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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
