Micki Pistorius > Quotes

“I asked her where the posters in his room came from. She told me she had found some magazines in the forest at a spot where some soldiers had camped and had brought them home. This was shortly before the sexual murders started. I believe those pin-ups were the catalyst that triggered the fantasy that had been brewing inside Zikode since his childhood. His mother had unwittingly lit the tinder which had erupted into a blaze and cost many women their lives.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“He had two types of victim. The prostitutes resembled the women who had rejected him and he acted out his agony and anger in a symbolic manner on these victims. The boys represented himself and, like Simons, he acted out his suffering directly on these victims.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“He unleashed his sexual frustrations on these women, but they also provided a means of venting his Oedipal anger at the mother figures for rejecting him, so he strangled the life out of them.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Serial killers experience the power over life and death as omnipotence. Since they have little control over their own lives and feelings, they become addicted to the omnipotence that control over someone else’s life gives them. Therefore, they will kill repetitively. It restores the mental imbalance they experience whenever their self-worth is challenged.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“The best way of preventing a person from becoming a serial killer is for the trained professionals in the social services, and even for concerned members of the public, to learn to identify the little dreamers who flee into their fantasy worlds to escape abuse and to refer these children for therapy.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“In the five years that I have worked as a profiler I have been involved in more than thirty serial killer cases.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Teenagers who recognise these fantasies in themselves should urgently consult a trained therapist and candidly and courageously talk to them. A person can be helped before he acts out the fantasy; and a person cannot be arrested for having murderous fantasies. Once the murder has been committed, it is too late.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Elmarie and I were swamped. At that stage we were handling fifteen active serial killers between us, of whom seven were in my head.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“But the very next day, a new serial killer filled the place that this one had vacated.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“All serial killers fixate in the latency phase, although they will also fixate in one or more of the other psychosexual phases. They always feel like outsiders.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Through the deaths of those I loved, I learned to value life and this sensitised me to the suffering of the families of the victims of serial killers. The tragedy of serial homicide is its dichotomy – serial killers kill because they suffer and, by killing, they cause immense suffering.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Because of the fact that they failed in their socialisation process, serial killers treat their victims as mere objects that exist for the gratification of their own needs. They show no empathy for the victim.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“If a man wants to dominate a woman, he will demand sex, and if a woman wants to dominate a man, she will refuse him sex.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Once a killer is in prison, we carry on with other investigations and do not pay much attention to those who are behind bars. This infuriates them and they get jealous. I compare it to sibling rivalry. I became the ‘Bad Mother’ object to our suspect and he vented his anger in those letters.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Control and power go hand in hand and there is no greater power than power over life and death. The moment one has another’s life literally in one’s hands, one is ultimately powerful, almost godlike. When one is in this position, one is no longer the victim, since someone else has become the victim.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“experienced sexual urges, but he was not socially equipped to handle them. He raped the women, who were substitutes for his sister, and he killed them because he was angry at her for rejecting and abandoning him.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“South Africa has the third highest murder rate in the world, with Colombia and Swaziland ahead of it. The high rate of murder illustrates the amount of work that a Murder and Robbery detective has to cope with, and yet South Africa holds the record for apprehending serial killers within three to six months of a special investigation team being established, provided the serial killer stays active.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“I stared at the black scar on the ground in front of me. From the photographs I could work out exactly where her face had lain. I was surprised to see that a small purple veld flower had grown there. To me it was beautiful.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“My profiles match the suspects we have arrested in 95 to 99 per cent of cases.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Serial killers do not take responsibility for killing; they are of the opinion that it is the police’s responsibility to prevent them from killing.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in the old Transvaal during the nineteenth century, and modern Johannesburg still has within its boundaries the huge white mine dumps that look like mini mountains. While the mine dumps were on the outskirts of the town years ago, the suburbs have since expanded around them and they lie there like monuments to a golden era.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Mhlengwa Zikode fixated in the Oedipus phase. His father was paralysed and Mhlengwa won the favour of both his mother and his older and only sister, who was his primary caretaker. He had a symbiotic relationship with both these women and could never really succeed in differentiating his own personality from theirs.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“The motive is settled deep within the unconscious psyche, and the serial killer is unaware of this. By ‘irresistible compulsion’ I do not mean that serial killers have absolutely no power over the urge to kill. Many of them experience the urge as an external force taking control of their own will and forcing them to commit murder, a force they perceive they cannot resist.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“every human being passes through five psychosexual developmental phases. They are the oral phase, anal phase, Oedipus or phallic phase, latency phase and the genital phase. A person can fixate in any of these phases and failure to resolve the fixation would be cause for pathology. A layman’s term for a fixation would be a mental short-circuit. It is an individualistic reaction to being exposed to too much or too little of something.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“The serial killer has a particularly strong and dominating id and consequently very ardent sexual and aggressive urges.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“At the age of nineteen, when his mother brought home the pin-up pictures, she inadvertently activated his seething fantasies. Mhlengwa felt the urge to have sex but lacked the social skills to form a relationship. He was also a very angry young man.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Had my brother not killed himself and had I not known how deeply this affects those who are left behind, I would have taken my life.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“I have found that most serial killers suffer from personality disorders rather than mental diseases. People with personality disorders have rigid personality structures and often have difficulties with interpersonal relationships, but they are not mad. On the other hand, people suffering from mental diseases may lose contact with reality, hallucinate and deteriorate in their general functioning.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“Serial killers are not born serial killers, but develop as a result of deep ingrained pain and unbearable rejection. It is tragic that they avenge their misery on innocent people who have had absolutely no part in causing their initial suffering, save that they unconsciously remind the serial killer of his first tormentor.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story

“I predicted that he would have been sodomised as a boy when he was the same age as the victims. Serial killers do what was done to them either directly or in a symbolic manner.”
― Micki Pistorius, Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story