Micki Pistorius

Micki Pistorius is a South African forensic or investigative psychologist and author. She was the first woman in her profession and the first profiler in South Africa, working on many high-profile cases involving serial killers for the South African Police Service in the 1990s. She is known for her autobiography, Catch Me a Killer (2000), on which a television series of the same name was based, released in 2024.

Quotes

• I asked her where the posters in his room came from. She told me she had found some magazines in the forest at a spot where some soldiers had camped and had brought them home. This was shortly before the sexual murders started. I believe those pin-ups were the catalyst that triggered the fantasy that had been brewing inside Zikode since his childhood. His mother had unwittingly lit the tinder which had erupted into a blaze and cost many women their lives.
  • [1]
• The motive is settled deep within the unconscious psyche, and the serial killer is unaware of this. By ‘irresistible compulsion’ I do not mean that serial killers have absolutely no power over the urge to kill. Many of them experience the urge as an external force taking control of their own will and forcing them to commit murder, a force they perceive they cannot resist.
  • [2]
• South Africa has the third highest murder rate in the world, with Colombia and Swaziland ahead of it. The high rate of murder illustrates the amount of work that a Murder and Robbery detective has to cope with, and yet South Africa holds the record for apprehending serial killers within three to six months of a special investigation team being established, provided the serial killer stays active.
  • [3]
• Every human being passes through five psychosexual developmental phases. They are the oral phase, anal phase, Oedipus or phallic phase, latency phase and the genital phase. A person can fixate in any of these phases and failure to resolve the fixation would be cause for pathology. A layman’s term for a fixation would be a mental short-circuit. It is an individualistic reaction to being exposed to too much or too little of something.
  • [4]