“And among those who aren’t academics?”
“Outside the academy, I’ve noticed that some of these bastards are more clever than Satan himself. Not intelligent but clever. And there are some, a minority, who have a high IQ , an innate aptitude for their despicable task and for dissimulation. And in one case and one case only until now do these three characteristics exist in a criminal who was also a person of great culture. I’m talking about Ted Bundy.”
“A well-known case in my country. He strangled and then sodomized something like thirty women with a tire iron.”
“Thirty-six. That we know about,” Paola corrected him. She remembered the Bundy case in great detail, in as much as it was required study material in Quantico.
Fowler nodded sadly.
“As I was saying, Victor Karosky came into the world in 1961 in Katowice, ironically just a few kilometers from where Karol Wojtyla was born. In 1969, the Karosky family, composed of himself, his parents, and two brothers, emigrated to the United States. His father found work in the General Motors plant in Detroit, and according to all the records, he was a good worker but very hard to handle. In 1972, there was a cutback owing to the gas crisis, and Karosky senior was the first worker out the door. The father had by then received his American citizenship, so he made himself comfortable in the tiny apartment he shared with his family, drinking up the severance pay and the unemployment insurance. He really went at it, gave himself over to the task. He became another person, and he started to sexually abuse Victor and his older brother. The brother’s name was Beria. When he was fourteen years old, he walked out of the house one day and never came back.”
“Karosky told you all this?” Dicanti asked, intrigued and puzzled at the same time.
“Only after intense regression therapy. When he arrived at the Institute, his story was that he came from a model Catholic family.”
Paola, writing everything down in the tiny script of a public worker, rubbed her eyes with her hand. She wanted to dislodge every speck of exhaustion before she started talking.
“What you are telling us fits perfectly into the common registers of first-level psychopaths: personal charm, absence of irrational thinking, a lack of trustworthiness and of remorse, a great talent for dissimulation. The blows from his father and the general consumption of alcohol by his parents have also been observed in more than seventy-four percent of known violent psychopaths.”
“So it’s the probable cause?” Fowler asked.
“More likely it’s one determinant among many. I can cite thousands of cases of people who were brought up in chaotic households much worse than the one you’ve described and they’ve advanced in life to a relatively normal maturity, if such a thing actually exists.”
“Hold on. We’ve barely scratched the surface. Karosky told us about the death of his younger brother in 1974, from meningitis, without anyone paying much attention to the fact. I was greatly surprised by how cool he was when he related that particular episode. Two months after the child died, the father mysteriously disappeared. Victor never explained whether he had something to do with the disappearance, although we did not think so, since he was only thirteen years old. But we do know that it was at this time that he began to torture small animals. Still, the worst thing for him was to remain at the mercy of an overbearing mother, obsessed with religion, who even went so far as to dress him up as a girl so they could ‘play together.’ It seems like she fondled him under his skirt, and was accustomed to telling young Victor that she would cut his ‘little packages’ so his disguise would be complete. The result: Karosky still wet the bed at fifteen years old. He wore discount clothes, out of fashion or torn—they were, after all, poor. At school he had to undergo insults and was very isolated. . . . One time in high school a friend made an unfortunate comment about Karosky’s attire as they passed in the corridor. Karosky, furious, beat the other kid in the face repeatedly with a heavy textbook. The kid wore glasses and the lenses shattered in his eyes. He was left sightless.”
“The eyes . . . just like the cadavers. So that was his first violent crime.”
“As far as we know, yes. Victor was sent to a reformatory outside Boston, and the last thing his mother said to him before waving good-bye was ‘I should have had an abortion.’ A few months later she committed suicide.”
The room was utterly silent. Words were beside the point.
“Karosky stayed at the reformatory until the end of 1979. We have no information for that year, but in 1980 he entered a seminary in Baltimore. Application forms for his entrance to the seminary stated that his record was clean and that he came from a traditionally Catholic family. He was nineteen years old by then, and it seemed that he had been reformed. We know almost nothing of his stay in the seminary, except that he studied until he fainted and that he was profoundly sickened by the institution’s openly homosexual environment. Conroy insisted that Karosky was a repressed homosexual who denied his true nature, but he was wrong. Karosky is neither a homosexual nor a heterosexual. He has no definite orientation. The fact that sex is not an integrated part of his personality is what, from my point of view, has caused such grave injury to his psyche.”
“Care to explain yourself?” Pontiero asked.
“I may as well. I am a priest who made the decision to remain celibate. That doesn’t stop me from being attracted to Dottoressa Dicanti,” said Fowler, gesturing toward Paola, who was unable to keep from turning red. “I know I am heterosexual, but I choose chastity of my own free will. I’ve integrated sexuality into my personality, although in such a way that I do not exercise it. Karosky’s case is very different. The profound traumas of his infancy and childhood provoked a split down the middle of his psyche. Karosky clearly rejected the part of his being that is sexual and even violent. He both hates and loves himself, simultaneously, and it crops up in outbreaks of violence, schizophrenia, and finally in the abuse of minors, duplicating his father’s abuses. In 1986, during his pastoral year, Karosky had his first incident with a minor. The victim was a young kid, fourteen years old, and there were kisses and petting, nothing else. We believe the minor did not consent to it. In any case, there’s no official proof the bishop heard about this episode, because in the end he ordained Karosky as a priest. From that day on he had an insane obsession with his hands. He washes them between thirty and forty times a day and takes exceptional care of them.”
Pontiero searched hurriedly among the hundreds of macabre photographs spread over the desk until he found the one he was searching for and spun it in the air to Fowler. The priest made an effortless two-fingered catch, an elegant move that Paola quietly admired.
“Two hands, severed and washed, placed on white canvas. White canvas is, in the Church, a symbol of respect and reverence. There are many references to it in the New Testament. As you know, Christ in his sepulchre was covered with a white canvas.”
“It’s not quite so white now,” Troi said in jest.
“I’m sure you would be delighted to apply your gadgets to the canvas in question,” Pontiero commented.
“No doubt about that. Continue, Fowler.”
“A priest’s hands are sacred. With them he administers the sacraments. That stayed very firmly in Karosky’s mind, as we’ll see. In 1987 he worked at a school in Pittsburgh, where his first abuses took place. His victims were young men between the ages of eight and eleven. He is unfamiliar with any type of adult consensual relationship, homosexual or heterosexual. When the complaints began to reach his superiors, they at first did nothing. Later they transferred him, parish to parish. Very soon there was a complaint of an attack on an altar boy, whom he struck in the face without any lasting consequences. . . . And finally he arrived at the Institute.”
“Do you think that if they had begun to help him earlier on things would have turned out differently?”
Fowler, his whole body tense, made an irritated gesture with his hands.
“We never helped him in the slightest. The onl
y thing we achieved was to liberate the killer lurking inside of Karosky. And then at last we made it possible for him to escape.”
“It was that bad?”
“Worse. When he arrived, he was a man overwhelmed, as much by his uncontrolled emotions as by his violent outbursts. He had remorse for his actions, although he denied it many times. He simply was unable to control himself. But with the passage of time, the wrongheaded treatments, and his close contact with the dregs of the priesthood who lived alongside him at the Institute, Karosky became something much worse. He turned cold and ironic. The remorse disappeared. As you can see, the most anguished memories from his childhood were blocked out. That alone turned him into a pederast. But with the help of disastrous regression therapies—”
“Why disastrous?”
“It would have been better if the objective had been to bring a bit of peace to the patient’s mind. But I greatly fear that Dr. Conroy felt a morbid curiosity for Karosky’s case, reaching to immoral extremes. In similar cases, what the hypnotizer tries to do is to implant, in an artificial manner, positive events in the memory of the patient, urging him to let go of the worst things that happened. Conroy prohibited that line of action. Not only did he record Karosky, he forced him to listen to the tapes in which, in a falsetto voice, he begged his mother to leave him in peace.”
“What sort of Mengele did they have running that place?” Paola was in shock.
“Conroy was convinced that Karosky had to accept himself. According to him, it was the only solution. He had to recognize that he’d had a hard childhood and that he was homosexual. As I told you before, he created his diagnosis in advance and afterwards was determined to squeeze the patient into it with a shoehorn. To top it all off, he subjected Karosky to a hormonal cocktail, much of it experimental, like a variant of the anti-contraceptive Depo-Covetan. With this drug, injected in abnormal doses, Conroy reduced Karosky’s level of sexual response while he strengthened his aggressiveness. The therapy went on and on, without positive results. There were periods in which he calmed down, but just that, periods, and Conroy interpreted that as a sign of success for his therapy. By the end he’d produced a chemical castration. Karosky is incapable of having an erection, and that frustration is destroying him.”
“When did you first come into contact with him?”
“I spoke with him frequently after I arrived at the Institute, in 1995. Between us we established a relationship with a certain level of confidence, which collapsed later on, as I’ll tell you in a minute. But I would rather not get ahead of myself. You see, fifteen days after his arrival at the Institute, they decided to give Karosky a penile plethysmograph. That’s a test where an apparatus is attached to the penis by means of electrodes. Said apparatus measures the sexual response to distinct stimuli.”
“I’m familiar with that test,” Paola said, like someone who had just heard about an outbreak of the Ebola virus.
“So you see . . . He took it very badly. During the session they showed him terrible images, things beyond the pale.”
“Meaning?”
“Things related to pedophilia.”
“Fuck.”
“Karosky reacted violently, and gravely wounded the specialist running the machine. The attendants were able to restrain him; otherwise he would have killed the guy. In the wake of that episode Conroy should have recognized that he was in no condition to be treated and should have sent him off to a mental hospital. But he never did so. He hired two security muscles, and ordered them not to take their eyes off Karosky, while he started subjecting him to regression therapy. That coincided with my arrival at the Institute. As the months went by, Karosky was withdrawing into himself. His outbursts of anger disappeared. Conroy attributed it to significant changes in his personality. They lifted the watch on him a bit. And one night, Karosky forced the lock on his room.”
“He was locked in?”
“They were in the habit of locking his room from the outside at certain hours, as a precautionary measure.”
“And what happened then?”
“He lopped off the hands of a priest who lived in the same wing. He told everyone that the priest was an impure man whom he had seen touching another priest in an ‘improper’ manner. While the guards ran towards the cell where the priest was howling in pain, Karosky was cleaning his victim’s hands under the nozzle of the shower.”
“The same modus operandi. As far as I’m concerned, that removes the last shred of doubt,” Paola said.
“To my amazement and even fury, Conroy failed to report the incident to the police. The mutilated priest received compensation, and a team of doctors in California managed to reattach his hands, although with far less maneuverability. And in the middle of all this, Conroy ordered security reinforced and built a six-by-ten-foot isolation cell. This was where Karosky lived until he escaped from the Institute. Session after session, therapy group after therapy group, Conroy was failing and Karosky was evolving into the monster he is today. I wrote several letters to the cardinal, explaining the problem. I never received an answer. In 1999, Karosky escaped from his cell and committed his first known murder: Father Peter Selznick.”
“We heard about him here. It was said to be a suicide.”
“Not true. Karosky escaped from his cell by forcing the lock with a ballpoint pen and he then used a metal shank he had sharpened in his cell to cut out Selznick’s tongue and lips. He also sliced off Selznick’s penis and forced him to eat it. Selznick hung on for three hours before he died, and nobody knew about it until the next morning.”
“What did Conroy say?”
“He officially defined the episode as a ‘setback.’ He managed to cover it up, by coercing the county judge and the sheriff to issue a ruling of suicide.”
“And they went along with it? Just like that?” Pontiero asked.
“They were both Catholics. I think Conroy manipulated them by appealing to their duty to protect the Church. But even if he hated to admit it, my boss was in fact very much afraid. He watched as Karosky’s mind slipped out of his control, as if day by day it was absorbing his will. In spite of that, he refused on repeated occasions to report the incidents to a higher level, no doubt for fear of losing his position. I wrote more letters to the archdiocese but they turned a blind eye. I talked with Karosky and never encountered even a trace of remorse, and finally I realized he had become someone else completely. He broke off contact. That was the last time I spoke to him. I am not going to lie: the beast locked up in that cell scared me. And Karosky stayed right where he was, at the Institute. They set up cameras, hired more guards. Until one night in June 2000, he disappeared. Just like that.”
“And Conroy? How did he react?”
“He was traumatized. He drank even more. On the third week his liver gave out and he died. A pity.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Pontiero said.
“We’re better off leaving him in peace. I ran the Institute on a temporary basis while they looked for a suitable replacement. The archdiocese never trusted me, I suppose on account of my continual complaints about my superior. I was in charge for barely a month, but I made the most of it. I restructured the staff as quickly as I could, hired professional personnel, and drew up new programs for the patients. Many of those changes were never put in place, but others were, so the effort was worth the trouble. I sent a concise report to an old contact of mine at VICAP by the name of Kelly Sanders. The suspect’s profile and Selznick’s unpunished murder greatly disturbed her. She put an agent on the job of bringing Karosky in. Came up with nothing.”
“That’s it? He just disappeared?” Paola had a hard time believing it.
“Disappeared into thin air. In 2001 it was thought he had resurfaced, after there was a murder with partial mutilation in Albany, New York. But it wasn’t him. Most people gave him up for dead, but fortunately someone logged his profile into the computer. I found a job at a soup kitchen at a charity in Spanish Harlem in New York City. I worke
d there for several years, until just a few days ago. An old boss contacted me on behalf of the service, and I thought I was going to be a military chaplain a second time. I was informed that there appeared to be signs that Karosky had gone back to work after his long silence. So here I am. I brought you a dossier with the pertinent documentation I pulled together on Karosky in the five years I worked with him.”
Fowler let the heavy file, almost six inches thick, flop onto the table.
“There are e-mails relating to the hormone I told you about, transcriptions of his interviews, an article in a magazine where he’s mentioned, letters from psychiatrists, reports . . . It is all yours, Dr. Dicanti. You can ask me about anything in there.”
Paola stretched her hand across the table to pick up the thick pile of papers, and she had just opened it when she felt terribly uneasy. Attached with a clip to the first page of the dossier was a photograph of Karosky. He had pale white skin, straight brown hair, gray eyes. In the years she had spent dedicated to studying those empty husks, void of human sentiment, that are serial killers, she had learned to recognize the vacant look behind the predator’s eyes. They were men who killed as naturally as they ate a meal. There is only one thing in nature remotely similar to that look, and those are the eyes of the white shark. They look without seeing, in a terrifying manner. There is nothing else like them.
And there it was, fully reflected in Karosky’s eyes.
“Shocking, no?” said Fowler, studying Paola with his eyes. “This man has something in his bearing, in his motions. Something indefinable. At first he passes unnoticed, but when, how shall I put it, his entire personality is on fire . . . it’s terrible.”