The next day she visited the bookstore and picked up a half dozen tomes on cults and their leaders. Mostly they concentrated on the usual list of suspects: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and so on. Once again she was impressed by how these people saw themselves as heroes. Not an earthshaking revelation, to be sure, but it piqued her interest. Koresh, Manson, and Jones were never described as serial killers. They had caused pain and death to their victims but they were labeled cult leaders. That was their designated title and no one seemed to want to debate the issue.

But how did they relate to serial killers?

The next day she was back at the bookstore and bought a dozen paperbacks on serial killers. She was a fast reader—it took her three days to devour the material. At the end of that time she was struck by what she considered a revelation. No matter how the FBI or the police sought to describe the motivation of a serial killer, they invariably came back to a single theme: these single white intelligent males committed murder to “get off.”

Sexually.

It was admittedly a crude interpretation. The famed FBI profiler, John Douglas, had spent years developing the sacred trinity that described such people: manipulation, domination, control. Yet those qualities—from the killer’s point of view—were still ultimately aimed at achieving sexual satisfaction.

But Kelly thought the core assumption too simplistic.

She felt serial killers and cult leaders were directly related.

Most successful serial killers were voracious readers. As a prelude to their killing sprees, they almost invariably developed a bizarre sense of what was good, what was evil. Few serial killers, when caught, would acknowledge they had done wrong.

For that reason, Kelly felt it was their distorted outlook of good and evil that gave them the strength to commit their cruel deeds, rather than the need for sexual release.

At the same time, she did not dismiss the system John Douglas and other profilers at Quantico had developed to evaluate killers. She merely thought the messiah component a missing piece of the puzzle. Her theory could be boiled down to a single sentence: serial killers felt they were acting righteously when they murdered.

It was just a theory. Maybe she was wrong.

But how to translate the idea into a mythology thesis?

One that her department heads would buy.