Philip Markoff, the 22-year-old accused Craigslist killer of model Julissa Brisman, may seem like the least likely of killers.  But when all the facts are known, Markoff’s story (if he is convicted) will start to make sense.  Granted, he’s a reasonably affable medical student without a criminal record ― but Scott Peterson was a friendly fellow and seemingly good neighbor before murdering his wife Laci and their unborn son, Conner.  Dr. Richard Sharpe,  the Harvard dermatologist (and cross-dresser, it turns out) was a respected physician prior to shooting his wife to death in front of their children.  Dr. Jonathan Kappler, a California anesthesiologist who murdered my friend and colleague Paul Mendelson back in 1990, had worked for decades as an anesthesiologist prior to accelerating to 60 mph in his car and intentionally mowing Paul down as he jogged. 
 
Psychiatric instability is often invisible until we look for it, in retrospect, after a terrible event triggers the inquiry.  But the evidence of that instability and the causes of it are never absent once we start digging. 
 
In the case of Philip Markoff, we could start excavating the roots of his violence by looking at his gambling habit.  If it is true that he owed gambling debts that motivated him to rob women-for-hire in hotel rooms, then he may have been someone deeply moved by the wheels of fate — by risk or ruin being determined by the alchemy of skill and the luck of the draw at a poker table.  In my experience treating gamblers, their connection to fate often comes from having little or no control over their lives as much younger people.  Sometimes, that adds up to having had parents who could have cared less about their feelings or desires. Sometimes, it adds up to not knowing when the next beating was going to come. And sometimes, it adds up to too many sudden losses. 
 
But it always adds up. When someone shoots a woman, then calmly walks to his car sending off text messages, he is unmoved by the cruelest roulette life can serve up.  Somewhere deep inside him, he is used to destruction because he has been destroyed.  He is without feelings because he has tried desperately to wall off his own — whether fear or grief or rage.
 
If I were with Markoff right now, I’d want to know why gambling spoke to him.  Why was Foxwoods the kind of place he felt at home?  Why was it the place he reportedly planned to marry his fiancé? 
 
Markoff also allegedly preyed upon women.  He didn’t pistol whip drug dealers and make off with their cash.  Maybe, if he’s guilty, he’s had it in for women.  Maybe he harbors deep feelings that his life was “stolen” from him with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage and its aftermath.  Maybe he thinks they’re all prostitutes when it really comes down to it.  Maybe he thinks they’re dangerous enough to him emotionally ― or even physically ― that they need to be tied up.  We don’t know — yet.  We never know, until we ask the relevant psychological questions.
 
I’ve been a forensic psychiatrist now for many years.  And I’ve learned one thing for sure:  No killer comes out of the blue.  No child is born into this world evil.  Every act of destructiveness can be explained.  And no one, not even a medical student whose fiancé loves him very much, is ultimately much of a mystery once you decide to burrow beneath the surface.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com or e-mail him at info@keithablow.com.

Monday evening, 500 or so residents of Covina, California gathered at the Royal Oak Intermediate School to discuss the horrific Christmas Eve slayings committed by Bruce Pardo.  Pardo, dressed as Santa Claus, walked into a family gathering at his ex-in-laws’ home, shooting a 9-year-old girl in the face and then killing nine other people.  Before escaping and committing suicide himself, he burned the house to the ground.

According to police, Pardo had hoped to kill other people, too, including his mother, his wife’s divorce attorney and the attorney’s family.  They believe he had been planning the carnage since June — perhaps even earlier.

Because of Pardo, 13 young people are orphans.  Still others are without one of their parents.

What makes a man, who appeared to others to be quirky, but friendly, commit such an atrocity?  How is it possible that the same person who had participated in a seemingly rational way in divorce proceedings could have done so with mayhem on his mind?  How could he have wished the owner of his favorite coffee shop—the Montrose Bakery and Café—a merry Christmas just several hours before the slayings?

We know some of the stresses Pardo was facing.  He had lost his job.  His marriage had dissolved in the wake of his wife having learned he had abandoned a son she knew nothing about, a son left brain-damaged by nearly drowning while Pardo was to be watching him.  Perhaps Pardo felt lingering guilt and grief over that tragedy.

Yet, in my 16 years as a psychiatrist, I have met hundreds of men and women who have shouldered equal or greater psychological burdens without their circumstances triggering violence of any kind.  I have been privileged to see many of them face the loss of children, homes, marriages or their own health by looking inside themselves for strength — and finding it.

Pardo apparently had no such reserves of character upon which to draw, no hope for the future, no empathy left for others.  He seems to fit into that category of men I have met in my work as a forensic psychiatrist who, faced with painful changes over which they lacked control, came to see their life stories — including the people in them — as ending, done with … over.  It is as if they were collecting scripts from actors in a play that was going badly and being shut down.  Then the curtain fell.

For Bruce Pardo, I can theorize (even without interviewing him), there had to be a deep-seeded belief — perhaps an unconscious one — that loss of control or perceived abandonment had always meant chaos and terror.  There may have been unavoidable suffering in his own life as a child, suffering he could do nothing to prevent, suffering that left him, long into his adult life, with a child’s intense brand of terror at being powerless.  There can be no consoling such a “man” when events — even those of his own making — seem to be rendering him isolated, subject to forces (like job loss and divorce decrees) he cannot bend to his infantile will, impotent.

Those feelings of impotence, I believe, may have been the ones turned upside-down and inside-out in the months leading to the Christmas Eve carnage in Covina.  They may have been the ones that became fuel for a pathological and sinister plot that, in his own twisted mind, turned Bruce Pardo, for one terrible night, into the strongest man on earth, wielding the power of life and death over others, as though the frailties in his own psyche could somehow be camouflaged, even beyond his own recognition, by a storm of bullets and shield of flame.