Sipping Coffee with a Serial Killer: On Conducting Life History Interviews with a Criminal Genius.

As part of my Ph.D. research on criminal genius, I conducted 44 semi-structured interviews. One of the 44 subjects, in particular, stood out. This noteworthy individual claimed that he had killed 15 people. His story was particularly interesting because--unlike most social research involving serial killers--he claimed that he had never been arrested or convicted for his homicides. Compelled by his account, I met with this subject on five additional occasions, and gradually compiled his criminal life history. Ethical and legal considerations limited inquiry into several dimensions of this subject's life history, but over time, an interesting and richly textured narrative emerged. This article first describes the life experiences of this offender and then describes the methodological choices that shaped the research. Because criminologists almost never establish research access with offenders of this kind, his story--articulated here in the form of a criminal life history--is a valuable contribution to social science literature. Key words: Genius, Elite, IQ, Crime, Murder, Interview, Life History, Self-Report, Access, and Ethics An Introduction to the Study of Criminal Genius Official criminal statistics and self-report studies traditionally support the claim that the average criminal offender has a slightly subnormal IQ score--about 92, or eight points less than the population average (Hirschi & Hindelang, 1977). However, because criminologists have historically focused their research on vulnerable populations such as juveniles or prison inmates (Barnes & Teeters, 1959), almost nothing is known about the patterns of criminal behavior among gifted adults with exceptional cognitive abilities (Blackburn, 1993). Indeed, prior to this study, no criminological data had ever been gathered on adult offenders with IQ scores in the genius range. Intrigued by this enigmatic topic, I studied the crimes of geniuses--offenses committed by people with IQ scores of 132 or higher (Simonton, 1994). Because I was trying to measure offending that did not necessarily result in arrests or convictions, official statistics would not suffice. Similarly, because I was interested in some offenses that did not produce knowing victims (i.e., consensual "victimless" crimes or crimes in which the victim is unaware that he or she has been victimized), victimization statistics would not suffice. Thus, I relied upon the self-report questionnaire (Huizinga & Elliott, 1986; Thornberry & Krohn, 2000) to inventory the offenses of my subjects. The self-report instrument is one of the only means to effectively study hidden offending (Hood & Sparks, 1970). Using a newly designed self-report questionnaire, I collected extensive self-report data from 424 subjects in three different groups of geniuses: 1. Members of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry [ISPE], an international elite high IQ society with a 150 IQ [99.9 percentile] admissions threshold 2. Undergraduate and graduate students at prestigious American and British universities 3. High IQ inmates incarcerated in American and British correctional facilities. Sampling from these groups allowed me to tap all three categories of genius described by Towers (1990): the outsider (the gifted individual, who joins a high IQ society to find the mental stimulation that he or she cannot find through professional or social avenues), the conformist (the gifted individual, who finds sufficient mental stimulation through work and peers), and the dropout (the gifted individual, who cannot or will not abide by the norms and laws of society). The questionnaire included 17 demographic questions, 72 different offense items (ranging in seriousness from the abuse of work privileges to homicide committed outside wartime), and asked subjects about the books, movies, and famous figures that had shaped their lives. Along with the self-report questionnaire, I also distributed the Eysenck Personality Scales [EPS], collecting data on key personality variables such as extraversion and psychoticism (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1996). …