KEY POINTS:
Nigel Latta uttered one the most chilling sentences anyone has heard on television for a long time.
The forensic psychologist was fronting the first in his profiles of murderers, Beyond the Darklands, at 9.30pm on TV One last night.
He looked at William Bell, who in 2001 walked
into the Mt Wellington-Panmure RSA with a shotgun in a guitar case. He shot and killed one man, and used the butt of the shotgun to kill two more people and seriously injure another.
Latta made the frightening admission that psychologists are good at identifying psychopathic behaviour, "but [we] don't know enough yet about how to treat them".
That won't help a restful night's sleep.
Latta made a clear case for Bell being a genuine psychopath, knowing exactly what he was doing, and enjoying it. Now he is serving 33 years before being eligible for parole. He recently hit the front pages, as the victim rather than the perpetrator of an assault, landing him in hospital.
Latta was no apologist, even when walking us through the familiar litany of abuse, truancy, petty crime and hard-won survival skills making up the early William Bell.
Included were a warm smile, a cheerful persona, and the sense of being a likeable rogue. Only, danger lights flickered. One was something all teachers look for. He was eight, long before he was old enough and strong enough to jettison the social skills for violence and fear.
He had stolen a car and waited in the school office for the police to turn up, relaxed and calm. Latta gave this great importance, as a window into his certainty he was brighter and sharper than anyone else, and didn't care.
That confidence emerged at his trial, when he insisted on giving evidence, convinced he could talk his way out of it, against a police case all but carved in stone.
The "couldn't care and don't care about anyone or anything" attitude had quickly darkened. At 16 he was beating up his mother. Refusing him was risky. Turned down for a job at a service station, he came back to rob it, not interested in money, but in hurting and killing. Getting fired from the RSA triggered the slaughter there.
There was no question of Bell's deprived childhood giving him a "get out of jail" card. "Would a better background have helped him?" Latta answered his own questions. "Maybe. Would he have killed again? Absolutely."
One glimmer of hope, if not for Bell, painted as likely irredeemable, but for the rest of us, came later in the show. It is in the psychopath's utter confidence in being able to get away with it. "It makes them do things that don't make sense to anyone except them, and they are (relatively) easy to catch."
For instance, after the service station robbery, Bell blithely followed his terrified victim to Middlemore Hospital, to chat and buy him coffee.
The show, the first of six, didn't do snappy editing, flashy camera work or overwrought narration. It didn't need it.
Latta's succinct drive-through of a criminal's mind and restrained production values were easily enough to drive down the temperature.
