Most people usually experience some level of guilt if they do something they know to be wrong – cheat in an exam, steal the paper from the neighbor’s door, cheat on a partner, tell a lie, or whatever. That sense of guilt is directly proportional to how wrong they believe their actions were – the worse the actions, the bigger the guilt trip. And bad actions don’t come much worse than murder. For that reason, many first-time murderers will be thrown into the depths of dark depression and experience a tremendous feeling of guilt directly after killing someone. With that in mind, it stood to reason that Lucien had also experienced enormous lows, and was overwhelmed by incredible feelings of guilt after his first ever murder.

‘OK, I agree that Lucien must’ve struggled with different stages of guilt in the aftermath of murdering Susan,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘But I still can see no reason why, overwhelmed by guilt or not, he would’ve fed parts of her body to her own parents, Robert.’

‘I can see two possible reasons,’ Hunter said, with a hand gesture. ‘The first one you mentioned just a moment ago.’

Kennedy’s eyes squinted a fraction. ‘And what was that?’

‘The belief that by consuming the flesh of their victims, the victims will then stay with them forever. They will become part of them,’ Taylor said in a half whisper. ‘Or whoever eats them.’ She allowed Kennedy a few seconds to reanalyze that statement.

Kennedy caught on quickly. ‘Jesus! Third-party transference.’ He looked at Hunter for confirmation but proceeded anyway. ‘So Lucien believed that if her parents consumed some of her flesh, then Susan would stay with them forever?’

‘As Lucien said,’ Taylor commented, ‘she was never meant to be a victim, and he also thought that her parents were nice people. So Robert could be right. He might’ve done it because he felt guilty at taking their daughter away from them.’

Kennedy considered that for a long, silent moment.

‘And the second possible reason?’ he finally asked.

‘The second reason links to the first,’ Hunter said. ‘Lucien told us that he used to hunt with his father, right?’

‘Yes, I remember that.’ Kennedy said.

‘He also said that his father was a great hunter.’

‘Yes, I remember that too.’

‘OK, many hunters inherit a belief that’s been passed down through generations and generations of Native Americans,’ Hunter explained.

Kennedy’s eyebrows arched curiously.

‘Native Americans never hunted for fun or sport. They hunted exclusively for food, and they believed that they must eat whatever they killed, always, because to eat their prey was to honor them. They believed that it kept their spirit alive in this world. It showed respect. To let their flesh go to waste, that would be a dishonor.’

Kennedy didn’t know that, but his memory and his eyes instantly flashed back to Susan Richards’ file sitting on his desk. Her mother was second-generation Shoshone, a Native American tribe, mostly from the area that became the state of Nevada. Her family name was Tuari, which meant ‘young eagle’. Kennedy was well aware that Lucien knew that too.

Taylor looked at Hunter intriguingly.

‘I read a lot,’ Hunter offered before she was able to ask the question.

‘So you think that, in his mind at least, Lucien was redeeming himself, even if only a little bit,’ Kennedy stated rather than asked. ‘He was being compassionate, by feeding her flesh to her own parents, he was trying to keep Susan’s spirit alive for them, even without their knowledge.

‘Everyone deludes in their own way.’ Hunter repeated Kennedy’s words from a little earlier. ‘But like I said, we can theorize as much as we like here, but the only one who really knows what was going on inside his head is Lucien himself.’

‘So in that case, let me ask you this,’ Kennedy said. ‘Why do you think he took part? Lucien said that he did sit down to have dinner with them that night.’

‘Because Lucien was experimenting.’

Kennedy pinched the bridge of his nose as if he could feel an oncoming headache.

‘In college, Lucien didn’t exactly doubt any of the theories behind these sadistic acts,’ he said. ‘He knew they were based on true accounts from apprehended offenders, but he was on the verge of almost obsessing with the feelings and emotions described by such offenders.’

Kennedy remembered something Lucien had said during one of the interviews. ‘He wanted to experience them for himself.’

‘Back then, he never said so in so many words,’ Hunter agreed. ‘But now we know that that was exactly what he wanted, to experiment. And that’s what makes Lucien so different from most psychopaths I’ve ever come up against.’

Kennedy’s eyebrows moved up inquisitively.

‘We know that he killed Susan, his first victim, by strangulation,’ Hunter elaborated. ‘But if we compare her murder to his latest one, the two victims in his trunk . . . the MO, the level of violence, everything has skyrocketed. I’m willing to bet that the violence in every murder he’d committed in between moved up a step at a time. But Lucien escalates not because he’s being guided by uncontrollable urges inside of him.’

‘He does it consciously,’ Taylor said, picking up Hunter’s thread of thought. ‘He does it because he wants to know how he would feel as he becomes more and more violent.’

‘That’s a frightening thought,’ Kennedy said. ‘The level of determination and self-discipline one needs to carry on escalating murder after murder for twenty-five years is mindboggling. And you think he did it just so he could experience the feeling?’

Hunter had paused, his memory digging out something long forgotten. ‘I’ll be damned!’ He finally exclaimed.

‘What?’ Kennedy asked.

‘I can’t believe he’s really doing it,’ Hunter murmured.

‘Doing what?’

‘I think Lucien might’ve been writing an encyclopedia.’

Fifty-Seven

Kennedy’s shoulder’s stiffened as he felt an awkward shiver grab hold of his whole body, something that didn’t happen very often when it came to BSU investigations. He waited for Hunter to continue.

‘I remember this discussion we had once.’ Hunter’s memory searched the past. ‘I think it was during our second year in college. We were discussing emotional triggers and drives in extreme violent murders – what psychological factors could drive an individual to sadistically and brutally offend and reoffend.’

‘OK,’ Kennedy said, still intrigued.

‘Back then, all we had were a bunch of theories put together by several psychologists and psychiatrists, and a handful of accounts by apprehended killers. Now bear in mind that notorious cannibal killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Armin Meiwes, or Andrej Chikatilo hadn’t been caught yet. Their interviews, accounts and thoughts weren’t on file.’

Kennedy and Taylor both nodded together.

‘As I’ve said,’ Hunter moved on, ‘Lucien didn’t doubt the veracity of the accounts we had then, but he wasn’t quite convinced by many of the psychological theories. What I remember he used to say a lot was: “How can they know for sure?”’

‘They couldn’t,’ Taylor said. ‘That’s why it was a theory, not a fact.’

‘Precisely,’ Hunter agreed. ‘And Lucien understood that.’

‘But he wasn’t satisfied,’ Kennedy concluded.

‘No, he wasn’t. And that day he suggested something so far-fetched, I had completely forgotten about it.’

‘And that was?’

Hunter took a deep breath while trying to remember the details.

‘The surreal possibility of someone becoming a killer solely to experiment,’ he finally said. ‘Lucien argued how ground-breaking it would be for criminal behavior psychology if a fully mentally capable individual went on a killing rampage, escalating his or her way through different levels of violence, and experimenting with different methods and fantasies, while at the same time taking comprehensive notes of everything, including feelings and psychological state of mind at the time, and in the aftermath of each murder. Some sort of in-depth psychological study of the mind of a killer, written by the killer himself.’