poisoning herself. I asked Steve whether be believed this story. He answered, looking me straight in the eye, "Ma Catlin would never tell a lie." But Steve poisoned Ma Catlin, his adoptive mother. Subsequent investigation revealed that the entire story was a fabrication. His birth mother had not poisoned herself. She was, in fact, still alive. Three other women were dead , however, poisoned by Steve who, I'm convinced, was in the throes of a fatal quest, a need to revisit his primal trauma, repetitively killing symbolic mother figures, poisoning them as, he believed, his birth mother killed herself when she abandoned him as an infant.

  Joel Rifkin, the most prolific serial killer in New York State history (Pulitzer and Swirsky, 1994; Kirschner, 2006), was also on a fatal quest, a pathological search for his birth mother, when he killed seventeen young women in the New York City/Long Island area from 1989 to 1993. Adopted as a newborn, Joel played out his role of the "good adoptee" at home where , adoption was a taboo subject, virtually never discussed, in a family atmosphere of almost total denial. "We never talked about adoption in our family, not even close to really talking about it," Joel said. He spontaneously used the term dissociation to describe his adoptive mother Jeanne's tenacious denial of the importance of his adoption. Even the psychotherapists who treated him in childhood and adolescence (for "dyslexia," would you believe?) sided with this resistance, avoiding discussing adoption. Joel always fantasized about his birth mother and was convinced she was a prostitute (though she wasn't).

  My first meeting with Joel was shortly after his arrest in 1993. Over the next twenty months, we met for more than 110 hours in the Nassau County and Suffolk County, Long Island prisons Though he thought of searching for his birth mother when away at college, he never did anything about it because, as he told me, "I didn't want to hurt my parents' feelings." Instead, he carried out this quest pathologically, in the throes of a (bizarre) repetition compulsion. Explaining that he always felt lonely, terribly lonely prior to each killing, and he would then troll for prostitutes, whom he felt a strong bond with, to counter his painful loneliness. Symbolically, even consciously, he identified the women he killed with fantasy images of his birth mother. He had no conscious anger toward them and described only a bond of affection with prostitutes from whom he sought the nurturing love he felt had been denied him. It was in their world that he sensed he belonged, feeling strangely at home. It was for these women, he insisted, that he felt nothing but affection. Though amnesic for the killings (which he called the "events") and what triggered them, Joel had total recall for the "disposals" of his victims, and his bizarre need to first return with the dead bodies intact to their source (where he searched for and found them) before dismembering them. If he did not return with the dead women to the source (scene of his symbolic reunion), he said, their life energy would not stay with him, to nurture him and counter his loneliness. In a tone as rational as