Nitpick: Male crooks are like that. Female crooks generally don’t have the same impulse to boast, which makes them harder to catch. Or law abiding women for that matter; I recall reading some time ago how various intelligence agencies these days go out of their way to hire women, because women don’t go and boast to people about all the Cool Stuff they know to impress them.
So I guess the takeaway is that we’re all narcissistic. Facebook. Holmes’ spilling the beans on his apartment. Male cops.
Well…
Am I the only one who thought this thread was going to be about 221B Baker Street?
No.
Me too. 
The answer to the second part is yes, you can be a brainiac and also be crazy, but to address the first part, the LA Times today quoted a fellow grad student who said that the shooter’s intelligence was exaggerated.
Accused movie shooter called a mediocre student intern
By Sam Quinones, July 22, 2012, 3:19 p.m., Los Angeles Times
The media keep referring to him as if he were a genius or something but I’m not getting that out of other reports about him. True, he was in a grad program, but most anyone who can test well, write and finish assignments can do that. What seems pretty consistent is the descriptions of him as a very quiet person who either shunned interpersonal experiences or was not very adept at them. I’ll be curious to see what else turns up about him because this violent terrorist behavior did not exist in a vacuum; there have to be other things going on, and likely for some time.
At least three others and counting.
Re spilling the beans: it could be as easy as “they asked.” Some people don’t have the wherewithal to lie, others find lies uncomfortable. We know very little about this person. There could be hundreds of reasons and we have no reason to discount any of them.
That’s my first impression every time I see the title.
[Tongue in cheek] Maybe he was hoping for a lenient sentence. [/Tongue in cheek]
Or Johnny Wadd’s bachelor pad.
If he really thinks he’s the Joker, then it’s pretty obvious what his motivation for telling them would be. He wanted to make them solve his puzzles and play his sadistic game, just as the movie character would.
it *super *bothers me how closely that describes me. however, i’m a stereo-typical, hermit-y artist–not a psycho killer.
Not yet, anyway.
The reasoning behind telling the police about the boobytraps is simple-he can now claim that he could have killed the police and there is nothing they could do about it, whereas if the police had found the devices on their own and disarmed them successfully he would have been a failure.
If he really thinks he’s the Joker, wouldn’t he have dyed his hair green instead of red?
I think I’m the only one who keeps thinking it’s about H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who had a very interesting hotel building.
If killing several relatives after months of planning counts as “lucid and meticulous mass violence”, in Spain we’ve had a couple of cases of teenaged boys whose schizofrenia onset led them to decide their sick* younger sibling and the rest of the family would be better off dead. Not “I hate them they must die” but “things are so completely fucked up they’re better off dead”.
One of them was about 10 years ago, there was another one last summer.
- brain damage in one case, Downs in the other
Nope, my first thought was “wait, he had an apartment, too?”