I once got a chance to chat with a psychologist who worked for the Rangers. I ran into him at the Schlitterbahn water park south of Austin, and talked while we waited for family members to finish their rides. He was involved with tracking down members of MS-13, the Latino gang. They're known for being particularly violent, so he was pretty eager to find them and get them prosecuted.
One piece of Ranger history I didn't know was that their badges are made from Mexican 5-Peso silver coins.
There was recently an article about the alien-ness of octopi, but to read about a guy doing this, he seems more unhuman than even those. Someone who can find life that disposable just for a bit of fun, will always be utterly beyond me.
Just a note, I understand that serial killers almost exclusively stick with their own ethnic group. If you watch the (short) video, that becomes very apparent here. The photos in the article don't show that so well, the video does.
"were almost all prostitutes, drug addicts or those he didn’t think would be missed."
Christ, the ultimate throwaway culture. Well done James Holland, you did a job I could not face.
Pressed about his life story, Little traced the urge to kill to his youth. He said he got his first erection in kindergarten when he watched his teacher touch her neck. Later in grade school, he dreamed of killing a girl who stroked her neck while teasing him.
He said it, but I have trouble believing that. There had to be something before that, perhaps something too far back to remember?
It shouldn't be that hard to believe. The reality is some people are born with biologically or structurally dysfunctional brains.
Is it hard for you to believe that someone could be born with schizophrenia? What about autism? What about poor impulse control?
When you think about the complicated interplay of social interaction in HEALTHY humans, which includes their innate capacity for violence (We definitely are part hunters with a propensity for war), and you compare the things we know that can go wrong and produce mental deficits of one form or another, it really shouldn't be that surprising that some people in the population would also be born with distinctly anti-social tendencies of one form or another.
Brains are complicated... there's all kinds of interesting things that happen too that may be related. For example, the disgust response of humans is typically lessened or even reversed during sexual arousal. So you can have almost a complete flip in behavior depending on context! The regions of the brain responsible for aggression and sexual arousal are also really close together and related. So is this really that much of a stretch?
You are not "born" with any of these. You are born with a genetic predisposition, for example with genetic variants that increase the risk of schizophrenia, but there are no certainties. It is an interplay between genetics and the environment, both genetic and environmental factors play a role in the development.
Let's imagine a hypothetical. Imagine we take a fresh planet, mostly identical to Earth. And we populate it with 1 billion infants, a billion robotic baby sitters, and no external influence. Our robotic Rosies will all behave identically and simply ensure the children do not starve and receive a homogeneous education. All will also be raised in mostly homogeneous settings. Do you believe that there would be no murderers, or others engaged in grossly deviant behavior in this world?
It's a fun thought experiment for quite a lot of social (and economic) issues really because it makes you consider notions of nurture vs nature and how many things are likely to emerge even without the preconditions which we have which do make them much more likely. For instance I'd certainly agree if we took 1% of our Rosies and forced them to sexually and physically abuse their charges, we'd certainly see a much larger ratio of those 1% end up as psychopaths, but that doesn't preclude the fact that, as I think you'd agree, you'd also certainly see plenty of psychopaths within the other 99% as well.
It's also possible he's just lying. If he's naturally a psychopath like you say, doesn't that mean he's predisposed towards lying? It's not like he's punished for lying or rewarded for telling the truth - we really have no way to corroborate any of this.
I'm not saying your theory isn't plausible, but what makes it any more likely than him just lying?
>> Let's imagine a hypothetical. Imagine we take a fresh planet, mostly identical to Earth. And we populate it with 1 billion infants, a billion robotic baby sitters, and no external influence. Our robotic Rosies will all behave identically and simply ensure the children do not starve and receive a homogeneous education. All will also be raised in mostly homogeneous settings. Do you believe that there would be no murderers, or others engaged in grossly deviant behavior in this world? <<
... This hypothetical enacted would directly result in chaos. There is no possibility of raising human beings to be civilized without human beings doing the raising.
Kind of sickening how he builds up his ego and tells him he loves him. Seems like that kind of treatment could potentially skew the accuracy of the confession.
“Hmm, I like being loved and praised and fed milkshakes here in prison, I’m going to keep talking, even if it isn’t true!”
Very few details about the confirmations of the confessions here, and a lot of insistence that Little has a "photographic memory" a pseudoscientific claim which implies we shouldn't question whether these confessions are real.
There is a mutual relationship here: Little gets company, attention, and praise, police get to wipe 57 cases off their books that they have no intention of ever trying in a court, and this particular investigator gets lionized.
edit:
> After the confessions came the painstaking work — confirming killings. There won’t be time to prosecute Little for all the deaths, but authorities believe they can sufficiently tie him to a homicide to consider the case solved.
This is the entirety of the content detailing the confirmations that I can find in the article.
They also noted this, without saying how they confirmed them:
> By his count, Holland and his team have confirmed 57 of Little’s 93 confessions, not including 21 in Southern California
That's a definitive statement. I agree that it would have been nice if the article had included a bit more regarding how they were confirmed (assuming it's reasonable to release such information - even if vague - at this point, as it may not be).
This ranger is teaching his techniques to police officers.
These techniques may be useful for serial killers (although we don't know, there's no research) but we know these interrogation techniques have caused many miscarriages of justice.
There's nothing you can do that won't potentially skew what a person says. They've managed to verify at least 57 confessions so far, so that seems like a pretty good result even if the other 57 are fabricated.
Personally, I'm not bothered by building up the serial killer's ego. The important thing about imprisonment is that he's prevented from killing more people.
I agree that it could, but I feel like this might be one of those situations where you just have to choose between very imperfect alternatives. If you use techniques like this, you might get wrong information. If you don't, you might get no information at all.
Maybe sometimes it's better to get very unreliable information and try to confirm it independently, the classic example being if they say something only the killer would know like where the body is buried.
You are dealing with the darkest depths of humanity to get these confessions. Sure as hell beats using torture and duress to extract this info. I’m not sure how someone would be able to convincingly lie about multiple murders if they were lying. Most details aren’t public. I have not had any close family become victims of a violent crime so I don’t know how important the confession is to these families, but it seems to mean a lot to many of them.
Totally unrelated to the article (which I enjoyed), but the LA Times website continuously jumped up and down on my iPad. I suspect ads reloading above or below the fold. Incredibly annoying!
It's amazing how can a professional solve this cases where others couldn't. Why there is so much hate towards women in US? I mean, particularly, these serial killers. Cases like this are rarely seen in South America, where violence has other drives (many times much less psychological).
Unfortunately (I am South American) I think you are wrong. Some of the most prolific serial killers have been South Smerican, but serial killers are not such a popular topic on the news here so it's not as widely known.
I would think it's also logical that serial killers tend to focus on women and children because they are generally easier to overpower than another male. There is probably also a sexual component to killing and I would guess that most serial killers tend to be heterosexual, hence why they mostly target women.
Yes. Prolific, but I wasn't talking about the number of victims but the number of produced serial killers. I know that there were (and are!) many serial killers in other countries, but what I am asking is how and why did USA produce more serial killers as a cultural and sociological phenomenon. You could say "Ok, but you don't know that and your observation can be explained, because in US they caught more of these guys while in other countries they remain unidentified". That is really hard to believe because many LE and their corresponding Investigation Divisions in the world have the same level and resources that in USA and it is really hard to loose tracks of many linked murder cases, even when they seem unrelated at first. Given enough time, data, and evidence, someone will relate those cases if they were committed by a mostly psychological-driven serial killer.
I also know that they look for the easy prey (as you said, it's logical), but there's something that seems out of that dimension in this issue. I also find really hard to miss that mass-shootings in USA are something far from logical (I'm not talking about accessibility to guns, or laws and policies about guns).
I apologize if I offended someone.
Question wasn't ok! Didn't mean what it seems to. Question I wanted to write was more about psychological predisposition to violence in US considering their serial killers.
If that's true, he would've talked a long time ago. He refused to talk to many investigators from various states who also could've gotten the same letter not seeking the death penalty (presuming the guy was already convicted for life), only Holland got him to talk. So, yes Holland is partly if not entirely responsible for getting him to talk.
I read the article, Holland definitely got the guy to talk through unconventional means. He has killers draw their victims. He seems unaffected by the flat way the killer describes his victims. It’s almost like becoming the killers “advocate” (lack of a better word) instead of prosecutor.
I’m not claiming you’re wrong; I’m just curious—are his methods actually unconventional? Once a person is serving a life sentence (nothing to lose), and there’s nothing his cooperation can do to get him out of prison (nothing to gain), it seems pretty obvious to me that anyone wanting to work with him would need to try something like what Holland has done.
One piece of Ranger history I didn't know was that their badges are made from Mexican 5-Peso silver coins.
https://www.americancowboy.com/people/history-texas-ranger-b...