Fictitious people seeking publicity can even become killers
Many people have heard of the famous Rorschach test, also called the Rorschach inkblot test, in which a person is asked to describe what they see in ambiguous inkblot images. This projective test often appears in popular culture and is frequently portrayed as a way of revealing a person’s unconscious thoughts, motives, or desires.
One of Hermann Rorschach’s favorite games as a child was Klecksography, which involves creating inkblots and making up stories or poems about them. He enjoyed the game so much that his school friends nicknamed him “Klecks,” the German word for “inkblot.”
His interest in inkblots continued into adulthood. While working in a psychiatric hospital, Rorschach noticed that patients with schizophrenia responded to the blots differently from patients with other diagnoses. He began wondering if inkblots could be used to create profiles for different mental disorders.
So, inspired perhaps by both his favorite childhood game and his studies of Sigmund Freud’s dream symbolism, Rorschach developed a systematic approach to using inkblots as an assessment tool.
Rorschach wasn’t the first to suggest that a person’s interpretation of an ambiguous scene might reveal hidden aspects of that individual’s personality. Alfred Binet also experimented with the idea of using inkblots as a way to test creativity and originally planned to include inkblots in his intelligence tests.
The Rorschach Inkblot Method is a performance-based personality assessment measure. The test consists of ten inkblots. Five inkblots include only shades of grey and black, two include red pigment along with the grey and black and three inkblots have a variety of colors. Test-takers are shown each inkblot, one at a time, and asked “What might this be?”
The Rorschach Inkblot Method was developed by Hermann Rorschach in 1921. From the start, Rorschach viewed his method as a perceptual task rather than an association or projective task. His great insight was to propose a method for coding how respondents formed percepts, that is, using color, shape, etc. Due to his untimely death from appendicitis, we will never know in what direction Rorschach might have taken his method.
Determinant coding is one of the most complex features of scoring Rorschach. This is where the examiner considers the reasons why you see what you see. What inkblot features helped determine your response and how?
There are six broad categories of inkblot determinants you could be responding to:
Color
Form
Movement
Pairs and Reflections
Shading
For example, if you report seeing a flower in Card 8 because of the red color, your examiner may code that response as a Color determinant.
Each category has its own subcategories and there are at least 26 possible determinant codes. More than one determinant can be used in a single response.
Interpreting a Rorschach record is a complex process. It requires a wealth of knowledge concerning personality dynamics generally as well as considerable experience with the Rorschach method specifically.
In addition to formal scores, Rorschach’s interpretation is also based on behaviors expressed during the testing, patterns of scores across responses, unique or consistent themes in the responses, and unique or idiosyncratic perceptions.
A relatively fast response might indicate being at ease with others and comfortable with social relationships. A delayed response, however, might reveal that the individual struggles with social interactions.
For felons convicted of violent crimes seeking a leave from prison, or under evaluation for probation, the ability to avoid responses indicative of hostility and aggression is likely to be crucial to gaining a positive evaluation. Under such circumstances, offenders might be inclined to present themselves as more mentally stable than they are, and thus be tempted to prepare for testing by seeking out information about the particular assessment. Relatively little is known about the effects of such preparation and practice.
Tutorial material about how to respond in line with particular psychological standards on the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM; Weiner, 2003) and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory2(MMPI2; Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989)isavailable on Internet Web sites. Instances of attorneys coaching their clients about validity scales and appropriate test response patterns are not uncommon (Bury & Bagby, 2002). Forensic examiners should, therefore, be cognizant of the possibility that the examinee might have prepared for testing to shift his or her test responses in a more well-adjusted and nonaggressive direction.
Instances of attorneys coaching their clients about validity scales and appropriate test response patterns are not uncommon (Bury & Bagby, 2002). Forensic examiners should, therefore, be cognizant of the possibility that the examinee might have prepared for testing to shift his or her test responses in a more well-adjusted and nonaggressive direction.
Ruiz, Drake, Glass, Marcotte, and van Gorp (2002) and Schultz and Loving (2012) found that the personality test tutorial information on most Internet Web sites was of minimal help. Even so, some sites present detailed test material that could still undermine the validity of psychological assessment.
Wikipedia (2004), for instance, has released all 10 Rorschach cards online as well as the guiding principles for recognizing adequate and poor responses (e.g., that using movement and color is “safe,” whereas including aggressive and other provocative content is risky).
Randall (2010) showed that test takers who completed the RIM twice–first without knowledge of the Wikipedia Internet information and later after having been exposed to such material–altered their manner of responding minimally from the first to the second assessment. Similarly, Schultz and Brabender (2013) also reported few differences between the results of individuals who had or had not read the Wikipedia Rorschach article, beyond a significantly lower number of responses and higher number of Populars among those who had read the article. Participants were recruited from a parentteacher association, from online parenting message boards, and from graduate programs in social work, education, nursing, and psychology at a small university.
Psychiatric patients unable to utilize this information when asked to present themselves as mentally healthy on these tests.
The researchers used a between-groups design with four groups: one experimental group of psychiatric outpatients who had been exposed to Internet advice on faking healthy responses to these tests, and who had been instructed to try to do this; two control groups of outpatients, one under uncoached “faking healthy” instructions and one under standard conditions; and a comparison group of students under standard conditions. The faking participants were asked to complete the tests as if they were job applicants trying to present themselves as well-adjusted individuals with few psychological symptoms and problems. On the RIM, both the Internet-coached and uncoached patients under faking healthy instructions, similarly to the patients under standard instructions, revealed significantly more perceptual and reality testing disturbances than the nonpatients under standard instructions did. The Internet-exposed faking patients produced, in addition, more constricted protocols with a significantly higher Pure Form percentage and fewer aggressive and other provocative contents than the other groups. Thus, on the RIM both patient groups under faking good instructions showed better ability to control and censor what they saw, as opposed to how they perceived it. The patients under standard instructions produced psychopathological scores on most of the RIM variables. The faking patients, both with and without Internet coaching, managed to appear healthy. The patients under standard instructions revealed substantial psychological problems and symptoms on the clinical scales. It can be said, therefore, that providing Internet coaching did not improve the test takers’ ability to imitate a mentally healthy manner of test response, but resulted in constricted, yet perceptually and cognitively disturbed.
A person deliberately and consciously acts as if they have a physical or mental illness when they are not really sick.
People are known to deliberately create or exaggerate symptoms of an illness in several ways. They may lie about or fake symptoms, hurt themselves to bring on symptoms, or alter tests (such as contaminating a urine sample) to make it look like they or the person in their care are sick because of an inner need to be seen as ill or injured, not to achieve a clear benefit, such as financial gain. People with factitious disorders are even willing and sometimes eager to undergo painful or risky tests and operations in order to obtain the sympathy and special attention given to people who are truly ill or have a loved one who is ill. Factitious disorders are considered mental illnesses because they are associated with severe emotional difficulties.
Many people with factitious disorders also suffer from other mental conditions, particularly personality disorders. People with personality disorders have long-standing patterns of thinking and acting that differ from what society considers usual or normal. These people generally also have poor coping skills and problems forming healthy relationships.
Factitious disorders are similar to another group of mental disorders called somatoform disorders, which also involve the presence of symptoms that are not due to actual physical illness or another mental illness. The main difference between the two groups of disorders is that people with somatoform disorders do not fake symptoms or mislead others about their symptoms on purpose.
Serials killers are often classified as either psychopaths or sociopaths. While psychopaths suffer from mental chronic disorders, demonstrating violent social behaviour; sociopaths suffer from personality disorders with extreme behaviours and attitudes. Determining which of these disorders an individual actually has; often decides their punishment, should a crime be committed.
In the case of Jack the Ripper, there has been much speculation regarding whether or not he was a psychopath or a sociopath. Was he afflicted with a mental illness that drove him towards his horrific, violent outbursts towards the prostitutes of 18th century London? Or was it an entirely different personality within an otherwise normal person in Whitechapel 1888? It is believed that a psychopath will always kill you if that is his intention, but a sociopath will have some conscience and could be persuaded otherwise.
With no way of knowing who Jack the Ripper was, beyond speculation and guesswork, the reasons for the killer being a psychopath lie in his actions concerning his victims. Many people suggest the Ripper was a psychopath because he was smart enough to ensure no clues were left behind, he was never caught and was most likely regarded as charming and gentlemanly in society.
Psychopaths are meticulous in their planning, which is part of the reason they are harder to catch. They are likely to stick to their plans, despite obstacles in their way. This was demonstrated by his carrying out the second kill of his double event, despite almost being caught in the first murder of the evening.
The killer was likely to be smart, strong and in control. He killed quickly, made no sexual.assaults and mutilated his victim’s post-mortem with no evidence to suggest torture before death. The changing of the MO on the last victim indicates he was deliberately trying to avoid being caught, which could mean that police investigations were getting close. It also suggests that he was gaining confidence in his work. He most likely found pleasure in the degrading situations he left his victims in and enjoyed their vulnerability. It was probable that he lived nearby to clean up swiftly, post-murder.
The notion that Jack the Ripper dressed up as someone with money to attract his prostitute victims demonstrates sociopathic tendencies and a split personality disorder. Another sociopathic learning is the fact that his modus operandi changed with the last kill. This not only demonstrated that he was an experienced criminal, but also capable of breaking, entering and stalking, on top of murder and mutilation.
The document also suggested he was a loner, possibly disfigured and very likely to be unmarried. He was likely to be neat, orderly and from an unstable background. Writing letters to the police and taunting them suggests he was proud of his work and that his victims were merely a consequence of this action, an action that he deemed justified.
Sociopaths usually end up the way they are, due to traumatic events such as abuse in their early lives. There are plenty of people who believe that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, a sociopath. In part, this is because sociopaths tend to move around a lot, and this would explain why the killings were concentrated over a few a months, and he was then never heard of again. . It also explains the displaying of his victims’ bodies, post mutilation, along with the way in which they were killed.
Jack the Ripper terrorized London in 1888, killing at least five women and mutilating their bodies in an unusual manner, indicating that the killer had a substantial knowledge of human anatomy. The culprit was never captured—or even identified—and Jack the Ripper remains one of England’s, and the world’s, most infamous criminals.
Jack the Ripper terrorized London in 1888, killing at least five women and mutilating their bodies in an unusual manner, indicating that the killer had a substantial knowledge of human anatomy. The culprit was never captured—or even identified—and Jack the Ripper remains one of England’s, and the world’s, most infamous criminals.
All five killings attributed to Jack the Ripper took place within a mile of each other, in or near the Whitechapel district of London’s East End, from August 7 to September 10, 1888. Several other murders occurring around that time period have also been investigated as the work of “Leather Apron” (another nickname given to the murderer).
A number of letters were allegedly sent by the killer to the London Metropolitan Police Service (often known as Scotland Yard), taunting officers about his gruesome activities and speculating on murders to come. The moniker “Jack the Ripper” originates from a letter—which may have been a hoax—published at the time of the attacks.
Despite countless investigations claiming definitive evidence of the brutal killer’s identity, his or her name and motive are still unknown.
Jack the Ripper’s murders suddenly stopped in the fall of 1888, but London citizens continued to demand answers that would not come, even more than a century later. The ongoing case—which has spawned an industry of books, films, TV series and historical tours—has met with a number of hindrances, including lack of evidence, a gamut of misinformation and false testimony, and tight regulations by Scotland Yard.
Jack the Ripper has been the topic of news stories for more than 120 years, and will likely continue to be for decades to come.
A similar case happened in India. The Stoneman murders is a real case that happened in the year 1983 to 1986 in Mumbai,India. Scores of penniless pavement dwellers were found dead on the streets of this city. All these beggars mostly died of serious head injuries. Mumbai shivered in dread and people were afraid to venture out of their homes as a deranged serial killer stalked the streets between the matunga and sion-nalgaum belt on the harbour line. The motive was not theft as the victims were mostly beggars and pavement dwellers. It was clearly the work of a psychopath,who the Bombay police drew a complete blank on. The killings abruptly stopped ,with the last killing taking place on 27th march, 1986. The case is still wide open and remains unsolved till date.
Psychopathy itself is a trait where the individual shows a lack of remorse, is detached from emotions, and shows extreme forms of apathy towards human emotions. While constituting a minority in the larger population, these individuals are responsible for more than half of the crimes committed within society. While most of them are grown adults committing acts after they achieve their independence and hide them from the world, some individuals start their killing spree from a very young age.
Kent Kiehl, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that an ominous sign that someone displays psychopathic behavior is when they commit crimes at a very young age: ages that are as young as 8, 9, 10. These children are more likely to display callous behavior when they grow up and might go on to commit heinous crimes.
India’s youngest and most infamous child psychopath, Amarjeet Sada, who was just eight years old when he first fed his lust for taking a human life and his desire to inflict pain on others. He chose to prey on children, and his first victim was just a small baby who was only eight months old. What makes this even more chilling is that it wasn’t just a random child; the eight-month-old child was Amarjeet’s own sister.
Shortly after the murder of his sister, Amarjeet struck again, murdering another infant who was six months old. This victim happened to be the daughter of his maternal uncle. Amarjeet seemed to find joy in picking out victims that he had easy access to and would strangle them to death. What is more horrific is that the families and the villagers knew about the murders that Sada had been committing but chose to remain silent, deeming them as internal familial issues. They didn’t realize that soon, Amarjeet’s killing spree would show life outside of his family as well.
On the morning of January 15, 1947, a mother taking her child for a walk in a Los Angeles neighborhood stumbled upon a gruesome sight: the body of a young naked woman sliced clean in half at the waist.
The body was just a few feet from the sidewalk and posed in such a way that the mother reportedly thought it was a mannequin at first glance. Despite the extensive mutilation and cuts on the body, there wasn’t a drop of blood at the scene, indicating that the young woman had been killed elsewhere.
The ensuing investigation was led by the L.A. Police Department. The FBI was asked to help, and it quickly identified the body—just 56 minutes, in fact, after getting blurred fingerprints via “Soundphoto” (a primitive fax machine used by news services) from Los Angeles.
The young woman turned out to be a 22-year-old Hollywood hopeful named Elizabeth Short—later dubbed the “Black Dahlia” by the press for her rumored penchant for sheer black clothes and for the Blue Dahlia movie out at that time.
In support of L.A. police, the FBI ran records checks on potential suspects and conducted interviews across the nation. Based on early suspicions that the murderer may have had skills in dissection because the body was so cleanly cut, agents were also asked to check out a group of students at the University of Southern California Medical School. And, in a tantalizing potential break in the case, the Bureau searched for a match to fingerprints found on an anonymous letter that may have been sent to authorities by the killer, but the prints weren’t in FBI files.
Who killed the Black Dahlia and why? It’s a mystery. The murderer has never been found, and given how much time has passed, probably never will be. The legend grows…
Shortly after after receiving the news of his father’s death, Steve Hodel found himself sorting through his belongings. Though Steve’s father, George Hodel, loomed large throughout his early childhood, their relationship had always been strained. George was a grandiose doctor with a distant personality who abandoned the family shortly after Steve’s ninth birthday, eventually moving far away to the Philippines.
As he went through his father’s possessions, Steve found a photo album tucked away in a box. It was small enough to fit in his palm and bound in wood. Feeling like a voyeur, he perused it. It was filled with the usual pictures – his mom, dad and brothers – as well as portraits of the family taken by the world-famous surrealist artist Man Ray, a family friend.
But towards the back, something caught his eye: two pictures of a young woman, her eyes cast downward, with curly, deep-black hair. Steve still doesn’t know why he had the idea, but as he looked at the images, he thought to himself: “My God, that looks like the Black Dahlia.”
The Black Dahlia, of course, is the nickname given to Elizabeth Short after her grisly death on 15 January 1947. The 22-year-old aspiring actor was living in Los Angeles when her corpse was found maimed and split in two, its body parts displayed in a grotesque posture on the ground of a vacant lot.
The personal connection between Short and George Hodel suggested by the album photos seemed outrageous. Hers was one of the most brutal murders in American history, and, after the Zodiac killer’s shooting spree in San Francisco, perhaps the most famous unsolved crime in California. But from this moment on, Steve was hooked.
In just over 23 years, Steve had diligently risen through the ranks of the Los Angeles police department, establishing a reputation as an unfaltering homicide detective. So like any good cop, Steve started digging and the details began to add up.
Crime scene photos showed that Short had been given a hemicorporectomy, a procedure that slices the body beneath the lumbar spine, the only spot where the body can be severed in half without breaking bone. It was taught in the 1930s, when George had been in medical school. The letters sent to the press and police from The Black Dahlia Avenger, a man claiming to be Short’s killer, also bore a chilling resemblance to his dad’s handwriting.
Steve has dug up a cache of evidence, including law enforcement files that show that his father topped the LAPD’s list of suspects at the time of the crime.
While law enforcement officials disagree about whether Steve Hodel is a brilliant vigilante or an obsessive crackpot, no one has been able to prove him wrong. That fact has been all the encouragement Steve needs to keep digging.
Details from murders in Los Angeles lead Steve to a string of murders in Chicago, which then led him to Manila and the slaying of a 28-year-old woman named Lucila Lalu, whose dismembered body had been found situated oddly like Short’s. She body was found scattered about a half mile from his father’s home, along a street named “Zodiac”.
The day after Short’s body was found, the Los Angeles Examiner sold more copies than it had any other day, except when it announced the allied victory in the second world war. Sales were fueled by the tawdry way the tabloid press covered Short – as a streetwalking, sexualized young thing (the rumors that she was a prostitute were untrue). As a childhood friend later recalled, “It was just horrible, the way she was portrayed.”
This sensationalized portrait has endured over time. Her murder has been memorialized in movies (The Black Dahlia, starring Scarlett Johansson, is the latest), and on television shows (most recently on an episode of American Horror Story).
In 1968 and ’69, the Zodiac Killer attacked seven people in four different Northern California locations. His first three targets were couples in secluded areas; two of these people survived. His last known victim was a taxi driver killed on October 11, 1969, in San Francisco. During and after his killing spree, Zodiac received attention and spread fear as he shared ciphers, letters, information and threats with authorities and the public. No murder has been officially linked to the Zodiac Killer since October 1969, but the unsolved case continues to fascinate.
Police initially had no idea a serial killer was responsible for these deaths. Therefore the investigation followed more standard steps, such as checking out Jensen’s ex-boyfriend. Jensen’s best friend later told SF Weekly, “All the detectives thought it had to be because of drugs. They refused to hear anything else.”
After his July 1969 attack, the Zodiac Killer began to contact newspapers via letters that included details only the killer would know. And in addition to phoning the police after the murders he committed in July, he made a phone call confession to law enforcement in September. The Zodiac Killer took responsibility for Stine’s death in a letter postmarked October 13, 1969, enclosing a piece of the driver’s bloodied shirt. He also reached out to the police by phone several days following that crime.
In a letter The San Francisco Examiner received on August 4, 1969, he wrote, “This is the Zodiac speaking,” marking his first use of the name “Zodiac.” That opening salutation would be repeated in many letters. His messages also often included a crosshairs symbol, which resembled the sight on a rifle — the same symbol on the hood worn during his September 1969 attack.
Zodiac seemed to enjoy the publicity he received. He took steps to ensure messages were widely shared, such as threatening to go on a “kill rampage” unless a cipher was printed in the San Francisco Chronicle, then issuing a separate threat to have a cipher published in The San Francisco Examiner. In a letter postmarked November 9, 1969, he taunted his pursuers, saying, “The police shall never catch me, because I have been too clever for them.”
Of Zodiac’s four coded messages, a married couple was able solve the first cipher to reveal that Zodiac had written, among other things, “I like killing people because it is so much fun.” Zodiac claimed he’d shared his identity in another coded message. Yet despite decades of trying, no other Zodiac cipher has been officially solved.
There was silence again until 1978 when a letter purportedly from Zodiac was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle. However, the legitimacy of the letter was questioned, as the handwriting and tone differed from earlier Zodiac communications. In addition, the discovery that year that a San Francisco detective had faked letters to the editor praising his own work on the case made some wonder if the detective had also falsified this Zodiac letter, something the detective and San Francisco police denied. The authenticity of the 1978 letter has not been confirmed.
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