Serial Killer Essay

Serial Killers: Childhood Traumas and Mental Instabilities or Plain Coincidence? Serial killers have been around all of human history. Their sinister ways of killing have been a good anchor for movie making in Hollywood, leading to many well known movies like “It”, which was based off of a real life story. Other movies would be based off on serial killers like the Zodiac killer and Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper was the infamous serial killer in London during the 17th century. He would kill women around the ages of 40’s and all of them would have one thing in common, they were all prostitutes. The way that he would kill them is always astonishing. He would rape the women and then cut their bodies open. The first time he ever killed, he took
Mental instability, or any other mental condition, could lead to serial killers to kill. The Zodiac Killer is a perfect example of this. Even though he was never caught, many think that he could have had some sort of mental instability. In the notes that the Zodiac sent to the San Francisco police, it showed his instability. In the book Serial Killers & Mass Murderers: Profiles of the World’s Most Barbaric Criminal written by Nigel Cawthorne, a writer that studied at the University of London. In Cawthorne’s book he talks mentions the Zodiac Killer and some of the notes that the Zodiac sent to the San Francisco police. “ It read: ‘I like killing people because it is so much more fun than killing wild game in the forrest [sic] because man is the most dangerous of all to kill….’”(Cawthorne 97). This shows that the Zodiac had some sort of mental instability that made him want to keep hunting and getting rare rewards that no other hunter would get from hunting wild game. That reward was fame, but not in the way that many would think of “being famous”. The Zodiac became extremely well known due to the fact that he took credit for all the people killed and would send notes and encrypted messages to the San Francisco