Serial Killers and their Motivations

I list some conditions that are influential in childhood and help to drive the person into becoming a serial rapist or a serial killer.

a). The child’s age when trauma begins.
b). The child’s degree of sensitivity (the more sensitive the child is, the greater are the effects of trauma).
c). The intensity of the child’s humiliation and denigration. This determines the intensity of retaliation.
d). The child’s degree of resilience. Socially-orientated children are usually more resilient than children who daydream a lot or who are more solitary.
e). A background mood of hatred (from slow-onset trauma) or resentment (from fast-onset trauma).
f ). A trigger situation when the conscious mood is hatred or resentment or bitterness.
g). The intensification of the person’s fragility or the erosion of his resiliency because of poor quality relationships with other people.

Not all childhood abuse is intentional. Ted Kaczynski, who became the Unabomber, was a lively baby. However, he went into hospital when he was only a few months old. He had hives and had to be isolated for 10 days without emotional contact with the parents; the nurses never gave him any emotional care either. When he came home he was changed very significantly and became withdrawn for much of the time. During the isolation he obviously felt that he was abandoned by caring adults. Hence he suffered unintentional emotional abuse by the hospital nursing staff.

The abuse changes the child’s narcissistic boundaries. The factors of narcissism are self-love and vanity. The abuse negates his sense of self-love, and so his vanity compensates by becoming inflated. This inflation of vanity has an unfortunate side-effect, that of increasing his background level of anxiety. Anxiety is the compound of fear and vanity. Hence as his vanity increases, so does his level of background anxiety.

In fast-onset trauma, the trauma can happen whilst the child is still young and so be an intense one. Whereas in slow-onset trauma, the initial trauma may be mild because the child adapts to it, and so the trigger will usually have to wait till after puberty. Puberty increases the stress levels of a child, and hence enables stress from trauma to overwhelm the adapted child if a suitable situation occurs. If the trauma is caused by the mother, then the child as it grows up will often find it difficult to form relationships with girls. If, then, in his teens or early 20s he is on the receiving end of sexual humiliation by a girl he is trying to date, then this becomes the trigger for revenge. Often the kind of girl or woman who humiliated him becomes the preferred kind of target for his revenge. This is how I view the likely trigger for Ted Bundy and Harvey Glatman.

The separation of abuse into fast and slow onset is perhaps an ideal analysis. Sometimes they may be mixed; for example, the abuse may begin slowly (the child adapts to repeated abuse) and at some point become fast and overwhelming. Abuse always creates fear and hatred in the child. In fast and slow onsets, the emphasis is different. Fast-onset trauma highlights fear, whilst slow-onset trauma highlights hate.

The emphasis between fear and hate can change if circumstances facilitate it. As an organised serial killer begins to break down (because the stresses affecting his subconscious mind are increasing), the dominance of hatred is replaced by the dominance of fear, and he turns into a dis-organised killer [³]. Consider the life of Ted Bundy. For most of his killing career he was organised and it seems that hate motivated him. Hatred allows a person to remain focused and controlled. But during his final rampage in Florida, his self-control and composure disintegrated as the fear became more intense than the hate. So he became disorganised and went on a killing spree.

Serial Killers and Remorse

R. D. Laing mentions the negative effect on a schizophrenic person of being an object of someone else’s hateful observation: the “hateful eye” effect which arouses the person’s fear and upsets him [4]. This has similarities with killers who cover the eyes of their victims.

Some psychologists think that when a killer covers the eyes of his victim, he is showing remorse. This may be so in a few cases. However, I consider that the more general reason is that if the killer sees the dead victim looking at him, he will feel the old familiar fear of women rising in him. If the fear arises, it will neutralise his “triumph”. So he covers the victim’s eyes in order to enjoy his triumph without being disturbed by fear.

Immature Masculinity

Each person is a mixture of masculinity and femininity. Whilst in the western world of today, a woman can be either masculine or feminine, as she chooses, it is not so easy for a man to be likewise. For the huge majority of men, a man is still supposed to be masculine and not feminine.

I relate one of my chief memories of my political demonstration days, in my 20s. During one big demonstration, I ended up near to one male policeman. He was almost on his own – there were only a handful of other policemen within supporting distance of him. He was the target for stone throwing by several male demonstrators. I was only a few feet away from him. Suddenly he seemed to go berserk and, ignoring his male tormentors, attacked three women standing quietly near him. He began to pull their hair, hitting and threatening them with his truncheon. His face had a savage expression on it. Why did he attack innocent women ? Why did he ignore the men who were stressing him ?

This incident puzzled me for years. Eventually three decades later my psycho-analysis gave an answer. Under the stress of physical intimidation by men his sense of masculinity faded; he could not rebuild it easily, so he switched to symbolically refuting his own femininity (thus making his weak masculinity seem greater than it was). Hence, under the impulse of anger, he refuted his own femininity by chosing to assault women rather than men.

Sexual Aspects of Serial Killing

I consider the scenario of a man killing many women over a period of time. Some writers claim that nearly all serial killings are sexual in nature – this claim is a confused one. It is conflating two separate issues that need to be separated, if we want to understand what is really happening in the mind of serial killers. The two issues are those of sexual liberation and sexual desire.

Consider when serial killing is an act of revenge against women. The primary need that drives the man is the need to humiliate women. From this need comes all other deviant desires against women. The man attacks a woman because she represents his mother or some other strong woman in his childhood: a step-mother, an aunt, perhaps an older sister. Let’s assume that the woman who is targeted is a symbol for his hatred of his mother. The reason for this hatred of the mother is the man’s fear and self-pity (when he was a child) towards his mother. The hatred is usually more obvious and so camouflages the fear and self-pity. The self-pity has caused some degree of fragility in his relationships to women, and so he fears women.

Because of his fear of the parent who caused the abuse, it is not usually possible for the child, even when he has become an adult, to kill that parent. He cannot face his fear of her. So he has to let out his rage by targeting someone else. Or else he can only kill the parent when that parent is asleep or completely incapacitated (such as being drunk).

The male child’s bonding to the mother is based on jealousy (mode of self-pity). Hence bonding always has a sexual component. Now we need to refine this component and split it up into two factors, those of femininity and sexuality. Each person, whether a man or a woman, is a mixture of feminine and masculine influences and states of mind. However, in most cultures, the man is supposed to be masculine, not feminine, and so most feminine men are often a target for public ridicule. When the man attacks a woman, he does so because he senses that his masculine sexuality is too weak: it is difficult for him to present himself as a virile male. He needs to build up his masculinity and reduce the feminine aspects of himself. A confrontational way of doing this is to humiliate a suitable woman, and this can be done in two ways. He can denigrate her femininity or he can denigrate her sexuality. In the first situation, by denigrating her femininity he is simultaneously denigrating the feminine aspects of himself. In the second situation, by denigrating her sexuality he simultaneously stimulates his own macho sexuality.

These two factors lead to two main ways of relating to the victim when he has control of her, whether she is still alive and unconscious, or dead. Once the woman is disabled or dead, his fear of her is temporarily vanquished.

h). He can assault her body and disarrange her clothing, such as exposing her breasts and pulling her skirt or trousers down. But no sexual penetration takes place. He may masturbate over her when she is dead, or he may masturbate later when he has returned to the safety on his home and relives the memory of the attack. This masturbation is not an expression of sexual desire. So what is he feeling when he masturbates? The woman is dead and hence his fear of women is temporarily dissipated. His excitement over the immediate loss of fear leads him to masturbate. He experiences the joy of sex that seems free of fear. He feels sexual liberation due to the influences of femininity fading for the moment.

i). The killer may start his killing career with scenario (h), and eventually move on to having sexual penetration of the victim. Penetration indicates sexual desire. Hence once sexual liberation becomes familiar to him, he can now enjoy sexual penetration as he feels his masculinity improving for a time.

With factor (h) the killer is denigrating the woman’s femininity (and hence his own femininity). This way, by reducing the influence of his own femininity, he feels better about his weak sense of masculinity.

With factor (i) the killer is denigrating the woman’s sexuality. He is degrading the image of woman to that of sex object. This is his way of building up positive sexual feelings about himself.

Serial Killing

The primary motivation of a serial killer will depend on which factor is of most importance: stability or empowerment. Sometimes both may be equally important.

Because fast-onset trauma emphasises fear, the person needs to quickly overcome that fear when he is assaulting the victim. So he has to find a way to overpower the victim fast. The person focuses on rapid overwhelming of the victim as his way of overcoming his fear of the victim. Hence he will be more likely to render the victim unconscious, or even kill the victim, as soon as possible. This will enhance his sense of stability. His major phantasies are likely to be ones of destruction. As a child, he was overwhelmed by trauma; as a man, his method of attack is to overwhelm the victim.

Slow-onset trauma emphasises jealousy, and so the person will focus more on establishing control over the victim. He wants to enhance his sense of power over her. He prefers to subject her to forms of degradation and humiliation. He wants to instil fear in her, and he may take his time in humiliating her. So he is more likely to kill her slowly. His major phantasies are likely to be ones of humiliating and degrading women, as a means of trying to overcome his sexual inadequacies, thereby making him feel more authentic. As a child, he was subject to emotional control by the mother; as a man, he prefers to subject his victims to emotional control.

Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway (the Green River killer) seemed to have acceptable sexual normality: Bundy had a girl friend and Ridgway was married three times, and neither seemed to be dominant and controlling towards the women. But they were not sexually fulfilled; they could only achieve this with dead women because they needed to overcome their deep fear of female sexuality. As killers, they killed their victims as quickly as possible in order to prevent having to face sexual fear, and then played with the corpses. Their motivation was destruction, not control.

Fast-onset trauma propels the killer towards overcoming fear and so attaining stability. He destroys his victim.
Slow-onset trauma propels the killer towards overcoming jealousy (in self-pity mode) and thereby attaining empowerment. He controls his victim.

My experience of being a walking volcano waiting to explode my bitterness onto a suitable target [5] can explain another feature of serial killing. Lust killers often stab the victim numerous times. The killer’s state of mind has become like a walking volcano, waiting to erupt into “over-the-top” violence. He goes into a frenzy at the moment of attack. His mood is almost certainly that of extreme bitterness.

[4]. See the book:
Laing, R.D. The Divided Self. Published by Penguin Books, 1960 and 1987, page 110 (he mentions the evil eye and death rays).

Another useful book by Laing is:
R. D. Laing and Esterson, A. Sanity, Madness and the Family. Published by Pelican Books 1970 and 1980. [4]

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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