Clues Sifted for Mind-Set of a Killer

A titillating trophy, a twisted sexual fantasy-come-true, a silent but grisly means of revenge. In the mind of Denise A. Huber’s killer, experts say, the 23-year-old victim may have symbolized a way to resolve sexual impotence or infantile conflicts.

Those who follow the history of bizarre and brutal crimes have never before heard of one quite like this: A young woman apparently bludgeoned to death, then carted around, naked and handcuffed, in a freezer for as long as three years. But some psychiatrists and criminologists ventured to speculate Tuesday on the murderer’s mind-set.

“The handcuffs suggest to me the person was frightened of women. . . . The freezing of the body suggests tremendous ambivalence, love-hate, a desire to preserve and keep intact. This is coming from a very disturbed individual,” said Dr. Lawrence Sporty, a Tustin psychiatrist on the faculty at UC Irvine.

The murder suspect, arrested last week after the body was found in a stolen rental truck at his Arizona house, is John Joseph Famalaro, a painting contractor described variously by those who knew him as amiable or irresponsible and reclusive.

There would not necessarily be any obvious signs of disturbance in someone who committed a murder like Huber’s, several experts said. All cautioned that they could not comment specifically on Famalaro or his background.

“Look at (Jeffrey) Dahmer,” said Robert R. Hazelwood, an experienced former FBI criminologist, referring to the case of a murderer who ate parts of his victims’ bodies. “He seemed normal to a lot of people.”

Some psychiatrists suggested that Huber’s killer could have been on the losing end of a long-running power struggle with a domineering mother.

“Clearly (the crime) represents some extreme desire to control and destroy,” said Dr. David Spiegel, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

“It would not be surprising if it represented some displaced anger toward a mother who intruded and controlled his life. . . . It may play out some fantasy of being in complete control of a person.”

Famalaro’s mother, like John, left conflicting impressions on friends and acquaintances. Anne Famalaro has been described as a strong-willed, opinionated, religious woman who was involved in conservative causes, such as the drive for “fundamental schools” in Santa Ana, before moving to Arizona.

“She was a very argumentative type of a person,” said Santa Ana City Atty. Edward J. Cooper.

Yet another Orange County acquaintance, Beverly Schick, described the mother as a “wonderful person” who did a lot of community work.

Famalaro, who moved to Arizona 1 1/2 years ago reportedly to care for his parents, lived next door to his mother in Dewey, about 15 miles from Prescott.

The mother, who could not be reached for comment Tuesday, told The Times on Sunday that she really couldn’t tell reporters much about her son.

“I think he’s a good boy,” she said. “I don’t know what to make of all this.”

There were, however, suggestions of trouble in the family. Famalaro’s older brother, Warren, was committed for nearly nine years to a state mental hospital for sexually assaulting two minors while a chiropractor. He subsequently lost his license.

David Stark, a chiropractor who purchased Warren’s practice in the early 1980s and got to know several members of the family, said Anne Famalaro was ambitious for her children.

Stark recalls one of the sons telling him that in their childhood, whenever the family drove past workers toiling by the side of the road, Anne Famalaro would point to them, admonishing her children: “Do you want to do that all your life? You’d better work harder.”

After Warren’s conviction, his mother, a devout Roman Catholic, barely spoke to him, Stark said. Although Warren worked as Stark’s office manager as part of the buyout agreement and his mother frequently stopped by for treatments, Anne Famalaro all but ignored her son, the chiropractor said.

“She wouldn’t even talk to Warren,” he said. “She would come in, get her neck adjusted and leave. I think she just stopped her communication with Warren.”

Stark said both brothers were ambitious, but that Warren was successful while John’s efforts always seemed to fall short. Each time John came in to the office, Stark said, he seemed to be starting on a new career.

“One day he was going to chiropractic college, the next time he was going to (police) cadet school, then he was trying real estate. Then the next time he’d be talking about going to law school,” he said.

John also was frenetic, “always going a mile a minute, talking about whatever he had going next,” Stark said.

Dr. Park Dietz, the country’s best known forensic psychiatrist, said the storage of the body in a freezer could relate to necrophiliac fantasies. Necrophiles are aroused by sexual contact with, or sexual fantasies about, corpses.

Dietz, the government’s key witness in the Dahmer case, said necrophiles often have a particular concern about being rejected or humiliated and not performing well enough. “These are more often going to be momma’s boys not successful at dating,” he said.

The sentencing report for Warren Famalaro included a statement from a former girlfriend, Mary Willhoite, who said Anne had tried to force the couple apart. She told authorities that the mother once threatened to kill her.

Some experts suggested that Huber’s murderer could have had an elaborate fantasy life involving his victim.

The body “could be a reminder of what was exciting, namely the murder. It could represent an affirmation of some achievement of power in his life,” said Dr. Bruce Danto, a Fullerton forensic psychiatrist who was a homicide detective for eight years.

As Dietz put it, necrophiles “have a rough awareness of what’s turning them on. . . . What they don’t understand is why they have this taste. They’re ashamed of the sexual part of what they do” but not necessarily of violence they might perform.

Dietz said the desire is not for the corpse per se, “but for the unresistant, undemanding, totally compliant, totally controlled sexual partner.”

Necrophiles are a varied group, he said. Many merely fantasize, while there are others like Dahmer, who drugged his partners so he could have sex with them for hours, and then tried to perform lobotomies on his victims.

“No one knows how common (necrophilia) is,” he said. “It’s one of the darker secrets.”

Dietz and others said the reason Huber was stored in a freezer need not involve necrophilia or have symbolic significance. It could be practical: The murderer could have been trying to obscure the time of death and confound those trying to build a case against him, or to delay discovery of the body.

But that would not explain the handcuffs.

“The question I would have is when she was dead, why weren’t the handcuffs removed? . . . That would indicate symbolism,” Hazelwood said.

Experts disagree on what would inspire this type of killer. Spiegel said it could be an accumulation of small offenses over the course of a lifetime.

“I don’t know if there is a common profile,” he said.

“Maybe there are a lot of uncorrected small transgressions in their lives and they just blow up. They absorb more than a normal person would.”

The victim, he said, may be “a replacement for a person they’d really like to kill.”

But Sporty said such a gruesome crime would have to be inspired by something much more traumatic, such as severe and repeated child abuse--and even that probably would not fully explain it.

He and others suggested a brain injury or substance abuse could have played a role. Dahmer, for example, was an alcoholic.

“People can survive and recover (from abuse) without it coming out to be anything like this horrendous crime,” he said.

Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson contributed to this report.