What are Serial Killers?

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Recommended: Psychology theories about serial killers

Serial killers have been a major problem in the United States for a long time. We don’t know why they kill human beings, but many people are trying to figure out why. A serial killer is a person that has murdered three or more people over a period of a month. There is also a period of time between the murders know as the “cooling off period”. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there have been approximately four hundred serial killers in the United States within the past century. The number of these murderers have increased over the past thirty years, with around eighty percent of them emerging since 1950.
The term “serial killer” was created in the mid-1970s by a man named Robert Ressler, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. “He chose "serial" because the police in England called these types of murders "crimes in a series" and because of the serial films that he grew up watching.”(Freeman). Before this term was created these murders were known as mass murders crimes. Serial killers can be act-focused, who kill quickly or process-focused, who kill slowly and torture their victims.
There are two types of serial killers. The visionary serial killers who murders people because they hear voices or have visions that direct them to do so. Then there are the missionary murders, who believe that they are meant to get rid of a particular group of people. Inside these two groups of serial killers, there can be four different types of serial killers. The Lust serial killers, the thrill serial killers, the gain serial killers, and the power-seeking serial killers. Lust killers derive sexual pleasure from killing, thrill killers get joy from it, gain killers murder b...

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...who most likely have had some kind of childhood problem such as divorce or lack of a parent. They might be thinking that they are doing the world a favor, or in search of power of people, or just simply just find pleasure in killing. As to why serial killers have been increasing over the past thirty years, there is no certain answer to it, but hopefully it stops increasing soon and decreases instead.

Works Cited
Freeman, Shanna. "HowStuffWorks "How Serial Killers Work"" HowStuffWorks. Web. 22 May 2014.
Hickey, Eric W. "Serial Killers: Defining Serial Murder." Serial Killers. Web. 20 May 2014.
Preston, Douglas J., and Lincoln Child. Still Life with Crows. New York: Warner, 2003. Print.
Schlesinger, Louis B. "Is Serial Homicide Really Increasing." Is Serial Homicide Really Increasing (2001). Web.
"Serial Killer." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 22 May 2014.

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