Technical Difficulties

Magnetized: Conversations with a Serial Killer by Carlos Busqued

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a condensation of hours upon hours of interviews Busqued did with Ricardo Melogno, who murdered four taxi drivers in Buenos Aires in 1982. Much of it is Melogno's autobiography; he spent most of his childhood and adolescence in a dissociative state, almost entirely divorced from reality, and it was in this dissociative state that he murdered the taxi drivers, so that when Busqued asks him to describe the murders, he can't. And he has absolutely no idea why he did it. From where he is at the time of the interviews, he can only partially recall his life before he was incarcerated. His incarceration was first in a mental hospital, where he was cavalierly and excessively---massively excessively---drugged, and between that and the need for self-preservation, Melogno's dissociative state seems to have ended. He became present in his own (horrible) life, and it's hard to say how much continuity there is between Melogno before and Melogno after; without any sense of his motivation, it's also hard to say whether he would commit murder again. I would guess that Melogno himself doesn't know.

Busqued also uses newspaper clippings, extracts from Melogno's official record, interviews with the man who arrested Melogno and with a psychiatrist who treated him for 7 years and who rejects all the varied and contradictory diagnoses he's been given, to offer the most rounded picture he can. I was not transfixed by this book, but it kept me interested and engaged and engendered a certain amount of empathy for its subject, who did four horrible things, but who has been treated horribly for 34 years in the Argentine prison system, and now, having served his sentence, is not being released because he's been legally defined as "dangerous"---which, on the one hand, he might well be, but, on the other, is manifestly unjust. The book raises ethical questions about the treatment of monsters. Melogno unquestionably WAS a monster, murdering four men for absolutely no reason that anyone, including Melogno himself, can find. Is he a monster now? If he is or if he isn't, should that make a difference in how he's treated? What is our ethical obligation to those like Melogno?



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