A question in criminology that has been asked time and again is what makes a serial killer.
Do these people have killing etched into their DNA, or did environmental factors push them
over the edge, or is it a bit of both?
As one expert put it, while killing is intrinsic in humans as a survival mechanism, perhaps
with some people something is broken and they don’t have the intellectual moderation function
in their brain working like most people do.
They act on their basic instincts.
Most of us process violent urges, some reasoning takes place in the frontal lobes, and we don’t
act on those urges.
Most killers however have suffered some kind of trauma in childhood, but not all, and it
should be said that this trauma is often self-reported.
For the most part serial killers remain a mystery, and that’s why profiling is such
a hard job.
In 2018 the Canadian historian and journalist Peter Vronsky was interviewed by The Guardian
regarding what makes a serial killer.
He’s just published his new book “Sons of Cain: a history of serial killers from
the stone age to the present”, and is well-known for his seminal work on depraved maniacs,
“Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters.”
In both books he takes a stab at understanding why these people do what they do, and in the
latter he spends the final part of the book discussing profiling techniques.
He’ll be the first to tell you, though, that profiling certainly is not an exact science
and time and again serial killer profilers have got it terribly wrong.
Other times, though, they were spot on.
While he says childhood trauma is the single theme that seems to pop up time and again
with serial killers, there are some people who have gone against the grain.
One such man is Ted Bundy, who despite being misinformed as to who his mother really was,
seems to have had an ordinary childhood.
We say “seems”, because who knows what went on behind closed doors in the Bundy household,
and Ted in interviews did make an effort to make people think he’d had this ordinary
life.
It could have been a case of “thou protest too much”, but who knows.
Ted’s dead, so not much more will be learned about him.
Then again, as Vronsky said in the Guardian interview, you can take 100 kids who suffered
some kind of childhood trauma and 99 of them won’t end up being serial killers.
One of those kids, though, might turn out to be the guy that stalks people in the night
and does unforgivable things.
Maybe a lot of the other kids have violent impulses due to the violence they have suffered,
but they don’t act on their compulsions.
It could be like we said, that the serial killers of the world do act out on these compulsions,
violent fantasies, as if their brains don’t have that brake of reason.
Their impulses are untethered; they are both out of control and yet often know exactly
what they are doing.
The problem now is there are so many kinds of serial killers.
For example, very few of them are actually certified mentally insane, such as Richard
Chase, aka “The Vampire of Sacramento.”
He deserved that moniker and more, because he did the most horrendous things you can
imagine.
He was also completely insane, suffering from a very bad case of paranoid schizophrenia.
The majority though, don’t suffer from such a profound mental illness and they artfully
plan their deeds and how they’ll get away with it.
Others are impulsive and have no interest in being around their victims once they are
dead, while some take their time with their victims, sometimes doing terrible things with
them while they alive.
Others wait until after they are dead to live out their lurid fantasy.
Anyone who’s read Vronsky’s books will have no doubt asked themself just how on Earth
could people take pleasure in that.
It’s beyond terrible what some killers do, incredibly perplexing, and the people that
do those awful things are often not how we would imagine a serial killer to be.
Sometimes they are the boy next door, the guy on the street with a good job and a loving
family; the president of the local bridge club, the guy who shows up for all his son’s
baseball games; the studious uncle, loving cousin, the beleaguered hardworking manager
and father of four.
That’s not always the case, and some killers have a history of violence and crime that
goes back years.
Some were serial misbehavers in childhood; they were cruel and enjoyed hurting the local
pets that they could get their hands on.
But kids with a history of misbehaving don’t necessarily become serial killers; they don’t
all become psychopaths.
There aren’t too many, in relative terms anyway, serial killers out there.
They are a one-person criminal enterprise unto themselves; incomprehensible aberrations
in the criminal world.
Before we get into how profilers do their job, let’s have a look at when they got
it right.
This should give you some insight as to how these people work, their modus operandi so
to speak: We mentioned this man Richard Chase, a serial
killer who suffered from an acute mental illness, in his case, psychosis.
As we said, while many or most serial killers will have what’s called Antisocial Personality
Disorders, they are aware of what they are doing.
With Chase, that was not the case, even though he was executed in the end rather than confined
to a mental health institution.
His crimes were so appalling it’s likely people didn’t ever want to give him the
chance of getting out of the asylum.
We won’t go into graphic detail, but will tell you that in 1978 in Sacramento, California,
a young man returned home to find his pregnant wife dead.
Despicable things had been done to her, as if a wild animal had attacked her.
Except the body had had some very strange things done to it, and it seemed as if it
had been drained of blood and the killer had drank that blood.
Not long after and not far away and three other bodies were found, each in a state again
as if something wild had mutilated them, while a baby was missing.
The crime scene was unimaginable, and again there was evidence the killer had drunk the
blood of the deceased.
Because of the nature of the crimes there was no doubt that this was no ordinary murderer.
It had to be someone completely, irrefutably unhinged.
A mad man, the very epitome of the word “psycho”.
As can be the case with such crimes, the local police can contact the FBI and get a profiler
on the job.
Because of the chaotic and disturbing crime scene that profiler quickly came to the conclusion
that he was what’s called a disorganized killer.
We’ll get to the meaning of that a bit later, but this was no killer who fastidiously planned
his crime.
He picked a person or persons and went berserk.
This was someone suffering from delusions, and very likely had a history of mental health
issues.
So, first thing first, we are looking for someone who has been confined in the past
to a mental health facility.
But secondly, the profiler said this man was most likely white, and that’s because the
victims were white.
Statistics tell us that most sexual murders are intraracial, meaning certain races usually
kill people of the same race.
It was also a white neighborhood, and someone not white would attract attention in such
a place.
The profiler also said because it looked like the killer was in the most acute stage of
paranoid schizophrenia, he was likely around the age of 25.
That’s because signs of this disease usually take root around the age of 15, and usually
the worst psychosis happens about a decade later.
He was also likely thin.
How did he know this?
Well, there is data on mental patients and body types, and if he was right about the
age and the illness, then he should be on the slim side.
Most people this ill don’t take good care of their health, if at all.
They are too far gone.
He would also live alone, because he was crazy and no one would live with him.
He had no friends, and was likely living in a very messy apartment due to him not taking
care of himself.
His crime was also very disorganized as we said.
He wouldn’t have finished school, or college, because of his mental health issues and very
likely was on welfare.
He wouldn’t be able to hold down a job, and anyway, the murders took place in the
afternoon on a weekday, so that made the profiler think this guy was out of work.
Because the crimes were close together and because the man was likely too crazy to drive,
he probably walked to the houses where he did his thing.
If he did have a car, it would be rundown and in a very messy state.
Basically they had a profile of a young man with mental health issues who lived alone,
was local, was thin, had no friends, had dropped out of school, lived in a state of squalor,
and likely stalked the neighborhood.
To cut a long story short, that’s exactly what they found.
Everything was correct, right down to his truck being a total mess.
It turned out that Chase was extremely gaunt, lived in total mess, and in his house he had
body parts and animal parts.
It’s a long story, but he had been suffering from psychosis for years.
He’d even been confined to an institution for injecting rabbit blood into his veins.
There he was known as Dracula, because he’d go out into the garden and capture birds or
any other animals and just bite off their heads.
Two nurses quit because they were frightened of him, but then for some reason he was released,
still half-crazy.
For years he had been drinking the blood of pets he stole or bought, believing his blood
was turning to powder.
Where he lived there had been a slew of missing pet reports.
Chase had been busy, and while he had been pulled over by cops with a bag of cow blood
and had a criminal record, he just went under the radar.
He then turned to humans, and you know what happened then.
The baby he had taken from one house was later found drained and half eaten.
In this case, having such a detailed profile of who police should be looking for made the
job of finding him that much easier.
Profiling worked.
So, how did profiling get started?
Some of you won’t know that German leader Adolf Hitler was psychologically profiled
because his enemies wanted to know what he might do next.
The profile was pretty spot on, and they even guessed his death would be suicide.
Slowly psychologists were hired to profile maniacs, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that
the FBI had a behavioral sciences unit.
In 1981 the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime was introduced by offender
profiler Robert K Ressler under president Reagan.
The Behavioral Science Unit is part of this.
One of its major concerns was ‘identifying and tracking repeat killers’.
That’s just one issue, but every division of the FBI will have a profiling coordinator
from this department.
It’s because of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime that we saw
such movies as “Silence of the Lambs.”
So, what do they do?
Well, first of all, computers help a lot.
When you have a database of killers and their modus operandi and their signature, you can
enter a crime into that database and it will pull up names, similar crimes committed elsewhere,
a profile of who this person could be, what kind of personality he might have or kind
of life he might live.
By the way, one of the most important things for profilers or agents to look at is the
modus operandi and signature.
With serial killers, or sexual murderers, the modus operandi might change.
Perhaps the killer usually finds his victims on the highway hitchhiking, or perhaps outside
school, or he preys on prostitutes, but if that doesn’t work he will change his strategy.
The MO is not written in stone.
But his signature, something he must do because it’s part of his fantasy, will not change.
Well, it can change, if he decides to up the ante of his fantasy.
His signature could be biting, or taking a body part as a trophy, or drinking blood.
On top of that there is something called Criminal Investigative Analysis, or CIA.
This includes six main steps.
The first step, called Profiling Inputs, is what you might imagine, which is crime scene
analysis.
Investigators look at crime scene photos, gather forensic evidence, look at information
about the location of the crime, analyze the medical examiner’s report, get background
information on the victim and also follow the victim’s last steps.
Step two, called Constructing a Decision Process Model, looks at the fundamental characteristics
of the murder.
Was it a single murder or a part of a series of murders.
Was it the primary objective of the killer or was it just incidental.
Who was the victim; was that person a high-risk individual such as a homeless person or a
prostitute, or low-risk such a professional family person.
Here they will look more at the scene.
Was the person taken there, or did it just happen there and what were the characteristics
of that scene.
In Chase’s case the person was low-risk, and the scene was chaos, as if he hadn’t
planned it.
The crime scene itself pointed to severe mental illness.
Another scene could be a dumped body in the woods, but how it’s hidden and certainly
what happened to it before death would hold valuable information.
Step three, called Crime Assessment, is very important and involves a controversial profiling
technique which asks if the killer was organized or disorganized.
We can’t go through everything these concepts mean, but in Vronsky’s book he gives some
examples.
If organized, the killer planned the crime and the escape route.
Like Ted Bundy, this is a person that went to great lengths not to be noticed and used
tricks to lure his victim into a sense of security.
He also made sure he’d get away without being seen.
They choose their victims carefully, but pick strangers, not people they know.
They usually lure their victims and capture them, and then dump the bodies some place
where police won’t discover them easily.
They are prepared and will have restraints with them.
They will often talk to their victims, manipulate them, and will get better at what they do
each time they do it.
They will likely study police investigating techniques and try and be one step ahead of
the cops.
They usually won’t kill close to where they live.
They also tend to have good jobs, have families, are above average intelligence, can be attractive,
educated, charming and full of social graces.
These are the guys that often live double lives.
They are not insane, and they know they are doing wrong, but they don’t care at all.
The disorganized killer is a different beast altogether.
They are spontaneous, acting without such painstaking planning.
They usually won’t talk to the victim, control them, and just murder them.
They might use a weapon, but might not even get rid of it after the crime.
They might leave the bodies where they killed them, but do things to those bodies first.
They might also take the body for later gratification, and will do something to it so it doesn’t
look like the living person.
These guys might not even use a car.
They could just stalk the streets and then lash out.
No planning was involved and a victim might not have been chosen beforehand.
These people are often unattractive, below average intelligence, are sometimes loners
living on the peripheries of society.
They might use drugs or alcohol a lot and are not great communicators.
They often have problems with the opposite sex, and don’t hold down relationships.
They might have mental issues and during their crimes they might feel confused and frightened.
You get the picture.
Some are methodical and some are erratic.
You’d think it would be harder to catch the methodical killer given his intelligence
and tactics, but at least they have more of an understandable modus operandi.
The problem with catching a disorganized killer, despite their lack of cunning and brains,
is the fact they are so very unpredictable.
It’s gets more confusing, though, because some killers are a mix of both.
On to step four, and this is called Criminal Profile.
This is when the profiler produces a report of the killer, such as the profiler did with
Richard Chase.
This could be quite short, or could be long.
We haven’t mentioned something called staging and posing.
This will be in that report.
Staging is when the killer deliberately moves the body at the scene into a position to mislead
investigators.
It might also include messing around with the crime scene to put investigators on the
wrong track.
This is part of the MO and can give police clues.
Staging, though, this is more a part of the signature.
This is when the killer leaves the body in a certain way because that’s part of his
fantasy.
The Boston Strangler would leave his victims in such a way that when someone opened a door
they would get the shock of their lives.
He seemed to like that.
Step five is the investigation itself and looking at leads and possible perpetrators.
Step six is Apprehension, and this is when the profile is compared to the actual killer.
The results will then be added to the FBI’s database when they are helpful and algorithms
will learn from this and hopefully be able to help police with investigations in the
future.
As we said, there have been success stories, Ted Bundy.
Richard Chase, Andrew Cunanan, Wayne Williams and more, but criminal profiling has come
under a lot of criticism.
We won’t discuss that today.
We must remember that this is the American profiling system, and other countries have
their own.
Nations such as the UK, Germany, China and Russia have a bloody history of sadistic serial
killers and you likely won’t have heard of many of those people.
We have focused on the U.S., but don’t think such horror doesn’t happen elsewhere.
You just didn’t see the movie, because there wasn’t one.
What do you think about criminal profiling?
Does it work?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video The Zodiac Serial Killer - How Did He Evade
The Police?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.