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Essays on the psychology of serial killers
Essays on the psychology of serial killers
Essays on the psychology of serial killers
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When horrific crimes occur in large cities, many of them can be chalked up to gang violence or to the larger population of that specific city. But when horrific crimes happen in small cities like Lincoln, Nebraska, people begin to ask questions like who did this and why. In 1958, a nineteen year old man named Charles Starkweather put the entire state of Nebraska and possibly the entire nation in a state of terror. With his murder spree taking only three days, Starkweather had collected a body count of ten bodies, including two teenagers and a young child. Understanding Starkweather’s past and state of mind begins to answer the second question of why.
Charles Starkweather was from a respectable hard-working family in Lincoln, Nebraska. Though they were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, the Starkweathers always provided for their large family. As a child, Starkweather suffered from several ailments that made him different and a target of bullies (Allen, 2004). In fact, he used his physical strength to get back at many of his childhood bullies. He was able to release much of the anger he held inside when he was able to physically bully those that had bullied him. Overall, Starkweather lived much of his life as a social outcast and blamed many of his problems on his inability to “blend-in” with his peers.
One of the first murders he performed was on his girlfriend’s family. Whether Caril Ann Fugate was an active participant or not, Starkweather murdered three of her family members in cold blood with disregard to Fugate’s feelings. The murder of her Fugate’s two and a half year old sister shows that Starkweather acted impulsively. Starkweather recalled that she would not stop crying so he “needed to shut he...
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...oducing the ideas of pain, suffering and sorrow, Starkweather would be asked to work on recognizing and respecting these concepts.
Starkweather would, also, be asked to track his likeliness of remorse for his crimes. By tracking this feeling, therapy progress can, also, be tracked. Making a person with antisocial personality disorder own their actions and take responsibility for them and their effect on others is necessary for reaching a therapeutic way of life. At any time that Starkweather’s progress begins to stall, sessions with him would be conducted to sort out what part of the process he dislikes, thinks is useless or simply cannot identify with. Working slowly, Starkweather may reach a point where he is no longer a danger to himself might make him a candidate for more privileges during his incarceration, which would likely be the rest of his life.
Alston, Alex A. and James Dickerson. Devil’s Sanctuary: An Eyewitness History of Mississippi Hate Crimes. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. 2009.
In his book, Blood Done Sign My Name, the author Timothy Tyson tells the story of the highly combustible racial atmosphere in the American South before, during, and after the Jim Crow era. Unlike Margaret Mitchell’s account of the glory and grandeur of the Antebellum South, Tyson exposes the reader to the horrific and brutal reality that the black race experienced on a daily basis. Tyson highlights the double standard that existed during this period in history, arguing that the hypocrisy of the “white” southern judicial system allowed the murder of a young black African-American male at the hands of white racists to go unpunished (Tyson 2004, 244). The hypocrisy and double standard that allowed whites to bring harm to blacks without fear of any repercussions had existed for years before the murder Tyson wrote about occurred in May of 1970 (Tyson 2004, 1).
After Caril’s family, the murders continued. The truth behind each murder to come is unknown because Charlie and Caril each told prosecutors a different story. August Meyer, an old family friend of the Starkweather family, came next in the streak of homicides. After killing the seventy year old man, the pair robbed his home after leaving his body in a barn.
... a need to serve justice out to the world. He would go out looking for injustice and cruel people that he could teach a lesson to. Finally he simply became obsessed with and would go looking for any reason to fight people. He had slowly became the person he had feared as a child. After a long time he was sick of what he had become and turned to creativity to change that. He began to write and from that writing he realized that he did not need to fight he could write and that writing made him feel better than fighting ever did. This memoir really portrays the impact violence has on a person’s life and how with a push in the right direction then can be helped. No one ever stops being who they were but they can build on that person to become someone stronger and more to their liking.
October 2002 was the beginning of what seemed like the longest three weeks in the Washington Metropolitan Area. No one wanted to believe that what was happening would change the lives of thousands. What appeared to be a random killing spree by an enraged lunatic, turned out to be part of a massive plan that claimed the lives of ten innocent people in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. When these shootings first began, they were believed to be linked to a white van or truck. It was later discovered that these shootings were being carried out by a man named John Allen Muhammad, and his teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, in a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan.
Jacobs, David, Jason T. Carmichael, and Stephanie Kent. 2005. “Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat and Death Sentences.” American Sociological Review 70: 656-677.
The events surround the deaths of four students in Kent, Ohio are disorderly and violent. In the government’s investigation after the shootings, the officials made several recommendations to students of the future. As the massacre is looked back upon, there are several key events that
On April 19th, 1989, Trisha Meili was the victim of violent assault, rape, and sodomy. The vicious attack left her in a coma for 12 days and The New York Times described it as “one of the most widely publicized crimes of the 1980’s.” The documentary, The Central Park Five, reveals the truth about what happened the night of April 19th, and how the subordinate group of young black boys were wrongly convicted. Analyzing the conflict theory of crime in association to the case of the central park five, understanding the way they were treated based on setting, why it was so easy for the law enforcement to pin the crime on the young black boys, and how wrongly convicting someone has great consequences along with relating it
From the summer of 1979 to the summer of 1981, at least twenty-eight people were abducted and killed during a murder spree in Atlanta, Georgia; these killings would come to be known as the Atlanta Child Murders. While the victims of the killings were people of all races and genders, most of the victims of the Atlanta Child Murders were young African-American males. These murders created great racial tension in the city of Atlanta, with its black population believing the murders to be the work of a white supremacist group. (Bardsley & Bell, n.d., p. l) However, when police finally apprehended a suspect in the case, they found it was neither a white supremacy group, nor a white person at all; it was a 23 year-old African-American man named Wayne Williams. (“What are”, n.d.)
This case study is intended to analyze the movie When a Man Loves a Woman, and to provide worst and best case scenarios for treatment. This film depicts a family that is struggling with a family member’s alcoholic dependency. The mother, Alice Green, is a school counselor who has an addiction to alcohol that is causing her to experience problems in her life as a result of her use. Her husband, Michael Green, is an airline pilot that is very protective Alice and often steps in and takes over for Alice, even in her role as a mother. Alice has two children, Jess and Casey, which also bear witness to their mother’s deterioration from alcohol addiction.
Every morning on my way to school I often pick up the Red Eye newspaper and read the latest news happening in Chicago. As I skim the pages I often see a section that shows the homicide tracker in the city of Chicago. This section of the newspaper shows numerous of deaths occurred in a month in a specific area. Consequently, similar to this homicide tracker on the newspaper the following articles have about the same homicide stories that have occurred in the city of Chicago years ago. In the book The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson illustrates the dreadful events about crime, violence, and illness all leading to death; The Coldest Case: The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre by Jonathan Eig describes a tragic murder of six men by the mob making Chicago seen as a gangland murder capital; The Untouchables by Eliot Ness tells the conflict Eliot Ness experienced trying to put the gangster Al Capone out of business, and For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago by Simon Baatz retells the case of judge Clarence Darrow which was to defend two boys of receiving the death penalty. The combination of these three stories shows serious issues such as crime, corruption and violence that are plaguing Chicago.
This paper is talking about “The Serial Killer,” but focus on Gary Ridgway- “The Green River Serial Killer.” He earned his nickname because the first five victims that he killed were found in the Green River. He was one of the most famous serial killers in the United States. Ridgway raped, chocked, killer and discarded 48 women, including many teenagers as young as 15 years old (Silja J, 2003). In Ridgway’s mind, he even believed that he was helping the police out, as he admitted in one interview with investigators (Silja J, 2003).
In the first assignment of Research Skills (Studio Pathway), we have to explain some terms in research. Every student has to choose 5 terms. 5 research terms that interested me are Case Study, Literature Review, Primary Source, Secondary Source, and Survey.
I chose to pick a fictional character that played in a couple of films and now has a TV series. This particular boy suffered severe emotional abuse as a child at the hands of his mother who preached to him that sexual intercourse is sinful and that all women except her are whores. The boy’s father died which left the boy and his mother living alone together until adolescence, when his mother took on a boyfriend. This boy became incredibly jealous and murdered both him and his mother with strychnine.
The Sensory integration frame of reference (FOR) has been used in occupational therapy treatment to treat individuals with Asperger’s syndrome ((Pfeiffer, Koenig, Kinnealey, Sheppard, & Henderson, 2011). Children with sensory processing deficits have difficulty regulating responses to sensations and stimuli (Pfeiffer et al., 2011). Therefore, the sensory integration FOR is designed to provide controlled sensory experiences so that an adaptive motor response is elicited (Pfeiffer et al., 2011). Interventions based on this FOR use planned, controlled sensory input in addition to the needs of the child and are characterized by an emphasis on sensory stimulation and active participation of the client (Pfeiffer et al., 2011). The objective of sensory integration is to improve sensory related behavior and attention and to increase abilities for children to interact socially, academically, and function independently (Pfeiffer et al., 2011). According to Pfeiffer et al. (2011), studies support the use of sensory integration interventions in children with Asperger’s syndrome.