True Crime

The killers inside us and the spies next door.

True crime books are not usually read for their intellectual heft. People look to them for sensation rather than deep thoughts. Two new books, however, not only combine crime and intellectual heft, they do it in such unexpected ways they could well become classics of the genre. Distinctive classics, too: One of the authors is a cerebral, apparently stable university researcher; the other is a disgraced journalist.

A Hard-Wired Impulse

In The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill (Penguin Press, $24.95), David M. Buss applies evolutionary theory to explain modern murder. A University of Texas psychology professor, he became drawn to the gruesome project, he writes, after witnessing a friend "fly into a murderous rage one night at a cocktail party." Until that night, Buss believed his friend to be a peaceful man in a happy marriage. So why did he suddenly seem capable of killing his wife?

Buss found himself questioning his belief that "only crazy or desperate people . . . or people brought up in subcultures of violence that have desensitized them" think about committing murder. As he studied the research of others and launched seven years of his own investigations, he developed a view of homicide as a survival strategy hard-wired into the human mind. It had little, if anything, he concluded, to do with the usual contemporary villains -- media violence, pornography, drugs, poverty. Societies predating television, meth epidemics and urban ghettos experienced murder rates equal to or exceeding today's.

Buss's meticulously designed and controlled research studies began informally when he asked students to complete a questionnaire that included the inquiry "Have you ever thought about killing someone?" The replies astonished him.

"Nothing had prepared me for the outpouring of murderous thoughts my students reported," Buss says. "These were intelligent, well-scrubbed, mostly middle-class kids, not the gang members or troubled runaways one might expect to express violent rage. Yet most of them had experienced at least one intense episode in which they had fantasized about killing someone."

Buss launched a study of homicidal fantasies in more than 5,000 people around the globe. His findings suggested that about 91 percent of men and about 84 percent of women, across cultures, think at some point about murdering a specific person; some act on those thoughts. Using his own data and supplementing it with a synthesis of others' research, Buss developed a theory encompassing murders from crimes of passion to premeditated contract killings.

Murder "can be explained by the twists and turns of a harsh evolutionary logic," he writes. "Killing is surely ruthless, but it is also most often not the result of either psychosis or cultural conditioning. Murder is a product of the evolutionary pressures our species confronted and adapted to."

In fact, Buss argues, murder has been so constant in nearly every society for thousands of years -- and so beneficial to human evolution -- that "the real mystery is . . . why killing has not been more prevalent." He suggests an answer to that mystery, as well: "The evolution of the psychology of murder has been like an arms race: in response to the threat of murder, we've developed a well-honed set of defenses against it, and they have acted as powerful deterrents."

As Buss unveils the subtleties of his theory -- debunking traditional explanations for domestic violence, for example -- his contravening of the conventional wisdom on murder shows promise of becoming the new conventional wisdom.

Shades of Truth

Michael Finkel's True Story (HarperCollins, $25.95) -- an unusual but effective amalgam of murder investigation, memoir and media criticism -- focuses on two men rather than all humanity.

One is a murderer-next-door in the Buss mold: Christian Longo, a seemingly pleasant, accomplished man accused of killing his wife and three young children in small-town Oregon. The other is Finkel himself, a contributor of hard-edged features to the New York Times Sunday magazine who was caught fabricating a character while reporting from the African nation of Ivory Coast.

Fired and disgraced, Finkel was about to isolate himself in his Bozeman, Mont., home when he received a surprise call from a reporter at the Oregonian newspaper in Portland. Finkel steeled himself for questions about the end of his career. But the reporter knew nothing about that. He wanted to interview Finkel about Longo, the murder suspect, who had fled to Mexico and adopted Finkel's identity as a disguise.