Psycho killer

The evil that spreadsheets can't catch

The Swedish podcast Krimrummet holds a grim fascination for me. It comes from a country where I never lived. The episode I heard this week told the story of an unnamed psychopath who had come to Sweden as a refugee baby from Kossovo in 1988. Pregnant at the age of 17, she stabbed to death a woman who was closing up her fabric shop for the sake of the £65 in the till. That was in 2005. Though the murder took place in a shopping street in the centre of Gothenburg and left masses of blood and DNA samples for the forensics, it remained unsolved for 18 years. The police knew the murderer was a woman, but for some reason supposed she was middle aged, and so did not routinely swab younger women arrested for other reasons. A couple of eye witnesses had given a description of a possible suspect, but I don’t think that the police had any leads into or out of the immigrant communities of the satellite towns round Gothenburg. All they had was a complete DNA sequence.

£65 is not much to kill another human being for, especially in a welfare state – and, at the time, the murderer was being looked after as a pregnant single mother, by the social services, who later found her a flat. They would later throw her out of it for generally anti-social behaviour, and she had another six children by various men. In 2018 she was interviewed as part of a vox pop of poor voters ahead of the general election. She was then living with seven children and others in three rooms – she took the reporter home to see it. She said she would vote Social Democrat, although she was tempted by the (populist Right) Sweden Democrats, “Because there are too many people coming in … even though I’m a {n-word} (blatte) myself.”

But it was not until 2023 when the surveillance cameras in the big IKEA on the E6 outside of Gothenburg, caught her cheating the self-service payment machines that she was swabbed after an arrest. At once, the police knew they had the murderer. There was only one snag. Although there is no statute of limitations on murder as a crime in Sweden, there is one, of fifteen years, for any crimes committed as a juvenile, and she had been only 17 when she killed the shop assistant, eighteen years before her arrest and identification. She had to be let go.

After her release she found a job in an old people’s home, using a faked CV, and lasted a month before she was caught stealing from the residents. She hadn’t had to kill anyone this time to amass more than £40,000 worth of jewellery. She pleaded guilty, although she disputed the value of what she’d stolen, and was sentenced to two and a half years in jail. I suppose she’ll be out very shortly. At the trial it emerged that she had a long history of working in the care sector on the back of fake CVs and being sacked for all kinds of misconduct. Some of the procedures meant to detect such problems had failed.

I don’t think this is primarily a story about immigration or even about Kossovars. Obviously you can read it that way, and many people will. It’s in part a story about the way that minority groups don’t talk to the police and the limitations of technology as a crime fighting tool. But psychopaths happen in any culture. I think it’s obvious that she should be locked up for the rest of her life, even if not technically a criminal. Society has to protect itself from people who have no conscience. And this is part of a wider point, reached through another story.

Someone recommended to me a pop science book on “Borderline Personality Disorder”. Presumably the Kossovar woman would qualify, but so would almost all of us. As you’d expect of an American pop psychology book, it offers a diagnosis that would explain everything that was wrong in your life, or in the character of your ex. But what surprised me was this description of a sufferer:

Carrie was hospitalized in a cardiac-care unit numerous times for severe chest pains, subsequently recognized to be anxiety-related. She went through periods of binge-eating and starvation-fasting; over a period of several weeks, her weight would vary by as much as seventy pounds. When she was thirty-two, she was brutally raped by a physician on the staff of the hospital in which she worked.
Soon after, she returned to school and was drawn into a sexual relationship with one of her female professors. By the age of forty-two, her collection of medical files was filled with almost every diagnosis imaginable, including schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, hypochondri-asis, anxiety, anorexia nervosa, sexual dysfunction, and post-traumatic stress disorder (following the rape).
Despite her mental and physical problems, Carrie was able to perform her work fairly well. Though she changed jobs frequently, she managed to complete a doctorate in social work. She was even able to teach for a while at a small women’s college.

(my italics)

The idea that social work or even teaching involve only skills which can be exercised by someone without an ounce of common sense, still less of judgment or of wisdom is really extraordinary. It implies that the skills needed for social work, or indeed any of the caring professions, are entirely impersonal. They could be exercised by a robot or an AI, or by any human trained to follow the algorithm.

This is a misconception of the world which long predates AI, of course. It started with industrialisation. It may be what some Marxists mean by “alienation” and it’s certainly something that is attacked as “lanyardism”.

I see it as the ambition to cast a giant spreadsheet like a net to capture the whole of society, so that we are all enmeshed in our proper cells. I’ve lived in societies where it nearly worked (heja Sverige!) but even then it required the cell walls of the spreadsheet to flex to fit the underlying irregularities of the people underneath, and the people who ran the place understood that, at least until they forgot it.

But there is no spreadsheet, and no procedure, which could reliably trap someone like the Kossovar woman. Even when you seem to treat people as wholly fungible units, you are still making assumptions about their character and nature which won’t hold for everyone. All societies need orthodoxies and impersonal rules to function. It’s just that these cannot apply to every situation and when we fall into the habit of thinking that they must, reality will shift beneath our feet and dump us on our arses.