IRREDEEMABLE

THE SERIAL KILLER FROM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND

CRIMINOLOGICAL ASPECT
INTRODUCTION

Man’s quest for a composite profile of ‘the murderer’ is not new. Pioneering work in the eighteenth
century, using physiognomy (the art of judging character by facial features), and phrenology (the study of
cranial bumps and ridges, vis-à-vis the development of mental faculties), failed to reveal significant
common physical similarities.

A more recent, twentieth-century theory held that chromosomal imbalance (caused by the presence of
an additional male, or ‘Y’, chromosome in the genes), increased the probability of violent criminal
behaviour. This supposition, however, was challenged when Richard Speck – the American multiple
murderer who killed eight nurses in one night in 1966, and who was thought to suffer from such an
imbalance – was found on examination to have no extra chromosome. Subsequent research showed that
most males with such an imbalance display no abnormally violent behaviour.

The FBI profilers (or analysts, as they are officially called) use behavioural traits commonly identified in
convicted, sexually-oriented murderers as their analytical mainstay; and that this technique stands the
test of time is clearly borne out by scrutiny of the 1888 Ripper (Jack the Ripper)murders.Robert
Ressler ,an FBI agent,was the first profiler to scientifically study serial killers and established the basic
outlines of the their personality.

The conclusion must be that the ritual was of supreme importance to the Ripper. More than that, it was
a clamorous, overpowering need, a compulsion, which overruled all other considerations that night –
personal safety included. Such criminal characteristics were so rarely encountered in the late nineteenth
century as to be wholly incomprehensible to the average police officer, no matter how experienced.In
this essay we are not going to make reference to the types of serial killers but to the psychological
caracteristics and the motivations and how these find expression in some examples of serail killers.

A.THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM

The FBI’s Crime Classification Manual (1992)
defines serial murder as “three or more separate
events in three or more separate locations with an
emotional cooling-off period between homicides.”
At first glance, the Bureau’s definition seems clear and concise. A second look, however, reveals three
built-in flaws that doom it from the start. First, we have the requirement of “three or more” murders to
make up a bona fide series. Unfortunately,the FBI’s other “official” categories of murder—single double,
triple, mass, and SPREE MURDER—make no allowance for the slayer who claims only two victims with
the requisite “cooling-off” period between crimes and who is then arrested prior to bagging number
three. Double murder, in FBI parlance, describes two victims killed at the same time and place; spree
murder, meanwhile,may have only two victims, but it is defined as “a single event with . . . no emotional
cooling-off period between murders.” Thus, the killer who waits months or even years between his first
and second kill then finds himself in jail has no place whatsoever in the Bureau’s scheme of things A
second problem is the FBI’s requirement that serial murders occur at “three or more separate locations.”
By that standard, some of the most prolific killers ofmodern times—including DEAN CORLL, JOHN
GACY,DONALD HARVEY, and Britain’s DENNIS NILSEN—do not qualify as serial murderers, since they
killed most or all of their victims at a single location.

Finally, we run head-on into the elusive, undefined

“cooling-off” period. No FBI spokesman has ever been able to pin down the time span;
indeed, the Crime Classification Manual tells us that “the cooling-off period can last for days, weeks, or
months”—and, presumably, even for years. Various authors have tried to resolve the problem by
suggesting arbitrary time limits: one suggests two weeks, another “more than thirty days,” but none of
their attempts to saddle unknown killers with a one-size-fits-all mandate stand up under close
examination.

B. THE BEGINNING

Robert Ressler writes in Whoever Fights Monsters:

‘As the psychologically damaged boys get closer to
adolescence, they find that they are unable to
develop the social skills that are precursors to sexual
skills and that are the coin of positive emotional
relationships... By the time a normal youngster is
dancing, going to parties, participating in kissing
games, the loner is turning in on himself and
developing fantasies that are deviant. The
fantasies are substitutes for more
positive human encounters, and as the
adolescent becomes more dependent on
them, he loses touch with acceptable
social values.’ And he adds: ‘Most were incapable of holding jobs or living up to
their intellectual potential.’

deprivation needs’ to refer to

The psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the phrase ‘

the basic needs that must be fulfilled before someone can

reach his or her normal potential. A child who has been half-starved will lack
certain vitamins that are essential to growth. And a child who is emotionally starved is likely to lack
certain psychological vitamins, which may form an obstacle to satisfactory relationships. Ressler
comments that although the result may not be murder or rape, ‘it will be some other sort of
demonstration of dysfunction’. In such people, the Doctor Jekyll aspect, shocked by what Mr Hyde is
doing, may become suicidal—hence Glatman’s plea to be executed and Meirhofer’s self-destruction.
Serial killers are almost invariably found to have
experienced environmental problems in their early
years. In many cases they stem from a broken home
in which the parents are divorced or separated, a
home with a weak or absent father-
figure and dominant female, sometimes
a home-life marked by a lack of
consistent discipline. As policemen and
probation officers have long known, the
psychological damage resulting from such a
deprived or miserable childhood all too often
manifests itself in a number of recognisably
aggressive traits. They include defiance of
authority, theft, persistent lying, acts of wilful
destruction, arson, cruelty to animals and other
children; with such symptoms accompanied by
long periods of daydreaming (or fantasising) –
that ever-available trapdoor leading into
a private, make-believe world where the
unhappy young can shape their revenge
on society for all ill-treatment, real or
imagined.
B. THE NEXT STEPS
In the context of serial murder, the triad of youthful behaviour most frequently seen as indicative of

violence ahead is: enuresis (bed wetting)

beyond the age of twelve (although analysts
also recognise that there may be several

different reasons for this). Next is

arson – sometimes committed by children
as young as five or six. Its long-term significance
lies in the type of arson offence. A
‘disorganised’ young arsonist is likely to cause
smaller fires and least monetary damage. In
contrast the ‘organised’ arsonist – the one who
thinks things through – usually starts his fires
from the outset in occupied buildings. His
intention is to hurt people, as well as to inflict
maximum monetary damage.
The ultimate state of the behavioural triad is

cruelty, to animals and other

people. ‘We’re not talking here about kicking the
dog,’ said one analyst. ‘We’re talking about throwing
puppies on to bonfires or tying firecrackers to the cat,
that kind of behaviour. One serial killer talks about “Tying
a cherry-bomb to the cat’s leg, lighting it – and blowing
the cat’s leg off. Made a lot of one-legged cats.”’ This trait
can be seen in children on both sides of the Atlantic who
grew up to be serial killers. Moors murderer Ian Brady
won a childhood reputation as an embryo psychopath
who threw cats from tenement windows in the Glasgow
Gorbals. When Ed Kemper, the Californian serial killer,
was thirteen he cut the family cat into pieces with his
Scout’s knife.
‘The next step is aggression against people. He
chooses animals first because animals can
scream, they show fear, they bleed, they do all
those things we do – but they’re not people.
This time, it’s projection. Now he’s getting even
with society.’ Hostility
to society is
one of the hallmarks of the
adult serial killer. Some express it in the murders they commit,

I am
others express it in words. We know that the man calling himself Jack the Ripper wrote ‘

down on whores and shan’t quit ripping them till I do get

buckled’. When actress Sharon Tate begged the Manson ‘Family’ gang to spare her for the sake of
her unborn child, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel responded by stabbing her sixteen

Finally Atkins dipped a towel in

times, inflicting several wounds after her death.

the actress’s blood and wrote ‘Pig’ on her living-room door.

Dennis Nilsen,who was dismembering young boys in 80s
London, – a heavy drinker – clearly felt this need to ‘get even’
with society in each murder he committed – including those he
could barely remember next morning. While awaiting trial, he wrote from jail to
the police who had questioned him: ‘God only knows what thoughts go through my mind when it is
captive within a destructive binge. Maybe the cunning, stalking killer instinct is the only single
concentration released from a mind which in that state knows no morality . . . There is no disputing the
fact that I am a violent killer under certain circumstances. It amazes me that I have no tears for these
victims. I have no tears for myself or those bereaved by my actions. Am I a wicked person, constantly
under pressure, who just cannot cope with it, who escapes to reap revenge against society through a
haze of a bottle of spirits?’

The same detailed behavioural research which first indentified the importance of fantasy in the evolution
of the serial killer also examined the part played by pornography. Between
1979 and 1983
agents from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit conducted an in-depth
psychological study of thirty-six convicted, incarcerated sex murderers
held in United States prisons nationwide. Of those thirty-six murderers,
twenty-five were serial killers: the other eleven were either ‘spree’
killers , or single or double sex murderers. Nearly half of those who co-
operated with the FBI analysts (43%) were found to have been sexually
abused in childhood, one third (32%) during adolescence, and a slightly
larger percentage (37%) over the age of eighteen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most
admitted to ‘sexual problems’ as adults. More importantly in the context of pornography, nearly seventy
per cent said they felt ‘sexually incompetent’ (as adults), and relied heavily on visual stimuli – with a
large majority rating pornography as the most effective stimulus.

That is what appeals most to the sexual sadist. To see a woman who is bound, or restrained in some way
with a gag round her mouth, looking terrified as someone threatens her with a knife or a gun. That is
their fantasy: to dominate and control, to inflict pain and suffering on the victim. To see this portrayed on
the cover of the magazine may fuel that fantasy – but it’s not the cause of the murder (he commits).
Such killers have these desires, they have this violent tendency within them, and that’s why they’re
attracted to this type of pornography. We find the sexual sadist and the really violent offender more
drawn to this type of pornography than what one might call “classical” pornography, with its explicit
sexual content. What the sexual sadist looks for is dominance, control over the victim, and that’s what he
sees in this kind of magazine cover. Bundy may have blamed pornography for his “sick obsessions” but
that kind of statement is typical of the serial killer. He always blames someone – or something – else for
what he’s done; he is not to blame, it’s never his fault.’

C.THE CULMINATION

For the serial killer, the most important

step is the one that bridges the gap
between fantasy and actuality,which is
murder,
Once in the thrall of this frenzy, the pent-up desires now
unleashed will be every bit as compelling, say, as the drug
addict’s need of a ‘fix’. The
difference is that this
need can be assuaged only by murder, all too
often the murder of a complete stranger; a type of person
known only to the killer himself, since both the type of victim
and the way in which he or she will be put to death will have
been conceived in fantasy, perhaps years before they meet.
Not until the fantasy-inspired murder has run
its course – possibly including violent assault,
abduction, rape, torture and/or mutilation –
will the frenzy abate, and a ‘cooling-off’ period
set in.
What causes this indeterminate, emotional
metamorphosis is uncertain. It may be
remorse, or self-disgust even, once the
enormity of the offence is fully realised. Or it may
simply be a passing surfeit of murder and mayhem, with their inevitable inner tensions. Whatever its
mainspring, this unique, emotional break in the murder cycle sets the serial killer apart from all other
multiple murderers. Dr James Dobson, the American psychologist who spoke at length with Ted Bundy
on the eve of Bundy’s execution in 1989, was told by Bundy that he felt remorse only once – after the

Then the sex

abduction, rape and murder of his first victim, student Lynda Ann Healy. ‘

frenzy overcame him, and he killed again: and as

each crime passed, he became de-sensitised.’
The ‘triggering factor’ which drives the serial
killer to commit murder is almost endless in its
variety, yet in the context of the violence of the
crime often such a trivial thing. The type of victim he kills is always in
The serial
the mind: conceived in fantasy, possibly years beforehand and uneasily dormant since.

murderer himself is often an ‘underachiever’, an intelligent

person (not an Einstein, but still of obvious promise); yet for
some reason the potential has never been realised. Now, say, he has
been sacked. To his mind, it will always be unfairly; and all the deep-seated hostility he harbours against

Another serial killer

society now erupts. He seeks out his symbolic victim – and kills.

may have a ‘dominant female’ stress problem. After a blazing row

with his wife/partner/mother he storms out, has a few drinks (or takes drugs), and ends up murdering a
‘stranger’ victim of opportunity: the classic transferred-aggression syndrome . Ed Kemper, lived –
and quarrelled incessantly with – his divorced, dominant mother. His practice was to behead, and later
sexually assault, pretty students (the type of girl his mother told him he would never be able to date).
After one row too many, Kemper turned on his mother – and decapitated her. With some serial killers,
the triggering factor may be partly self-induced. Bundy, for example, blamed pornography for feeding his
‘sick obsessions’. Medical serial killers, on the other hand, crave the ultimate power (over life and death);
and once tasted, their need of it .

No matter what emotion may spark off – or terminate

– the unique ‘cooling-off’ period, its duration can vary
considerably in the same serial killer, from one murder to
the next: from an hour, say, to a day, a week, months
possibly and even years.
D.LUST MURDERS
One of the most heinous crimes
They describe lust murder as: ‘

committed by man. While not a common occurrence, it is one

which frightens and arouses the public as does no other
crime . . . The lust murder is unique, and is distinguished from
the sadistic homicide by the involvement of a mutilating attack
or displacement of the breasts, rectum or genitals. Further, while
there are always exceptions, basically two types of individuals commit
the lust murder . . . the Organised Nonsocial and Disorganised Asocial
personalities and it becomes addictive.Briefly, they define the organised nonsocial lust
killer as an egocentric who dislikes people generally, yet is adept at posing as an outwardly warm person
for as long as may be needed to gain his own ends. Behind the façade lies a cunning methodical killer
who is very much aware of the impact his sort of murder will have on society – and commits it for
precisely that reason, to shock and offend. Usually he ‘lives some distance from the crime scene and will

fellow lust killer he ‘harbours

cruise, looking for a victim’. Like his disorganised,

similar feelings of hostility (to society) but . . . overtly expresses

it through aggressive and seemingly senseless acts. Typically, he begins
to demonstrate his hostility as he passes through puberty and into adolescence. He would be described
as a troublemaker and a manipulator of people, concerned only for himself. It is the nonsocial’s aim to
get even with society and inflict pain and punishment upon others.’

In contrast, the
disorganised asocial lust killer is a loner. ‘He experiences
difficulty in negotiating interpersonal relationships and consequently
feels rejected and lonely. He lacks the cunning of the nonsocial type, and commits the crime
in a more frenzied and less methodical manner. The crime is likely to be committed in close proximity to
his residence or place of employment, where he feels secure and more at ease . . . Family and associates
would describe him as a nice, quiet person who keeps himself to himself, but who never quite realised
his potential. During adolescence he may have engaged in voyeuristic activities or the theft of feminine
clothing. Such activities serve as a substitute for his inability to approach women sexually in a mature
and confident manner.’

Seldom does the lust killer come from an environment of love and
understanding. It is more likely that he was an abused or neglected
child who experienced a great deal of conflict in his early life and was
unable to develop and use adequate coping devices. Had he been able to do so,
he would have withstood the stresses placed upon him and developed normally in early childhood . . .
These stresses, frustrations and subsequent anxieties, along with the inability to
cope with them, may lead the individual to withdraw from the society which he
perceives as hostile and threatening.
In sexually motivated murder, the killer’s personal fixation determines his (or her) choice of
victims.Pedophiles hunt children (sometimes without regard to gender, more commonly preferring one
sex or the other); “gay” killers typically (but not always) select same-sex victims; bisexual slayers may
rape and kill victims of either sex, indiscriminately. Other sex-driven killers fixate on the elderly, on
victims from a particular group or class (prostitutes, nurses, etc.), or those who possess specific physical
traits (red hair, large breasts,)

E.EXEMPLES

SON OF SAM DAVID BERKOWITZ

He was a paranoid schizophrenic who lived alone in a room lit by a naked light bulb, sleeping on a bare
mattress. The floor was covered with empty milk cartons and bottles. On the walls he had scrawled
messages such as: ‘In this hole lives the wicked king.’ ‘Kill for my Master.’ ‘I turn children into killers.’

His father, who had run a hardware store in the Bronx, had retired to Florida after being robbed. Nat
Berkowitz was not the Son of Sam’s real father. David Berkowitz, born 1 June 1953, was illegitimate, and
his mother had offered him up for adoption. He had felt rejected from the beginning, and longed to find
his real mother.

He reacted to his poor self-image by boasting and lying—

particularly about his sexual prowess. In reality, he was afraid of women. He
 Living alone in apartments
told the police that demons began telling him to kill in 1974.

that he allowed to degenerate into pigsties, kept awake at night

by the sound of trucks or barking dogs, he slipped into
paranoia, telling his father in a letter that people hated him and
spat at him as he walked down the street. ‘The girls call me
ugly, and they bother me the most.’ On Christmas Eve 1975, he began his attempt
at revenge on women by taking a knife and attacking two of them. The first one screamed and he ran
away. The second, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, was badly cut and had one lung punctured, but recovered.
The blood disturbed him, which is why he travelled to Texas to buy a gun. Seven months later, heused it
in his first murder.

The name Sam seems to have been taken from a neighbour called Sam Carr, whose black Labrador
sometimes kept Berkowitz awake. He wrote Carr anonymous letters, and on 27 April 1977, shot the dog
—which recovered. He also wrote anonymous letters to people he believed to be persecuting him. He
had been reported to the police on a number of occasions as a ‘nut’, but no one suspected that he might
be the Son of Sam.

Berkowitz was judged legally sane, and was arraigned on 23 August 1977. He pleaded guilty, saving New
York the cost of a trial. He was sentenced to 365 years in prison.

1 .......One important discovery was that Berkowitz was an arsonist, and that he
had set at least 1,488 fires in New York, which are documented in his diary. He had
also triggered hundreds of false alarms. For a long time now, arson has been recognised as
basically a sex crime—many arsonists masturbate as they watch the flames. This helped confirm
Ressler’s suspicions that the Son of Sam shootings were sexual in origin.

2 ....Ressler,who was head of the Behavioural unit of the FBI, found Berkowitz to be shy, reserved, polite,
and low key, and that he spoke only when spoken Berkowitz to be shy, reserved, polite, and low key, and
that he spoke only when spoken to. When Ressler tried to touch on the possible sexual aspect of the
murders. Berkowitz flatly denied that they had any, claiming that he had had a normal sex life, with
girlfriends, and that the murders were just shootings. This, Ressler discovered, was an attempt to
mislead. Berkowitz had never had girlfriends, and this was the root of his trouble .

3......Berkowitz was far too shy and withdrawn to attempt anything so ambitious. He lacked the
aggression to be a true predator. So every evening he went out with a .44, looking
for lone women or girls, or couples necking in cars. As he stalked them and then shot
them, he admitted, he became sexually excited, and would masturbate afterwards.

The men were shot simply because they happened to be with the young women, the true targets.

On the nights when he couldn’t find a victim, he told them, he would drive to the scenes of earlier
murders and replay them in his imagination. If there were still bloodstains visible on the pavement, he
would sit in his car and masturbate.

4.......In all, it seems clear that Berkowitz belonged to a class of killers who are basically ‘wannabes’.
While most people attempt to achieve a sense of value or worth by doing something that their
fellows regard as admirable or useful, people whose self-esteem is irretrievably low daydream
of shocking or outraging them, so that they can at least regard themselves as mavericks or rebel
outsiders. Berkowitz
told Ressler how, as a teenager, he wanted to
get to Vietnam, daydreaming of receiving medals and ‘being
recognised as an important individual, and thereby fashioning
an identity for himself’. It was not to be. His army career—in Korea—was undistinguished
and a visit to a prostitute resulted in syphilis.

5..........When he was 22 years old, he began trying to trace his natural mother, Betty Falco, and finally
succeeded through an old telephone directory. There was an emotional reunion at her home in Coney
Island in May 1975. He also met his half-sister Roslyn, 37, who welcomed him to her home.

But although he was glad to have found his family, it was

too late. He was too frustrated and unfulfilled to find
satisfaction in his new role as a son and brother. He
began suffering from frequent headaches. And on
Christmas Eve 1975, he took a hickory-handled hunting
knife and went out in search of a woman to stab. On Co-Op City
Boulevard he doubleparked and followed a woman who came out of a supermarket. She was wearing a
long, heavy coat, and he raised the knife and brought it down on her back. The knife failed to penetrate
the thick material, but the woman turned, saw a man with his arm raised to strike again, and began to
scream. Berkowitz turned and ran away.

He wandered around until he saw another female approaching; this was a 15-year-old schoolgirl named
Michelle Forman. He followed her across a pedestrian bridge, and stabbed her in the head, and then the
upper body. As she turned he saw she was pretty; she lashed out at him, and then fell down. When she
tried to grab his leg, he ran off....

6........The real motive, it seemed, was the desire to become

known, to become notorious. There was a sense of potency in holding a whole city to
ransom, in seeing the crowds who bought the newspapers that described the latest shooting. That is
why he began communicating with the police, and with journalist Jimmy Breslin. Ressler has some harsh
words to say about the journalists who kept feeding the media frenzy, even when there were no new
developments to write about. They, he believed, simply encouraged Berkowitz to continue, like a child
who enjoys attention.

Yet what emerged from these interviews is that Berkowitz was not simply a nonentity looking for action
to give him a sense of identity. There had been a touch of sadism in his make-up since childhood, when
he had poured ammonia into his adoptive mother’s fish tank to kill the fish, and killed her pet bird with
rat poison, getting pleasure from watching it die slowly. He enjoyed torturing mice and moths. In
adolescence, his masturbation fantasies were mixed with violence. And when he graduated to arson, he
enjoyed watching bodies being carried out of burning buildings

7......Berkowitz’s problem was that he felt inadequate and compensated with

violent fantasies, which made him incapable of the give and take of a
relationship. Ressler concludes: ‘Like so many of the criminals I interviewed, he had grown up to
murder.

ANDREI CHICATILO
The Russian Andrei Chikatilo operated throughout the 1980s, mostly around the city of Rostov
on Don. He was able to go on killing for such a long period largely because of the Soviet policy
of refusing to give publicity to criminal cases, in a futile effort to convince the world that,
compared to the decadent West, Russia was virtually free of crime. The result was that the
citizens of Rostov were unaware that Russia’s worst serial killer was working in their midst,
and therefore had no chance to take precautions, or to warn their children about plausible
strangers.

Andrei Chikatilo was born in the farming village of Yablochnoye, in the Ukraine, on 6 October
1936. Ukrainians are an ethnic minority in Russia, and because so many peasants opposed
‘collective farming’, Stalin treated them as his personal enemies; millions died in the
starvation of the early 30s. Chikatilo’s family were very poor and lived in a one-room hut; his
parents worked hard in the fields for very little pay.
Medical examination of Chikatilo after his arrest showed abnormal electrical activity of the
brain which dated from birth – ‘probably the result of something that happened in the
uterus.’ His skull was slightly hydrocephalic, the pupils of his eyes of different sizes, and when
he stuck out his tongue, it came out to the right-hand side.

In spite of these abnormalities, Chikatilo was in no way mentally sub-normal, and was a good
student at school, and undoubtedly of a high IQ. He was fond of his father, a kind, easy-going
man, but his mother, Anna, was a virago who never showed affection, either for Chikatilo or
for his sister Tatyana, seven years his junior. She had been dead almost twenty years at the
time of her son’s arrest.

1.....When Chikatilo was five, his mother told him about a

male cousin who had vanished two years before his birth, and
who – according to her – was killed and eaten by starving
peasants. (According to his sister, it was an older brother who
had vanished.) This, Chikatilo claimed, preyed on his mind and
promoted a tendency to morbidity.
2.During the war – when the Ukraine was occupied by
Germans – Chikatilo saw the aftermath of a bombing raid,
with dismembered corpses and pools of blood. He later told a
psychiatrist that when he saw this, he experienced an
excitement that was almost sexual.
This underlying sadism was reinforced by an immensely popular novel of the post-war period,
Molodaya Gvardiya (The Young Guard), which was about patriotic young communists who
fought against Nazism. They were shown beating up Germans and throwing them down mine
shafts, and Chikatilo enjoyed indulging in revenge fantasies based on the novel. He saw
himself as a young partisan who tortured German prisoners for information. And he later told
in interrogators that during his first murder, he experienced a ‘high’ that made him feel like a
young partisan. In the novel, all the young partisans are finally killed, which introduced an
undertone of masochism into his fantasies.

3.......In his teens, he began to grow large and powerful – his new nickname was ‘Andrei Sila’,
meaning ‘Andrew the Strong’. He read voraciously, and displayed a prodigious memory. At
sixteen he became editor of the school newspaper, and was appointed school ‘agitator for
political information’, which entailed reading aloud (and explaining) articles from Pravda.

But he remained virtually friendless, and was

paralysingly shy with the opposite sex. When, on one
occasion, he found a more-than-willing girl, he was so
terrified that he was unable to achieve an erection. He
became convinced that he was impotent and
would never have a normal sex live. This only
increased the morbid intensity of his
masturbation fantasies.
4...At eighteen he tried to enter Moscow University to
study law, but was turned down because – he believed –
of his father’s war record. (hate against society)Instead he
trained as an engineer at technical college. After a two-year course he was sent by the Young
Communist League to work in a factory in the dreary town of Nizhno-Tagil. Again he tried sex
with local girls, but always failed at the crucial moment. The only time he succeeded
achieving sexual satisfaction was when a girl tried pushing him away; he held her tight as she
struggled, and found that herstruggle induced an orgasm.

There were three years of national service – during which he joined the Communist Party –
followed by a job as a telephone engineer in a small town near Rostov. Once his fellow
engineers saw him masturbating in the woods – his short sightedness made him unaware that
they were within sight – and it was yet another humiliation to increase his deep self-pity.

5......When he was 27, his sister Tatyana – now married – decided to become a matchmaker,
and introduced him to a shy girl called Fayina who was looking for a husband. His timidity
gradually vanished and they married. But on their wedding night, he was impotent as usual –
it was a long time before he could succeed in intercourse, and even then, it was seldom more
than four times a year. Two children – a boy and a girl – were born.
6.......After obtaining a degree in Russian philology and literature from Rostov University in
1971, Chikatilo found himself a job as a schoolteacher in Novoshakhtinsk, in the coalfields.
He was a hopelessly bad teacher; awkward, irritable, and
inclined to mumble.
7.......He soon began to enter the dormitories of teenage girls when they were in their
underwear; several described him masturbating with his hand in his trouser pocket. In May
1973, swimming with a fifteen-year-old pupil, he was unable to restrain himself from fondling
her breasts and genitals, and her screams excited him even more. In 1974, he was forced to
resign from his job, but no mention of the reason was made in his work record.

8.....He found a job in Shakhti at a technical school, where his youngest pupils were fifteen,

But in 1978, he went into the boys’

and for a while kept out of trouble.

dormitory in the middle of the night, pulled back the

bedclothes of a fifteen year old, and began to suck his
penis. The boy woke up. When Chikatilo tried to repeat this two nights later, the boys
were all waiting for him and drove him away. As usual, he remained isolated and disliked,
both by pupils and colleagues, while his neighbours found him a thoroughly unpleasant man.

It was at this time that he bought his small hut at the other end of the town, and began
picking up female down-and-outs and trying to entice children there.

And in December of that year, 1978, he

9........

committed his first murder – that of nine-

year-old Lena Zakotnova.He was 42 years
old. He started a conversation with her as she was walking home from school; when she
revealed that she desperately needed to go to the toilet, he persuaded her to go into his

There he hurled her to the ground and began

shack.

tearing off her clothes. But even when she was

subdued, he failed to achieve an erection to have
sex with her. He ejaculated anyway, and pushed
the semen into her with his fingers,rupturing her
hymen. The blood filled him with excitement, and
he pulled out a penknife and stabbed her
repeatedly. Afterwards he carried her body to a nearby stream and threw it in.
Although Chikatilo was questioned nine times by the police, another man with a record of sex
crime, Aleksandr Kravchenko, was arrested for the murder, and executed.

Chikatilo committed his next murder almost three years later, in September 1981. He met
seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkachenko at a bus stop, and persuaded her to walk with him to
nearby woods. She was almost certainly willing to have sex with him, but he was too excited.
He threw her down, bludgeoned her with his heavy fists, and choked her to death. Then he
bit off one of her nipples and ejaculated over the corpse.

10......This murder established the pattern for all Chikatilo’s later murders – over 50 of them.
He would lure someone to the woods, batter them into submission,
usually stab them to death, achieve a climax, then leave the body
covered with leaves or buried in a shallow grave.
In the following year, he committed seven murders – five of these girls, ranging in age from
ten to nineteen, and two boys, aged fifteen and nineteen. As he continued to kill, Chikatilo

He liked to inflict dozens of stab

became increasingly sadistic.

wounds on his victims, none serious enough to

kill, to bite out the tongues, and to emasculate
the boys(lust kilings). He is known, on many
occasions, to have carried cooking equipment
with him, and may have practised cannibalism.
By the end of the following summer, 1983, the number of his victims had increased to
fourteen, and the Rostov police began the hunt for a sex killer. But, shielded by public
ignorance, Chikatilo went on to kill three more times that year – two women and a fourteen-
year-old boy. By September 1984, his total had risen to 32.

Chikatilo’s method was to hang around train stations and travel on buses, trying to make pick-
ups. On 13 September 1984, a police inspector followed Chikatilo for hours, watching him
accost women, and even being fellated by one of his pick-ups on a bench. He arrested him,
and felt certain that he had caught the murderer when he discovered a knife, a rope and a jar
of vaseline in his briefcase. Yet Chikatilo was saved by a strange chance – he was one of those
rare people whose blood group was different from the group of his semen – his blood was
type A, his semen type AB. Unaware of this, the police decided to release him.

For nine months he stopped killing, then was driven by his compulsion to start again. He killed
prostitutes, and young boys and girls –ne boy was only nine. By late 1990 the number of
victims had reached 53, and the hunt for the serial killer was being organised from Moscow.
The police set up surveillance patrols on small railway stations near wooded areas. When the
body of a 22-year-old woman was found in woods near Donleskhoz station on 13 October
1990, a policeman recalled interviewing a suspicious-looking man a week earlier. He had
asked for identification, and been given a passport that bore the name Andrei Chikatilo. The
policeman had sent in a report but – typically – it had been lost.

When police learned that Chikatilo had been questioned about the murder of nine-year-old
Lena Zakotnova in 1978, they were fairly certain they had their man. He was arrested on 20
November 1990, and when his semen group was tested, it was proved to be AB, like that of
the murderer. Soon Chikatilo confessed, and even led the police to bodies that had never
been found.

11......His trial opened on 14 April 1992; Chikatilo, kept in a

cage to protect him from public fury, raged and shouted at the
court, and even waved his penis at the public, shouting: ‘Look
at this useless thing! What could I do with that?’
He was sentenced to death on 14 October for 52 murders, and on 14 February 1994 was
executed by a pistol shot in the back of the head.
TED BUNDY
Bundy differs from most serial killers in one basic respect: his childhood was
apparently normal and happy. Nevertheless, his background was far from
‘normal’. Theodore Robert Bundy was an illegitimate child, born in
November 1946 to a respectable and religious young
secretary, Louise Cowell, in a home for unmarried mothers in
Philadelphia; his mother has always refused to disclose the
father’s identity. The child was left alone for several weeks before being
taken to the home of his grandfather, a market gardener, and that initial period
without parental affection may account for his later inability to form close
relationships. His grandfather was a despotic and violent man who often beat up
his wife, although he doted on the baby (who was explained to neighbours as an
adopted child). When his mother decided to move to Tacoma (Washington
state) when the baby was four, Ted was miserable at losing the only ‘father’ he
had ever known. Louise Cowell married an ex-navy cook, John Bundy, but the
child never formed any close relationship with his stepfather, finding him boring
and uncultured.

1.....As a schoolboy Bundy was an incorrigible fantasist, daydreaming

of being adopted by the cowboy star Roy Rogers, and trying, at one
point, to persuade his mother to allow him to be adopted by an uncle
who was a professor of music. He soon became a thief and habitual liar. He
also became an excellent skier, but he had stolen much of the equipment on
which he learned. He experienced a basic drive to ‘be somebody’, to be famous,
but a streak of self-pity, the feeling that the world was against him, prevented
him from making the kind of effort that might have led to success.

Although good-looking, the young Bundy was also shy and introverted – it was
not until his early twenties that he lost his virginity while sleeping off a drunken
evening on a friend’s settee, when the lady of the house came and ‘raped’ him.
2.....The ultimate key to Bundy is obviously his immensely powerful sex drive.
From an early age he was a compulsive masturbator; he fantasised about
necrophilia, and later became a devotee of hard porn. His long-term
girlfriend told how he liked to tie her up with stockings before sex; but such acts
could not satisfy his desire – like some legendary caliph – for sexual variety and
for total control of his partner. He later admitted that he often strangled
the victim during the sexual act; vaginas were stuffed with twigs and
dirt and one victim was sodomised with an aerosol can.
2....Perhaps the most important single factor in turning Bundy into a serial killer was a
relationship with a fellow student named Stephanie Brooks. Bundy fell in love
with her in his late teens; she was beautiful, sophisticated and came of a
wealthy family. To impress her he went to Stanford University to study Chinese;
but he was lonely, emotionally immature, and his grades were poor. ‘I found
myself thinking of standards of success that I didn’t seem to be living up to.’
(Absence of positive relations)Stephanie wearied of his immaturity and dropped
him. He was shattered and deeply resentful. His brother later commented: ‘Stephanie
screwed him up . . . I’d never seen him like this before.’ One consequence of the emotional
upset was that Bundy returned to thieving on a regular basis; he began shoplifting and
stealing for ‘thrills’.On one occasion he even stole a large potted plant from someone’s
garden, and drove off with it sticking through the open roof of his car.

3.......He formed a relationship with a young divorcee, Meg Anders, and became a full-time
volunteer for the black republican candidate for governor. He also found a job working for the
Crime Commission and Department of Justice Planning – other males in the office envied his
confidence, charm and good looks. When Stephanie Brooks met him again seven years after
dropping him, she was so impressed by the new and high-powered Ted that she agreed to
marry him – they spent Christmas of 1973 together. Bundy’s
object, however, was
not to win her back but to get his revenge for the earlier humiliation.
(he feels iredeemable)When, in the new year, she rang him to ask why he had not
contacted her since their weekend together, he said coldly: ‘I have no idea what you’re talking
about,’ and hung up on her. Then, as if his ‘revenge’ had somehow broken an inner dam and
inspired him with a sense of ruthless power and confidence, he committed his first murder.

The vital clue to Bundy lies in a comment made by his friend Ann Rule, a Seattle journalist, in
her book The Stranger Beside Me. She remarks that he became violently upset if he
telephoned Meg Anders – his long-time girlfriend in Seattle – from Salt Lake City, and got no
reply. ‘Strangely, while he was being continually unfaithful himself, he expected – demanded
– that she be totally loyal to him.’ This is one of the basic characteristics of a type of person
who has been labelled ‘the Right Man’ or ‘the Violent Man.

4.....Bundy was good-looking and intelligent; but he was a late developer, and
early
frustrations and disappointments seem to have convinced him that he
was a ‘loser’. This may be deduced from his compulsive thieving – potential ‘winners’ are
too concerned with their future to risk being labelled a criminal. Bundy’s stealing became a
compulsion after Stephanie Brooks had ‘dumped’ him; it obviously contained mildly suicidal
elements, the feeling that ‘Nothing matters any more’. In spite of his intelligence he was a
poor student, and his grades were usually Bs. The tide began to turn when he worked for the
Justice Department and the Republican candidate, but by that time he was already a
compulsive Peeping Tom. ‘Revenge’ on Stephanie Brooks also came too late; it only served to
rationalise his feeling that all women were bitches and deserved to be raped.

5......When they began to probe, Bundy hedged, lied, claimed faulty

memory, and resorted to endless self-justification: Intellectually
seemed profoundly disassociative, a compartmentaliser, and thus a
superb rationaliser.

Emotionally, he struck them as a severe case of arrested development:

‘He might as well have been a twelve-year-old, and a precocious and
bratty one at that. So extreme was his childishness that his pleas of
innocence were of a character very similar to that of the little boy
who’ll deny wrongdoing in the face of overwhelming evidence to the
contrary. 6......Bundy talked for hours into a tape
recorder. In his words.... There were, in effect, two ‘Teds’—the
analytical human being, and an entity inside him that was called the
‘hunchback’, the Mr Hyde alter ego.
After generalising for some time about violence in modern society, the
disintegration of the home, and so on, Bundy got down to specifics, and began
to discuss his own development.
He had been an illegitimate child, born to a respectable young woman in Philadelphia. She
moved to Seattle to escape the stigma, and married a cook in the Veterans Administration
Hospital. Ted was an oversensitive and self-conscious child who had all the usual daydreams

of fame and wealth. And at an early stage he became a thief and something of a
habitual liar—as many imaginative children do. But he seems to have been deeply
upset by the discovery of his illegitimacy

7......Theodore Bundy developed into a Peeping Tom as a result of catching an

accidental glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted upstairs window.

(triggering factor) From then on, he began to prowl the streets of

Seattle at night, looking for bedroom windows to spy through. ‘He approached it
almost like a project,’ ‘throwing himself into it, literally, for years’.

Then, ‘like an addiction, the need for a more

powerful experience was coming over him’. He made
clumsy attempts to disable women’s cars, but since these were parked in the
university district, they usually found help without any difficulty. Bundy
regarded this as a kind of game, a flirtation with danger; ‘but the habit grew
perceptibly more insistent, just as Ted had become a bolder and bolder thief
over the years’

,
8...... One evening in the summer of 1973, after drinking heavily

Bundy saw a woman leaving a bar and walking

up a dark side street. He found a heavy piece of wood
in a vacant lot, and stalked her. ‘There was really no control at
this point.’ ‘The situation is novel,’ said Bundy (speaking
of himself in the third person), ‘because while he
may have toyed around with fantasies before, and
made several abortive attempts to act out a
fantasy, it never had reached the point where
actually he was confronted with harming another
individual.’ Nevertheless, he got ahead of the girl and lay in wait for her,
but before she reached the point where he was hiding, she stopped and went
into a house. Bundy told his interviewers: ‘The
revelation of
the experience and the frenzied desire that seized him
really seemed to usher in a new dimension to that part
of him that was obsessed with violence and women.
‘What he had done terrified him, purely terrified him. Full of remorse and
remonstrating with himself for the suicidal nature of that activity’ – Bundy also
recognised murder as a form of suicide – he quickly sobered up. He was
horrified by the recognition that he had the capacity to do such a thing.’
Nevertheless the craving to watch girls undressing was too strong to be resisted. One night he
was peering through a basement window at a girl preparing for bed when he discovered that
the door had been left open. He sneaked into her room and leapt on her, but when she
screamed, he fled. ‘Then he was seized with the same kind of disgust and repulsion and fear
and wonder at why he was allowing himself to attempt such extraordinary violence.’ He was
so upset that he gave up his voyeuristic activities for three months; but on 4 January 1974 he
again crept into a basement after he had watched a girl undressing. He wrenched a metal bar
from the bed frame and struck her repeatedly on the head. Then, apparently finding himself
impotent, he rammed the bar into her vagina.
The girl recovered after a
week in a coma. It took Bundy a month to recover from the
trauma of what he had done. Next time he carried his fantasy
through to the end. On 31 January 1974 he entered a
students’ lodging house and tried bedroom doors until he
found one that was unlocked. It was that of twenty-one-year-
old Lynda Ann Healy. This time he seized her by the throat and
ordered her to remain silent. Then, either at knifepoint or gunpoint – it never
became clear which – he forced her to dress, then bound and gagged her, and made her walk
out of the house with him. He drove her out to Taylor Mountain, twenty miles from Seattle,
then spent hours acting out his sexual fantasies. The interviewers asked him whether there
had been any conversation with his victim. ‘There’d be some. Since this girl in front of him
represented not a person, but again the image, or something desirable, the last thing we
would expect him to want to do would be to personalise this person.’ Finally, he bludgeoned
her to death and left the body on the mountain. Lynda Ann Healy would be the first of four
girls he raped and murdered in the same place.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about Bundy’s account of himself is the
description of how he descended into sex murder by a series of almost
infinitesimal steps. Any normal male might experience sexual excitement at a
casual glimpse of a woman taking off her clothes near a lighted window. Any
normal male might return to a place where he knew he could watch a girl
undressing. Any normal male might become increasingly obsessed by watching
girls undress until he had turned it into a ‘project’. At what point would the
normal male draw the line? Possibly at actually harming another human being –
but then, Bundy also drew the line there, until his craving pushed him the
inevitable step further . . .

In the months following the murder of Lynda Ann Healy, Bundy’s compulsion
increased. Four more girls – Donna Gail Manson, Susan Rancourt, Roberta Parks
and Brenda Ball – were abducted, raped and murdered in the same way. On 14
July 1974 he abducted two girls on the same day – Janice Ott and Denise
Naslund – from Lake Sammamish Park. Both were approached by a good-looking
young man with his arm in a sling, who asked for help in lifting a boat on to the
luggage rack of his car. People sitting near Janice Ott heard him introduce
himself as Ted, and heard her ask him to sit down and talk for a while before she
went off to help him. Bundy abducted her at gunpoint, took her to an empty
house, and raped her. Then he went back to the park, picked up his second
victim, and took her back to the same house, raping her in front of Janice Ott.
Finally he killed them both and dumped their bodies in undergrowth a few miles
away.
In September 1974 Bundy moved to Salt Lake City to study law. If he wished to remain
uncaught it would obviously have been sensible to stop killing girls, since if he used the same
modus operandi in two places, it would be a great deal easier to track him down. (In fact,
Bundy’s name already appeared on a list of police suspects – two women had named him as
the possible killer – but since the list comprised 3,500 names, he was only one of many.) But
he would have been unable to stop, even if he wanted to: the ‘hunchback’ was now in full
control. So in Salt Lake City five more girls were abducted and raped between October 1974
and January 1975. One girl escaped. Seventeen-year-old Carol DaRonch was in a supermarket
complex on 8 November 1974 when a good-looking young man approached her and identified
himself as a detective. He told her that her car had been broken into, and lured her into his
own car – a Volkswagen – on the pretext of taking her to the police station. Then he snapped
a handcuff on one of her wrists and pointed a gun at her head. The girl grabbed for the door
handle and fell out of the car; the man was following her, holding an iron bar, when the
headlights of an oncoming car illuminated them both; Bundy leapt into his car and drove off.
Later that same evening, he abducted another seventeen-year-old, Debbie Kent, from a
school concert, and murdered her.

On a Saturday night in August 1975, a policeman in a patrol

car was startled when a Volkswagen pulled out from the
pavement and drove off at top speed. The policeman followed
and finally made the car pull over. Its driver was Ted Bundy,
and handcuffs and burgling tools were found in the trunk. By
now, the crime computer in Seattle had reduced the list of
suspects to ten, and Bundy’s name was at number seven.
When Salt Lake City police realised that Bundy was from
Seattle, they made him stand in a line-up in the Hall of Justice Carol
DaRonch and two other witnesses identified him as the abductor of 8
November. On 27 December 1976 Bundy was found guilty of aggravated
kidnapping and sentenced to between one and fifteen years in prison.

By now police were also gathering evidence to link him with the disappearance
of a twenty-three-year-old nurse, Caryn Campbell, from a holiday hotel in
Colorado. In January Bundy escaped from the Colorado courthouse, but was
recaptured within days. The following December he escaped again by
unscrewing a light fitment, and this time succeeded in making his way to
Tallahassee, Florida, where he rented a room in a student hostel. Now, with
everything to lose, he was still unable to resist the compulsion to murder. On
the night of 15 January 1978 he entered a student rooming house on the
university campus and attacked four girls in quick succession with a wooden
club. One was strangled with her tights and raped; another died on her way to
hospital; the other two were to recover. An hour and a half later, still
unsatisfied, he broke into another rooming house and clubbed another girl
unconscious; he was disturbed by the girl’s next-door neighbour, and fled.
Bundy returned to the anonymity of his student rooming house, where he was
known as Chris Hagen.

A month later, on 9 February 1978, he abducted a twelve-year-old schoolgirl,

Kimberley Leach, from the Lake City Junior High School; she was his youngest
victim. Her body was found two months later in an abandoned shack. By this
time, Bundy had been arrested – again by a policeman in a patrol car who was
puzzled by his erratic driving.

At his trial in Florida, Bundy maintained his innocence, insisting that it was pure
coincidence that he had been in the areas where sixteen girls had been raped
and murdered. Teeth marks on the buttocks of one of his victims were
demonstrated by a dental expert to be Bundy’s own, and he was found guilty
and sentenced to death. (Bundy had insisted on conducting his own defence,
and rejecting the plea-bargaining that might have saved his life.)

9....Before his electrocution on 24 January 1989, he had confessed to another

seven murders, bringing the total to twenty-three, and was obviously prepared
to confess to more when time ran out. Police remain convinced that the total
could amount to as many as forty.

F.CAUSES OF THE SERIAL KILLER AS A MODERN PHENOMENON

The serial killer is a virtually inevitable product of the
evolution of our society. In Compulsive Killers (1986) Elliot
Leyton has produced a ‘social’ theory of serial killers. What is
happening today could be compared with what happened in Europe in the eighteenth
century, when the soaring population rate in the large cities combined with the introduction
of a new cheap drink called gin to produce an unparalleled crime explosion. Cities like London
and Paris became vast pestilence-infected slums, and the ‘overcrowded rat’ syndrome
proceeded to operate on the human population. In fact, in these two cities the crime
explosion was brought under control with remarkable ease by a new and efficient police
force. As the Industrial Revolution brought more overcrowding – between 1800 and 1900 the
population more than doubled – the age of economic crime gave way to the age of sex crime.

In the mid-twentieth century, the age of sex crime

1.....

merged into a new age of self-esteem crime; and there

was an important difference. Any medium-dominance
male(according to Maslow's theory about dominance in
relationships) might commit rape if he happened to be
drunk and sexually frustrated. As far as we can see, self-esteem crimes
are always committed by members of the ‘dominant five per cent’ – and, moreover,In the late
nineteenth century there were just as many frustrated, high-dominance working-class males
in the world, but poor education and the gap between social classes kept them ‘in their place’.

2.....The result is that ‘rights’ that were once theoretical

have finally become an actuality.Bundy admitted

that, at any point during his crimes, he could
have stopped himself if he had wanted to; he
simply had no desire to stop. He had decided
that he had a right to kill, just as a thief
decides that he has a right to steal. Every tramp knows
that the police have no right to arrest him without good reason; every schoolboy knows that a
schoolmaster who loses his temper and hits him runs the risk of dismissal. It is no longer
necessary to be wealthy or influential to ensure impartial treatment at the hands of the law.

3......By
the mid-twentieth century increasing
literacy and the erosion of class barriers meant
that increasing numbers of these males were
able to articulate their resentment.We have
seen that the beginning of the thought process
that leads to crime involves looking around for
someone on whom we can lay the blame. Some
of these had the kind of traumatic childhood that seems
typical of serial killers – lonely, physically abused, unwanted
by parents, accident-prone (often suffering head injuries) and
obsessed by sexual fantasies – and the result was bound to be,
sooner or later, a sex-crime explosion.
4......This is what we have witnessed in the last four decades of the twentieth century, and
there seems no reason to assume that the early decades of the twenty-first century will show
any improvement – on the contrary, it seems inevitable that Europe will follow
America into the age of serial murder. Joel Norris speaks optimistically about the
development of ‘profiles that could lead to the development of a diagnostic or prediction
instrument’; but although we have seen how psychological profiling can be used to trap serial
killers, it seems unlikely that it will ever enable psychiatrists to recognise them in time to
prevent them from becoming killers. The best we can hope is that social changes will
eventually remove the conditions that incubate the type.
What this means, unfortunately, is that there is no simple short-term solution to the problem
of the serial killer, any more than there has ever been a simple solution to the problem of

The long-term solution, for our

crime and violence.

descendants of the twenty-first century, would

be to attack the basic causes: ‘overcrowded
rat’ syndrome, child abuse, social frustration.
We have seen that, so far, all serial killers have emerged from the same social group – the
working class or lower middle class – and in that case, the theoretical solution

G. REFERENCES
1...THE SERIAL KILLERS

A Study in the Psychology of Violence

Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman

2....Serial Killer Investigations COLIN WILSON

Summersdale Publishers Ltd

3......Buried Dreams Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer Tim Cahill

OPEN ROAD PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

4.....THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS MICHAEL NEWTON