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I watched a Cold Case Files episode about that type, last night. "Hero in his own mind" is a perfect description of this guy. His name was Bob Spangler. He had killed his two teenaged children w/o provocation, after killing his wife. He tricked his wife into sitting with her eyes closed by telling her he had a present for her for Christmas. When she had her eyes closed, he just walked up and shot her in the head. He arranged so that it looked like she had shot her own children, then committed suicide.

IMO, it was sheer incompetence that kept the truth from being found out about that one for something like 16 years. As a result of the failure to investigate those murders properly, about 16 years later, Spangler took his 3rd wife hiking near the Grand Canyon, and she "fell" to her death.

The police interviewed him for long hours. He let them, b/c he liked to talk about himself. Finally he confessed to the three earlier murders. But he wouldn't come clean on the more recent one--until the interviewer explained that he couldn't REALLY be considered a serial killer unless he had had more than one episode of killing. That got to his pathetic ego, and he confessed to the Grand Canyon murder.

He sat there and told them things like, "I'm an interesting person... I'm different from the average person." TYPICAL. What a laughable piece of sh## he was.

Most psychopaths, though, don't reach those "heights". Instead, as Hervey Cleckley said in his excellent book "The Mask of Sanity", they spend their lives scamming people in more minor ways. They have absolutely no reverence for anything, no matter how serious or important it is. In fact, they take pleasure in sneering behind their hands about things which others find serious. Empty suits.