By Chris Bartholomew
Mindy,
Although I am not a 'professional' I do think I know what you should do. Please take this advice as something I am trying to help you with, don't be offended.
You are going about this the wrong way. YOU learning all about serial killers will not help your son. Can you imagine how he'd feel if he knew what you were doing, if he finds out this will hurt, not help him, and helping HIM is what we want right?
My advice is that you should NOT get in touch with a serial killer for advice about your son. I have studied them and they are manipulative, and not really living to help anyone but themselves. Most of them lie about what could have stopped them, and they lie about their reasons for killing.
You should seek the help of an analyst for yourself, you go talk to a psychologist, you find out what he/she thinks YOUR course of action should be. You are diagnosing your own son and are way too close to this to know what you should be doing. I know we study serial killers to find out what makes them tick, but see, we really don't know yet, which is why you need help in helping your son. How do you know you aren't pushing him IN that direction by reading everything you can get your hands on? You already said he has some of the signs so if you go tell a professional this, he/she can suggest a course of action AFTER they study it themselves.
If you know about your son because he told you, why not just talk to him about it and see if he knows why he's doing this and try to come to an understanding from the source. Believe me, the last thing someone should do is tell a serial killer about their young boy.
Editor's note: this is a reply to a reader, printed in the magazine in 2008 to 2009, answering a letter in issue one from a mother who had written in asking whether her son might be a serial killer waiting to happen. It is reproduced as written and is kept here as a piece of the magazine's correspondence rather than as guidance. It is not clinical advice and does not claim to be; the author says so in the first line and again in the fourth, where the substance of the answer is to stop reading about serial killers and go and see a psychologist. On the one point the archive can speak to, the author is right about the source she was thinking of writing to. Killers' own accounts of what would have stopped them do not survive contact with the record. This archive holds cases where the confessed figure runs to several hundred and the convicted figure is three, and the reason those numbers are famous is that the men chose them.