Causation of Serial Killers Essay - 2039 Words

â€Å"I just know it’s a dark side of me. It kind of controls me. I personally think it’s- I know it’s not very Christian, but I actually think its demons within me† (Wenzl et al. 308). Dennis Rader, infamously known as BTK, commented about what he called his â€Å"factor X† above, which he claimed was his motive for killing. The demons within Rader supposedly caused him to murder four members from the Otero Family leaving the youngest daughter hanging in the basement nearly naked and gagged (Wenzl et al. 10). We now know that these demons within and â€Å"factor X† that Rader was referring to was his psychopathology, but we cannot ignore that these traits were triggered by early childhood experience. His early childhood experiences as in many other†¦show more content†¦In order to prevent this, he consumed and soaked himself in the blood of those he had slain (Brogaard). Chase suffered from paranoia as a result of his schizophrenia, making him believe that there actually were Nazis trying to kill him. Similar to Watts, Chase also lost his sense of reality allowing his paranoia to consume him and as a result he killed multiple people. This inability to differentiate between fantasy and reality is significant among all psychotic serial killers. Psychotic serial killers can also be triggered by their relationships with family members and loss of close relatives, such as in the case of Ed Gein (Morrison 51). Ed Gein was also a Schizophrenic, who began digging up graves and most notably skinning his victims to make suits consisting of women’s breasts and genitals (Morrison 52). People hypothesized that Gein wore these suits made from his female victims because he wanted a sex change (Brogaard). This is incorrect because in an interview with Morrison, Gein made it clear that they were wrong and they were only assumptions (quote and page). These criminal actions were triggered after the loss of his brother, father, and most importantly, his over-bearing mother (Morrison 51). The death of his family left Gein alone, and his psychosis disabled his ability to properly mourn and cope with the deaths. In order to cope with the death of his mother, GeinShow MoreRelatedEssay The Making of a Serial Killer, An Annotated Bibliograp hy1410 Words   |  6 PagesAnnotated Bibliography: Brogaard, Berit. The Making of a Serial Killer. Psychology Today. Sussex Directories, Inc., 7 Dec. 2012. Web. 03 May 2014. Berit Brogaard, D.M.Sci., Ph.D., is a Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research at the University of Miami. She earned a medical degree in neuroscience and a doctorate in philosophy. 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