My Interesting Fact Is....

...I've got this ongoing interest in serial killers.

What a way to start a post, but please give this blog a chance before hastily clicking the close button or moving on in a hurry (I'm honestly not that much of a creep!).

From 2009-2010 I was a tour guide.  A tour guide around my university campus.  A job with respectable pay considering it usually took up 3 hours of my time on one afternoon a week.  It required a bunch of us donning our lovely purple t-shirts emblazoned with 'CAMPUS TOUR GUIDE' or something else completely irrelevant on our backs if we were unlucky enough, and generally standing out in the freezing cold (and turning blue in my case) pretending that this is exactly where we wanted to be.  This was usually followed by 3 hours marching up and down hills, embellishing our anecdotes and selling to youngsters that university really is the place to be (whilst secretly cursing the living daylights of doing this with so much work to be getting on with back in our study rooms and actually wishing someone had told us that uni was too much hard work!).  But as a whole it was an amazing job.  No matter how grudgingly you felt about it at the start, you got into the swing of things and were buoyed on by the audience (if they were a particularly receptive one that is).  I also, as with all my jobs, have a 101 stories to tell from these tours but this will all be done (eventually) on my other blog.

So it was all good with the one exception.  The exception that once in a blue moon, the lead person from the recruitment department would ask us to introduce ourselves, not only with our name, course and college as was the standard, but with an interesting fact.  This was enough for me to shrivel up and die.  Feel the pressure of 200 pairs of eyes bearing down on you assessing you and judging you on what your interesting fact is about yourself.  This is made even worse by the fact you're thinking 'I really am not that interesting'. All I was, was a student who wolfed down energy drink and a packet of crisps for breakfast if I had a 9am, followed by sleeping time, a lecture, nap time, then hitting the town - a typical student.  So the one time I got asked this (I'd only 5 minutes before been studying in the library close to deadline time but had been called on as a dependable reserve) I was the first person up.  And I froze.  I put on my best showbiz smile, looked out into the audience and went 'I actually can't think of an interesting fact about myself, can I have an "Aww"?'.  And lo and behold, the audience gave me an 'aww'!!! Despite this being a win on my part that there was audience participation and I wasn't left hanging, I felt my insides squirm that nothing I could think of was interesting.  In retrospect I could have told them I'd had a number of jobs despite only being 19; I knew every word to the Titanic; or my favourite childhood song was 'I Got You Babe'.  But c'est le vie.

However, I'd quite forgotten all of this until I had a mini reunion with my old faithful tour guide partner.  He was my rock, and my cover up when I decided to play pranks during the tours (again probably will talk about this in my other blog) and he was eternally optimistic when we were strung together for hours standing around.  His interesting fact was that he hadn't cut his hair in a number of years.  However, when I chanced to bump into him one day this week I noticed he'd finally had it cut.  In fact I barely recognised him.  And the first thing I could think of was 'wow, what's your interesting fact going to be now?' despite us both having moved on from the tours (or sadly rejected for younger models).  He shrugged and went 'I don't have one' and we reminisced about the time I got the audience to sympathise with me but as he said 'that only works once'.  So as we sat down by the riverbanks enjoying the sun I went 'I guess my only interesting fact is that I'm obsessed with serial killers'.  He looked at me, he pulled a face, and he said 'Best not to lead with that one in front of a 100 people'.

So here's my explaining myself finally.  I am not obsessed with serial killers but rather psychopaths.  Having studied psychology, abnormal psychology and lack of empathy were my favourite topics.  I even studied level of empathy and accuracy/speed of emotion facial recognition for my dissertation in my final year.  Being highly empathic myself and unable to watch a movie/soap/charity advert/see someone in pain/envisage someone in pain without breaking down myself is something I can't understand would be in other people, and more specifically, serial killers.  As my boyfriend once said 'You appear to have such great empathy for any stranger, you would stop and help a random in the street despite it being of no benefit to yourself.  Yet when it comes to people you're close to, i.e. me, you're more than happy to put others above'.  Obviously I hope the latter statement is not completely true.  But I do hold this thing that I would never, could ever, hurt a hair on anyone's head.  Lord, I can't even watch someone flex their muscles because it looks like it could hurt them.

When it comes to psychopaths they couldn't be more opposite to me.  They will deceive, cheat, manipulate, abuse, and murder anyone without a moments thought, sympathy or have remorse and guilt for their victims and family afterwards.  They are literally cold blooded.  They even go so far as to say that they are the victims.  And so trying to understand the likes of Ted Bundy (murdered 30-36 women), John Wayne Gacy (had 29 dead bodies under his very house), Tommy Lynn Sells (30-70+ murders) etc etc has me flummoxed.  And with psychologists and psychiatrists trying to find the source for such motivation for massacre it is highly interesting - was it nature, nurture or both- it seems to be any kind of combination will produce these almost monsters.

It is this that I find so intriguing.  No matter how creepy it is.  I am reading a book which describes the human side of Ted Bundy, and it's startling to think how...well...how normal he seemed to be, and how easily your own next door neighbour could well be hiding a dangerous and dark secret.  It's essential from a society perspective that a root cause is discovered and can be picked up before such crimes are committed.

So when I tell say that I'm interested in serial killers I'm not trying to be creepy, I'm trying to understand, not why someone did it, but how someone can put a stop to someone's life with little consideration of the victim and their family.  We all are akin to splurt out the why i.e. 'God I'll kill you if you tell him!' but we're not all akin for the how and this to me, is highly unsettling.

However, perhaps he is right...I do need a better interesting fact to lead with rather than initiating a long discussion of the motives and emotional abnormalities of a psychopath...