As new details tumble out about the macabre murder of 26-year-old Shraddha Walker by Aaftab Ameen Poonawala, who chopped her up into 35 pieces, it seems he picked up the dismemberment technique from the TV show Dexter. Dexter, is an American crime drama television series in which a forensic blood spatter analyst called Dexter Morgan leads a secret parallel life as a vigilante serial killer, hunting down murderers who have not been adequately punished by the justice system due to corruption or legal technicalities.
Canadian independent filmmaker Mark Andrew Twitchell was so inspired by Dexter that he created his own plot line, which he shot as a short film about a vigilante murder. Fortunately, he was caught after his first killing and, in 2011, sentenced to life in prison.
A copycat crime is one that is modelled after or inspired by a previous crime that has been reported in the media or published in fiction. Few copycat crimes are fully replicated. Instead, the imitator lifts and copies certain elements — the modus operandi, the setting, the technique — of the original crime.
Intense media coverage of the Jack the Ripper murders in 1912 spawned a multitude of similar crimes, and the term “copycat effect” came into being.
Here, it’s mostly about understanding a killer’s psychology. It is fascinating to see what creates a monster out of a human being. A traumatic childhood, an imbalanced response to certain situations like grief, loss, betrayal — what is that one trigger that switches off a person’s humanity and turns him/her into a cold-blooded murderer?
Despite thousands of professionals studying psychology and trying to decipher how the human mind works, there will never be a fixed formula for how a person reacts to a situation. For instance, how do you react when you have a fight with your partner? Perhaps they wanted to take the relationship a step forward, but you didn’t. You could end the relationship and either stay in touch to ease the pain or completely cut off from them. You could also have a discussion and see if both of you could meet midway and move at a slower pace to meet each other’s expectations.
The steady drip feed of news about Shraddha Walkar’s murder by Aaftab Ameen Poonawala, after initial shock and horror, is veering towards analysis. The questions now are why he did what he did. Why was she murdered? Well, possible motives for murder are profit, revenge, jealousy, to conceal a crime, to avoid humiliation & disgrace or plain, old homicidal mania. Right there in the manual. It is a general perception from psychiatrists that “most criminals are psychopaths”.
Poonawala allegedly looked at Walkar’s head in the fridge every day and used dating apps after the killing. Dr Anil Kumar, who stitched the wound on his forearm right after he murdered Walkar on May 18, remembered him as “arrogant, hyper, aggressive and confident”. The overriding shock though is his “confidence and coolness” even after being caught.
Take the case of Jeffrey Dahmer. He started killing in 1978, just 18 years old, and wasn’t arrested for murder until 1991, after a would-be victim escaped and led police back to Dahmer’s Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home. Photos of mutilated bodies and body parts strewn across the apartment were seen. He even had a vat of acid he used to dispose of victims. In all, Dahmer killed 17 people, mostly young men of color. He served time in prison twice — the first time for molestation and the second time for murder — and was killed by a fellow inmate in 1994.
A construction worker, John Wayne Gacy, was involved in politics and even acted as a clown for birthday parties. Gacy came under suspicion in 1978 when a 15-year-old boy, last seen with him, went missing. Soon after, a search warrant granted police access to the Gacy home. They found 30 bodies buried in a four-foot crawl space under his home. He was convicted of 33 counts of murder, with additional counts of rape and torture. He was executed by lethal injection in 1994.
Twelve years before Shraddha Walkar’s murder shook the country, Dehradun lived its own nightmare with the Anupama Gulati killing, in which her husband sawed her body into 72 pieces and froze them, before dumping them over several days. The two horrific murders have several aspects in common. It is believed that they not only reveal the brutality of the killers but also the fact that the murders were premeditated, and not committed in a fit of rage. Such murders do not happen out of the blue. Signals begin to manifest in the form of quarrels and acts of domestic violence. The killers in both the cases did not just use a saw to chop the body but also used a fridge or a deep freezer to hide the pieces and the foul smell.
Just as Walkar’s killer Aaftab Poonawala kept going to the forest area of Chhatarpur after midnight to dispose the body parts, Anupama Gulati’s husband Rajesh Gulati went to the Mussoorie diversion on Rajpur Road for days to dump them in a drain. In both cases, the killers were clever enough to not let any of their neighbours get a wind of the gruesome crime for months. Anupama Gulati’s husband misled her family and friends by sending them messages from her mail ID. Poonawala kept updating Shraddha Walkar’s social media status for weeks.
At a webinar on the “Role of personality traits in serial killing” organised by the Kozhikode-based Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (IMHNS) on 16 November 2022, they analysed the cause of murder and the psychological state of the killer. Addressing the webinar, Disaster Mental Health Expert and Advisor to National Mental Health Programme, Naresh Purohit on Wednesday said this crime, as of now, shows that the accused must’ve killed his girlfriend in a fit of rage without thinking of the repercussions. And the cutting of the body for disposal must’ve come as a survival instinct to cover his tracks and avoid an arrest, Purohit added explaining the chopping into 35 pieces, which Aaftab tried disposing of at different locations in and around the national capital. He categorically said personality traits play a bigger role in serial killing. Accused must’ve done what he did in the moment of rage due to pent up furry against his girlfriend.
When psychopaths watch a movie or a web series, their first choice is to see some violence in them and learn new methods of crime. So that they can execute any crime very well. It is worrying that a person does not even know that he is suffering from this disease.
Mental health professionals take a larger look at this man, who seemed urbane and urban as they try to get into the mind of a killer, who even now, as cops said, “ he is remorseless; slept well in the lock up and ate fine, at least 3/4 chapatis.”
It’s a scary trend that desensitises people towards human life. Instead of glorifying serial killers and turning them into Halloween costumes, we should treat them as examples of what not to do and how not to deal with emotional traumas of our own, if we wish to stay away from the world of crime and murder.
Dr S Krishnan is an Associate Professor in Seedling School of Law and Governance, Jaipur National University, Jaipur.