Some homicide defendants complain that "voices" made them do it. Forensic examination reveals that they were sane at the time of the act. When it is determined that they had no prior history of the kind of mental illness that would produce auditory hallucinations, they are thought to be malingering.

An alternative explanation is that the defendant was the victim of a hoax and was under the influence of electronic psychological coercion. These electronic systems are used in several ways to bring about psychological coercion. They are used to send subliminal word streams. The defendant-victim is completely unaware of the persistent mental training with these subliminal instruction sets. They are programmed into the subconscious mind months or even years before the criminal act. The training is used to create a guided obsession. It works like a post-hypnotic suggestion. When a certain event comes to pass, it triggers the hidden obsession. At this point, the defendant-victim may hear voices telling him to kill. The voices are coming from memory. They are triggered by the subliminal instruction sets in his subconscious mind. After the homicide, the memory of it may evoke voices. This is a traumatic memory. Sometimes trauma of memory reveals the original instruction sets. Remembering a subliminal instruction is not an auditory hallucination. It is like remembering a song from a recording. This kind of memory is not a recurrent dream as in PTSD. It is an evoked memory.

The PTSD is indicated by strong feelings of helplessness, guilt, or self-loathing in the defendant. The defendant remains confused. He did not really want to commit the crime. Because he was insidiously coerced, he has a special kind of post traumatic stress disorder. The case of David Berkowitz is a good illustration of this post coercion stress disorder. It is strikingly similar to Kip Kinkel's experience. Berkowitz was the "Son of Sam" serial killer in New York City. "Voices" directed him. He developed a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. This is not a standard criminal type. Berkowitz was the first documented case of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality in the history of crime (Abrahamsen, pp. 185-186). Jekyll and Hyde was not a multiple personality. As of 1985, only 20 persons in the last twenty-five years had multiple personality and even some of these could be role playing (Abrahamsen, p. 196).

Berkowitz's Jekyll and Hyde roles were not a dissociation. In multiple personality, one can't remember what the other did, but Berkowitz had excellent memory of his killings (Abrahamsen, p. 197) This vivid awareness of bad deeds leads to his defensiveness. With his alertness, he could not "imagine that 'Son of Sam thoughts' could have displaced his normal consciousness or commandeered his behavior." (Abrahamsen, p. 198). "His behavior had the superficial markings of a double personality, but at its core it was role playing, the performance shaped by his hysterical personality." (Abrahamsen, p. 198).

A Jekyll and Hyde syndrome is what one would expect to find when psychological coercion has mentally forced defendants to do something that they otherwise would not have done. At his sentencing hearing, Kinkel said that he had a profound self-loathing. Berkowitz had a lot of self-loathing. Self-loathing was the the cause of Berkowitz's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde behavior (Abrahamsen, pp. 190-192). The latent self-loathing started long before the arraignment. It was not a result of being caught.

"A child hates himself because he doesn't feel liked by others. He therefore thinks there is something wrong with him." (Abrahamsen, p. 192). This is very much an effect of standard isolation and coercion techniques of intelligence operations which affect young people. Kinkel came from a good family. He loved his parents. The subliminal training and electronic "voices" made him think that he was no good. Berkowitz was an adopted child, but that is not enough to explain how his testing of reality was disturbed. His pschological well being was damaged by a mind control system.

Electronic psychological coercion leaves signs which can be recognized by medical experts. The coercion system targets the language processing centers of the brain. This can cause an immediate impairment of concentration for reading and writing. This can lead to a reading disability as it did with Kip Kinkel (State v. Kinkel, pp. 644-651, 739, 741). Kinkel was very poor at spelling. This was in contrast to his high intelligence. Spelling is poor when there is auditory impairment. Persistent streams of subliminal words targeting the hearing center of the brain could cause this. Kinkel had good visual perception, but a low visual memory. Subliminal training pictures which target the vision center of the brain could cause this.

At the time of the case, it was thought that Kinkel had a developmental schizophrenia. No one thought of an external cause. The language processing areas are impaired in schizophrenia. After he was incarcerated, his schizophrenia started to get better (State v. Kinkel, 374-375, 389). Normally, developmental or process schizophrenia does not get better. The schizophrenic symptoms were caused by thej electronic coercion.

Berkowitz had a very high level of anxiety. Kinkel had an elevated anxiety scale on the MMPI-A (State v. Kinkel, p. 373).

The psychological coercion at an early age probably causes an impairment of social maturity. Berkowitz had psychological testing after the killings. He had bright scores on the Wechsler intelligence test. The exception was a low score on the Picture Arrangements subtest. This indicates low social intelligence. (Abrahamsen, p. 149)

Berkowitz and Kinkel both reported hearing command voices. They have a kind of internal loudness, though coming from an external location. Kinkel experienced this beginning at age twelve (State v. Kinkel, p. 387). Command voices are an unusual technique. They electronically target a part of the brain that processes hearing. They are used for making the defendant appear insane. They are intended to be perceived by the victim and are probably not subliminal. A command or communication electronic voice is not the same as a programmed obsessional voice which is evoked by an incident. The obsessional voice is programmed ahead of time.

This is what happened to Kinkel. His dad picked him up from school. He was likely to be expelled. His dad said, "You disgust me." Then the voices started. He dad was probably programmed to say those words. This triggering of an obsession led directly to his killing his dad that day. Kinkel did not know why he could not refuse the command to kill. "They kept saying it to me. It didn't seem real." (State v. Kinkel, pp. 409-411).

Kinkel did not realize his reason for killing was irrational (State v. Kinkel, pp. 433-436). Command voices are combined with the creation of delusions. The defendant is trained with subliminal instruction sets. These remain repressed in his memory. He will act them out thinking it was his own idea. Later, he perceives command voices telling him to perform similar acts. He thinks he is doing what the voices command. This is only partly true. He has already been trained with subliminal instructions and fantasies. He has far less control than he thinks he does. The command voices are a part of the hoax. They might be described as "demons" or messages from extraterrestrials or some other explanation. It is part of the hoax to conceal the electronic source that is penetrating the inner ear with communication signals which mimic the effect of thinking words. The defendant holds on to the delusion because he can't discover the source of the signals.

Kinkel was convinced that China was going to invade the U.S. Therefore, he had a stockpile of weapons and explosives (State v. Kinkel, pp. 402-403, 673). He was persistently harassed in bizarre circumstances by a man who threatened to kill him. Therefore, he bought an illegal weapon. The harassment really happened, but no one else took it seriously (State v. Kinkel, pp. 407-408). Yet, when he talked about it later, Kinkel did not really know why he wanted to buy the gun and keep it in his locker at school (State v. Kinkel, pp. 95-96).

Kinkel had the behavior of a person who was playing a role from which he could not escape. On the way to the school cafeteria to shoot anyone he could find, he told a student he liked to stay out of the cafeteria. After Kinkel shot his parents, he answered a telephone call from his teacher and conducted a normal conversation as if nothing was amiss. Kinkel was temporarily psychotic.

Another indication of the perpetration of delusions is the use of nuisances as cover stories. The defendant does not guess that he is the object of an intelligence operation. For example, hidden subliminal training directed Berkowitz to rent a particular apartment. He feels inexplicably motivated. It was a transient obsession. When he inquired about renting, the landlord informed him of a potential nuisance, but he ignored the warning. Later, dogs barking in the neighborhood during all of his sleeping hours became an intolerable situation. The landlord professed an inability to control the situation.

Subtle electronic impairment of the defendant's tranquillity is the most important cause of the defendant's mental torture, yet, the nuisances remain the apparent causes. They are blown out of proportion. The defendant has no reliable witnesses. He becomes more isolated and is convinced that no one is taking his complaints seriously.

Berkowitz's neighbor had his TV turned up to loud. It drove Berkowitz crazy. Yet, he was afraid to knock on his neighbor's door and tell him. He was incapable of give and take. This reinforced a violent response (Abrahamsen, p. 174).

After incarceration, the voices and obsessions gradually go away. The traumatic voices linger and may be difficult to distinguish form evoked memories. Berkowitz' mental condition improved after arrest. As the months went by, he seemed to recover quickly. The voices which he described as demons went away. A real mental illness is not like this. To Abrahamsen, this was evidence that his stories about demons were malingering. This seemed plausible because Berkowitz just happened to have a character that is given to exaggeration and self-deception (Abrahamsen, pp. 145-146, 155).

The defendant gradually comes to see the fallacy of the artificially created delusions. Transitory or situational delusions are not really delusions (Abrahamsen, p. 136). As Abrahamsen observed, "A psychosis cannot be turned on or off at will -- unless of course it is a sham." (Abrahamsen, p. 121).

Abrahamsen, David, Confessions of Son of Sam, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.

Bentall RP, Slade PD, "Reality testing and auditory hallucinations: a signal detection analysis," British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 1985, 24(3):159-169.

State v. Kinkel, Kipland P., Sentencing Hearing Transcript, Oregon Court of Appeals, Salem.

Copyright © 2004 Daniel A. Montgomery

Dan Montgomery
P.O. Box 40624
Eugene, OR 97404
kryptox@sonic.net