While I have no qualification to speak to this subject directly, it struck me while glancing through the local newspaper so I thought I would share.

It seems curious to me that once a mass murderer/serial killer/what-have-you is apprehended they are subjected to multiple interviews/interrogations lasting several hours over the span of days, weeks, potentially months/years until they decide what to do with said individual. What are they hoping to glean from these questionings? It seems almost funny to communicate after the fact. Admittedly there is no knowing who's at-risk/on-edge (thought police?), but it's a safe bet if there had been someone in this person's life with whom they could regularly communicate and establish a healthy social/emotional bond with they would likely be capable of empathy or whatever it is that distills our desires and tames our id. They will often admit, no one could help me or there was nothing that could be done- but that seems disingenuous. Perhaps their psychotic fuse was lit before they were fully capable of cognition and recollection or maybe repressed from memory, but there must be a cause and effect.

The first law of thermodynamics states, "Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only change forms."

In quoting that I thought I had definitively proven myself and sufficiently exhausted this line of reasoning, but the last clause brings up an interesting point. These deviant personas are not created or destroyed, but the individual transmutes into their deviant behavior. I guess that would be a possible way to explain the catatonic state some of the accused are found in (a la Sirhan Sirhan). Assuming this were the case, what is to be said of the persona shift? Where else is it observed? Can it be quantified? It seems improbable for instantaneous behavioral change to exist without external influence (a la Phineas Gage).

I withdrawal, I guess the exhaustive questioning is justified because now I am scratching my head asking simple questions probing for a deeper meaning, because it seems to simple to pass it off as a nature/nurture thing and rather obtuse to believe it operates like a light switch especially when it's been documented that most killers have a history of violence. But what do we say of the lone postman? Clearly that was a break, but it involved some amount of premeditation and planning as most individuals do not carry machine guns on their person ("Just in case...").