But here’s the problem: if 100 kids grow up in an abusive foster home, and one turns out to be a serial killer – what about the other 99? They grew up to be, well, maybe not all well-adjusted citizens, but certainly not serial killers. It’s true that almost all serial killers suffered childhood trauma. If killers are the products of childhood trauma, or underdeveloped brains, are they still “responsible” for their actions? When you read these killers’ biographies it is no surprise they turned into what they did. I really don’t know.īut there is nothing in his past that obviously parallels the early lives of, say, Charles Manson or Henry Lee Lucas. It could be that there is something but he doesn’t want to admit it. He comes from a nuclear family … the father was there, the mother was there, and there is no clear history of trauma or abuse. I am currently studying a serial killer called Richard Cottingham. There is also the strangeness of the late age at which he started. There is nothing in his childhood to explain his behavior. He was flying the equivalent of Air Force One – flying around the prime minister, visiting dignitaries – then suddenly in his 40s, a colonel, he commits two sexual homicides. We had a killer here in Canada who was the commander of an air force base. Mugshot of murder suspect Ted Bundy, 1980. He did, however, grow up believing that his mother was his sister. No one has really found any evidence of “trauma” in his childhood, in the dramatic, traditional sense. That being said, there do seem to be some examples. Most serial killer biographies are self-reported, so you are relying on what they tell you. Trauma is the single recurring theme in the biographies of most killers.Īre there any cases of serial killers who had well-adjusted childhoods? Many serial killers are survivors of early childhood trauma of some kind – physical or sexual abuse, family dysfunction, emotionally distant or absent parents. And often that capacity is grafted onto a sexual impulse – aggression sexualized at puberty. What remains behind is these un-fully-socialized beings with this capacity to attack and kill. Perhaps it’s not that serial killers are made, but that the majority of us are unmade, by good parenting and socialization. Killers are anachronisms whose primal instincts are not being moderated by the more intellectual parts of our brain. My basic argument is that it is intrinsic to the human survival mechanism that we have this capacity to repeatedly kill. Are serial killers a product of nature (genetics) or nurture (environmental factors)? One of the oldest questions in criminology – and, for that matter, philosophy, law, theology – is whether criminals are born or made. John Wayne Gacy, who was responsible for 33 murders.
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