What Makes a Person Become a Serial Killer?

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What makes a person kill? What is it that drives a living human being to take the life of another? This troubling query has plagued societies since the beginning of time. Poignant to all social strata, homicide is a mystery to the poor and the wealthy, the young and the old, women and men. Every type of person can be a killer, no matter what background, race or gender, and this is what makes killing so puzzling. the phenomenon challenges every nation, and almost every notion(from greed and lust to envy and anger) has been proposed as reasons why human beings destroy one another, yet not one of them is a solid explanation, the single key that would unlock the enigma. The question persists: why do people kill?
At any one time it is estimated that there are between 50-75 serial killers operating in the United States. Of this number, approximately 7-8 are female, which is consistent with studies on murder in general, where women total only a small percentage of those who kill (hickey, 1997).
Female serial killers account for only eight percent of American serial killers but American females account for three-fourth of all female serial killers worldwide (H. Thomas, 2004).
Of a total of about 400 serial killers identified between 1800 and 1995, approximately 16 percent were females- a total of 62 killers. Although this number is not an overwhelming majority, neither is it a number that can be ignored. Those 62 women collectively killed between 400 and 600 victims including men, women and children (Peter, 2007).
Because this phenomenon has been ignored, by a large number of law enforcement agencies, as well as society as a whole, fail to realize that females can and do commit acts of multiple murders. Due to police not having the k...

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...homicides.
After all my research and reading I have learned that even as we evolve as law enforcement and with technology we still may never understand why women kill even though the most infamous killers that are female are known as black widows there is still a wide range of different types of female killers out there. We may never be able to get into the minds of female serial killers the way we have when it comes to male serial killers. Sometimes women kill in the crime of passion or because they were abused their whole lives. Some women just snap one day and have had enough or they or so far from reality that they do not know fake from real and kill and do not remember killing. You also have women that are psycholgically in their mind thinking they are saving their victims by constantly hurting them for attention over and over until they finally kill them.

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