The murder victim's father has said he does not want VDS to get the death penalty (which, of course, he won't). I think, in this instance, I agree with him. This is a guy who needs to rot for as long as possible in a very bad prison. An utterly useless veneer of a human being, totally self-absorbed in shallow pleasure, and having never worked a moment in his life at a productive endeavor. Unredeemable. That house of cards has caved in on him, and I doubt even now that he understands that. He's thinking of himself as somehow a victim of circumstances. Well, let those circumstances be as difficult as humaneness will permit.
In another thread there was minor debate about whether or not he is to be considered a serial killer. I opined at the time that he probably should be, but I'll now amend that a little. I think he may be an apprentice serial killer, but hadn't got quite to the stage of really qualifying.
It's more than simply an issue of multiple homicides, or causation of multiple incidents of death. Serial killers, in the strict sense we understand from the likes of John Gacy, Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, Dennis Rader, are people for whom the murders themselves are the real driving interest. For these people, that moment of total control, of ending another person's life, up close and personal, is the real high. VDS never got to that stage, I don't think. For him, the predatory behavior centered on control and rape. The deaths, two of which we are pretty certain of now, were incidental. I'm sure he considers both "accidents".
But he was willing to go that far, and if he had got away with this one, I don't have much doubt it would have been a thrill he would need to repeat. A lot of serial killers seem to have started this way (Herb Baumeister and Jeffrey Dahmer are good examples; Gacy maybe, too). The good news here is that VDS is an idiot. He didn't have the smarts to be a Ted Bundy, thank God. Only the complicity of Aruban legal authorities kept him out of the slammer on the first one. I'd bet he's left a wake of other date-rapes, but I actually doubt there are other corpses beyond the two we know.
On the issue of Aruban authorities, I don't buy the idea that they were simply incompetent inexperienced rubes. Natalee Holloway's mother was asked by one of them a very weird question early on in the investigation of that disappearance, did her daughter ever have seizures? She was mystified by the question (Natalee didn't), and couldn't figure out why it had even been asked. But when VDS was caught on that court-inadmissable secret video from the reporter, confessing to one of the many versions of Natalee's death he told, he indicated both by word and gesture that she had gone into some form of seizure, drink-and-drug induced, no doubt. The Aruban police had to have got that information from VDS, in order even to have asked Holloway's mother the question. Those police have a hell of a lot to answer for, as do the two Kalpoe brothers, who are on record with a variety of contradictory stories as to what happened that key night.
We're a long way from having heard the end of all this.
caw
