posted August 12, 2015 03:49 PM            

Can you 'see' the fascination in your synastry? Does it give you any clues as to WHY that fascination came about - or what it 'means'?

As I've mentioned in several posts, I'm passionate about history, and I'm pretty much obsessive about my research. I've always felt a peculiar sense of affinity with some historical figures, but when I discovered the topic of my current research, I felt the kind of pull I've never felt before. This was it. There was no going back. Several people from this specific period pull me towards them: ones I like and ones I don't like, it doesn't seem to make much difference. I feel like I *know* them, even when there's little that can be known about them.

There are two, a married couple, towards whom I feel as strongly as towards the people I love in 'real life'. I LOVE them as if they were family, though I try to keep them at a distance because I don't want to get emotional about research; I don't want my judgment to be clouded.

Curiously, there is also someone, an enemy of this couple, towards whom I should feel a great antipathy - but I don't. I try to muster the deep dislike, but fail. I feel like I know him, too. I don't approve of what he did, but I'm fascinated by him as well. I want him to reveal his secrets to me. Bizarrely, I feel like I ought to help him somehow (?!) though he may be guilty of some absolutely terrible things.

But it's odd that my fascination is quite 'selective'. At the heart of my research there are also other people, people who hold keys to various mysteries, but while I want to know what they know, I don't feel the same way about them. There doesn't seem to be any way to predict towards whom I feel this 'affinity'. It's either there or it isn't. It doesn't matter whose side they're on, either: they may be friend or foe.

posted August 12, 2015 07:55 PM            

Yep.

Theodore Robert Bundy. You might say I cut my teeth on that profile. It all started when our final assignment for Forensic Psychology was due -- constructing a profile of a known signature killer, using whichever method we selected. As I was also in a correspondence programme via the FBI Academy (NCAVC), I chose the method popularised by a criminologist and profiler for which I have immense respect: Robert K Ressler.

I hated being fascinated with such a 'pedestrian' profile; who wasn't still shocked and confounded by that man-slash-monster? It was so ... passe. And yet, I couldn't deny it, either. Since day one, I had a special fascination with understanding that monster's particular brand of madness.

The power had gone out. Everyone was milling about in the hallways, carrying on. I had been so slammed with my Constitution of the Criminal Process course, which, known to our prof as 'law school lite' in which he promised to 'utterly destroy us, just like law school' (but, really, he meant well) and writing a brief on Miranda, that it was due in three days. So, I stayed inside, wracking my brain for insight, hoping that I'd be able to write a bang-up something when the lights kicked back on.

And I still had precious little.

Because Bundy was an enigma and a chameleon. Nobody knew Bundy. But after that night ... I knew him better than I ever even wanted to.

I don't know what happened. I honestly can't say. Being from a family that's prone to what I now understand as psychic experiences, and, having been thoroughly evaluated and deemed sane and credible, I hesitate to say something supernatural occurred, but then the alternative is being bonkers -- so, we'll go with the former.

I saw everything. I felt his presence in the pitch black of the room. I felt it. Thoughts flew to my head, and I suddenly knew things I didn't before. And I saw them. I saw them smile, and their smiles turn to terror. I saw the perfect middle part of their bone straight hair, always brunette, as he murdered his ex-girlfriend, the one who broke his heart in the wake of the trauma that split him apart completely from that point onward, over and over again, in each and every girl. How he made them pay -- relentlessly -- for her initial 'crime'.

With the lights back on, I was soon transcribing the words of a spectre. Some bizarre amalgam of whatever I'd seen or experienced and had remembered. And the fury -- ohhh, the fury that filled me. A curious marriage of Will Graham and Alison DuBois. A reluctant painter whose canvas is misery, tragedy, and death, for which the medium is ... righteous indignation, and a hell-bent desire for the truth.

'In that moment, you are God,' he said, a quote which came per his work with David Keppel. 'I wanted to be God,' he 'said', expounding upon his published thought. 'And then I wanted to kill myself. Effectively, killing God.'

Who knows what happened that night? What strange psychological monstrosity in which my years of fascination had culminated? My desire for understanding and ultimate justice?

I wrote a profile that challenged the status quo, held at that time in the BAU. And, for my unappreciated innovation, I received a C+ on the paper itself. A week or so later, however, as my mentor -- a former Bureau hostage negotiator and forensic pathologist had requested to see it, something ... odd happened. My grade was amended to an A, and rumour was floating around that my bold suggestions were being integrated into the standard Bundy profile, used in the Academy's criminology courses.

Fifteen years later, my 'hunches' were correct, as 'new evidence' has revealed over time -- or merely just new heads producing new thoughts. Who can say which? I've never said how I've arrived at them, merely that it was logical. And ... perhaps it was.

But they can't imagine the visceral knowledge contained therein -- and I care not to try and articulate it.