Serial Killer Research Paper

Where Do Serial Killers Come From?

It was January 1974, and the people of Wichita, Kansas were staying up all night, with their guns in their hands, ready for the unthinkable to happen. Four members of the Ortero family had just been brutally murdered in their own home, in the middle of the day. Julie and Joseph, the mother and father, had been found tied at the hands and wrists, strangled, in their bedroom. Beside them lay their nine year old son Joey, who had been murdered the same way. Even after the police discovered their bodies they were still not prepared for what they found in the basement. The Orteros' daughter, Josie, had been stripped and hung from a sewer pipe. This was just the very beginning of the serial killer career of
His father was said to bring whores home and perform sexual acts with them in front of the children. Albert also witnessed his father break his mother's fingers one by one and knock out some of her teeth (Schechter & Everitt, 1996). His father later sold Albert into slavery, and he eventually grew up to terrorize and murder thirteen women over a span of eighteen months. Growing up with his father as the only male role model in Albert's life, must have had major negative effects on him. He observed women being treated as objects, and was taught to abuse them physically when they acted out. Henry Lee Lucas is known as one of America's horrific serial killers. Investigators are not entirely sure of his actual victim count, but they place it somewhere from sixty nine to eighty. Henry suffered a rough childhood under the care of his abusive, alcoholic mother. She was extremely abusive, often beating poor Henry with large wooden objects. His mother would also bring home some of her clients, and force her son to watch them perform sexual acts. Henry's childhood was much like Albert DeSalvo's. Both were exposed to physical and sexual abuse at an extremely young age (Schechter & Everitt,
Upbringing, I believe, has a heavy weight on shaping people's personalities. Addiction is a new way for me to look at the problem of serial killings and has explained some things for me, such as, why do they continue to kill even when the police are hot on their tracks? Sometimes it would be smart for a serial killer to lay low when they become high profile, but their addiction doesn't allow them to do this. We still might not have a complete understanding of how a serial killers mind works, but I believe we are slowly progressing. Recent confessions of serial killers has also given us a priceless tool for looking into the mind of these people. When BTK was taken into custody, he finally began to confess and didn't stop. He ended up spending thirty three hours in interrogation, walking investigators through his crimes and telling them what was going through his mind. John Wayne Gacy allowed psychologists to ask him questions up until he was put to death. These encounters gave what we call "normal people" a chance to look into the head of a psychopath. Maybe someday we can pinpoint the exact factors for creating a serial killer, and prevent them from a full