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The psychology Behind a Murder
From Jack the Ripper to Jeffrey Dahmer to the Gilgo Beach killer, serial killers have long inspired public fear—and public fascination. Louis Schlesinger, PhD, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and coinvestigator of a research project on sexual and serial murder with the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, talks about what we really know about these murderers’ motivations and their methods, how some manage to avoid capture for so long, and how forensic psychology research can help investigators solve cases.
Last summer, police in New York arrested architect Rex Heuermann and charged him with a series of murders that took place on Long Island between 1996 and 2011. The arrest of the suspect in the so-called Gilgo Beach Killings appears to have closed one of the more recent chapters in the history of American serial killers.
From Jeffrey Dahmer to Ted Bundy to Son of Sam, serial killers have long inspired public fear—and public fascination. What, we wonder, could drive someone to commit such crimes—and how do these people get away with murder for so long?
Today we’re going to talk with a forensic psychologist who studies serial killing. We will discuss what the research tells us about serial murderers’ motivations and methods. Are they all psychopaths or sociopaths or something else? What exactly do those terms mean? Do serial killers ever feel remorse for their actions? How common is serial murder and why do so many of us find it so fascinating?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. Louis Schlesinger, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He has spent decades studying serial murder and is the coprincipal investigator of a joint research project with the FBI Behavioral Science Unit studying sexual and serial murder, rape, bias homicide, suicide by cop, and other extraordinary crimes.
He is a board-certified forensic psychologist and an APA fellow, and has published many research articles and 10 books on the topics of homicide, sexual homicide, and criminal psychopathology.
Professor Of The University
Let’s start with a definition of the term. What constitutes a serial killer and is there a minimum number of such killings that one has to commit to meet the definition?
Well, serial killer literally means killing people in a series. Now, when you speak about that, you have to talk about what type of serial killer you’re referring to, because they’re very, very different in terms of how they behave, their psychodynamics, what motivates them, and so on.
The type of serial killer that we know most about and that what most people are interested in is the serial sexual murderer like the Boston Strangler, BTK, Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, and you mentioned the Gilgo Beach guy more recently. But there’s other types of individuals that kill in a series.
For example, there’s contract killers that would kill people for money. It is a world of difference for someone who’s killing a series of people for money versus someone killing for sexual gratification.
There’s the health care serial killers. Those are people that go into a hospital for example, and kill a number of people. Some are nurses, some are physicians that do that. Again, it’s a very different type of dynamic.
And if you go into any state prison or penitentiary in the United States, you’re going to find a number of people throughout their criminal career who have killed more than one or two people during a robbery, some sort of felony thing, and so on. So we have to keep it separate.
Now, what most people are interested in—and the serial sexual murderers that you refer to in the introduction, Jeffrey Dahmer and BTK and those sorts of things—are the serial sexual murderers.
And so let me just talk about that and define that a little bit so the audience understands what we’re referring to.
Most people can understand murder. Most people don’t have any problem understanding that. But sexual murder is very difficult for the average person to wrap their arms around.
Part1
And so the question is, what’s going on with these people? Before we talk about what’s going on in their mind, we have to get a couple of definitions straight.
Serial sexual murder is not listed as a paraphilia in any of the diagnostic manuals. A paraphilia being an abnormal sexual arousal pattern like pedophilia, attraction to children, fetishism, sexual arousal to non-living objects, and this sort of thing. So it’s not listed in a diagnostic manual, and it’s also not defined in statute.
Murder is defined in statute, but serial murder or serial sexual murder is not. Also an important point with respect to this, and many, many people get this wrong, including nonclinical psychologists and sociologists and so on, is there does not have to be intercourse in order for it to be sexual. Why? Because the violence takes the place of it. As a matter of fact, in many, many of these cases, there’s no sexual penetration at all.
In addition to, complicating the problem that that wasn’t enough, is there’s no national crime statistics on the number of serial sexual murders in the United States, and no country keeps these statistics.
Now, Canada, for example, our neighbor to the north, used to keep statistics on serial sexual murder, but their definition was very different. It was killing someone in the context of a sex crime. In other words, they would commit a sex crime and then kill the victim so that they couldn’t turn him in. That’s very, very different than killing someone for sexual gratification.
Statistics Canada, which is comparable to our Uniform Crime Reports, no longer categorizes sexual murder because I spoke to them recently about it, and it just becomes too complicated.
So serial sexual murder, this is somebody that is going out and killing repetitively because the murder itself is sexually gratifying. Let me say a couple things about human sexuality first.
On one end of the continuum, you have heterosexuals, adults attracted to members of the opposite sex. On the other end of the continuum, you could have homosexuals, adults attracted to members of the same sex. But is that it for human sexuality?
The answer is no. There’s many, many, many shades of gray in between there. There’s also abnormal sexual arousal patterns, as I mentioned: pedophilia, arousal to children; infantophilia, sexual arousal to preverbal infants; hebephilia, sexual arousal to pubescent adolescents.
And there’s things like fetishism and exhibitionism and these sorts of things. In my view, the best way to understand serial sexual murder is another paraphilia, another abnormal sexual arousal pattern.
And specifically in these cases, there’s a fusion of sex and aggression so that the aggressive act itself is eroticized, it’s stimulating
Part3
For example, I said neurobiological, is it hormonal? Is it chemical? Is it electrical? Is it a combination of those factors plus a head injury, plus trauma and poor parenting? And I think yes—I think the answer is yes. And that’s why it’s very, very small. The number of people that do it, it’s always been around and there’s no evidence that it’s increasing. Now you hear different estimates.
How many serial killers are there roaming around the country? The FBI has never put out an official statement with respect to that. It’s basically unknown, and I think unknowable, actually.
Let me just say one other thing to answer your question specifically with respect to our understanding of, you said personality traits and so on. If you look—serial sexual murder is very popularized.
I mean, you can turn on one of the TV stations—every night, you’re going to see a crime documentary on this serial killer, that serial killer and so on. But if you look at the peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals in the past 20 years for popularized mental disorders like bipolar disorder, PTSD, eating disorders, those are popularized too.
There’s between 60,000 and 75,000 articles on each of those disorders. Do you know how many peer-reviewed published articles there have been, empirical studies now, of serial sexual murder in the past 20 years? No, you don’t.
And so it’s hard to answer your question definitively, but I can say this with respect to personality traits—and that’s interesting as well. There’s generally two types of individuals who commit sexual murder.
Some do it in a very planned fashion where they try to elude law enforcement, they’re forensically aware, and they leave crime scenes that are generally without a lot of physical evidence. If you look at it visually, you’ll see them as very organized. The murder weapon is taken with them, if it’s a ligature strangulation, for example. The room itself is not all broken up with furniture. There’s no blood of the offender on the victim. And so that’s one type of offender, and he usually does it in a series which is thought out.
Now there’s another group that acts out more spontaneously Now why? It’s because the underlying personality disturbance of that group is much more disturbed. If you look at people that kill one or two serial sexual murders and then they’re caught, these are people that have borderline personality, schizophrenia, schizotypal personality, that’s a severe personality disorder, for example. What’s the problem?
The problem is that type of disorder, psychopathology, mental disorder does not allow the person to inhibit their impulses. So when they see, for example, a victim that crosses their path, they strike out, and if you strike out impulsively, there may be witnesses around, you’ll leave forensic evidence around—you didn’t plan on killing anybody and you’re apprehended quickly.
The other type has more what’s often called psychopathic traits, narcissistic traits, and whatever personality they have, it doesn’t disable them from planning. You could be narcissistic, you could be psychopathic, but you can still plan and inhibit your impulses.
And that’s what you see in those sorts of cases. And as a result, because they’re forensically aware and they can plan, they can rack up a very high number of victims. Those are the cases that the FBI usually becomes involved in.
Why? Because the FBI’s called in almost always when it’s a difficult-to-solve case. Otherwise, if it’s just one murder or two, local law enforcement can usually make the apprehension
Part5
Well, I mentioned Rex Heuermann in my intro. He was married. I mean, is that unusual for a serial sexual killer to actually have a marital relationship?
No, that’s not uncommon. That’s not uncommon for the serial sexual murderer who plans his crimes because he has the type of personality that’s generally speaking, not off-putting. They look normal. They have a mask of normality. They can speak. They can engage, and so on. The other type of sexual murder who’s much more disturbed very often is not married.
Any type of sexual involvement, it’s often with a sex worker. They very often live with a parent and so on. But those individuals that you see with a high number of victims very often are married or in a committed relationship at the time.
And the partner, the wife usually says things like, “I knew something was odd about him or weird, but I never dreamed that he would be going around killing people.”
Now you say to yourself, now when you hear this, you say, “ah, come on, you live with this guy.” But this has been reported from Krafft-Ebing’s time, back in the 1800s. Because how would you know? To think that your partner is weird is one thing, but to think that he’s going out killing people is such an alien thought and it’s so remote, and that’s what so many of the women say who are subsequently interviewed—some serial sexual murderers, like the Boston Strangler for example, was generally speaking a fairly good husband and he was a good parent.
I mean, the children of a lot of them said, my father is a fairly normal guy. He did this, he did that. And so on. Dennis Rader, BTK’s wife had no idea at all. As a matter of fact, the police who interacted with her said, she’s just a very, very nice person. And he raised a family and had a fairly responsible position.
So this is way more complicated, this type of disorder, than for example, depression or PTSD and that sort of thing.
This is very complicated and I know that—well, let me say this a couple things. The American people want their serial killers to be evil geniuses with IQs of 180 who speak five languages, including Aramaic, who are connoisseurs of fine wine like Hannibal Lecter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And even those very few offenders who went to college for example, and had a degree—Bundy, you mentioned the Gilgo Beach guy— they really don’t use their intelligence as far as I can determine in any really, really productive way in carrying out their murders because we had the case up in the Pacific Northwest of Gary Ridgeway.
They called him the Green River Killer. He eluded law enforcement for over 20 years. His IQ was 83 and so on.
Now you say, now why is that? Well, I’ll tell you a couple of reasons. The hardest thing—let me say it this way, the hardest thing for a serial killer is the abduction. How do you get a woman to go with you? That’s not so simple. And so that’s why you see sex workers are very often targeted.
Part of their job description is to go with a stranger, have sex, take your clothes off, usually in a remote area. Also, if a sex worker turns up dead, you don’t know what her real identity is. She’s known on the street by a street name and she may have been killed in New York, but she could be from Chicago or Florida or anywhere.
So it’s very, very, very, very difficult. And that’s why you see those women are targeted
So what about female serial killers? Are they sexual serial killers, first of all, and is their profile similar to that of male serial killers?
Well, female serial sexual murderers are generally non-existent. Now, there was a woman in Florida, Aileen Wuornos, who killed a bunch of men, but she was a sex worker.
She hated men. She just killed men for the motivation of just revenge or something like that. And that was actually studied and a paper published on that as well. Yes, she killed in a series. So literally she was a serial killer, but the motivation was not sexual. Yeah, it’s really a different thing.
And again, keep in mind, in the past 20 years, we only have 22 publications on this. And so a lot of what you hear said is coming from folklore and Silence of the Lambs and people repeating these sorts of things, which can be dangerous in an investigation because serial sexual murderers, those who read the newspapers and follow the news, and they hear somebody pontificating about this may change their plan, may change their the method of operation.
We saw a good example of that about 10 years ago, I think in Washington, DC, where they had the DC sniper who was a guy with a young, I think 17-year-old juvenile with him going around shooting people, and there were people pontificating on TV about the signature, the signature. Now they got that from the serial killer routine, and then there was someone else talking about geographic profiling.
And so the next murder that weekend was 90 miles away. It was outside of the DC area, which makes the investigation so much more difficult. Now you’ve got a tri-state area as opposed to a small area. So these sorts of things really don’t help.
But does there tend to be a signature in these types of serial sexual killings? I mean, part of the reason that Son of Sam got caught—I mean, there were a lot of reasons, but he did keep looking for the same type of woman to the point where women who lived in Brooklyn were wearing blonde wigs, that sort of thing. So are there signatures?
Oh, well, let me say this. I did the only research study, empirical study on ritual and signature in serial sexual murder. It was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law back in 2010. And what we found is notwithstanding Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Lecter who was talking about putting a moth or butterfly in the mouth of all these women, it’s way more complicated than that.
They do behave in ritualistic ways, but not exact ways. Let me say two things of our study, without getting into the weeds, that I think people will find interesting. One thing is that their behavior at a crime scene tends to evolve, and so the more comfort they have in killing, the more elaborate their behavior at a crime scene will become.
So initial torture becomes much more elaborate torture later on. But the most important finding that we found is that in 70% of the cases, a serial killer does something with one victim in a series that he does not do with others in a series.
Part7
The problem with that is if you go to a yearbook of all coeds who were in college during the—they all had hair—long hair parted down the middle. That was a very, very popular hairstyle back then. And so no. Now, having said that, there is a subgroup of serial sexual murders that will target people based on specific physical characteristics, but it’s very, very rare.
Most of them, it’s due to their vulnerability, the victim’s vulnerability and their accessibility. And it may not be as obvious as you might think, for example. Yes, certainly doing things like hitchhiking and leaving a bar with a stranger, those are all high risk things that most women know about.
But if an individual is fixated on a victim obsessed with her, a neighbor, for example, and observes her when she goes to work, when she comes home Wednesday night and Friday night, her boyfriend stays over, is he going to try to abduct her on a Wednesday night or Friday night? No, because there’s a male figure there. And so that type of routine behavior pattern unwittingly is a vulnerability and very few people think about that as well.
Is it common for serial sexual killers also to be serial confessors? That is to confess to murders that they didn’t commit?
Let me break it down this way. Yes, there are some people that will confess to murders that they didn’t commit to gain notoriety and to gain a lot of status in the institution.
One of my cases is not a serial sexual murder, but it’s a very famous case that many people are aware of. Richard Kuklinski, the Iceman. He is a New Jersey case, and I evaluated him when he was apprehended back in the 1980s. He tells everyone he killed over a hundred people. He died a couple of years ago.
I never believed that. Where are all the dead people? And when he is interviewed, it becomes more and more elaborate, all these things that—no, I never believed that at all, but generally speaking, that’s an aberration.
I’ll tell you what we did. We did a study—started to do a study of confessions in different types of crime. We know a lot about false confessions. I mean, there’s been a lot of research. Many of my colleagues at John Jay did some of the seminal research on false confessions,
Saul Kassin, my colleague there and others as well. So we know a lot about that. But what about confessions in general?
Do we know a lot about confessions? So we looked at intimate partner homicides and how they confess, and what we found is they’re not confessing to the police, they’re confessing to a family member. We also found eight cases where they confessed in a suicide note. So the type of confession depends upon the type of murder.
And what we started to do is right before the pandemic started, we looked at serial sexual murderers and their confessions—and the study was stopped in the middle due to the pandemic. Our research is now back in gear since January of this year, but for almost 3 years it was shut down due to the pandemic.
We just couldn’t do anything. So we started a study on serial killers and how they confessed, and what we found is 50% of them don’t confess. They say to the police, you do what you got to do, but I’m not saying a word. They’re sophisticated offenders. And that gives a little bit of insight into what you just said
Now, a lot of people have violent, sexual and nonsexual fantasies, but they don’t act on them. Is there a precipitating factor that drives these people to actually finally act out on what they’ve been fantasizing about?
Yes. In the general population, I won’t say most, but many, many people have very disturbed sexual fantasies that they keep private even to their partner because they’re afraid if they say to their partner, I want to do this, she’s going to say, what are you nuts?
Do you have to see a doctor? I’m not doing that. What’s the matter with you? So they keep it very much to themselves. Same with those individuals who fantasize about killing women in this type of way.
The number of people who have these perverse fantasies is much, much higher than those who actually acted out. And so why do some act it out? Well, I can say this.
What we do know is that of those who do act out, there’s usually some precipitant, some sort of upsetting event, such as the loss of a relationship, which means a lot to a male, the loss of a job. Men usually get some level of status from a job. In so many ways, male psychology is much more fragile than women, for example, who a job, whatever, doesn’t mean all that much.
And I’ve had a case where the guy began killing—he started his killing series when his girlfriend became pregnant, that upset him and so on. And so we can say in many cases what the precipitant is, but definitely not in all cases.
Part2
And so people look at this and say, okay, murder—understand murder. I could even understand hatred of women, for example, let’s kill women. But what they can’t understand, which is very difficult to understand, is what they do at the crime scene with these victims. They very often leave the victim in a sexually degrading position with foreign object insertions, for example. And so why do they do it?
And the answer to that question is, killing alone is not psychosexually sufficient. So they have to go above and beyond actually killing the person to get complete sexual gratification. And the sexual instinct itself is very, very strong.
That’s why—that’s how God made us. So for example, if in order for a woman to become pregnant, she had to run 20 miles, most of women would say, you run 20 miles. I can’t be bothered. There’d be no species. But God was way too smart for that, right?
So in order for propagation of the species, he made the sexual instinct very, very strong. And so most people have a sexual encounter, they don’t say, well, that’s good. I’m going to move on to something else. Now they want to do it again and again. And so what you see is a compulsive repetitive aspect to serial sexual murder.
What drives people to become serial sexual killers? I mean, how much do we really know about their motivations? And are there any common personality traits?
The answer is it’s not due to trauma. It’s not due to poor parenting, and it’s not an American phenomenon. Serial sexual murder has been described as far back as the 1800s. As a matter of fact, the first person to describe in a scientific way in terms of case description was a psychiatrist in Germany named Richard von Krafft-Ebing.
And his classic book is titled Psychopathia Sexualis. And there’s a chapter in there where he describes almost everything that we know about sexual murder today, was described in 1886 by Krafft-Ebing—not 1986 in Quantico, Virginia, but 1886. And so why did they do it?
Again, you find it in every country, in every culture from premodern times, and there’s no evidence at all that it’s increasing—I did a study on that actually—not withstanding what you might hear in the news now.
Why do they do it? The best understanding I think we have at this point is that it’s a biopsychosocial phenomenon with, in my view, a heavy emphasis on neurobiology. Now, poor parenting, traumatic events, none of those things are helpful, that’s for sure. But the number of people who’ve had horrible childhoods, who’ve had terrible parenting, who’ve been abused, they don’t go out become serial sexual murderers. It’s a very, very small amount of the population. And in order for somebody to become a serial sexual murder, I believe many things have to go wrong.
Part4
Let me talk about three different terms—psychopathic personality, sociopathic and antisocial personality disorder—because they get kind of mushed together, particularly when you speak about these things and people refer to it and so on.
The only official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that’s the manual that psychologists, psychiatrists and so on rely on, is antisocial personality disorder.
That’s been the official diagnosis for years. Sociopathic personality was in the manual back in the 1950s, but it has since been eliminated. Interestingly, when someone pontificates about these sorts of things, they’ll always say he’s a psychopath. He’s a psychopath. Right. Now, psychopath, psychopathic personality is time honored.
It’s been around since the 1800s when some of the early alienists, which what they called psychiatrists back in the turn of the last century was called moral insanity, and so on.
And it’s always been in the literature, it’s been in the psychiatric literature, it’s been in the psychoanalytic literature, it’s been in the psychological literature, but it’s never been an official diagnosis.
But what is generally meant by psychopath is somebody who outwardly appears normal. They have what Hervey Cleckley called a mask of sanity. They can cover up the underlying disturbance, and the underlying disturbance is a lack of emotional attachment to other people.
That’s what makes us human. We have attachments to other people. The psychopath in a general in a Cleckleyian sense does not have that, they’re devoid of that. And so they can cut off a person just like that. So that was Cleckley’s conception, and it’s used a lot.
Now, why is it used in serial killing? Why do you hear people say “He’s a psychopath, he’s a psychopath”? Psychopathy does not make you go out and kill people for sexual gratification. It doesn’t. What it does do is it determines how the murder is carried out.
So if you have a psychopathic personality and you also have a sexual arousal pattern where there’s a fusion of sex and aggression so that the aggressive act itself is eroticized, then you can plan your crime.
And if you can plan your crime and you’re forensically aware, you can elude law enforcement and rack up a high number of victims. And that’s the answer to that. It’s not causative. A personality disorder does not cause anybody to go out and kill women to get sexual gratification. It determines on how they go about doing it.
Now that leads to the question of remorse or even regret. I mean, do such people feel remorse? Do they regret or are they only remorseful when they get caught?Well, that’s a very difficult determination, how you determine if somebody is remorseful or not.
Now, if you see any old criminal in prison, which I’ve been doing for 48 years now, almost all of them, not everyone, but almost all of them will say, oh, I never should have done it. I feel bad. It’s terrible thing, and so on. So it’s very difficult to determine.
The serial sexual murderer usually does not feel any type of remorse towards the victim himself. And I keep saying “himself” because these are 99.99% men killing women, generally speaking. So no, these are people again, as Cleckley said, they’re devoid of human emotion.
They have trouble with empathy. Interestingly enough, although they don’t have bonding to other people, many people attach themselves to the psychopath and that’s why you see many psychopaths have an entourage following them around, hangers on and this type of thing.
Part6
For example, if they link five women in a series together, they’re linked for some reason. And you look at the five women, four of the bodies are just dumped with no clothes on, but one body is mutilated in some way. Her breasts are cut off, there’s something shoved in or that type of thing.
Look at the average homicide detective with 25 years of experience. They’re going to say, that’s a different guy. Look at his behavior, what he did with that victim. That’s not true, and you would only know that if you studied a high number of these cases, which most don’t—the FBI does, I do, and there’s a couple of people in the country affiliated with the FBI that studies these sorts of things—but it’s counterintuitive.
And so we found in 70% of the cases an offender will do something with one victim that he did not do with others in the series. So then we asked the question, well, where does he do it in the series, in the beginning, the middle, or the end?
We thought in the end, once he gains more comfort, he’ll experiment at a crime scene and do something different. Not true. One third do it in the beginning, one third do it in the middle and one third do it in the end. That’s why you have to do the research rather than just rely on popular culture and this sort of thing.
But is it even possible to come up with an accurate profile—because it sounds like that’s what you’re trying to help with—when there are so few cases and there is this level of variety?
Yeah, there is, and let me say it this way. You can come up with some sort of quote unquote “profile,” but not to go to court and link them with—link those crimes because there’s no scientific evidence that would pass the legal standard for the admissibility of scientific evidence, which is either called the Frye standard, is it generally accepted, or the Daubert standard, meaning is it more than generally accepted, is it empirically supported, published in peer reviewed journals and all the rest?
The point of the Daubert standard is to keep junk science out of the courtroom, and so you can use a quote unquote “profile” in an investigation, but to go to court and say, this guy killed these five people based on behavior—there’s only one study, is my study basically, and that’s just not enough to meet the legal standard.Earlier, I think you indicated that there may be some biosocial thing going on with people who become serial sexual killers.
Has any study been done into the brains of these people to better understand what is going on that’s different?
The answer is nothing really definitive at this point for a number of reasons. There’s so few cases, number one. Number two, to study their brains, they’re going to have to get their permission to become somewhat invasive, and a lot of these guys are just not doing that.
There are some people that are looking at CAT scans and PET scans and MRIs and trying to come up with something, but it’s very, very difficult because of the number of cases. There just aren’t that many cases around, and there’s not that many cases accessible.
As I mentioned before, if you want to study PTSD, easy to get cases, go to a VA hospital. You want to study alcoholism, go to a rehab center. You want to study bipolar disorder, go to a psychiatric hospital. You want to study serial sexual murder, where are you going to get the cases?
If you’re not connected with the FBI who has a national reach, it’s very, very, very difficult to do this. And at John Jay, we’ve had about a 20-year relationship with the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit down in Quantico, and we’re continuing to do this research and so on.
I’ll tell you one interesting finding that was just published a couple of weeks ago in the Journal of Forensic Sciences is you would think that these individuals would have a history of sexual assault or rape in their background. They don’t.
And so I looked very carefully at these studies going back to Krafft-Ebing. Even Krafft-Ebing described medical abnormalities, family histories, prior arrests, all sorts of characteristics, but didn’t describe one case of a history of sexual assault or rape. So we found in our cases, 26% of the offenders have a history of sexual assault, which means that three fourths of them don’t.
But we found something very important, that will help in an investigation, that is if an offender sexually penetrated a homicide victim in their series, there’s about an 80% chance he had a likelihood of a conviction in his rap sheet of sexual assault/rape. That helps enormously in an investigation because other things that we know in the background of serial sexual murders, such as inappropriate maternal sexual conduct in their upbringing, sadistic fantasy, animal cruelty, other types of mental health disorders, are not going to be available to an investigator in an investigation. Once you get a suspect, then you can get to mental health records and that might be available then.
But in an investigation, you only have his rap sheet. And so if one in the series is sexually penetrated, that’s close to an 80% likelihood that he had sexual assault in his rap sheet, and it really helps the investigation a lot.
Do serial sexual killers as a rule, desire to become famous even as they need to hide their identity so that they can keep killing? I mean, how much of a motivator is that?
No, that’s been overhyped right from the beginning. There’s so much of this is overhyped, that he’s playing with the police, he’s toying with the investigation, he’s sitting in his room and rolling his hands. No, they do not want to get caught, but very often they will do things that almost ensure that they’ll get caught. Take for example, Dennis Rader, the BTK guy from Kansas. Thirty years the cases were cold.
What happened is a lawyer in the Topeka area where he was from wrote a book on these cases and it got some publicity and he wanted to get credit in a sense, in his own twisted mind. And so he started communicating with the police, and that will almost ensure that you’re going to get caught. And in fact, he did get caught—by and large did not want to get caught.
Let me just dispel one sort of myth that you mentioned about with David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Are they targeting people with specific characteristics? That came from the ’70s and particularly the Ted Bundy investigation because the women that he killed in the 1970s when he was operative had brown hair parted down the middle.
Part8
And again, this requires more research and less hypothesizing and speculating and pontificating based on Silence of the Lambs and these other sorts of things
Let me ask you about DNA evidence, which has become quite prevalent and very effective at this point, especially large-scale DNA databases that have really changed the way that police do their work. How is that changing the process of going after serial sexual killers?Well, DNA evidence, and not only serial sexual murder, but in all sorts of crime is just become enormously, enormously helpful.
This is hard science and it’s very, very persuasive in court. In fact, in many, many cases, juries expect to hear DNA and other forensic evidence, although in some cases you can’t get DNA evidence.
It’s very, very difficult. I had a case where the victim was underwater for a year, and of course you can’t get DNA evidence from that. Unfortunately, jurors expect it. Because of the popularity of crime shows in general, the jurors are very different today than they were 20 or 30 years ago.
I had a case I remember not that long ago where the jury hung on a case, and after it was all over, the judge who had a good rapport with the jury said, well, what was the problem? The evidence was overwhelming. And he said, well, we all thought he did it, but there was no luminol used. Luminol is a spray that makes blood—and you see it in all the shows. Well, what do you think the red stuff was coming out of the dead person?
That’s blood. You don’t have to use luminol to determine it was blood, but they do in the shows. And so you have to be very careful now in jury selection. That’s really up to the judges, to voir dire these jurors to the extent that will you listen to what the judge is saying as opposed to what you heard on TV? And it’s very, very hard to undo something that you’ve heard so many times before.
Last question, and I guess I’m going to ask you to speculate a little bit here. Why do so many people, especially women, seem to find serial sexual killers and killing so morbidly fascinating?
Well, yes. I mean, they certainly do. And if you look at the crime shows, like ID Discovery and I’ve done so many of those, and I speak to the producers, they say 80% of their viewers are women. And in my opinion, I think it’s a number of different factors.
Number one, they tend to be the victim of these cases, and they want to learn how not to become a victim because so many of these guys, particularly the guys that they feature on the crime shows, look so normal and behave so normally. That’s one reason.
The other reason is I think women, for example, more than men, are psychologically more interested in the complexity of the inner workings of the human mind as opposed to a guy. For example, in jury selection, you have one of these cases of someone going around and mutilating women.
Many guys will say, kill him, he’s not a person. Whereas a woman may be more empathetic, may be more understanding, make sure to try to understand his background and this sort of thing. So I mean, those are two speculative answers as to why women become involved in this.
I’ll say one other thing as a closing thing, to answer your question a little bit differently. The death of a child of one of these people is devastating for not only the family members, but the community and even the country in highly publicized cases.
And I’ve had the opportunity over the years to speak to family members who lost a child and talk about difference between men and women. In my experience, it particularly seems to affect fathers more than mothers. I mean, they’re just so devastated.
And I remember one father said to me, I’ll never forget it, he said to me, if my daughter died of cancer, or my daughter died in a horrible car accident, that’s one thing. These things happen, but my daughter died because some guy got sexual gratification killing her. He said, I can’t wrap my head around that.
I just can’t go on with that type of thought. And it’s a very, very disturbing thought. It just really, really is, and you just can’t help but feel such empathy for people and to spur us all on to try to unravel this as best we can.
Also, in terms of preventing this, when we see some red flags like sexual burglaries and repetitive fire setting and these sorts of things, what kind of interventions can we have from a mental health perspective to intervene and try to prevent the development of these sorts of cases?
