Forensic Psychology Research
What Makes a Killer?
One of the oldest questions in criminology – and, for that matter, philosophy, law, theology – is whether criminals are born or made. Are serial killers a product of nature (genetics) or nurture (environmental factors)?
Peter Vronsky is the author of Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from Stone Age to the Present, a book that explores why some people become killers, and others don’t.The book explores how our understandings of serial killers – called “monsters” before the advent of modern psychology – have changed over time, and considers answers to a difficult question: what, exactly, “makes” a serial killer?
Many serial killers are survivors of early childhood trauma of some kind – physical or sexual abuse, family dysfunction, emotionally distant or absent parents. Trauma is the single recurring theme in the biographies of most killers As a consequence of this trauma, they suppress their emotional response. They never learn the appropriate responses to trauma, and never develop other emotions, which is why they find it difficult to empathize with others.
Research shows that certain genes can predispose people to violence. Many serial killers experience childhood trauma or early separation from their mothers. As a consequence of that trauma or separation, scientists believe, they learned to suppress empathy or suffered damage to the areas of the brain that control emotional impulses. Serial killers often are loners who fear all relationships and seek to control, to destroy other people to eliminate the possibility of another humiliating rejection. Those who've studied serial killers believe that many are at least partly motivated by the attention and fame that mass media can provide mass murderers.
