We in Holland get the story’s instalments by the day. It is not easy to judge from the distance of TV clips and the odd interview with an obviously stoned Joran van der Sloot, but I would not be surprised if he were analysed as a textbook psychopath (sociopath).
Remember the movie ‘Primal Fear’, with Edward Norton?
Van der Sloot does not seem to feel any human emotion (empathy, compassion, perhaps even real fear). He walks like a zombie through life. But he knows how to act out emotions, as if he cared - or else he wouldn’t have attracted the attention of young and impressionable women. I think something horribly went wrong in his upbringing, or in his neurological development. Which, of course, is certainly not to say he’s not to blame for his acts.
I don’t know whether something happened to the young Joran that he couldn’t cope with, but that is a psychiatrical possibility. Were his parents divorced? In a violent way? Did he experience perinatal damage to his head? Did he get beaten up a lot? It’s all possible.
But at this point one thing is most certain: he won’t be having the happiest of times in a Peru prison, whether he’ll be in there for 35 years (in a murder conviction) or somewhere between 6 and 20 years (manslaughter as an act of impulse).
I’d like to know what his mother knew and when she knew it. She looks so innocent on TV — motherly, charming, concerned, obviously enchanted with her handsome son. Did she have any idea what he was/is really like?
Doesn’t young Joran have a sister? Or, was he an only child?
He will have lots of problems in the prison there, be lucky if he makes it a year alive.
It would be interesting for the FBI to profile him. Breaking of the neck with no mention of a sexual component seems to me to be a fairly rage driven, advanced technique for killing someone and doesn’t really fit the typical profile of a serial killer. This one wanted his hands on her to kill her quickly it seems vs. the serial killer where torture and sexual abuse usually occurs.
From a profiling text book...
“Serial killers enjoy extending the suffering of their victims. They get a lot of power by determining whether their victim will live or die. They may torture their victim for several days to obtain as much pleasaure as possible.”
“A majority of serial killers have a history of sexual and physical abuse during childhood. In half of the serial killers families, the biological father had left before the child was 12 years old and the child was raised by a domineering mother. In the cases where the father didn’t leave, he was domineering and abusive. Many serial killers were bed wetters beyond the age of 12. Delinquent acts such as pyromania, theft, and cruelty to animals were present in the childhoods of most serial killers.”