distorted faces' before he dug a shallow grave, removed their clothing, and dumped them into it with 'fiendish delight.' Holmes considered that 'for eight years before their deaths I had been almost as much a father to them as though they had been my own children.' "It is precisely this behavior that most puzzles the ordinary person and draws the researcher's attention: how can a man torture and asphyxiate children, or burn them and view it as entertainment? How can he 'befriend' them for years, knowing the whole time that he will end their lives? How can he describe it as pleasurable? This is the reason the psychopath holds our fascination. It's why researchers even during Holmes's era tried extracting criminal brains post-mortem for study. They hoped to locate the seat of disturbed moral consciousness." No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Holmes pulled a lot of cons and committed many murders aside from the ones that took place in his "Murder Castle," though, and it was one of those unrelated cons that finally got him caught. Dr. Ramsland starts with that case of insurance fraud, follows Holmes's arrest, the subsequent investigation into his other crimes, and his incarceration and trial, and uses her background in criminal psychology to paint a picture of Holmes's probable mindset during that time. She also explains his attempts to manipulate the public before and during his trial, and digs a little into the possible root causes of psychopathy in general.
The book includes some discussion of phrenology -- a pseudoscience that was fashionable in the early 1800s -- and touches on neuroscientific research into psychopathy and the ethics of punishing true psychopaths, but mostly it functions as a "true crime"-type story.
It's a quick read, short and compelling. I don't know whether I LIKED it, I mean, it's a horrible story, but that has nothing to do with Dr. Ramsland's writing or storytelling style, which I did like. ( )