The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (10 page)

C
AUSES

What turns a person into a serial killer? There’s no shortage of theories. Unfortunately none of them is completely convincing.

One of the most intriguing (if controversial) comes from the little-known field of paleopsychology. According to this view, our civilized brains are built on a primitive, animalistic core known as the R-complex. Deep inside every one of us are the savage instincts of our apelike ancestors. For the vast majority of people, this basic, brute nature is kept in check by our more highly evolved faculties—reason, intelligence, and logic. But for various reasons, a small fraction of people are controlled by their primitive brains. In essence, advocates of this view see serial killers as throwbacks—bloodthirsty, Stone Age savages living in the modern world.

Freudian theorists take a similar view, though they talk about the id instead of the R-complex and see serial killers not as latter-day apemen but as profoundly stunted personalities, fixated at an infantile stage of psychosexual development. Because of their traumatic upbringings, compulsive killers never progress beyond the emotional development of a two-year-old. Put a porcelain vase in a toddler’s hands and it will end up in little pieces. Serial killers act the same way. They love to destroy things. To them, a human being is just a breakable object—something to be taken apart for pleasure.

Other explanations run the gamut from the physiological (head injuries, hormonal imbalances, genetic deficiencies) to the sociological (class resentment, overpopulation, too much exposure to media violence). There are even environmental theories. One expert has proposed that serial murderers suffer from a disease caused, among other factors, by toxic pollutants.

Whatever other factors may or may not be involved, one common denominator seems to be that they all have an atrocious family background. The appalling
Upbringing
of most, if not all, serial killers clearly contributes to their pathology, turning them into people so full of hate and self-loathing
that sadistic murder becomes their substitute for intimacy (see
Sadism
). Still, even a truly dreadful upbringing doesn’t seem to be a sufficient explanation. After all, countless human beings suffer traumatic childhoods without growing up to be serial lust killers.

Ultimately, the root causes of serial murder are unknowable—as mysterious in their way as the sources of Mozart’s musicianship or Einstein’s mathematical genius. Perhaps the only possible answer is the one provided by the great American novelist Herman Melville in his masterpiece
Billy Budd.
Pondering the depravity of the villainous John Claggart, who sets out to destroy the innocent hero for no discernible reason, Melville concludes that Claggart’s “evil nature” was “not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living” but was “born with him and innate.”

Sometimes, in short, “elemental evil” simply takes a human form.

“Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort.”

H
ERMAN
M
ELVILLE
Billy Budd

Cesare Lombroso and “Criminal Man”

A hundred years ago, an Italian physician named Cesare Lombroso invented the field of “criminal anthropology,” a forerunner of the current theory of “paleopsychology.” Lombroso believed that criminals were “atavisms”—savage, apelike beings born, by some unexplained evolutionary quirk, into the modern world. Because they were throwbacks to a prehistoric past,
criminals could be identified by certain physical characteristics. They actually possessed the anatomical traits of apes—thick skulls, big jaws, high cheekbones, jutting brows, long arms, thick necks, etc.

A serial killer named Vincenz Verzeni helped convince Lombroso that his theory was valid. After strangling two women outside Rome, Verzeni disembowelled the corpses and, in one case, drank the victim’s blood. Examining the vampire killer after his arrest, Lombroso discovered that the young man—with his large jaw, bull neck, malformed ears, and low forehead—was a perfect specimen of “primitive humanity.” Before long, Lombroso was claiming that you could identify a “born criminal” purely by his physical features. Called to testify at the trial of one young suspect, Lombroso argued that the man must certainly be guilty because he had big ears, a crooked nose, a sinister look, and a tattoo.

Needless to say, Lombroso’s theory of “criminal man” has been thoroughly discredited by now—especially his notion that you can identify a murderer just by looking at him.

At least thirty young women—who once met a handsome, clean-cut young fellow named Ted
Bundy
, who looked nothing in the world like an ape—could have told the famous criminologist just how wrong he was.

C
HARACTERISTICS

Besides the obvious ones—sick minds, sociopathic personalities, unspeakable desires, etc.—serial killers tend to share a number of characteristics. In a paper presented to the International Association of Forensic Sciences in 1984,
FBI
Special Agents Robert Ressler, John Douglas, and several colleagues listed the following “general characteristics” of serial sex murderers:

1. The great majority are single white males.

2. They tend to be intelligent, with IQs in the “bright normal” range.

3. In spite of their high IQs, they do poorly in school, have a hard time holding down jobs, and often work as unskilled laborers.

4. They tend to come from markedly unstable families. Typically, they are abandoned as children by their fathers and raised by domineering mothers.

5. Their families often have criminal, psychiatric, and alcoholic histories.

6. They hate their fathers. They hate their mothers.

7. They are commonly abused as children—psychologically, physically, and sexually. Sometimes the abuser is a stranger. Sometimes it is a friend. Often it is a family member.

8. Many of them end up spending time in institutions as children and have records of early psychiatric problems.

9. They have a high rate of suicide attempts.

10. They are intensely interested from an early age in voyeurism, fetishism, and sadomasochistic pornography.

For other characteristics of serial killers, see the following entries:
Causes
,
Race and Racism
,
Triad
,
Upbringing
,
and
Women
.

Andrei Chikatilo

According to the party line, serial killers didn’t exist in the Soviet state. There was only one problem with this assertion. Even while Communist officials were declaring that serial murder was strictly “a decadent Western phenomenon,” one of the most monstrous psychopaths in the annals of crime was at large in the Russian port city of Rostov.

He was Andrei Chikatilo—a mousy-looking forty-two-year-old factory clerk, married, with children. Possessed by a monstrous blood lust, he targeted easy prey—boys, girls, defenseless young women. Usually, he would lure them away from bus stops with the promise of a ride or a meal. Leading them into a lonely stretch of woods, he would pounce like a werewolf, committing unspeakable atrocities on his victims, often while they were still alive. (Cutting out their tongues, biting off their nipples, slicing off their noses, gouging out their eyes, devouring their genitals—these were just a few of the horrors he perpetrated.) So fierce was his appetite for human blood that during one four-week span in 1984, he butchered no fewer than six young victims.

Chikatilo’s unwitting accomplice in these hideous crimes was the Soviet totalitarian system. According to Communist dogma, crime could not exist in a classless people’s republic like the USSR. Rather than admit that they were wrong, Soviet authorities covered up Chikatilo’s monstrous spree. As a result, during the “Mad Beast’s” twelve-year reign of terror, Soviet citizens didn’t even know that a serial killer was on the loose. Instead of being on their guard, they were left vulnerable to his advances.