The study suggests that serial killers kill because of the impact of exposure to physical abuse, drug abuse, and alcoholism from an early age. Brain injury and mental disorders also play a significant role. Serial killers come from all walks of life and are usually abused in childhood by their parents or someone close to them. They are usually only discovered when they commit a crime or murder, and at that point, it is too late.
Serial killers do not think the same way society would consider the norm. He did, however, grow up believing that his mother was his sister. We had a killer here in Canada who was the commander of an air force base. He was flying the equivalent of Air Force One — flying around the prime minister, visiting dignitaries — then suddenly in his 40s, a colonel, he commits two sexual homicides.
He is a mystery. There is nothing in his childhood to explain his behavior. There is also the strangeness of the late age at which he started. I am currently studying a serial killer called Richard Cottingham. I talked to him in prison last month. He comes from a nuclear family … the father was there, the mother was there, and there is no clear history of trauma or abuse. But there is nothing in his past that obviously parallels the early lives of, say, Charles Manson or Henry Lee Lucas.
They grew up to be, well, maybe not all well-adjusted citizens, but certainly not serial killers. What is the missing X factor? My sense is responsibility falls on the offender here. Serial killers choose to act on their compulsions. During the first big wave of celebrity serial killers in the s and s, some defense lawyers tried to argue in court that serial killers are not guilty by reason of insanity, because an irresistible compulsion to kill is a form of temporary insanity.
The legal definition of insanity is an inability to distinguish right from wrong and an inability to understand the consequences of an action. One can make the argument that serial killers suffer from psychopathy, that because they are psychopaths they have no sense of remorse or empathy and their decision-making process is faulty.
The number one trait of a psychopath is a lack of empathy. Others are a tendency to lie, a need for thrills — psychopaths become bored very quickly — and narcissism. But the lack of empathy is the biggest thing. One common explanation is that psychopaths experience some kind of trauma in early childhood — perhaps as early as their infant state — and as a consequence suppress their emotional response.
They never learn the appropriate responses to trauma, and never develop other emotions, which is why they find it difficult to empathize with others.
They can compartmentalize. What do you make of Bruce McArthur, the alleged Toronto gay village killer arrested earlier this year? Bruce McArthur is interesting because he was apprehended at such a late age. If McArthur has been committing crimes since the s or s then this is going to be an extremely difficult investigation.
Currently law enforcement are looking at his dating apps for evidence and to link him to more possible victims. There have been dozens of gay serial killers. So that alone is not unusual. There is obviously a lot less stigma about being gay today than there was in the s or s or even s. Then, gay serial killers were sometimes more effective because both they and their victims were living a secret double life.
It seems possible that serial killers have somehow learned to view their victims as purely an object to be abused, or even an assembly of unconnected parts.
This might explain why some killers have sex with dead victims, or even turn their bodies into objects of utility or decoration, but it does not explain why they seem so driven to hurt and kill their victims. One explanation for the latter phenomenon is that many serial killers are insecure individuals who feel compelled to kill due to a morbid fear of rejection. In many cases, the fear of rejection seems to result from having been abandoned or abused by a parent.
Such fear may compel a fledgling serial killer to want to eliminate any objects of their affections. They may come to believe that by destroying the person they desire, they can eliminate the possibility of being abandoned, humiliated, or otherwise hurt, as they were in childhood. Serial killers also appear to lack a sense of social conscience. Through our parents, siblings, teachers, peers, and other individuals who influence us as we grow up, we learn to distinguish right from wrong.
It is this that inhibits us from engaging in anti-social behaviour. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience. It remains far from clear why a few people react to abuse or trauma at an earlier stage in their lives by later becoming a serial killer. But hopefully new insights into the psychological or neurological basis of their actions may in the future help us to identify potential future such killers and dissuade them from committing such horrendous crimes.
Featured image via Pixabay.
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