Executed People

"In my opinion, the best chance you have of catching this guy is to get a site with a fresh body and stake it out."

"...just like anybody else with an obsession, whether it be fishing, bowling or skiing, he has ways he can vicariously satisfy it. Maybe he is going to peep shows and reading detective magazines. I think there's an excellent chance that one way he gets off is by going to look at what they call the slasher films."

"I don't want to die. I'm not going to kid you. I'll kid you not. I deserve certainly the most extreme punishment society has...I think society deserves to be protected from me and others like me."

"I'm not guilty? [Laughs] Does that include the time I stole a comic book when I was five years old? I'm not guilty of the charges which have been filed against me."

"Sure, I get angry. I get very, very angry and indignant. I don't like being locked up for something I didn't do, and I don't like my liberty taken away, and I don't like being treated like an animal, and I don't like people walking around and ogling me like I'm some sort of weirdo, because I'm not."

"I don't know all of what you're speaking about Lucky [Severson, reporter interviewing him] it's too broad and I can't get into it in any detail. But I'm satisfied with my blanket statement that I'm innocent. No man is truly innocent. I mean we all have transgressed some way in our lives and as I say, I've been impolite and there are things I regret having done in my life but nothing like the things, I think, that you're referring to."

"I don't think anybody doubts whether I've done some bad things. The question is: what, of course, and how and, maybe even most importantly, why?"

"That's why it's so much easier for me to try to locate the bodies than it is to talk about the actual thing. It's so much more positive such as it could be."

"I just said that the Hawkins girl's head was severed and taken up the road about twenty-five to fifty yards and buried in a location about ten yards west of the road, on a rocky hillside. Did you hear that?"

"I wanted to become a part of my defense because I am such a part of it. Obviously I'm going to bear the consequences, so why not bear the responsibilities?"

"You're like a fisherman who fishes for years and catches a small fish. Sometimes a medium fish. [You] get lucky and get a big fish. But you know that there's a real big fish under there that always gets away. You and your group are going to get a lot of serial killers and they're going to help you. But with the real good ones, the only way you're going to know what goes on under the water is to go under the water. The fisherman drowns going underwater. But I can take you there without drowning. If I trust you. And if I decide."

"Well, had he been cautious, he would’ve probably killed the first individual before leaving to get the second girl, but in this instance since we’ve agreed he wasn’t acting cautiously, he hadn’t killed the first girl when he abducted the second."

".....murder is not just a crime of lust or violence. It becomes possession. They are part of you … [the victim] becomes a part of you, and you [two] are forever one … and the grounds where you kill them or leave them become sacred to you, and you will always be drawn back to them."

"Guilt. It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism and it's very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our body."

"When you feel the last bit of breath leaving their body, you're looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!"

"A factor that is almost indispensable to this kind of behavior [serial killing] is the mobility of contemporary American life. Living in large centers of population, and living with lots of people, you can get used to dealing with strangers. It's the anonymity factor, and it has a twofold effect. First of all if you're among strangers you're less likely to remember them, or care what they're doing or what they should, or should not, be doing. If they should or shouldn't be there. Secondly, you're conditioned almost not to be afraid of strangers. Mobility is very important here. As we've seen...the individual's [himself in third person] modus operandi was moving large distances in an attempt to camouflage what he was doing. Moving these distances, he was able to take advantage of the anonymity factor."

"People say "Ted Bundy didn't show any emotion, there must be something in there". I showed emotion. You know what people said? "See, he really can get violent and angry"."

"I have known people who ... radiate vulnerability .... Their facial expressions say 'I am afraid of you.' These people invite abuse ... By expecting to be hurt, do they subtly encourage it?"

"Which one do they pick? Do they pick the law student with no criminal background, who was probably even known by some of the prosecutors working the case? Or are they going to go after the types, you know, the guys in the files... the real weirdos?"

"I didn't know what made things tick. I didn't know what made people want to be friends. I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions."

"One of the things that makes it a little bit difficult is that at this point she was quite lucid, talking about things. It’s not funny, but it’s odd the kinds of things people will say under those circumstances. And she said that she had a Spanish test the next day, and she thought that I had taken her to help tutor her for her Spanish test. It’s kind of an odd thing to say. Anyway."

"Okay, you've got the indictment, that's all you're gonna get... I'll plead not guilty right now."

"Jim [Coleman, his defense attorney] and Fred [Lawrence, his minister], I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends."

"I'm not looking for anything. I understand now a lot of stuff about myself that I didn't understand then. It makes me realize what was going on. The senselessness of it appalls me although I'm sure not so much as those who were so close to it."

"Tell the jury they were wrong."

"I'm not gonna be in this room when that jury walks in. I'm not going through this and you knew that, your honor. You know how far you can push me..... You wanna make a circus? You got a circus. [points to prosecutor] I'll rain on your parade Jack. You'll see a thunderstorm. This will not be the pat little drama you've arranged."

"[Ted] would walk me out to my car at two in the morning when my shift was over, and he'd say "Ann please lock your doors, I don't want anything bad to happen to you on the way home". Well, I'd just been locked up with probably the most dangerous man in the western states."

"I think I stand as much chance of dying in front of a firing squad or in a gas chamber as you do being killed on a plane flight home. Let's hope you don't."

"The ultimate possession was, in fact, the taking of the life. And then … the physical possession of the remains."

"For everything he did to the girls–the bludgeoning, the strangulation, humiliating their bodies, torturing them–I feel that the electric chair is too good for him."

"I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet."

"But he found himself with this girl who was struggling and screaming. Uh, not screaming, but let’s say just basically arguing with him. There were houses in the vicinity and he was concerned that somebody might hear. And so, in an attempt to stop her from talking or arguing, he placed his hand over her mouth. She stopped and he attempted to remove her clothes and she began to object again. At this point, he was in a state of not just agitation, but something on the order of panic. He was fearing that she would arouse somebody in the vicinity. So, not thinking clearly but still intending not to harm her, let’s say, he placed his hands around her throat… Just to throttle her into unconsciousness so that she wouldn’t scream anymore. She stopped struggling, and it appeared that she was unconscious. But not, in his opinion, to a point where he had killed her... Then let’s say he removed her clothes and raped her and put his own clothes back on. At about that point, he began to notice that the girl wasn’t moving. It appeared, although he wasn’t certain, that he’d done what he had promised himself he wouldn’t do. And he had done it, really, almost inadvertently. Uh, so he took the girl by one of her arms and pulled her to a darkened corner of this little orchard and then, in a fit of panic, fled the scene. He got back in his car and drove back to his house, still not knowing if the girl was alive or dead. But once he returned to the house, upon reflection he began to wonder. He didn’t know if he’d left anything at the crime scene. He hadn’t thought about publicity and physical evidence. So he decided to return to the scene and if the body was there to recover it and take it somewhere else where it wouldn’t be found."

"Most prisoners are perfectly mentally healthy compared with the paranoia of prison officials."

"In a captive environment, paranoia is unavoidable. Only the prison authorities call it paranoia; prisoners call it sensible precautions."

"I can't stand feeble, robotic psychiatrists. They give you false drugs and turn you into a zombie."

"It's the theatricality, Wuthering Heights, Hound of the Baskervilles."

"You're just a package. You're in a cage and people poke you with a stick."

"I believe the term ‘serial killer’ is highly misleading, in that it implicitly suggests to the general public that murder is the paramount object or motivating urge in the mind of the killer … They naturally attribute this motivation partly because they value human life above all else, and partly because, as their endless fascination with the subject suggests, they have a vague conception of murder as being somehow mystical, highly dramatic, or even a nebulously romantic experience, replete with unimaginable connotations of eroticism. And guilt for it must be paid for in full."

"[Churchill's wartime menus] show him slurping bottles of whisky, champagne [and] brandy with every sumptuous meal, while the underclass fought and starved for the privilege of poverty and unemployment. Thankfully, the Germans bombed Glasgow back to full employment. Even in the 1960s Earl Mountbatten was prosecuted for adding water to the milk on his farm so you can imagine how the landed gentry 'rationed' themselves during the war."

"Trivia and pettiness consume mankind, surely the most pretentious creation of all."

"Anybody who sends human aid, please make sure that it reaches hungry and homeless people not to people who will rent BMW M3"

"scs-net filter (Syrian version of the great firewall of china) is blocking everything. why we can't get a good internet connection in Syria?"

"Dubai is now reduced to its component sounds: do-buy"

"Life is spent looking while never seeing"

"HackerSpaces are not for cracking, would you mind googlling that before writing complaints?"

"Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects"

"want to start building an open source cross-social-networks prediction RESTful API using aiki"

"Trustonomy: the trust economy"

"Aiki lab is a place for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning."

"Got a legal approve from the Syrian government for Aiki Lab the first hackerspace in the Arab world. starting very soon in Damascus"