As they say, denial is a helluva drug.
Isn't it? Plus, these killers (and rapists and others) keep on such a mask. They are good (maybe not excellent) observers, who are able to mimic being normal. And they probably try to convince themselves they are going to become normal.
I am guessing there are precipitating factors in this murderer's final breakdown. Such as poor grades, having to attend a real university with actual fellow students, living away from parental support, having his ideas challenged by someone, being in a position to continue some of his earlier behaviors (that are not legal) into a new situation.
Parents had no clue how far he could go. No one did.
Very interesting post and ideas.
My 5p take on the "survey" was that it read as oddly amateurish and poorly-constructed for generating useful qualitative content. I'm a bit surprised that something like it would be approved for post-graduate release and am not sure how it would have passed required ethics boards or been deployed within subject populations (source: I research, teach and supervise at an R15 uni).
BK is likely IMO to a planning thrill-killer a la Stephen McDaniel, someone who sees himself though a Nietzschean and/or fanfiction lens, and for whom the act of murder is a heroic act of self-knowing, and the ultimate subversion of stuffy social moresm blah blah blah.
It's all boll*cks of course, and he will also be the guy who gets het up about someone queue-jumping at an ice-cream stand, but my guess is that when the truth of his "** why ** emerges, it will be sad, stupid and self-glorifying, and won't enlarge human knowledge one whit.
And it was the white Elantra, after all. Fine work by LE and I look forward to the day when we can all forget BK and remember the dead.
Well yes. But have you heard professors writing and speaking about this very problem? First of all, his was not the most rigorous course of study (and he was still in school at 28 and we have only that survey as evidence of his "research.")
Oddly amateurish? Yes, but with good professors, that wouldn't have happened, IMO. And with a strong university that has a human subjects protocol, he'd have never gotten anywhere near using that survey.
I think we'll find some ideological component to these crimes. And it won't enlarge our understanding of humans-in-general at all, but might make some people - especially college students - more suspicious of the people around them (not necessarily a good thing).
What this case does do is reinforce that LE, with its techniques, knows what it's doing after all.