The rarer kind, the organized killers, are the ones who tend to be smarter than the average person. The Unabomber is a textbook example of that. His targets were chosen well in advance and his method, a bomb, was designed to allow him to murder from far away. Bombers tend to be the highest-IQ killers you come across. It takes intense planning and discipline. Of course that could be self-selecting. The dumb bombers usually only end up killing themselves.

Less premeditated, but intelligent and opportunist, are killers like John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, who were almost in plain sight. They knew enough to stay ahead of suspicion. And when it fell on them, they were so much cleverer than the average killer, the usual rules didn’t apply to catching them.

Understanding the difference between criminal minds is at the core of FBI behavioral analysis. But being able to describe someone isn’t the same as being able to catch them or really understand them.

A criminology professor once shared with us a disturbing statistic. He plotted out the average IQ scores of various professions. He drew a circle around law enforcement: 104. Above average, but not by much. He then explained the amount of deviation from this number was very small and the chances of someone with an IQ in the 150 or genius range working in this field are almost infinitesimal.

If you throw five hundred law enforcement officers after one highly organized killer, statistically speaking not one of them is going to be as smart as him. When you’re dealing with someone like the Unabomber, not one in ten thousand.

The key, he reminded us, wasn’t being smarter. It’s being persistent. It was logic. Smarter isn’t always an advantage. You could beat a Doberman in a battle of wits on Jeopardy!, but not if you’re locked in a room with one.

Generally, you catch the less intelligent, disorganized killers because they screw up and get caught with a body in the trunk or their intended victim manages to escape. They leave lots of forensic evidence that makes it easy to connect them to their crime.

Organized killers take much longer to find. You have to decipher their patterns and you can often spend years narrowing down suspects. Sniffing them out like a dog in a hunt. Ted Bundy’s name cropped up lots of times as a potential suspect, along with hundreds of other names. There’s no way to know which one is the real bad guy until you get a lucky break. With the Unabomber, it came because he wanted the world to hear his manifesto. It was his estranged brother who saw the connection. The physical evidence didn’t lead us to him, his ego did. The manifesto was his scent.

At first glance, the Warlock is all ego. The attention we’re giving to this asshole is starting to make a little more sense to me. Only one presumed victim, but he’s shown himself equally adept at two areas of crime that take high IQs. He hacked one of the most well-protected networks in the world, and he committed what looks like a highly organized murder.