Serial Killers: A Psychological Analysis

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"For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry," said Carl Panzram, referencing his murders of 20 people, showing absolutely no remorse, guilt, or any feeling whatsoever for the crimes he committed. With a bleak childhood and parental issues, all children of the Panzram family, thankfully, did not end up being serial killers. So what made Carl do these dastardly deeds? This paper delves into the motives behind serial killers of the past and describes the physical, mental or sociological problems that dominate the personalities of these individuals and encourage them to kill. The purposes behind serial killing to date have all had common links, usually with parental conflicts or the killers are of unsound mind. Abnormalities in development …show more content…

This is shaped by the genes a person possesses, and these genes are probably expressed as a consequence of these experiences (Keegan, 2014). This paper delves into the effects of parental conflict during the childhood of serial killers and attempts to find direct links between genetics, psychopathy and a thirst for murder, if any exist.
We can certainly derive a common link from serial killers of the past, that being parental conflicts combined with either psychological or sexual abuse that led to them growing up with anger management issues and twisted minds. A frightening statistic by De Becker stated that “100 percent [of serial killers] had been abused as children, either with violence, neglect, or humiliation” (Mitchell & Aamodt, 2005). Abuse may be characterized into three types, namely sexual, physical or psychological abuse. If we focus on lust killers, a type of serial killers who kill to satisfy their sexual desires, nearly 68% of them were subjected to maltreatment of some kind. Other statistics show 36% suffered physical abuse, 26% suffered sexual …show more content…

Bonn. He mentions the way serial killers compartmentalize their whole lives, one aspect includes them being professors and another aspect shows their true murderous colours (Bonn, 2017). This compartmentalization is in order to escape being caught while taking their anger out on reality. The motives that drive them to doing dastardly deeds stems from them living in normal neighbourhoods and yet not experiencing a childhood that one would expect from white picket fence areas. This shows strong signs of psychopathy, which means if we can identify psychopathy early on from the characteristics of an individual, we can be relatively sure that the person will turn out to be a violent adult. Psychopathy can now be estimated based on a simple test designed by Professor Robert Hare, a criminal psychologist. The Hare test comprises of 20 questions, each one scored as 0 (if not applicable to the person), 1 (if partially applicable) or 2 (if fully applicable). The criteria include symptoms of a common psychopath including pathological lying, lack of empathy, tendency to get bored quickly and manipulative behaviour. If the person scores above 35, one can ascertain that he or she is a psychopath. Now psychopaths have cognitive empathy and this is very different from emotional empathy,

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