Killer Instinct Having A Mind For Murder – Donald Grant

We are then left to speculate on the basis of what can be gleaned from their life histories. Sursaree’s crime is more akin to this. One of the most notorious such cases was that of the British general practitioner Harold Shipman, who, from the 1970s through the 1990s, is thought to have murdered at least 215 of his elderly female patients by giving them a fatal dose of morphine intravenously. It took many years for his colleagues and associates to realise what was happening, despite the warning signs.

Evidence of a lot of psychopathology and past misbehaviour was eventually pieced together, but no-one expected these crimes to happen —it just seemed impossible to imagine. Shipman was able to exploit these normal human reactions and continue with his destructive ways, until they could no longer be ignored. Just as such apparently cool, calculated murders are hard to imagine, the motivations that are discoverable never seem enough to explain why killing was the answer.

Is it enough to say that Shipman found his own mother’s slow, painful death from lung cancer hard to deal with? Similarly, can a mother really kill a baby to get attention and sympathy for herself, or to take revenge on her husband? In general, there has to be an intense degree of narcissism and sense of entitlement involved. The murderer has to either be blind to the feelings of others or perhaps relish the infliction of harm.

This perverse exploitation of power may be expressing deeply repressed anger or resentment. It takes powerful forces such as these to unleash our killer instinct in the absence of severe mental illness. OceanofPDF.com When the nursing home rang, 68-year-old Colin Wilson felt as if his world were crashing down around him. It was 11 a.m. on a Tuesday in early 2008, and Colin had been in his shed making preparations for a garden trellis he was planning to erect. His wife, Jean, was out at her book club, so when he heard the phone ring he went into the kitchen to answer it.

It was Cheryl, the nurse in charge of the home where Colin had finally managed to place his mother, Ida, only two weeks earlier, after a long and exhausting search. Sounding quite harassed, Cheryl reported that Ida had become violent towards staff and even other patients. The nurse had previously expressed concern that Ida wasn’t settling into her new home, that she was demanding and difficult, but had said they were trying hard to help her accept her new environment.

Now she was saying the words that Colin had dreaded hearing: they could no longer cope with Ida. He agreed to go out to the home and talk to Cheryl about the problem.

It is a terrifying insight into the killer within. By laying bare the crimes, compulsions and twisting contradictions of ten individual killers, Grant succeeds in exposing something even more disturbing —that each of us is capable, at our worst, of something dark and violent. In a lifetime spent working with hundreds of murderers and thousands more who have committed brutal acts, Grant has learned to strip away their defences, revealing the base instincts, bitter childhoods and self-serving justifications that led them to commit the very worst of crimes.

He has attempted to inhabit the minds of these murderers and to understand their actions. The result—this book—is painful, honest and unflinching. More compelling than any crime fiction, Killer Instinct should be required reading, for it reveals how the line between good and evil lies very close to home. Dan Box, host of the Bowraville podcast series, winner of two Walkley awards and the Sir Keith Murdoch and Les Kennedy awards Killer Instinct …

is an intriguing read. It gives a fascinating insight into the world of killers, forensic psychiatry and the legal system, including the difficulties of predicting dangerousness. Who hasn’t wondered if, given a particular set of circumstances or mental illness, they might be driven to kill another? Forensic psychiatrist Donald Grant, whose reports I read with confidence during my twenty-six years as a judge, explores that and other big questions, such as who is capable of rehabilitation, who has rehabilitated, and who is beyond redemption.

Margaret McMurdo, immediate past President, Court of Appeal, Queensland Supreme Court What a great book! A fascinating and compelling read. From the outset, you are struck by the authenticity of the authorial voice. Donald Grant is not some sensationalist hack looking to beat up a story for cheap thrills. This is a book by a trained professional intimately involved in the affairs described.

Over the course of his career, he has seen a lot. There is tremendous variety in the case studies. Each is completely engrossing in its own particular way … You learn a lot from this text. It is perfectly paced with moments of reflection and diagnosis amidst the horror of sadism and murder. Alastair Blanshard, Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Enquiry, University of Queensland This is a fascinating insight from one of Australia’s leading forensic psychiatrists into an area of human behaviour that forever baffles most people.

A must read for all of those interested, or involved in, cases of murder as to how the forensic psychiatrist unravels and makes sense of this often alarming and incomprehensible behaviour.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 0a583810106a60fd
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,842,074 bytes (1.757 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9780522873597, 9780522873603
• Pages: 203
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 387.1 minutes
• Total Words: 77,420
• Total Characters: 451,984
• Average Words per Page: 381.38
• Average Characters per Page: 2226.52

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