I do not agree that there’s nothing to be learned from serial killers. It’s plain, of course, that we haven’t learned it.

I decided I wanted to be a judge in my third year of law school, a decision that substantially improved my grades. ;- I ran for a justice of the peace position before my Bar scores came back. I lost, but not terribly so, and I caught the bottom ring of the judicial ladder a couple of years later.

In the meantime, I had been doing criminal defense work along with consumer and civil rights law. I applied to a prosecutor’s office to get some experience on the other side, but that office had a black ball rule and I got black balled for defending a case so vigorously that I embarrassed the prosecutor. I’ve always thought he would have been OK if I hadn’t won.

Anyway, I did four years as a criminal magistrate, about 13 years as a full time criminal trial judge, and another 22 years by assignment. Then 15 years teaching criminal justice.

When I started, I did not believe human beings could be evil. I do now. I have seen things I very much wish I could un-see, except that if I hadn’t seen them then somebody else would have had to.

There are these folks we call sociopaths and we don’t know how to cure them. They can, unfortunately, be charming, and that makes them excellent serial killers.

In all those years, I ran across three. To me, they all gave off a cold vibe that did not seem to affect others.

One of them was an amateur serial killer specializing in women. He was the only one who got a parole off the Texas death row when the Furman case was decided.

One of them was a professional serial killer, a hit man. I saw him in my magistrate role when he was arrested over a botched job. His weapon for the job was a high powered rifle with a scope. He stationed himself atop a little hill across the street from the cafe where his assigned mark — a witness in a drug case — took lunch every day. Just as he squeezed the trigger, his target dropped a fork on the floor and bent over to pick it up. The errant round killed two persons, a husband and wife, at another table.

The third was a street hoodlum who was removing the person he thought was the only witness. That might have been the case, had he not returned to her apartment to make sure he didn’t miss any valuables….and walked in on a police forensics tech.

Numbers one and three were in front of me for killings just as random as number two. The hit man was offended that everybody else was offended and remarked, “Didn’t any of you ever have a bad day at work?”

My point about sociopaths is that they are few but they are scary. I doubt that they are born that way, but the only way to find out would be with a much bigger sample than one human being in one jurisdiction can find.

I have wondered how much overlap there is with terrorists, because there is a federal prison with quite a few residents who answer that description. Of course, you can’t do much study of a human being without his or her consent, but that seems to me unlikely to be a problem. There’s not much to do when you are serving life without parole.

I guess my point is that not everybody gawking is merely a gawker…although I may as well have been for all the good I did. The fact that I did not catch a clue does not show there is no clue to be caught and I think we need to keep looking.