Serial Killers

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Although my life has never been personally changed by a serial killer, it is a topic I have always found fascinating, and have always tried to learn as much about as possible. After reading The Anatomy of Motive, by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, I found that something doesn't necessarily have to directly happen to you in order for it to affect your life. The book was riveting and I had a lot of trouble putting it down, but the dreams, or more descriptively nightmares, I started having were a very undesirable side effect. Most nights after reading I would wake up covered in sweat, gasping for breath. The thought of some of the cases I read about made me sick to my stomach, and the way I started looking at those around me even changed a little bit. But the pursuit of information on such an interesting topic took over and I kept up with the research regardless of the results. What I found was a very interesting description of how people can do these things, why they would want to, and most importantly how to catch them.

On December 7, 171 police were called to a large Victorian mansion on Hillside Ave in Westfield, New Jersey. Neighbors had decided to call when they noticed that there had been lights burning in the house all day and all night for weeks on end. What was found turned out to be much worse then anyone would have imagined. There were several bodies in sleeping bags on the floor of the house's ballroom and over the loudspeaker a funeral dirge could be heard playing repeatedly. The dead were Helen, forty-five years old; her sixteen year old daughter, Patricia; and two sons, John Frederick, fifteen, and Frederick, thirteen. On further inspection of the house the police also found the body of Helen List's eighty-four-year-old mother-in-law in a storage room. Each victim had suffered a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

Before the officers left that day there was one suspect on their minds, the missing father, John Emil List. The evidence against him consisted of a series of letters that he ad written, but never sent to various people of importance to the List family. The letters explained his reasoning for what he had done. List had also had the paper canceled, stopped the milk delivery, told the children's schools they would be absent, and withdrawn the remaining $,8 from the family's bank account. His car was found at Kennedy Airport in Queens, with the title and owner's identification left inside. John List had disappeared, and had left no trace. All of this shows how carefully he was able to plan and act on his family's murders, there was no sense of urgency, and no sense of regret. So the question is why? Why would a man go to such lengths to kill his family, and how was he able to do it so meticulously? In one of the letters he had written he made reference to the fact that he was afraid the family was turning away from God, and he wanted to stop them before they went too far. Also in the letter he explained that he wasn't earning anywhere near enough to support his family. He also justified the murder of his mother by saying that the events would have been too much of a shock to her so he had to kill her to relieve her of the pain.

These reasons are obviously not reasons a sane man could have justified, so what made him different? Former FBI profiler John Douglas suggests that List was an obsessive compulsive type who needed everything to piece together the way he saw fit. He felt his life and the life of his family had gotten far too messy and out of control, so he took things into his own hands in order to "save them". Douglas made the assumption that List would return to a place that was familiar and comfortable to him. He ended up being right. On June 1, 18 List was found living in Midlothian, Virginia with his new wife, only a couple miles away from where he had met his first wife. He was living under another name, and might never have been caught if not for America's Most Wanted, and one of his old neighbor's recognition of him. Through fingerprints the police were able to identify with certainty that it was List, and they arrested him.

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The first thing I thought of when I read this story was how someone could ever convince them self that killing their family was an answer to any problem. And even though Douglas gives a lot of basic information about what List's problems actually were, there is no real way to answer the question of what his motive truly could have been, other then the fact that List was not a mentally well-off individual, perhaps partly by nature, but also by the nurturing he had received throughout his life.

As The Police song states, "Once that you've decided on a killing First you make a stone of your heart And if you find that your hands are still willing Then you can turn a murder into art", The first step a serial killer has to take is making them self numb to what they're doing. Many serial killers have had pasts that include some kind of extreme physical or sexual abuse from a parent or parental figure. There have also been studies that show many serial killers tortured animals as children. This shows that from a very young age they were not only being taught that hurting others is okay, but also how to make a living creature suffer with no regret or remorse. Shervert Frazier, who has served as president of the American Psychiatric Association, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and supervisor of psychiatric services at Massachusetts's Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, has concluded that "these killers had been subjected to brutalizing treatment that generated overwhelming hostile and ultimately murderous emotions". Though I do feel pity for anyone who was abused as a child, it does not serve as a good enough excuse for this kind of behavior, and it still doesn't explain to me how someone could do such a thing.

The average serial killer tends to be white heterosexual males in his twenties or thirties who is a loner with low self esteem. His methodical rampages are almost always sexually motivated. His killings tend to be part of an elaborate sexual fantasy that builds to a climax at the moment of his murderous outburst. Serial Killers usually murder strangers with cooling off periods between each crime. Many are sadistic in nature. They enjoy returning to grave sites and crime scenes to fantasize about the previous kills. Furthermore, many killers like to insert themselves in the investigations of their crimes and some like to taunt the police. Serial killers generally are very smart, and very patient. They have the ability to plan out their crimes without any interruption from their conscience. They seem to explore killing like it's a game. It's as if they have taken human life and turned it into a sick entertainment system in order to see what happens when they destroy it.

One question I've always wondered about serial killers is whether or not they know what they're doing is wrong. Either they do, and they just don't mind, or they are so sick in the head that they don't even see their actions as morally wrong. It's very difficult for me to imagine a person who doesn't understand that killing is wrong, but on the other hand it's even harder to imagine a person who knows it is wrong, but does it anyway. Overall, through the reading I've done, it seems that more then anything these people want power. They want the feeling that comes along with "playing God", regardless of what it entails. This leads me to believe that they do know what they're doing, they have just lost (if they ever had) the ability to care.

One last thing to think about is the crime scene itself. It is stated in The Anatomy of Motive that "to know the artist, you must study his art". Many serial killers leave clues behind, they want the police to have to search to find them, but eventually their goal is to get caught. In order to gain the infamy that comes along with this occupation you need to be caught. It's odd to think about someone wanting their name to go down in history as a serial killer, but in many cases that is the goal. The killer thinks it is the only thing they can really succeed at, so why not? This ends up being the main difference between serial killers, and Spree. Spree killers murder for a "purpose" of some kind, and usually end up killing themselves at the end of their reign of terror. Serial killers have far too much respect for their art to do such a thing, they want to be known, and studied.

In the end I do feel the book gave a good description of the life of a serial killer, and a couple interesting theories as to their motives. But I don't feel any more confident in the reasons people do this. Maybe it is the type of thing that no one ever truly understands without living that life. If that is the case then I'm fine with my ignorance, but it still bothers me to think that there are people out there either raised to act this way, or born to act this way. How can society try to help these people before their acts become murderous? What can we do to pick them out and notice them, before they have hurt others? Maybe these questions are impossible to answer; maybe this is just one of the facts humans have to live with in an imperfect world. But I would like to believe that with each new case that gets investigated, we are getting closer and closer to the reasons behind these acts, and the prevention necessary to stop them.

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