She had another insight. It came to her while watching Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. The main character, played by Robert De Niro, was a veteran living on the edge. After being rebuffed by the woman he loves, he decides to kill the presidential candidate she works for—either to impress her or devastate her. Kelly was never completely sure of his motivation, and it didn’t matter anyway. Toward the end of the film, the guy fails to kill the candidate, and out of frustration he goes on a killing spree in a tough part of town, in which he slays a number of pimps and drug dealers. Because he is shot and wounded in the process, in the final scenes he is recognized by New York City as a major hero.

The point? The line between hero and villain was paper thin.

Her thesis? Serial killers were not so different than the major villains in literature that had just missed becoming heroes. Certainly most of these people—real or imagined—started out wanting to be heroes. The killers simply made a few wrong turns along the way.

Her theory was outrageous, it had a thousand holes in it, and yet as soon as she started researching and writing it, she saw she could run with it. The examples in mythology were numberless. In fact, it was hard to find a hero who had not almost fucked up his life, or the lives of those close to him. One could go as far back as Homer. The old bard had instinctively understood that Ulysses needed several years to cool off before he could return home. Kelly had great fun writing a section that analyzed his desire to steer his men near the bone-strewn shores of the Sirens’ inhospitable island. She posed the simple question in her thesis: what kind of sadistic nut would do such a thing?

She wrote the line half in jest but, hey, she figured, the fossilized academics above her needed a jolt just to know they were still alive. Her dissertation was entitled “Heroes and Villains,” and no one was more surprised than she when a mere month after handing in her paper, Princeton granted her a Ph.D.

So the story might have ended there. Three years later she was married, living in New York City with dashing Tony and little Anna, and teaching creative writing and mythology at NYU. She would have liked to say she was happy. On her list of things to accomplish in life, she had already crossed off the top five.

Yet Kelly was bored out of her skull.