Fascination With Serial Killers

T. Jefferson Parker’s essay on evil missed the point of evil entirely (“The Obsession With Evil,” Opinion, Jan. 19). Evil is very easy to define.

A friend of mine once summed up what he perceived the message of the Bible was in one sentence--the Golden Rule; do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Evil, then, is doing unto others as you would not have others do unto you.

Saddam Hussein is evil because he has people tortured, murdered and imprisoned for disagreeing with him. The Soviet Union was an evil empire because it repressed and imprisoned people for disagreeing with it. Serial killers are evil for basically the same reasons; they imprison, torture and kill others, but their motives differ. Serial killers work their evil not because their victims disagree with them, but rather because the killers obtain a thrill, partly sexual, from it.

Everyone has or has had evil thoughts, wicked fantasies and the like. Why this should be is and will continue to be the subject of much debate. Most people lock these thoughts away in a corner of their mind and forget them. Others fantasize or pretend to carry out their personal evils. A very few, serial killers for instance, let their dark thoughts loose to play.

Serial killers, as well as other truly evil people, have no compassion for others. The sufferings of their victims are merely evidence to them of their own power and dominance.

Simply put, evil is selfishness. A serial killer is one who selfishly carries out his dark fantasies. We find them interesting because we wonder what it would be like to let our own dark sides take over, or perhaps the killers do deeds similar to our own evil fantasies. Better we should read Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

DAVID A. LATHRAP, San Diego