Then What?

John Hinckley, Jr.

The Graduate, one of the archetypal movies of my generation, ends with Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson on the back seat of a bus. He has just won her back at her wedding, they have evaded their malevolent relatives, and they are now finally free of everyone else’s expectations and dictates. Gradually and wordlessly, however, their expressions of love and giddy exhileration turn more serious as they seem to contemplate the question:

Now what?

They have no money, Benjamin has abandoned his car, they have alienated everyone they know, Elaine’s only clothing is the white wedding gown she is wearing, and they are on a local bus!

To a large extent, this question also permeates the field of behavioral analysis and explicates the minds of certain types of criminals criminals.

Yesterday, we looked at the case of Anthony Brinkman, the Missouri man who arranged on the Internet to have his 11-year-old daughter beaten and raped while he looked on. Fortunately, he was actually dealing with an undercover cyber cop and when he arrived at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in St. Louis to deliver the child, he was immediately arrested.

But aside from the obvious horror of this scenario, we have to ask: What if his scheme had worked? What if he had been able to watch and get off on this little girl being beaten and sexually assaulted? Then what? Was he intending to return home with her and continue “normal” life? My guess is that he never even thought it through.

John Hinckley had elaborate plans in 1981 for winning the heart of his dream girl, actress Jodie Foster. Before he decided to shoot a president – first Carter, and when that didn’t work out, Reagan – he had developed a scheme to hijack an airplane and trade the hostages for Foster. Let’s say, completely improbably, it had worked: He would order the plane to go somewhere. Then what? He and Jodie would live happily ever after?

Seven years before, Samuel Byck had hijacked a plane on the ground at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and ordered the pilot to take off. When the pilot responded that he couldn’t move the plane as long as the wheel chocks were in place, Byck shot him and the co-pilot. Then what? Did he know how to fly a plane? No.

In Byck’s case, this was symptomatic of the mental disintegration of someone obsessed with and plagued by his own insignificance. In Hinckley’s case, it was a desperate attempt to match the stature of a woman who outclassed him in every conceivable way. And in Brinkman’s case, who knows? I suspect his obsession with his sexual fantasy was so strong that everything else in life took a backseat.

The distinction in all of these cases and many more we could cite is that these were obsessional, as opposed to “rational” crimes. A rational crime has some potential tangible benefit to the perpetrator – normally acquiring money or other valuables. An obsessional or predatory crime has little rationale about it. It is either performed to give the offender a kind of emotional satisfaction or completion he gets from nothing else in his life, or else to increase his own sense of his status. This is true of most assassins, who very seldom have any real political motive for their actions.

In either instance the logic will only go so far. There can be long-term and meticulous planning. But once the goal has been achieved – a sexual fantasy involving children, taking over an airplane, impressing a beautiful young actress – the planning process breaks down, and logic with it.

If these kinds of potential criminals could just see their way clear to ask themselves, “Then what?”, a lot of tragedy could be avoided.

•