FWIW:
Today was the first day of fall semester and I presented a "blind hypothetical" to my professor of aberrant psychology, a Ph.D and clinical psychologist. I asked her the following:
-If a young man with an apparently average and more likely high IQ and no overt signs of learning disability were to have presented with odd behaviors such as growing his nails long, scratching and hissing at classmates in adolescence/high school while being relatively awkward and introverted socially but not completely socially crippled, what would your initial thoughts be?
She said [and I quote, because I wrote it down]:
-"Hissing/scratching behaviors at that age are clear indications of a problem, no way around it, and I would suspect the boy would have had issues reaching all the way back into early child hood. Depending on the context it could be Schizotypal PD, that's what those set of traits most closely resemble to me, or even early signs of schizophrenia but I would need more information"
I added:
-"What if said young man were to be heavily immersed, like plenty of other adolescents and young adults, in fantasy genre, going so far as to have created his own elvish language and writing fantasy novels? Would that mitigate/explain his eccentric behavior in your view given the DSM's mention of 'subcultural norms?'"
Her response:
-"No, not necessarily, I would lean toward signs of a developing schizotypal personality perhaps, if he had no positive or negative symptoms I wouldn't go so far as to say schizophrenia but schizotypal personality disorder can often, not in all cases but it can develop into schizophrenia later on. At any rate I'd say he'd need help, pretty seriously"
I then filled her in on who and what I was talking about, describing what we do know of SMD's behaviors via observers as well as his academic accomplishments, the murder charge, etc. She didn't comment on guilt or innocence, but said she felt that if he were guilty, in her professional opinion he'd certainly need help in some capacity as her main reaction was schizotypal PD. Add violence/murder to the equation she also felt comorbid antisocial PD was likely.
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Additional thoughts:
If the condom thefts were indeed fetishistic in nature, I would say this is a good pointer to SMD's signature. Signature and MO differ in that the signature reveals the emotional drive behind the crime, while the MO is the method used to carry out the crime. His signature in terms of the condom thefts would be quite revealing regarding the motive behind Lauren's slaying.
After reading over Anatomy of Motive by legendary FBI profiler John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, I also feel that a guilty SMD would best fit the description of an internalizer who Douglas describes as among the greatest cowards of all offenders. Internalizers are very often arsonists or bombers, because they must remove themselves a degree from the crime and the victim, but many one-on-one murderers are internalizers as well. In the latter case, they will try to blitz or incapacitate their victim rather than to face them for a prolonged period or torture them while alive. This way they avoid witnessing the possible judgement of their victim. They don't want that, they want to skip that part and fulfill their fantasy without feelings of inadequacy plaguing them at that moment. It is, in essence, a masturbatory experience.
I also agree with an earlier poster who commented that the end of his time as a student and the beginning of life in the ''real world'' where he'd actually have to use social skills and abide certain social norms could have been part of what triggered him to act out, but victimology is far too important to ignore in a case like this, so I do believe something about Lauren in particular was also a stressor, and it was likely her impending departure, imo. Most likely, barring some event we are unaware of, it was a combination of the two.The two most common triggers are loss of job/station in life and loss of love.
