by Morgan Gomes
I couldn’t be happier with the work we are doing and the progress being made in my third week on the SHoP team. I have dealt with research in the past, but never been part of the researching process and I love it. I am working on the “Serial Homicide and Path Dependency” team investigating the personal lives and criminal offenses of United States serial killers using a comprehensive and alphabetized list to ensure we don’t miss any documented killers. While we do our best to locate all the relevant information on these people, some have enigmatic childhoods. Regardless, with such a large pool of information, I have no doubt we will be able to identify and analyze the recurring patterns already emerging across the variables.
Early in the week, I spent time looking into Adolph James Rode, better known as Cesar Barone. Often in these killers, we see themes of abuse, family instability/unreliability, and emotional unavailability, but Cesar Barone isn’t one of those people. His mother left the family for another marriage when he was four, but other than that divorce, he had a loving step-mother and father that worked hard for him and his siblings with no reports of abuse in or out of the home. Despite this, he was riddled with behavioral problems, not simple tantrums or rebellion either. He would frequently threaten his elementary school classmates, “sometimes with knives, other times with lit cigarettes” (Montaldo, 2019). Some professionals believe that his mother’s early absence may have contributed to his disdain for women that characterize his brutalizations. Unfortunately, we will never know his true motivations as he took them to his grave, refusing to share with the interviewers who sought to make sense of it all (True Crime, 2021).
It is clear that Barone is a dangerous man. However, what makes him arguably more dangerous than others is his early behavioral issues that only increased in violence and number as he grew older. These killings didn’t seem to have a trigger either as this behavior started by the time he was 5 years old. Despite his numerous crimes beginning in childhood, he was continuously in and out of juvenile delinquency centers, jail, and prison due to being released only to commit the same crimes shortly after. He was frequently transferred and even escaped a maximum security prison in Florida.
While Barone has many things in common with the various serial killers we are studying, there are some key events that make him stand out. Notably, he often confused law enforcement because his M.O. fluctuated from victim to victim with variations in the nature of his crimes that made it difficult to connect them as serial. For example, Barone had an accomplice for one murder and further inconsistencies between the rest like relationship to the victim (relatives and strangers), age, societal role, and cause of death. Another peculiar thing occurred after his release when he was 26. He moved to Washington, changed his name from Adolph James Rode to Cesar Barone, and lied about his criminal record in order to join the military. Not only was he accepted, but he received sharpshooter qualifications and EMT training among other things.
What is perhaps most interesting to me is that while incarcerated, Barone communicated with Ted Bundy, something he enjoyed bragging about to his fellow inmates, and he was known to reenact the rape and murder of some of his victims using a bar of soap and comb while mimicking the sounds they made in the struggle. For this reason as well as his preferred victim type (old women), even the hardened criminals surrounding him took issue with his offenses and ratted him out, ultimately landing him a death sentence as his crimes stacked up against him with these new leads.
Despite his seemingly innate desire to kill, it is interesting to see how social factors and the environment influenced the choices he made and work to provide insight into the aspects of his offenses he wasn’t willing to share.
Montaldo, Charles. 2019. “Learn about Serial Rapist and Killer Cesar Barone.” ThoughtCo. Retrieved October 17, 2021 (https://www.thoughtco.com/serial-rapist-and-killer-cesar-barone-973160).
True Crime, FilmRise. 2021. “World’s Most Evil Killers – Season 5, Episode 20 – Cesar Barone – Full Episode – Youtube.” YouTube. Retrieved October 17, 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZGWLbjQNiw).