Gideon’s Origins

I've been talking to people professionally for upwards of thirty years, but I still felt the sweat on my palms as Kasey Turner announced "Class, please welcome our guest speaker David Keating”.

"Hello. I am David Keating. I am one of the world's foremost criminal psychologists. While I credit my success to a select few individuals, none more than professor James Lombardi. I first met Lombardi at the tender age of 12 for my fifth hospital visit that year. You can only fall down the stairs so many times and have hospital staff believe that story. I was brought into a room to speak with Lombardi privately, at the time, their resident counsellor. He already knew my story. Hell, the homeless guy sitting outside the hospital knew my story. Lombardi never presumed to know anything, he wanted me to tell him. He wanted me to say the words. You can't be in denial of the words said, if you're the one saying them. He didn't want to tell me what happened and have me nod or shake my head. He wanted me to say it. My father beat me.

The next time I saw Lombardi was six years later at Adam's State University, when I attended his PSYC 245 course, Brain and Behavior. I showed up to his class a solid 15 minutes into his lecture, slunk into the nearest seat and prayed to God he didn't notice that I interrupted his class. He looked up mid sentence of "The amygdala -" stared me straight in the eyes, and resumed speaking. I realized then that I'd have to make up for my horrendous first impression for the rest of the semester and show him that incident was out of character for me. I was a 4.0 transfer student who happened to get lost coming up from the back side of the campus. That was the first and last time I was ever late to his class. From that point on, I took every single psychology course professor Lombardi taught. It was the greatest decision of my life. Lombardi wasn't just a professor; he was a teacher, a mentor, and a better advisor than the schmucks who've been doing it for years.

Lombardi knew before I did that psychology was my true calling. I'd always taken an interest in it, but I didn't really know what I wanted until Lombardi showed me my strength in it. In addition to his stories and words of advice intermingled into lecture, he quickly took me under his wing and offered tailored guidance for an eager pupil. I frequently hunted him down on campus and sought him out during his office hours. We discussed everything from campus events that would be beneficial to get involved in, to what career paths with be a good fit for me based on my interests. At the time, I couldn't imagine settling on just one focus of psychology. The world was my oyster and I was fascinated with every aspect of what psychology could offer me. How could I limit myself to working in a lab, trying to understand how Alzheimer's affects each area of the brain, when I was so intrigued with how patients with dissociative identity disorder take on completely different physical abilities dependant upon which personality is present. And how could I reside myself to day after day of counseling, when I so desperately wanted to know every crevice of the criminal mind and what distinctly drove their desires. There were so many options available to me that I found myself lost in it all, going nowhere, taking as many classes in everything, that I was ultimately achieving nothing in my career pursuit. I needed direction. I needed to decide what I not only felt strongest about, but what I felt I could do the most with. What area of psychology would allow me to help the most people. As Lombardi and I discussed my current interests and past inspirations for psychology, he recalled to me the day we met. I had all but put those days out of my memory, but now that they were fresh in my mind, I could recall them vividly. I remembered seeing a very distinct bird on that day… a barn owl. What seemed to be an ordinary creature, but I’d never seen one close enough to appreciate the details of such a bird. A snow white belly, deep amber and brown wings that spanned far greater than I ever imagined. He had fierce talons, but such precision, you knew he’d never use them without intention. And then my eyes met with his; I looked deep into that black abyss and felt my own fear and longing merry with his. Almost as if he knew my struggles, and for a brief moment I felt his. I continued to see this same owl, who was missing one toe on his left foot, every day day after that until the day I saw Lombardi again. Almost as if this single owl, who I so named Polaris, knew what path I was meant to take. And I knew right then, that criminal psychology was precisely the niche I was seeking. It wasn't the past trauma that was driving me, quite the contrary. It was the sense of security that washed over me when Lombardi assured me I would never be put in that house again. It was the guidance of Polaris, who I never saw again, that I knew l was where I was meant to be. That I was no longer without a voice. That someone had been an advocate for me and prevented me from further harm. I wanted to be that advocate for everyone who didn't have one. But I wanted to do it on a much grander scale. I wanted to catch the serial killer who robbed a mother of her child. The sociopath who stole the lives of seven women. And the man driving around in an unmarked truck asking children for help finding his dog. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be the difference.

We watch people commit these evils in the world every day and can do nothing but look at the aftermath. I wanted to do more. I wanted to get into their minds, I wanted to know what made them tick, what compelled to do the things they do, and what would make them stop, if anything. I'm one of the world's foremost criminal psychologists; I was compelled to achieved more".