Caught in the Act

Because Adam Leroy Lane’s driving routes over the previous decade took him as far north as New Hampshire, as far west as California and as far south as Georgia, federal authorities tried to determine whether a bona fide serial killer had been captured inside our home on July 30, 2007.

By this point, I had begun keeping a daily journal, jotting down my feelings and fears as they occurred to me as well as reflecting on what went before. These were my private thoughts and emotions as I tried to make sense of something that was utterly incomprehensible to me, so out of curiosity and necessity I began my own search for some of the very same answers that investigators in a growing number of states were seeking with regard to Adam Leroy Lane.

What was in the mind of Lane when he was stalking and killing? We may never know. He might not even know himself. Serial killers account for less than 1 percent of all murders, but they seem to occupy a disproportionate percentage of the human psyche, at least the American psyche. They terrify and captivate us; one reason why they are so scary is that after years of research, experts still can’t explain why some people kill, just for the sake of killing, with nothing to gain, without motive or emotion. Just for the sheer act itself.

Studies of killers like him have been conducted by experts in the field trying to shed some light on the subject. Robert K. Ressler is probably the original and foremost authority on criminal profiling. He is a former FBI special agent who might be most famous for coining the term serial killer and later advising Thomas Harris on his book The Silence of the Lambs. Ressler first began his studies into the minds of killers in the late 1970s. He wanted to know what made them commit such heinous acts of violence. His prison interviews became part of the FBI’s Criminal Personality Research Project, of which he was the principal investigator.

After dozens of rigorous and comprehensive interviews, his team was able to uncover patterns of behavior and learning that were common among all the imprisoned murderers. The profiling techniques that resulted from this study were groundbreaking at the time, though they may seem far less spectacular to laypeople today because of the techniques’ saturation in movies and TV programs.

In his 1992 book Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler quantified the results of his findings by saying that “there is no such thing as the person who at age thirty-five suddenly changes from being perfectly normal and erupts into totally evil, disruptive, murderous behavior.” He goes on to state that the seeds for murder had been implanted in these individuals long before they claimed their first victims, usually beginning in early childhood.

Contrary to the portrayal of fictional murderers, most serial killers do not come from broken or overly impoverished homes. And most do not have intelligence levels that are either below or far above “normal.” Their IQs tend to be generally average, like most people. So why, then, do they end up so unfeeling and indifferent to the taking of life?

Ressler surmised that although there may have been an appearance of normalcy in the childhood and adolescent homes of these homicidal individuals, there is often a cocktail of dysfunction that simmered just below the surface. At the root, there is often some form of mental illness, physical or sexual abuse, drug or alcohol dependency, criminal activity among members of the immediate family or some combination thereof. But even this cannot fully explain what prompts homicidal behavior; Ressler acknowledges that not everyone who shares those experiences or comes from “dysfunctional families” goes on, as a matter of consequence, to become killers.

However, if there was a commonly shared element among all of the incarcerated murderers, it was the lack of a loving, nurturing family. Ressler found that every single one of the killers he interviewed suffered from severe emotional abuse as a child; all had had “uniformly cool, distant, unloving, neglectful” mothers. More damaging than physical abuse, the lasting psychological harm that results from this emotional torment was what Ressler saw as the crux of the issue.

This in no way blames all mothers for the ills of the world, or even blames Adam Lane’s mother for her son’s actions. Ressler is quick to point out that even when mothers properly nurture their children, the abuses of the father, or other male family members, can completely undermine all of her best efforts, the resulting damages producing some of the worst killers in history. The absence of a father or father figure, either through death, incarceration or abandonment, at this stage also had a detrimental impact on the burgeoning killers who Ressler interviewed later in their lives. The fathers who stuck around were either abusive or neglectful to the child or the child’s mother or both. Ressler simply states that the age of eight to twelve is critical, and in the subjects he studied, it was a time when their aberrant antisocial behavior began to manifest itself.

Ressler also talked extensively about fantasies and the role they play in the mind of someone who is driven to kill repeatedly. He defined fantasy as something that is unattainable in normal life. Whereas a normal male fantasy might be a sexual desire for a movie star, an abnormal fantasy might be to immobilize or slash such a movie star during sex. The fantasies of the deviant, he states, are characterized by themes of dominance, revenge and control.

“Whereas the normal person fantasizes in terms of sexual adventure, the deviant links sexual and destructive acts. Normal fantasies of interpersonal adventure are fused with abnormal attempts to degrade, humiliate and dominate others,” Ressler states; abnormal fantasies are substitutes for more positive human encounters.

This depersonalization, he said—making the other person into a mere object—was common among the murderers he talked to in his studies. “Normal people relate sexual activity as part of loving. Deviants feel the sexual urge without having learned that it has anything to do with affection.” He classified all of them as sexually dysfunctional. “That is,” he suggests, “they were unable to have and maintain mature, consensual sexual experiences with other adults, and they translated that inability into sexual murders.”

I felt strongly that this was what drove Adam Leroy Lane to destroy the lives he did. Although he did not sexually assault his victims, his murderous acts are considered sex murders by definition.

Even when the home and social environments are non-nurturing, and seriously violent fantasies develop, Ressler points out, many potential offenders still do not step over the line to commit violent acts. He describes these young men, however, as ticking time bombs, waiting to go off. Murder is always precipitated by some strong precrime stress, so Lane’s brief marriage separation could have, in theory, set him off on his murderous rampage, as the indulgence in his fantasies became the solution to his problems.

“Things have been building up to a point where the potential murderer is ready to commit his violent act,” Ressler writes, “and then a possible victim appears, one who is in a particularly vulnerable position. And the potential murderer becomes an actual murderer.”

The violent act both frightens and thrills the killer, Ressler believes. He has experienced a state of heightened emotional arousal during the crime, and he likes the feeling. Worried about arrest, but at the same time feeling more egocentric than ever, he becomes convinced that he can do it again, with impunity. He is likely to incorporate details of the first murder into his fantasies and begin to construct his future crimes, improving on the methods he used previously to make them even more satisfying.

“Now that the first murder has occurred,” Ressler writes, “in subsequent crimes, the life stresses [of the murderer] that preceded the [previous murder] may not need be present. Now that he’s over the line, the murderer usually more inconspicuously plans his future crimes. The first one may have had some of the earmarks of spontaneity, but the next victim will in all likelihood be more carefully sought out, the murder more expertly done and displaying more violence to the victim than was evident in the first crime. And the lonely boy from the non-nurturing home has become a serial killer.”

That kind of progression is clearly evident in the murders Adam Leroy Lane committed. After he killed Darlene Ewalt on her back porch, Monica Massaro’s death was much more brutal. His actions were also bolder; casually striding out of Patricia Brooks’s home after her attack and entering Monica’s house and remaining in her bedroom after she died clearly demonstrated his belief that he was untouchable. When he got out of his truck in Chelmsford, his fantasies were likely driving him to take even greater risks, and he was probably beginning to believe that he was unstoppable.

For me, all this secondhand research may have done more harm than good. The answers I sought about Adam Leroy Lane only generated more questions. I needed facts but got only theory. I found myself asking a lot of “what if” questions: What if Lane decided to enter another house instead of ours? Would he have claimed other victims and still be on the loose? What if I had gotten up for a glass of water ten minutes later than I did? What if our air conditioner had been working and we didn’t hear the sounds from the next room? What if it had been just me who had gone in to check on Shea shortly before 4:00 a.m.? What if the dog had barked, causing me to get up and go outside to check on him like I always did, only to meet with the same fate as Patricia Brooks, or worse yet, Darlene Ewalt and Monica Massaro? What if I had been found lying in a pool of blood the next morning, and my husband or son or both became the main suspects in my murder?

These questions plagued me. It was a form of survivor guilt; for some reason, or no reason at all, everything had worked out in our favor, and we had been spared the tragedy and grief that the poor families of Lane’s other victims had to endure. I imagined the Ewalts and the Massaros resented us for this, hated us, even. I didn’t think we’d deserved to survive more than they had, and I tried to put myself and my family in the other families’ shoes.