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11-07-2005, 07:46 PM
CatDawg asked me to post my paper here and so here is a VERY rough draft.
âIt was an urge strong urge, and the longer I let it go the stronger it got, to where I was taking risks to go out and kill people- risks that normally, according to my little rules of operation, I wouldnât take because they could lead to arrest.â â Edmund Kemper
What makes serial killers tick? Who are they and whom do they kill? Are they outsiders or are they just like us?
A serial killer is defined by having a minimum of three or four victims, with a âcooling offâ period in between. The killer is usually a complete stranger to the victims. The victims are usually vulnerable. Their murders are rarely for a profit, the motives are psychological. Some murders reflect a need to sadistically dominate the victim.
On average, serial killers are white men from a lower to middle class background. They are usually aged 20 to 30. Their parents physically or emotionally abused many. As children, developing serial killers often played with fire, tortured animals, and wet their beds. These symptoms are so common in fledgling killers that they were named âthe triad of symptoms.â Brain injuries are common yet some are extremely intellectual individuals. Most are fascinated with the police or authority figures in general and those will at least have attempted to become police or serve in the military or work as security personnel.
The coveted role to a serial killer is a position of authority, yet when they are caught, many will suddenly fall into the role of âinsane.â They pretend to have multiple personality, schizophrenic, or prone to blackouts. They will use anything to evade the responsibilities that they have to face.
Serial killers choose victims weaker than themselves. Often their victims will fit a certain stereotype, which has symbolic meaning for the killer. With rare exceptions, serial killers will objectify and often humiliate their victims. They are sadists and seek perverse pleasure in torturing their victims. There have been events in which killers will resuscitate a victim at the brink of death to be able to torture them more. They feel the need to dominate, control, and âownâ the people. This contradicts their beliefs because after the victim is dead, they are once again abandoned and left with their hatred. This cycle will repeat itself until they are caught or dead themselves. Often in cases, the killers will beg police to catch them or ask for help in controlled their urges because they have no control over them anymore and that in turn is why they continue to kill.
Sadly, if you want to avoid crossing paths with a serial killer, your best strategy is to stay away from the charming, impeccably dressed, polite, personable people that you come into contact with on a daily basis. In this outward sense, the killers camouflage themselves into society. They have jobs, shop, go to church, and walk the streets as well as anyone else. Most think that the opposite is more factual, that the maniac with uncontrollable urges and easily traceable insanity will manage to oppose themselves to all around them and stand out from all normalcies.
The term âserial killerâ was coined back in 1971 and since the 19th century society stopped trying to the killings on the Devil and actually began trying to develop common traits between serial murderers. Criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau believed that violent men had âprimitiveâ faces with heavy jaws and low foreheads. Lombroso started the belief that by measuring foreheads of criminals, he could target the violent criminal.
Franz Josef Gall promoted âphrenology.â By feeling the bumps on a personâs head he believed that a personâs character and intelligence level could be predicted. Another related theory was physiognomy in which Johann Kaspar Lavatar claimed that a character could be determined by reading their facial features.
Traditional explanations have become more logical. These now include childhood abuse, genetics, chemical imbalances, brain injuries, exposure to traumatic events, perceived social injustices, among many, many others. If serial killers all act on âimpulsesâ then what stops us from acting out our aggressions as well? Do they lack a moral switch that allows them to turn such feelings and reactions on and off?
Childhood events are something that most serial killers have in common. Common occurrences and backgrounds can be traced back and linked rather easily. Adoption has been considered as a potential cause of the killings. Did the childâs biological parents leave them with deviant genes? What was the mother and why did she reject and abandon their child?
When a child gets to the age that the adoption is explained to them, does it have an effect on their psyche? Knowing that their parents did not care enough for them to keep them in some cases could damage a childâs influential mind. If the child actually meets their biological parent(s) and is rejected again, the damage is alot worse. A childâs self-identity will be affected by adoption but it does not always mean that a multiple murderer is the outcome.
Serial killers often blame their exposure to violence had a very influential effect on their outcome. Witnessing or receiving harsh punishments are almost parallel to the violent behavior of humans.
For all sorts of reasons, many killers were isolated from their peers at a young age. Many were shy and unsociable; others were ridiculed for other reasons. Isolation, over time, grows more severe and they begin to rely on the world they have built within their minds. Their fantasies begin to take over their thought process and take them out of reality. Such fantasies often involve violence and reveal themselves through two of three predicting âtriadâ systems: arson and animal cruelty.
Going into further detail with the âtriadâ of systems we are able to see many common traits. If not stopped at an early age, violence against animals will soon develop into violence against humans. Animals are often used as practice for harming and/or killing humans. Ed Kemper exhibited one example of such behavior. This future serial killer once buried his familyâs cat alive, dug it up, and proceeded to cut off its head. Another murderer that started out with animal cruelty was no other than Mr. Jeffery Dahmer. A young Dahmer was notorious for cutting off the heads of dogs and placing them on sticks behind his familyâs home.
Pyromania, an uncontrollable impulse to start fires, is sometimes a sexually stimulating act for killers. Destroying property feeds their perverse need to destroy another human being. Seeing humans as objects also, the change from setting fires to murder is not hard in their mind.
Being the most intimate of the symptoms, bedwetting is extremely common between multiple murderers. An estimate 60% of these killers wet their beds past the age of adolescence. Often, as kids, they were left to spend the rest of those nights in urine-soaked bed sheets.
The theory of their families being solely responsible for their behavior raises many questions. Why donât siblings of these kids become killers as well? If they did it because they did not feel as if they fitted in, why not get support from other neglected people? The killers take the life from their victims, which leaves them alone again, but were that not the problem that some initially tried to solve? What other components pushed these serial killers over the edge?
Being exposed to violence would tie in with a killerâs upbringing. Cases begin with a child being abused by their parents. Although the killer to use as their advantage in court fabricates some stories of childhood torture, some witnesses have actually proved many cases to be factual. Childhood abuse alone cannot be the sole excuse of an up and coming serial killer either. Some parents raising these children believed that by disciplining them strong that they would mature their child and make them emotional tougher. The lack of love however has disastrous effects in the long run. Fathers can and often do disappear from kidâs lives and some mothers can be too domineering but the number of times that the outcome has resulted in perfectly physically and mentally healthy children help to disprove this fact.
âOne side of me says, âIâd like to talk to her, date her.â The other side of me says, âI wonder what her head would look like on a stick.ââ â Ed Kemper The inabilities to recognize people as worthy of compassion and take any of their emotions into consideration are trademarks of psychopaths. Psychopathology was once considered to be âmoral insanity.â Today, it is more commonly known as âantisocial personality disorderâ or âsociopathology.â
They are diagnosed by their purposeless and irrational antisocial behavior. They lack conscience and are literally fearless. Punishments do not affect them because of this lack of fear. Studies show that 60% psychopathic individuals had lost a parent. As children they were deprived from the love and nurturing needed from their parents. They were raised with inconsistencies in their discipline, either their father was too stern and the mother too soft or vice versa. Many had hypocritical parents who behind closed doors belittled their children while presented a false image of a perfectly happy family to the public eye.
Genetics and physiological factors contribute to yielding psychopaths. Tests have been run that show that the nervous systems of them were different. They experience a substantial lower amount of fear and anxiety than a normal person does. Another experiment was conducted and it was concluding those low arousal levels within psychopaths caused impulses, thrill seeking, and made it extremely difficult to change their behavior. The need for higher levels of stimulation makes them seek dangerous situations. Medically, autonomic nervous system is responsible for these sluggish reactions to stimuli.
Serial killers only stop when they are caught or killed. Ed Kemper has been the only one to call the police to confess and wait to be picked up. Thankfully, society is not willing to put serial killers but into the world to find out if they can be rehabilitated. Killers are lifeless objects and try making others into the same in a literal sense. They live outsides our normal social boundaries. Something makes them choose to go outside the rules that confine the rest of us. Living in their own world of mayhem with us on the outside, they themselves know no more of what made them kill than we do. Will we ever truly know what makes a serial killer tick?
âIt was an urge strong urge, and the longer I let it go the stronger it got, to where I was taking risks to go out and kill people- risks that normally, according to my little rules of operation, I wouldnât take because they could lead to arrest.â â Edmund Kemper
What makes serial killers tick? Who are they and whom do they kill? Are they outsiders or are they just like us?
A serial killer is defined by having a minimum of three or four victims, with a âcooling offâ period in between. The killer is usually a complete stranger to the victims. The victims are usually vulnerable. Their murders are rarely for a profit, the motives are psychological. Some murders reflect a need to sadistically dominate the victim.
On average, serial killers are white men from a lower to middle class background. They are usually aged 20 to 30. Their parents physically or emotionally abused many. As children, developing serial killers often played with fire, tortured animals, and wet their beds. These symptoms are so common in fledgling killers that they were named âthe triad of symptoms.â Brain injuries are common yet some are extremely intellectual individuals. Most are fascinated with the police or authority figures in general and those will at least have attempted to become police or serve in the military or work as security personnel.
The coveted role to a serial killer is a position of authority, yet when they are caught, many will suddenly fall into the role of âinsane.â They pretend to have multiple personality, schizophrenic, or prone to blackouts. They will use anything to evade the responsibilities that they have to face.
Serial killers choose victims weaker than themselves. Often their victims will fit a certain stereotype, which has symbolic meaning for the killer. With rare exceptions, serial killers will objectify and often humiliate their victims. They are sadists and seek perverse pleasure in torturing their victims. There have been events in which killers will resuscitate a victim at the brink of death to be able to torture them more. They feel the need to dominate, control, and âownâ the people. This contradicts their beliefs because after the victim is dead, they are once again abandoned and left with their hatred. This cycle will repeat itself until they are caught or dead themselves. Often in cases, the killers will beg police to catch them or ask for help in controlled their urges because they have no control over them anymore and that in turn is why they continue to kill.
Sadly, if you want to avoid crossing paths with a serial killer, your best strategy is to stay away from the charming, impeccably dressed, polite, personable people that you come into contact with on a daily basis. In this outward sense, the killers camouflage themselves into society. They have jobs, shop, go to church, and walk the streets as well as anyone else. Most think that the opposite is more factual, that the maniac with uncontrollable urges and easily traceable insanity will manage to oppose themselves to all around them and stand out from all normalcies.
The term âserial killerâ was coined back in 1971 and since the 19th century society stopped trying to the killings on the Devil and actually began trying to develop common traits between serial murderers. Criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau believed that violent men had âprimitiveâ faces with heavy jaws and low foreheads. Lombroso started the belief that by measuring foreheads of criminals, he could target the violent criminal.
Franz Josef Gall promoted âphrenology.â By feeling the bumps on a personâs head he believed that a personâs character and intelligence level could be predicted. Another related theory was physiognomy in which Johann Kaspar Lavatar claimed that a character could be determined by reading their facial features.
Traditional explanations have become more logical. These now include childhood abuse, genetics, chemical imbalances, brain injuries, exposure to traumatic events, perceived social injustices, among many, many others. If serial killers all act on âimpulsesâ then what stops us from acting out our aggressions as well? Do they lack a moral switch that allows them to turn such feelings and reactions on and off?
Childhood events are something that most serial killers have in common. Common occurrences and backgrounds can be traced back and linked rather easily. Adoption has been considered as a potential cause of the killings. Did the childâs biological parents leave them with deviant genes? What was the mother and why did she reject and abandon their child?
When a child gets to the age that the adoption is explained to them, does it have an effect on their psyche? Knowing that their parents did not care enough for them to keep them in some cases could damage a childâs influential mind. If the child actually meets their biological parent(s) and is rejected again, the damage is alot worse. A childâs self-identity will be affected by adoption but it does not always mean that a multiple murderer is the outcome.
Serial killers often blame their exposure to violence had a very influential effect on their outcome. Witnessing or receiving harsh punishments are almost parallel to the violent behavior of humans.
For all sorts of reasons, many killers were isolated from their peers at a young age. Many were shy and unsociable; others were ridiculed for other reasons. Isolation, over time, grows more severe and they begin to rely on the world they have built within their minds. Their fantasies begin to take over their thought process and take them out of reality. Such fantasies often involve violence and reveal themselves through two of three predicting âtriadâ systems: arson and animal cruelty.
Going into further detail with the âtriadâ of systems we are able to see many common traits. If not stopped at an early age, violence against animals will soon develop into violence against humans. Animals are often used as practice for harming and/or killing humans. Ed Kemper exhibited one example of such behavior. This future serial killer once buried his familyâs cat alive, dug it up, and proceeded to cut off its head. Another murderer that started out with animal cruelty was no other than Mr. Jeffery Dahmer. A young Dahmer was notorious for cutting off the heads of dogs and placing them on sticks behind his familyâs home.
Pyromania, an uncontrollable impulse to start fires, is sometimes a sexually stimulating act for killers. Destroying property feeds their perverse need to destroy another human being. Seeing humans as objects also, the change from setting fires to murder is not hard in their mind.
Being the most intimate of the symptoms, bedwetting is extremely common between multiple murderers. An estimate 60% of these killers wet their beds past the age of adolescence. Often, as kids, they were left to spend the rest of those nights in urine-soaked bed sheets.
The theory of their families being solely responsible for their behavior raises many questions. Why donât siblings of these kids become killers as well? If they did it because they did not feel as if they fitted in, why not get support from other neglected people? The killers take the life from their victims, which leaves them alone again, but were that not the problem that some initially tried to solve? What other components pushed these serial killers over the edge?
Being exposed to violence would tie in with a killerâs upbringing. Cases begin with a child being abused by their parents. Although the killer to use as their advantage in court fabricates some stories of childhood torture, some witnesses have actually proved many cases to be factual. Childhood abuse alone cannot be the sole excuse of an up and coming serial killer either. Some parents raising these children believed that by disciplining them strong that they would mature their child and make them emotional tougher. The lack of love however has disastrous effects in the long run. Fathers can and often do disappear from kidâs lives and some mothers can be too domineering but the number of times that the outcome has resulted in perfectly physically and mentally healthy children help to disprove this fact.
âOne side of me says, âIâd like to talk to her, date her.â The other side of me says, âI wonder what her head would look like on a stick.ââ â Ed Kemper The inabilities to recognize people as worthy of compassion and take any of their emotions into consideration are trademarks of psychopaths. Psychopathology was once considered to be âmoral insanity.â Today, it is more commonly known as âantisocial personality disorderâ or âsociopathology.â
They are diagnosed by their purposeless and irrational antisocial behavior. They lack conscience and are literally fearless. Punishments do not affect them because of this lack of fear. Studies show that 60% psychopathic individuals had lost a parent. As children they were deprived from the love and nurturing needed from their parents. They were raised with inconsistencies in their discipline, either their father was too stern and the mother too soft or vice versa. Many had hypocritical parents who behind closed doors belittled their children while presented a false image of a perfectly happy family to the public eye.
Genetics and physiological factors contribute to yielding psychopaths. Tests have been run that show that the nervous systems of them were different. They experience a substantial lower amount of fear and anxiety than a normal person does. Another experiment was conducted and it was concluding those low arousal levels within psychopaths caused impulses, thrill seeking, and made it extremely difficult to change their behavior. The need for higher levels of stimulation makes them seek dangerous situations. Medically, autonomic nervous system is responsible for these sluggish reactions to stimuli.
Serial killers only stop when they are caught or killed. Ed Kemper has been the only one to call the police to confess and wait to be picked up. Thankfully, society is not willing to put serial killers but into the world to find out if they can be rehabilitated. Killers are lifeless objects and try making others into the same in a literal sense. They live outsides our normal social boundaries. Something makes them choose to go outside the rules that confine the rest of us. Living in their own world of mayhem with us on the outside, they themselves know no more of what made them kill than we do. Will we ever truly know what makes a serial killer tick?
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11-07-2005, 10:32 PM
That's a good paper, especially for High School. I' d give it an A for sure in high school. Maybe even a C+ here at UK depending on what the question was. It could use a stronger thesis to start out, but the intro. was very good and grabbed my attention right away.
I love the reference to Lombroso. I've studied his Atavism theory in detail quite a bit recently. Then with Franz Gall maybe you could mention that in his Phrenology there were three regions of the brain. Intellectual, Moral, and Lower. He believed the lower type was associated with criminal behavior and would be the largest in criminals.
The adoption theory is interesting too because there have actually been studies done on that. A study of 4,000 Danish males found criminal conviction rates of 24.5 % among those with natural parents who had been convicted of a crime compared to 14.7 % with natural parents who had never been convicted.
The rest of the paper seems pretty in tact as well. There's a ton of theories out there about crime, but it would take up to a 20 page paper to do that. That will be a good portfolio piece for sure..Great job..
I love the reference to Lombroso. I've studied his Atavism theory in detail quite a bit recently. Then with Franz Gall maybe you could mention that in his Phrenology there were three regions of the brain. Intellectual, Moral, and Lower. He believed the lower type was associated with criminal behavior and would be the largest in criminals.
The adoption theory is interesting too because there have actually been studies done on that. A study of 4,000 Danish males found criminal conviction rates of 24.5 % among those with natural parents who had been convicted of a crime compared to 14.7 % with natural parents who had never been convicted.
The rest of the paper seems pretty in tact as well. There's a ton of theories out there about crime, but it would take up to a 20 page paper to do that. That will be a good portfolio piece for sure..Great job..
11-07-2005, 11:15 PM
alfus21 Wrote:That's a good paper, especially for High School. I' d give it an A for sure in high school. Maybe even a C+ here at UK depending on what the question was. It could use a stronger thesis to start out, but the intro. was very good and grabbed my attention right away.
I love the reference to Lombroso. I've studied his Atavism theory in detail quite a bit recently. Then with Franz Gall maybe you could mention that in his Phrenology there were three regions of the brain. Intellectual, Moral, and Lower. He believed the lower type was associated with criminal behavior and would be the largest in criminals.
The adoption theory is interesting too because there have actually been studies done on that. A study of 4,000 Danish males found criminal conviction rates of 24.5 % among those with natural parents who had been convicted of a crime compared to 14.7 % with natural parents who had never been convicted.
The rest of the paper seems pretty in tact as well. There's a ton of theories out there about crime, but it would take up to a 20 page paper to do that. That will be a good portfolio piece for sure..Great job..
Thanks very much for your comments and I will be sure to include the information that you have provided to me in my next draft of my paper. (Referring to the C+ depending on what the question was, in this assignment there was no given definition of what she wanted, just a paper related to criminal justice or forensic science, sooo yea didn't have much to go on there.) I really thank you though, I am glad that you have background in the area and think that well of it.
11-07-2005, 11:19 PM
batpuff Wrote:What are you going to major in at college? Because you did some pretty good research, Maybe social worker, Criminal Science Major, You choices are wide open.
I am going to get an Associate Degree in Criminal Justice and a B.S. in Forensic Science (Focus on the Forensic Chemistry option which deals with trace evidence, analysis, etc. and get my elective hours in with the Forensic Biology option maybe because it deals with DNA and etc.)
11-08-2005, 01:24 PM
tribe thats a really good paper*
11-09-2005, 10:31 AM
Awesome man.
11-09-2005, 12:48 PM
looks good....good job
11-09-2005, 03:40 PM
I am heading to EKU in 2 years, going to PCC first and get an Associate Degree there and get a B.S. at Eastern. Wish that I could but I didn't start taking my ACT early enough and trying to get a high score and things like that. Just not Eastern material right off from the bat.
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