Simonsen agreed. “He does not kill for the sake of excitement.”
“Then there is the sexual motive, which I also think can be ruled out in Falkenborg’s case. In by far the majority of cases where serial murder is sexually motivated, the murderer’s treatment of his victims is brutal or sadistic, often to a horribly painful degree, and that applies not only to actions, but almost always to the words used as well. But apart from the fact that Falkenborg suffocates the women with a plastic bag—”
Here Troulsen interrupted.
“You have to excuse me, but to be frank I have a hard time overlooking that.”
“Let me put it differently: he suffocates the women, but what does he do in addition that underscores sadistic behavior? The answer is nothing. He uses neither torture nor rape. On the contrary—taking the full situation into consideration—he is relatively careful with his victims. He does not offend Rikke Barbara Hvidt’s modesty more than is strictly necessary when he takes off her bra, he asks her to please wait until the moped riders are gone, and he gets her to hold her hands out not by threatening her, but by patiently asking her to. And these arguments can also be used to reject dominance as a motive. I have never heard of a dominance murderer who spoke in that way to the victim he was killing. It simply doesn’t tally.”
Simonsen said, “But he frightens them with his mask, if we assume that he was wearing one at the other murders he committed.”
“I feel quite certain that he did.”
“But isn’t that a kind of torture? I mean, the women must have been terrified.”
“The mask is extremely interesting. I think he used it to frighten them, but also to hide himself and conceal his own anxiety. But may I have permission to wait for now before I consider the mask?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Another circumstance that puzzles me is that if he kills to achieve dominance, as I believed in the beginning, why does he choose to operate in darkness? The dominating effect and thereby his enjoyment of the killing would be much greater if he could observe the women’s reaction clearly and in detail, which he cannot under artificial light on dark beaches or in the Greenlandic polar night. Many dominance murderers kill at a place other than where they leave the bodies purely so that they have better conditions in which to kill.
“Furthermore our killer goes to great lengths to put the blame on Carl Henning Thomsen for the murder of his daughter Catherine. This does not tally in any way with a dominance motive, where the murderers very often make claims on both the victims and the crime even after the murder. Like a hunter who is proud of the animals he has killed and hangs them on his wall as trophies. With Catherine Thomsen the opposite happens. But having said this, our man’s very eagerness to lure Carl Henning Thomsen into a trap, and also his strange behaviour in 1990 with the pig that he nails on the tree to bother his neighbours, are two elements in his conduct that I simply don’t understand.”
The profiler stopped talking for a moment and looked around at the group.
“They don’t fit with his other conduct, and here I am not only thinking about the murders but also about the other witness statements that describe him as quiet, capable, sociable, well liked, but also very naive and almost infantile. Do you have any observations about this?”
Pedersen said categorically, “The important thing for me is whether he was quiet and capable as a child.”
The psychologist’s eyes wandered uncertainly.
“Yes, well, that may be an interesting angle. Are there any other comments?”
His four listeners all shook their heads. Simonsen interjected, “This puzzled me too. The episode with the pig doesn’t tie in with his other documented behaviour, and I was hoping you could help us get an insight into that—along the lines that perhaps he has two personalities.”
“No, he’s not schizophrenic, if that’s what you mean. Absolutely not. But it may be necessary for us to let that be for the time being. Unless . . . ”
He looked around, but no one had any further ideas.
“The last and most important reason that I am rejecting dominance as well as sexual satisfaction as motives, is that he does not take the initiative himself, and his cooling-off periods . . . that is, the period between his murders . . . is far too great. If he was dominance or sexually motivated, we would have experienced more—certainly a few more—murders. So my conclusion is that he derives no satisfaction from his misdeeds. Bear in mind, however, my initial reservation. I am doubtful that he derives enjoyment from frightening the women, but I cannot be sure he does not.”
Simonsen had clearly hoped for a different interpretation.