Could Mitt Romney’s No 1 Guy Be A Potential Serial Killer?

This is a very strange story indeed, and the kind of behaviour one reads about in those serial killer investigation books: it’s the sort of thing Ted Buindy would’ve done.

Why did Mitt Romney’s campaign operations director need to impersonate a police officer?

[…]

Police are investigating one of Mitt Romney’s top campaign aides for allegedly impersonating a trooper by calling a Wilmington company and threatening to cite the driver of a company van for erratic driving, according to two law enforcement sources familiar with the probe.

Jay Garrity, who is director of operations on Romney’s presidential campaign and a constant presence at his side, became the primary target of the investigation, according to one of the sources, after authorities traced the cellphone used to make the call back to him

[…]

The investigation comes three years after Garrity, while working for Romney in the State House, was cited for having flashing lights and other police equipment in his car without proper permits.

The New Hampshire attorney general, according to the Associated Press, has also opened an investigation into a report that a Romney aide, later identified as Garrity, pulled over a New York Times reporter in New Hampshire and said he had run his license plate.

Does that sound like normal behaviour to you ? Me neither. Other famouis police impersonators include the likes of murderer Wayne Williams and others (.pdf):

Still, there were definite signs that all was not right with the enterprising young Williams. Despite his intelligence and ambition, he couldn’t make it through college, dropping out of Georgia State after just one year. His dream of discovering the next Stevie Wonder came to nothing, and he gained a reputation as a blowhard and liar—the kind of person who claims to have important contacts and is always making big promises that never pan out. An extreme loner, he had no real social relationships and continued to live with his parents into his twenties. He also began displaying some troubling behavioral traits, including a fondness for impersonating police officers (a common tendency among serial killers), as well as a morbid interest in accident scenes—the grislier the better. Monitoring police transmissions on
his shortwave, he rushed to the sites of car wrecks or fires or even plane crashes, shooting photographs and videos, then peddling them to the local media.

Perhaps they ought to take a look at this guy’s hard drive too.

In the phone call to the Wilmington company, which was recorded by an answering service and obtained by the Globe, a man who identifies himself as “Trooper Garrity with the Massachusetts State Police” complains about the driving of a van owned by Wayne’s Drains Middlesex Sewers of Wilmington. The caller repeatedly says he is a trooper and questions when the driver will return to the office.

“I’m going to get the address of your company,” the caller says during the May 13 call. “I’m going to come down to your company. I’m going to personally issue this driver a citation for both speeding, driving erratic, cutting across.”

“The whole thing was just hinky,” said Wayne Barme, owner of the Wilmington drain and sewer cleaning company, whose wife, Dot, contacted State Police after receiving the complaint.

The act of impersonating a police officer hints at a couple of negative possibilities – either nefarious campaign political purposes, or more chillingly, his wanting to harm individuals by misusing assumed police powers. Neither is good in someone who’s the right hand man of a supposedly serious Presidential candidate.

Doesn’t say anything good about Mitt Romney’s judgement, either.