And what you say makes me wonder how we even ever got the notion that sociopaths were clever

I feel Thomas Harris must have been heavily responsible for the serial killer idea; it doesn't come out of Peeping Tom (1960), Psycho (1960), or even Hitchcock's later Frenzy (1972). And then it fuses so well with all kinds of supernatural monsters, whether it has anything to do with real people or not, it becomes its own world.