Inside the Criminal Mind – Serial Killers

What makes a serial killer? What drives him towards sadistic murder? What are the
roots of his cold-blooded brutality?
Was it the result of an abusive childhood? Or was it hard-wired from the very birth?
It’s been questioned for 250 years now. Is someone born a criminal or is someone
made a criminal?
Nowadays, cutting edge research takes us on a dark and dangerous thrill ride. A
remarkable journey, coming face-to-face with pure evil, and venturing inside the criminal
mind.
They may appear to be ordinary, your next-door neighbour can be one of them. In
reality they’re far from it. What they all have in common is an unquenchable thirst for
murder, with a total lack of remorse. They are the embodiment of brutal inhumanity.
They are serial killers.
Since Jack the Ripper terrorized London in the 1880’s, criminologists and forensic
scientists have searched for keys to unlock the twisted psyche of these monsters.
There’s no one course that makes an individual turn into or becoming criminals.There’s
no one individual path. There are different things you want to look at, and one is the
family dynamics, the relationship with the family, the mother and the father, rr the
relationship mother and father had with themselves.
Research showed that, as children, they suffered significant abuse, sometimes
psychological, sometimes physical, often sexual. There was usually a long history of
psychiatric problems, criminal behavior, and alcoholism within the family.
Often they might share disrupted, broken childhood, in the sense that their family lives,
their socialization patterns are atypical. They’re not regular ones. Perhaps a family
breakdown, family violence, all those sorts of things.

In the 1960’s forensic psychologist J.M. MacDonald popularized the idea that there are
three behavioral red flags that serial killers exhibited during childhood. It was dubbed
the MacDonald Triangle. The MacDonald Triangle applied to some serial killers. Ted
Bundy was known to have tortured and killed animals during childhood. But the theory
lost credibility as research evolved. The Homicidal Triad was superseded by behavioral
studies that theorized that the serial killer’s dysfunctional childhood created a cold-
hearted lack of empathy.
Part of the development of empathy comes through modeling from the parents, and
also seeing how the mother and father interact with each other. You have to have the
ability to develop relationships. If you do not have that chance to develop relationships
it’s very hard to develop empathy and /or remorse. Lack of empathy is a primary
characteristic of a psychopath: this total absence of concern for others and the effects
of their actions on them. Certainly, not all psychopaths are criminals, but it is frequently
a trait of serial killers.

The FBI explains psychopathy as a personality disorder manifested in people who use a
mixture of charm, manipulation, intimidation and occasionally violence to control others
and satisfy their own selfish needs. It generally is that there’s an absence of emotions in
relationships, or they don’t feel emotions the way others do. They interact in a very
superficial but charming, manipulative, deceptive manner. There’s the absence of
remorse. So it’s a combination of the emotional, the interpersonal and the behavioral
sides coming together.
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Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers in North America was born to a
single mother and brought up by her parents. He grew up surrounded by lies. Bundy
was told he was the adopted son of his grandparents and his mother was his sister. As
an adult, he was extremely confused about his own identity, and is considered a classic
psychopath. Bundy murdered over 30 young women and compared his serial killings to
stamp collecting.

Another common trait of serial killers is known as paraphilia, abnormal sexual behaviors
or impulses characterized by intense and recurring sexual fantasies and urges. These
behaviors have been linked to victims of sexual abuse as children. Lust serial murder is
sometimes an outgrowth of paraphilia. Because of their extreme social isolation and
general hatred of the world and everyone in it, they profess to have felt suicidal as
teenagers. They display a precocious interest in deviant sexuality and they’re obsessed
with violence, voyeurism and pornography.
Sometimes you can find nuggets of information during their juvenile years where they
have entertained these kinds of fantasies, where there was a fusion of a sexual
thoughts and violence, resulting in arousing.
Another frightening trait of serial killers is that, often, they don’t look frightening at all.
Contrary to the popular stereotype of a monster living somewhere in a dark corner or
abandoned house, what is very striking is that they are often fathers and are even
successful in life.
As a student in Seattle, Ted Bundy held a variety of part-time jobs. As part of his
psychology studies, he volunteered with the city suicide hotline center. He became
involved in politics and even managed the Republican Party’s Seattle campaign office.

There seem to be various motivations that drive serial killers: fear of rejection, need for
power and a sense of inferiority. Certainly it’s true that some serial killers are also
motivated by pure anger. They’re angry with particular types of people or people in
general and they need to punish them. We know that certain serial killers are motivated
by failings in the home where they were brought up and issues in single family
parenting, by pornography, sexual frustration or a need to seek acceptance which is not
available to them.
Sexual sadistic offenders tend to engage in a behavior more as arousal to control and
dominate the individual. That’s why arousing to them is not just the pain they inflict, the
physical pain, but the fact that they can engage in that behavior can become arousing
to them.
The often-asked question is why two children suffer the same terrible childhood, but one
will cope and the other will kill? A great question, that is currently hotly debated. And it’s
something that has been questioned for 250 years now. Is someone born a criminal? or
Is someone made a criminal?
Cutting edge research in the new field of neurocriminology is now trying to determine if
some people are pre-disposed to violent behavior from birth. There is neuroimaging
studies, FMRI studies looking at the differences between “normal” brains and
individuals who are psychopathic telling that there are differences in neuroanatomy.
In 2013, Dr. Adrian Raine, Professor of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania,
released a study observing neuro and brain imaging in violent criminals, murderers,
psychopats, and serial killers. Their brains were observed to be different to those of
normal people, with diminished acivities in the areas of the brain that are linked with
self-awareness, the processing of emotions and sensitivity to violence. As a group, the
murderers had much poorer functioning in the prefrontal cortex, the area involved in
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regulating and controlling behavior. This is the part of the brain that Raine calls "our
guardian angel of behavior". “If it’s asleep,” he says, “the devil can come out.” But these
were the impulse killers, people who murdered in a rage, not the cold, methodical serial
killers. The serial killers actually had high functioning in the prefrontal cortex, but low
functioning in a deeper part of the brain called the amygdala. This is the seat of
emotions, involving empathy, conscience and remorse. For them, this area was
physically shrunken by 18 percent. This could account for why they can kill without guilt
or remorse.
Neurocriminologists have also found another possible biological predictor of dangerous,
antisocial behavior and that is low resting heart rate. They theorize that those with low
rates don’t feel fear as strongly as others. They may be more violent and take physical
risks because they are less fearful of the consequences.
Another theory is that life may feel a bit dull to people with low heart rates, so they seek
excitement and crave intense stimulation.

The long running question remains: is it nature or nurture?

Research compiled by psychologist Joel Norris identified several phases that serial
killers go through:
The Aura Phase, where the killer begins losing grip on reality. Aura can be, before the
first offense, what’s the fantasies that the person is having, how are these fantasies
playing out. Are they writing them down anywhere? Are they videotaping
themselves?Are they recording themselves? But it’s really, kind of, the playing out of an
idea in their head, that’s increasing in intensity, about what it is that they want to satisfy.
It may be sexually arousing, it may not be, depending on the kind of offender. Becoming
more antisocial as his fantasies increase and become violent sexual acts drawn from
childhood, he may medicate himself with drink or drugs, but eventually reaches a point
where he has to act out his fantasies. He then enters into what is known as the Trolling
Phase.

The Trolling Phase, when the killer searches for a victim. Trolling has to do with,
again,
looking for location, a victim type that seems or would match the person’s fantasy. They
would begin going around certain locations, certain areas to see whether or not they
would have access to those types of persons or locations, meaning far away from their
home, close to their home. And then that would involve some driving around to see
what
they can find, those kinds of persons or locations. It may be trying to find a location
where
they can keep a victim for some time before they actually kill them. Having gone
through
the process of trolling, seeking out victims and locations, the killer enters into what is
identified as the Wooing Phase.

The Wooing Phase, where the killer lures his victim in. Once the serial killer has his
victim, he moves onto the next phase known as the Capture Phase.
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 The Capture Phase, where the victim is entrapped. Now the victim has been
successfully wooed and captured, the killer’s mask finally comes off. He reveals who he
really is, locking up his victim or rendering them unconscious. He is sure he is in
absolute
control. He is well on his way to the climax of his evil cycle of killing.
In 1988, Joel Norris described the murder phase as the ritual reuniting of the killer’s
childhood with the roles now reversed. He is in control and can do with his victim what
he will. Torture, degradation and rape often lead up to the murder. He has
depersonalized
his victim and he finally kills them.
Some offenders will want to stay with the body postmortem, after they killed the person.
Then they may want to engage in some kind of sexual acts. If they engage in a sexual
act and it provides them some type of sexual arousal, that would be considered in the
ballpark of necrophilia.
The next phase after the murder, was described by Norris as the Totem Phase.

The Totem Phase. The killer often gathers mementos from his victims or even body
parts, in an attempt to hang on to the feeling of power and control he had.
After the kill, the excitement is over and the serial killer returns from his fantasy to
reality. Depression is likely to set in. Part of the reason why some of these offenders
repeat is because once they attain that behavior that matches their fantasy, they may
become depressed. Not depressed in the way that you and I become depressed, but, “It
didn’t live up to what I had hoped it to be”. So, part of the reason why they, perhaps,
take notes or they do videos of the offense is to further refine their behavior to meet the
fantasy. After the event there’s kind of a letdown. “It wasn’t as good as I thought it would
be” or “it wasn’t what I had hoped” or “I didn’t use that mechanism, that object the way I
wanted to, because I didn’t have enough time”. So there’s a bit of a letdown and they’ll
use that to eventually feed the next preparation for the next behavioral act to occur to
hopefully further meet the fantasy.
During this phase the killer can become so depressed that he may attempt suicide. His
fantasy will begin to grow and become more real. He will begin to go through these
phases again as he builds up to his next kill and the cycle repeats itself.

Ted Bundy followed the path described by Norris: trolling, wooing, capturing and
murdering. Bundy admitted to 30 killings in seven states between 1974 and 1978. He
was an effective psychopathic liar, therefore the actual truth will never be known. It’s
likely he killed many more. His victims were all young women aged between 12 and 24.
He was described by a member of his defense team as the very definition of heartless
evil.
Unlike most homicides, in the majority of serial murder cases, there is no identifiable
relationship between the killer and the victims. The studys show that serial killers are
usually men, but they come from all races. Strangulation is the most common method of
killing and 78% of the cases involve sexual activity as well. In over half the cases, the
killers remove multiple items from the crime scene.

Despite the scientific and technological giant steps that have been made, we still have a
lot to learn about the criminal mind. We learn more about the human brain every day,
but the nature vs. nurture debate still continues. Perhaps we are only slightly closer to
understanding what makes a man evil.
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What makes a serial killer?
“It’s a very complicated question. It’s a tremendous combination of things. And there are
many, many reasons why a person can end up being evil.
When you take a look at the development of serial killers, often times they come from
homes that are quite broken. They come from homes where you see a dominant mother
and an absent father. And it always is intriguing in serial killers that the father influence
seems to be missing in their early years and there’s some sort of a revulsion to the
dominant mother image which is later on taken out on women during the course of their
lives.

And there’s the thing that they refer to as the triad of the homicidal personality. One
element is bed wetter (enuresis). Another element is fire setter ( fire-setting). And the
last is animal killer (animal cruelty). Those three things will give any person studying an
individual a real lead onto how they have turned violent.

Coming face-to-face with a serial killer will give you two experiences. The first
experience will give you the surprise that he looks so normal; the second one is that
he’s talkative, polite and oftentimes really condescending.
The background of serial killers oftentimes tracks very well with a moderate person
interms of earnings. He’s not really the poor and very, very seldom would he be the rich.
They can be well educated, but at the same token, they turn to serial killing because of
an inner thrill and a fantasy that they’re carrying out.
The personality and mind of a normal person is vastly different from a serial killer's.
Very, very seldom will you have a normal person fantasizing killing another human
being. It just doesn’t occur. The serial killer adapts a set of beliefs and patterns of action
that are far, far different from what would even enter the mind of a normal person.
Many times a serial killer will pick the most accessible victim and oftentimes the most
accessible victim are prostitutes. They’ll approach a car and that’s all a serial killer
needs.
One of the common things that we’ve seen with serial killers is the desire to keep
trophies, to keep something that will remind them of that killing. Mindful of the fact that
in the killing is a tremendous sexual gratification that takes place in the killer, and often
they want to keep that in their memory bank and they do so by taking souvenirs.
Ted Bundy was probably one of the most charming serial killers. When he would meet a
young lady, he was very captivating. He was attractive. He was an interesting person.
And, oftentimes, the real intelligent, which Ted Bundy was, serial killer is such that he
can engage people, convince them what he is and the people who are his victims would
be the last ones in the world to realize that they were going to be their executioner.
The apprehension of a serial killer is a very, very, difficult police task. What gives away
a serial killer is the evidence that the serial killer leaves behind and/or takes with him.
Never, never have we witnessed a serial killer that doesn’t leave a particular pattern, so
the most difficult thing for law enforcement is the connection of one killing to another, to
establish the fact of serial killing.
"What makes a man evil is extraordinarily complex and probably a question that’s been
asked since beginning of time.”
Patrick J. Mullany Co-Founder, Psychological Profiling Division, FBI