Q & A: What would it take to set off a killing spree in 2 angry teenage misfits?

Q: Two teens love each other but murder nearly anyone for the slightest wrong. What could set off 2 angry misfits enough to kill 46 unrelated people and would the more people they kill the more they go insane? Also would their fractured mental state and loose view on morals be obvious?

The girl has amnesia and believes her parents are traveling the world but in actuality she killed them. The boy is more of a psychopath and has a Charles Manson-esque quality about him. He is rather open to his homicidal nature to other killers but is seemingly normal.

A:In some backwards ways, you're in luck. This kind of bizarre behavior is seeming less bizarre as we experience school shooting after school shooting. One of the reasons experts believe kids are killing people on these sprees is that they've been coddled, indulged, and given whatever they want, leading to narcissism -- thinking they're special and should get anything and everything they want. Thinking that they're special and others should worship them as special, and they're going to make darn sure everyone knows their names.

They're not necessarily diagnosable with anything, a lot of these kids. They've just grown up in a time when nothing is denied them. And they act like 1-year-olds when they don't get what they want, because they never learned not to. And they'll go so far as to kill people to show their wrath.

One of the biggest problems for you, I think, would be how to keep them from getting caught, because teenagers don't tend to be clever (worldly) enough to hide what they're doing long-term...and you know the law would be looking for people who had killed that many. On the other hand, if they're moving quickly and don't care if they get caught (or just don't think it's possible for someone to catch them), they would be so mercurial and ruthless that the law might have trouble catching up to them. And teenagers are excellent at impulsivity and mercuriality (if that's even a word :-).

Could the girl possibly have a fugue? That would make sense of why she adopts this (probably partial) new identity (ie a killer) and carries on like a psychopath with the boy, even though she really isn't. Her adoption of new personality traits would be in keeping with a fugue, and it fits with the dissociative amnesia. (Dissociative amnesia is forgetting something from your past because it's too upsetting. A dissociative fugue requires you to TRAVEL along with the forgetting...and it usually includes partial or complete adoption of a new identity.) Typically fugues don't last long (a few days at most), partly because it's so hard to disappear with social security numbers, credit cards, etc. But teenagers might fly under the radar better than an adult who's established in the world with credit cards and so forth.

A movie that depicts a fugue pretty well is The Long Kiss Goodnight.

As for the killing -- most human beings have a built-in revulsion against killing other humans, but it does (unfortunately) get easier with time. And the boy's attitude that it's ok might make it easier for her more quickly than the girl might otherwise experience. If the boy has Manson's charisma, that just makes him easier to follow and imitate.

Would their behavior be obvious...yes, they'd be hard to miss, I expect, because they'd act out even when they weren't killing. They might even boast about the killings. I suppose you could argue that people would ignore their bad behavior -- you know, "teenagers, so loud and annoying" -- or not take them seriously. People are starting to take teenagers who talk about violence much more seriously, though, again due to the school shootings. But people have this desire not to cause "trouble" and "overreact," and to "stay out of other people's business" and "not get involved," so you're going to get that attitude a lot. Plus people are often afraid of rowdy teens. So you could use those tendencies to your advantage.