RedHanded

by Suruthi Bala

  Jones himself was discovered with a gunshot wound to the head—he had not taken the cyanide. Maybe after seeing just how “painless” it was, he didn’t fancy it for himself, but he knew he couldn’t leave Jonestown alive. Like he had said to his followers so many times, the only way out of Jonestown was in a box.

  When news of what had been found deep in the Guyanese jungle leaked, it shook the world. Up until the events of September 11, 2001, the massacre at Jonestown was the largest modern-day instance of intentional civilian death in the history of the United States. But amidst all the death and destruction, we’re happy to say that there were survivors, too; some had run off into the jungle and some had managed to slip away when Jones had instructed them to take suitcases containing $7.3 million to the nearest Soviet Union embassy. (It looks like Jones did have the money to feed his people after all… so much for the socialism.)

  AN UNEXPECTED VICTIM…

  While most people know about the horrors of the human deaths at Jonestown, people rarely talk about the single chimp fatality. Remember Jones’s previous life as a door-to-door chimpanzee salesman? Well, a fully grown adult chimp called Mr. Muggs lived with Jim Jones in Jonestown. Jones told everyone that he had single-handedly rescued Mr. Muggs from scientific experimentation, but it’s much more likely that he had just bought him from a pet shop. Mr. Muggs’s body was found in the jungle commune, too, but he hadn’t been forced to take cyanide; he, like Jones, had been shot in the head.

  Leaving Ain’t Easy

  We’ve tackled a lot of questions in this chapter, but let’s come back to the key one that usually dominates the discourse around cults. Why did people stay even when everything was going so batshit fucking crazy?

  There were, of course, a bunch of very real and very huge barriers to leaving the Peoples Temple. Remember that Jonestown was in the middle of the jungle in Guyana! So even if you managed to get to the airstrip—with no phone, no money, and no passport—how were you supposed to charter a plane to come get you, or pay someone to take you on the 19-hour boat trip back to civilization? This was a huge impediment, but there were other invisible ones, too.

  Jim Jones used all the tactics we discussed on pages 127–129 and he was supremely good at almost all of them. The people in Jonestown were severely malnourished and they barely slept, which made decision-making and critical thinking difficult, if not impossible. And by isolating his followers, both geographically and ideologically, Jones was able to totally control the communication within the cult; not just between followers but inside the cultists’ own heads.

  Through the use of the Red Brigade, his Peoples Forums, and the public beatings, Jones also managed to sow a culture of extreme fear. The members of the cult were terrified of being reported for dissent so no one spoke to anyone about anything of substance. Being trapped, scared, and unable to communicate is of course a recipe for major anxiety and depression. Anxious, depressed people—who are scared out of their minds—are less likely to make elaborate escape plans. And they are much more likely to exhibit drastically changed behaviors, and even to kill themselves—whether it’s under the guise of a revolutionary act or not.

  Humans are emotional, and often behave irrationally. People will keep playing the lottery even though they know that the chances of them winning are slim to none. Hannah will keep swiping on Hinge even though she knows she will die alone. Hope is the key factor and we need it to survive. Hope is incredibly powerful stuff, and the people of Jonestown had loads of it; they truly believed that they were building a better world. And this brings us back to why cults go after intelligent, socially conscious, hard-working people—they are filled with hopes and dreams. And the followers of the Peoples Temple had attached such hope and emotion to Jonestown—and the racial integration and equality it represented—that they held onto it, come what may.

  So why then did all of these normal people, fighting for a better world, kill themselves and each other? Jim Jones didn’t trick them with secret concoctions; people knowingly poisoned their peers and their families. They did what they were told because they were broken people. Jim Jones had broken them. But what can explain this mental pivot on a deeper psychological level?

  Well, there is a theory that being in a cult can cause people to exhibit borderline personality organization, which is one of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder or BPD.

  WHAT IS BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER?

  Borderline personality disorder (or emotionally unstable personality disorder) can happen for lots of different reasons, some genetic and some environmental. Often people with BPD have experienced a traumatic childhood. According to the UK’s National Health Service and the charity MIND, those living with BPD feel emotions more strongly and uncontrollably than other people and exhibit disturbed patterns of thinking. Here are some of the symptoms:

  Intense fear of abandonment, but also being convinced everyone is going to abandon you even if you do everything right

  Extremely intense emotions that can change rapidly

  No strong sense of self-identity, meaning you can become very different around different groups of people and are easily influenced

  Feeling of emptiness

  Impulsive behavior that puts you and those around you in danger

  Self-harm

  Suicidal ideation

  Uncontrollable anger

  Extreme difficulty maintaining balanced relationships

  Paranoia

  Dissociation

  Not everyone diagnosed with BPD will experience all of these symptoms, but generally more than seven of these, as outlined in the DSM-5, is considered to be enough for a diagnosis.

  Life with BPD is a life of extremes and disturbed thinking. Suicidal ideation is a result of disturbed thinking, and the different forms this can take are laid out by David Lester in his paper “The Role of Irrational Thinking in Suicidal Behavior.” Evolutionarily speaking, we are hardwired to want to survive, and so to end our lives is not rational behavior.

  So why are we bringing all this up? Well, in the paper “An Object Relations Approach to Cult Membership,” Joseph D. Salande and David R. Perkins argue that the repetitive activity, lack of sleep, and constant pressure to conform that cult members are often exposed to can actually cause their personality organization to break down to the point that their thinking resembles someone with borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, or antisocial personality disorder.

  And it does make sense—being indoctrinated into a cult is a traumatic experience and everything about a cult is built to weaken our normal functioning egos, induce dissociation, and compromise critical thinking. Now, these academics are not suggesting that cult members spontaneously sprout personality disorders. Rather, it’s that cult experiences weaken a healthy person so much so that it causes the self-destructive behavior one might observe in someone with a serious personality disorder.

  So, as unbelievable as what the followers of Jim Jones did may seem—biologically and psychologically—it would appear that a lot of people would act the same way, had they been put through what happened in Jonestown.

  6

  RELATIONSHIPS

  Hormones, Hybristophilia, and Horse-Drawn Carriages

  LOVE IS ONE OF THE MOST PROFOUND EMOTIONS THAT WE AS humans experience. It has the power to transform our lives, influence our mental health, and even affect our physical wellbeing. (It can also absolutely ruin your life.) The people we meet and the relationships we forge shape who we are. They have as much potential to determine our futures as our childhoods, our socioeconomic situation, or at what age we learned how to stop over-plucking our eyebrows.

  Every rom-com, every song, and every annoying article that pops up on our Facebook timelines announcing “10 Signs to Know You’ve Found the One” tell us that love can change us for the better. And apparently, it’s not just us. It seems that love can even help vicious serial killers.

  Consider, for example, Gary Ridgw
ay (a.k.a. the Green River Killer), whom we met briefly in chapter 2. He was one of the most prolific serial killers ever, having murdered up to 90 women over the course of a decade. During the peak of his killings, he had twice been unhappily married, but when he met a woman named Judith Mawson, fell in love, and married her in 1988, the murders essentially stopped.

  It seems that some serial killers can stop, given the right circumstances—like a stabilizing marriage or reduced stress—and love can play a huge role in that. As criminologist Dr. Michael Stone put it in an interview with the New York Times in 2018, “Some of these men have little oases of compassion, within the vast desert of their contempt and hatred of women.”

  But what about a love that, instead of quenching a killer’s drive to murder, actually feeds into it? Surely it stands to reason that if love can have such a powerful impact on a serial killer that it can stop them from killing, the pendulum can also swing the other way and make them even more brutal.

  In this chapter, we’re going to look at a case that we feel highlights this nightmarish match-made-in-hell situation perfectly so that we can examine how and why a romantic union influences murderous behavior. We’ll also explore what drives those who may never have become killers had they not met that “right” person… who steered their lives into a big old murder ditch.

  Killer Couples: Swipe the Fuck Away From Me

  There’s an image conjured up in all our minds when we think of a killer, particularly a serial killer—it’s the idea of a lone man out stalking his victims, usually wearing a trench coat. We also know that most serial killers prefer to work alone; they have a specific MO, a fine-tuned set of motivations, and their own very niche fantasies. They don’t want to share the thrill, and of course, many serial killers are not the most social of butterflies.

  So this makes it all the more interesting when we do come across killer couples. But just how rare or common are they? In his 2002 book, Serial Murderers and Their Victims, Eric W. Hickey finds that roughly a quarter of serial killers actually operated as pairs or teams, and this number went up to almost a third when only female serial killers were analyzed. So while they aren’t as common as the solo killer, couples or teams do make up a significant subset of this dangerous population.

  What’s more interesting, though, is the difference in dynamic. Studies show there are significant differences between solo and partnered killers in terms of number of victims, length of career, method of murder, and their motives. Generally, couples who kill together murder more victims, they are usually more brutal (thanks to the multiplying of motives when more than one person is involved), and they typically get caught faster. And while killer couples come in all shapes, sizes, and sexual orientations, in this particular chapter we’re going to focus on the heterosexual killer couple, because the role of the woman within these unions—and the idea of female criminality itself—is so often massively overlooked. Typical.

  This bias may well be because of who is perceived to be the more dominant partner—and therefore, more culpable. In 2015, Hickey analyzed the data pertaining to hundreds of serial killer couples and teams, and he found that in every example one person was in control. And this makes sense—in most relationships there is usually a more dominant partner. In these killer teams, it was usually the male, but the role of the female killer and her motivations are still vital to explore and understand. All too often, any theories that we do see thrown about as to why submissive women kill with dominant men completely dissolve the woman’s agency.

  The female in the pair is usually portrayed as just a weak-minded follower or a compliant victim, and sometimes that’s true. But it is absolutely not always the case. Some women are actively and happily involved, driven by their own murderous and deviant desires. Just being the more submissive member of the pair doesn’t mean that they were being forced or manipulated to kill. And while these submissives may never have killed before their murderous relationship, their darkest impulses are unlocked and unleashed by the dominant aggressor and they fully embrace it.

  In such cases the two lovebirds sense something in the other, a dark kindred spirit. This draws them together and they become bound by the emotional glue of shared dysfunction, abuse, and chaos. This can create a powerful “us-against-the-rest-of-the-world” mentality and allows the couple to romanticize themselves as Bonnie and Clyde–like antiheroes. And although Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s ’03 Bonnie and Clyde is an absolute banger, we won’t be doing any romanticizing in this chapter, because let’s not forget Bonnie and Clyde killed at least 13 people.

  So let’s get started with the main characters at the center of this chapter: Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo.

  The Ken and Barbie Killers

  Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo—a couple who brutally tortured, raped, and murdered three girls together—got the rather perky moniker of the “Ken and Barbie Killers” thanks to their good looks. Karla was a fun, outgoing, blonde teenage girl and Paul was a tall, handsome man oozing confidence and charisma. The nickname, although annoyingly glamorizing, is perhaps fitting because their appearances did play a key role in attracting them to each other, and also possibly in helping them fly under the radar for as long as they did. But before we get to their whirlwind romance of death, let’s start with who Karla was pre-Paul.

  KARLA

  Karla grew up in Ontario, Canada, the eldest of three girls in a loving and supportive family. As a child, Karla had been a bit difficult, described by some as being quite domineering, stubborn, and not playing well with others. According to the book Karla: A Pact with the Devil by Stephen Williams, she’d also been a bit of a bully at school, and displayed other signs of callous and problematic behavior. For example, she once threw a friend’s pet hamster out a window with a homemade parachute strapped to its back. Sure, these things can happen when children are playing, but the hamster died and Karla didn’t seem at all bothered.

  We’ll come back to Karla’s specific personality issues and psychological makeup later in this chapter, but if there were any concerns about her at this point, they dissipated by the time she hit adolescence. Other than being prone to raging arguments with her parents, teenage Karla was popular, smart, and pretty (even with the painfully 1980s bleach-blonde mullet/bangs thing she had going on), and so as far as anyone who knew her was concerned, she was “perfect.”

  During her senior year of high school, Karla, while trying to figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life, got a part-time job at a local veterinarian clinic. This made her realize her passion for working with animals (thankfully minus the parachute experiments). In October 1987, 17-year-old Karla Homolka headed to Toronto to attend a pet convention. It was there that she first laid eyes on 23-year-old Paul Bernardo.

  Paul swaggered into the hotel bar, and for Karla, it was love at first sight. He had everything she wanted: he was older, he was charming, and to her, he was drop-dead bloody gorgeous. But there was much more to Paul than met the eye; there was a darkness in him bubbling away just beneath his perfectly coiffed Patrick Bateman hair.

  PAUL

  While Karla had been relatively normal up until the point that the pair crossed paths, the same can’t be said for Paul. He had had a wealthy suburban upbringing, but it had been far from stable or happy.

  The Bernardo home was a nightmarish one, and Paul’s childhood traumas can be listed like a bingo card for predicting a future serial killer. First, Paul’s father was extremely emotionally and physically abusive toward his mother and it was also rumored that he sexually abused Paul’s sister. Kenneth Bernardo was actually convicted of child molestation in 1975, and as an adult, his daughter even pressed charges against him for the abuse she said she endured at his hands. Despite his turbulent home life, however, Paul was known for being a happy child and it wasn’t until he was a teenager that a darker side of him began to emerge. The catalyst for this seems to have been that, at the age of 16, Paul discovered that his dad, Kenneth, wasn’t actually
his biological father, and that he had been conceived after his mother had an affair. This shook Paul’s sense of self and he resented his mother for it. Discovery of true parentage can rock the foundations of a child’s psyche; Ted Bundy, for example, claimed that a huge turning point in his life was when he discovered that his sister was actually his mother.

  Of course, the negative impact of such revelations can be mitigated by parents who handle it in a kind and compassionate way, but considering the fact that Paul’s parents started referring to him as the “bastard child from hell,” we’re going to say that they failed, quite considerably, on that front. As a result, Paul’s fury toward his mother became explosive, and he would regularly scream at her, calling her a “whore” and a “slut.” This anger grew into a deep sense of rage that soon spilled over into how young Paul viewed all women.

  As an adolescent, he quickly became a voracious consumer of extreme pornography. By the time he was in college, Paul Bernardo was having violent fantasies about rape and dreaming about building his own “virgin farm” where he would keep women as sex slaves. As we said, Paul was an attractive guy (if you like the preppy look), so he never had trouble finding girlfriends. Keeping them, however, proved to be less easy. Paul was obsessed with aggressive, degrading, controlling sex, and early into his relationships he would start to pressure partners into participating in sex acts involving bondage, asphyxiation, sodomy, and humiliation. The women he dated were just not into it, and they all ran the hell away.

  In 1986, after months of harassment from Paul, two of his ex-girlfriends actually filed restraining orders against him. This incident appears to have been a trigger for Paul; it was soon after in May 1987 at the age of 22 that he committed his first known rape. By the time Paul met Karla in that hotel bar in October 1987, he had already raped two women and attacked a third.