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JOURNAL OF INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE / September 1986 mate control. When directed toward oneself in childhood, it can be a counter- reaction to overwhelming fear, and its dominance in thought and play reveals the child’s troubled state of mind. In one case, the 12-year-old subject repeatedly played ‘‘gas chamber” with his sister. This game required his sister to tie him up in a chair, throw an imaginary switch, and when “gas” was introduced, the subject would grasp at his throat, drop to the floor, writhe convulsively, and “die.”’ This game combined a sexual theme (compression of the carotid arteries for a sexual sensation) and death theme fantasy. Early Expressions of Sexual and Aggressive Fantasy Early fantasies often give rise to behavior tryouts that are precursors to criminal behavior (MacCulloch, 1983). These precursor behaviors have the capacity to move the child into pain-inflicting acts and to break through in subtle, as well as overt, ways. They may emerge as play-engagement be- haviors with others (i.e., bullying younger children or putting pins in the rug for a sister to walk on) or actions involving only themselves (i.e., tying ropes around their necks or cutting parts of their bodies). Such behavior was noted in the reported cruelty to other children by the offenders as youths as well as in the offender's earliest encounters with law enforcement. Although such encounters are often dismissed as adolescent adjustment problems, they may be evidence of an escalation in aggressive acts toward others. Especially illustrative of such escalation of fantasy expression is the pre- viously cited example of the 3-year-old boy who was observed by his mother with his penis tied to a bureau drawer. As a young adolescent, he was found by his parents in the bathtub practicing autoerotic asphyxia with his penis and neck tied to the cross-bar of the faucets. At age 14 his parents took him toa psychiatrist after noticing rope burns on his neck. At age 17 this same subject abducted a girl at knife-point, took her to a deserted area where he kept her all night, and released her in the morning. The adolescent was apprehended and then released; the charge on his record was ‘girl trouble." Of importance is the offender's shift in the object of aggression from himself to a woman. Not until late adolescence, when the offender began following women, confront- ing them witha knife, binding them, and fondling them was the offender sent to prison. After release from prison, his crimes escalated to the murder of three young women by asphyxia. The early expressions of aggressive fantasies were often painful memories for the offenders to reveal and the ones, for various reasons, that were never discussed. They may have realized that they could have controlled their actions and that they were aware that they had crossed the line between fantasy and reality. In cases where the men were not apprehended for their early crimes, they learned they were not controlled by authority and that they 46