The Serial Killer Files Quotes

“It makes perfect sense that if human beings are raised in warm, loving households; if they are brought up to believe that the world is a secure and decent place, then they will grow up with a healthy relationship toward themselves and other people. - able to give love freely and receive it in return. Conversely, if a person is severely mistreated from his earliest years, subjected to constant psychological and physical abuse, he or she will grow up with a malignant view of life. To such a person, the world is a hateful place where all human relationships are based, not on love and respect, but on power, suffering, and humiliation.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Largely because of its emphasis on gore, the Illustrated Police News had the highest circulation of any publication in Victorian England.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“publicly raped by a specially trained giraffe, after which she was torn apart by wild animals.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Only the technology has changed. The public’s appetite for sensational true-crime stories has remained exactly the same.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“In attempting to create a psychological profile of an unknown serial killer, investigators try to distinguish between the perpetrator’s “signature”—the seemingly gratuitous acts of excessive violence or sadistic cruelty he commits for his own depraved pleasure—and his MO or modus operandi. Technically speaking, the latter term refers to the killer’s preferred method of committing his crimes without getting caught: how he selects, snares, subdues, and dispatches his victims, then makes his getaway.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Psychosis is defined as a severe mental disorder characterized by some degree of personality disintegration. Psychotics live in a nightmarish world of their own. They suffer from hallucinations and delusions—hear voices, see visions, are possessed by bizarre beliefs. They have lost touch with reality. Unlike psychopaths—who appear to be normal, rational people even while leading grotesque secret lives—psychotics match the common conception of insanity. The main forms of psychosis are schizophrenia and paranoia. For the most part, serial killers aren’t psychotic.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Indeed, anyone inclined to blame psychopathic violence on a killer's favorite books or movies must deal with the discomfiting fact that a significant number of serial murderers have been devoted students of the Bible.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“The virtuous man is contempt to dream what the wicked man really does.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“The love of cruelty is a component of human psychology as old as the species itself.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Soup bowls made from the sawed-off tops of human heads. Chairs upholstered in human flesh. Lampshades fashioned of skin. A boxful of noses. A shade pull decorated with a pair of women's lips. A belt made of female nipples. A shoe box containing a collection of preserved female genitalia. The faces of nine women, carefully dried, stuffed with paper and mounted, like hunting trophies on a wall. A skin vest, complete with breasts, which had been fashioned from the tanned upper torso of a middle-aged woman.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“I am what you have made me and the mad-dog devil killer fiend leper is a reflection of your society. - Charles Manson”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Scrawled in lipstick on the living room wall was a cry for help that would become the single most famous serial killer message of the century: "For heavens sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“When you consider that most of these guys are angry, ineffectual losers who feel they've been given the shaft by life, and that most of them have experienced some sort of physical or emotional abuse... it isn't surprising that one of their main fantasy occupations is police officer.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Perhaps the most popular ploy has been the “multiple personality” gambit, which has been attempted—with a stunning lack of success—by a number of infamous serial killers.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“As for serial killers, “Only 3.6 percent have been declared incompetent for trial or cleared by reason of insanity,” according to one expert. Even a severely delusional psychotic like Herbert Mullin—who believed he could ward off an apocalyptic earthquake by slaughtering strangers—was deemed “sane by legal standards” and convicted of murder.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“For the most part, winning an acquittal with an insanity plea is so difficult that few defense lawyers attempt it. In the last hundred years, barely one percent of all felons brought to trial in this country have resorted to this tactic. And of that tiny minority, only one in three has been found NGRI (“not guilty by reason of insanity”).”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“As psychiatrist Donald Lunde puts it in his classic book Murder and Madness, the purpose of an insanity trial is to “separate the mad from the bad.” American juries, however, as Lunde also points out, are often reluctant “to believe that someone who kills is mad rather than bad. In fact, many people suspect that the insanity defense is a ruse employed by clever lawyers in collaboration with naive psychiatrists to win an acquittal of an obviously guilty client.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“According to the FBI, there are two categories of serial killer keepsakes: the “souvenir” and the “trophy.” The first presumably serves the same function that a statuette of the Eiffel Tower does for a tourist who has just vacationed in Paris—it reminds the killer of how much fun he had and allows him to relive the experience in fantasy until he can do it again. Trophies, on the other hand, are analogous to the mounted moose head or stag antlers that a hunter might proudly display over the fireplace—prideful evidence of the killer’s lethal skill.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“The first American serial killer of the twentieth century was a strangler—Earle Leonard Nelson, aka the “Gorilla Murderer,” a Bible-quoting psycho who traveled from coast to coast, choking women to death before raping their corpses (Alfred Hitchcock also made a movie loosely inspired by this notorious case: his 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt).”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“R. M. Holmes and J. DeBurger divide serial killers into four varieties, based on their underlying motivations: visionary types (psychotics who hear voices or see visions commanding them to kill); mission-oriented types (generally prostitute killers who believe they are on a crusade to rid the world of scum); hedonistic types (lust-killers who murder for perverted pleasure); and control-oriented types (who derive their sick gratification less from sex than from the assertion of power and dominance over the victim).”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“In attempting to get a handle on the complex phenomenon of serial homicide, experts have come up with various ways of classifying these killers. Crime historian Philip Jenkins, for example, proposes two major categories: the predictable type (criminals with a long history of brutal fantasy and behavior whose progression to serial murder seems unsurprising) versus the respectable type (petty felons with no prior history of violent crime whose sudden turn to serial murder is unexpected). Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz identifies three major kinds of serial murderers: psychopaths who kill for sadistic sexual pleasure, psychotics who act under the influence of hallucinations, and custodial killers like doctors, nurses, and other caretakers who usually poison or smother their victims.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Another problem is that it’s not always easy to distinguish between a killer’s MO and his signature. Supposedly, a signature act is something the killer needs to do to satisfy his sickest urges—“whatever he gets his rocks off on,” as Ted Bundy so bluntly put it—whereas the MO relates to the purely practical aspects of pulling off and getting away with the crime. But it’s often hard to make such hard-and-fast distinctions.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“The term “target of opportunity” is also used to describe victims who are randomly slain by a serial murderer simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Prostitutes (especially when they come from the underclass)—along with street hustlers, teenage runaways, vagrants, junkies, and other social outcasts—are what criminologists call “targets of opportunity”: people who are especially vulnerable to serial homicide because they are easy to snare and overpower and are so marginalized that no one, including members of the police and the press, pays much attention when they go missing.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“The best estimate of experts like James Alan Fox of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University is that, at any given time, there are two to three dozen serial killers at large in the country, responsible for the deaths of between one and two hundred victims.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Because of the prominent role that such vicious daydreams play as a preliminary to the act of serial murder, Robert Ressler and his colleagues reached the conclusion that fantasy is the mainspring of sexual homicide. “My research convinced me that the key was not the early trauma but the development of perverse thought patterns,” Ressler has written. “These men were motivated to murder by their fantasies.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“It’s not just extreme deviance that distinguishes the fantasy life of psychopaths but their overpowering urge to translate their sickest fantasies into fact. The most extravagant erotic daydreams of normal people always run up against what Freud called “the reality principle.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“In his landmark 1899 book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud quotes Plato on the difference between ordinary citizens and criminals: “The virtuous man is content to dream what the wicked man really does.” Freud’s point is that, in the depths of the unconscious mind, even the most morally upright person harbors fantasies of forbidden behavior—of savage lust and primal violence. But the quote implies something else, too: that what differentiates “wicked men” (and women) from the rest of us is their willingness to act on their darkest desires.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“According to psychiatrists, the loathing such killers feel for their mothers becomes projected onto all females, resulting in what crime writer Stephen Michaud calls “malignant misogyny.” Women come to be seen as noxious, disgusting creatures that deserve whatever horrors are inflicted on them—a sentiment chillingly expressed by “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi, who steadfastly defended his atrocities.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Recent scientific research has reinforced the findings of people like Otnow and Athens by demonstrating that a traumatic upbringing can actually alter the anatomy of a person’s brain. Brain scans performed on severely abused children have found that specific areas of the cortex—related not just to the intelligence but to the emotions—never develop properly, leaving them incapable of feeling empathy for other human beings.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers