The Psychological And Sociological Characteristics Of The Serial Killers

While profiling serial killers we must look into their psychological and sociological characteristics in order to see if there is a pattern in which criminologist are able to pin point traits that can be related to other serial killers. By having this information criminologist are able to make determinations to what social approach problems a serial killer might posse. While serial killers only represent a small fraction of criminals in the United States, their crime contributes to only a small number of crimes (O’Reilly-Fleming, 1996). O’Reilly-Fleming (1996) suggests that there is an estimated ten serial killers in the United States at one time, however, the FBI estimates that there are between twenty-five and fifty serial killers operating throughout the U.S. at any given time ().

Richard Ramirez was born February 29, 1960 in El Paso, Texas to a Mexican American railway worker named Julian Ramirez and his wife Mercedes who was a factory worker, Richard was also the youngest of seven children growing up in the Ramirez home. At the young age of two, Richard had a dresser fall on his head where he laid unconscious for fifteen minutes. He received a total of thirty stitches and still visible to the day he died (Richard, 2015). By the age of six he frequently had seizers and his doctor diagnosed Richard with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. This would also be the same time Richard would witness the server beating of his oldest brother Ruben at the hands of their father (Richard, 2015).

At 1972, Richard started hanging out with his cousin Mike who had just returned from the Vietnam War. They talked about Satanic worship while smoking marijuana together. While in the Vietnam War, Mike took pictures of woman giving him sexual stimulation while...

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.... While there is no direct connections with Satanic Warship, however, when an adolescent such as Richard becomes entwined with satanic activities there may be a systematic of a number of disorders such as psychoactive substance abuse, depression, borderline personality disorder, disruptive behavior, or anti-social personality (Wheeler, 1988, p. 547). Freud (1920), expressed that the death instincts is expressed as an innate and destructive aggression. According to Freud (1920), the death instinct could be directed to harm to self or may be directed outward to another person as a target of aggression.

Richard Ramirez’s killing seemed to contain a lot of aggression in the ways he killed his victims and we will never know one hundred percent where the aggressions came from. Theories are never exact, but gives us a better understandings of serial killers as a whole.