Now, I'm of two minds on how to respond to this. On one hand, I find myself thinking that murderers are among the lowest forms of life upon this earth, especially those of this particular nature. I'm, however, biased in this stance, due to the fact that my Uncle was murdered by a student of his. As a result of my bias, I hold murderers in a high degree of contempt and revile them as a lower class of being then rapists or violent pedophiliacs.
The other thought that I have is how a person who operates like that would engage in such things is because they viewed it as the fastest route to accomplish some goal. Perhaps it was wealth, perhaps it was the elimination of a person whom you believed was a rival on the verge of destroying your efforts. I could think up many different possible motives for such an act. To commit murder, especially an act of murder that is not blatently obvious as a crime comitted in high passion, one must beable to separate themselves from their victims. There needs to be a sufficent breach between the concepts of "person" and "thing" that your former friend is now worth less to you then a dog.
Such individuals are frequently described in the media as sociopaths or psychopaths, but it's not an accurate description of the psychological "problem" at play here. It's actually a form of anti-social disorder. Anti-social disorder doesn't mearly mean that you have a strong vein of misanthropy but that you can not identify at all with the social group, in this case. Usually, the killers who have such a form of anti-social disorder also have some form of meglomania. I think it is a way that the ego/mind/brain (what ever damn term you want) compensates for the radical and unhealthy split that is present there.
These people have two different general groups that they come in. One is a very suave and seemingly socially sophisitacated, where as the other is the sterotypical serial killer who lives off in the boonies with their rusty axe, waiting to snap and kill all people in a 30 mile radius. The schisim that is observed in most muderers who have anti-social disorder is a result of an early childhood psychological trauma. It's frequently traced to some form of problems with: gender indentification, sexual orientation identification, or pathological abuse by another. They may or may not have a history of violence that is to an extent that it is recorded in public record by way of police reports.
More often then not, however, it is usually such that the violence is expressed in means that are easily hidden or explained away in childhood. "Boys will be boys." or "Oh, they all go through that phase." As these people grow into maturity, they realize that the tendancies that they have are not such that would allow them to function well in society. This serves to further alienate them and widen the breach between "people" and "things" in their minds. From what I've been able to determine in my research, it's about the age of late teens early 20s that this thought pattern (which initally was a defense mechanisim for coping with the childhood trauma) is finally completed and entrenched in the mind.
Then, you have the development of the two groups of killers. One group will say "fuck it, these mongrels can't handle it, then too damn bad." They continue to satisfy the violent urges, which usually are either compulsive efforts to ease some form of psychological angst or reinactment of the childhood trauma. These ones become the sterotypical axe murderer in the woods.
The others work to hide their tendancies in a fustrated effort to work with society at large. They will either express their tendancies via fantasies and through vicarious living in violent media/graphic materials/literature or through the subtle continuation of their earlier methods. Unfortunately, in either group, they become resistant to the earlier method of assuaging the growing fixation upon sadisim and need to become more elaborate to satisfy the psychological "need".
In many respect, the act of killing is just another way to get a fix for their need. This person may have been some one who kicked the dog, beat his wife, and eventually graduated to murder because of the growing compulsion. Unfortunately, this "need" is a fustrated attempt to address something that can be resolved via psychotherapy and can be overcome or rechanneled into more .... constructive outlets.
Now, tell me... am I delving too deeply for character development?
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