The ABCs of Crazy
Dakota Lee Gold
Salt Lake Center for Science Education
Senior Seminar
Mrs. Haakenson
February 23, 2023
How do serial killers become serial killers? A few of the most common instances are childhood trauma, mental health, and environmental life. Many of the most well-known and notorious killers had a traumatic past that led up to their actions in their future, showing a strong correlation between a traumatic past and the twisted minds they develop in the future. But what about those that grew up in a good home, with no trauma to be present, who become one of those well-known and notorious killers?
The BTK killer (otherwise named Dennis Lynn Rader) was infamous for the “bind, torture, kill”, aspect of his killings. He grew
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He says in an interview with local KAKE-TV reporter
Larry Hatteberg, “I got along real well with dad,” Rader recalled. “But mom wasn’t always quite
THE ABC’S OF CRAZY 2 happy. I’ve always loved her. I still love her, greatly. But I did have a little... a little bit of grudge against momma.” (July 2nd, 2005). His father worked long hours whereas his mother spent her time reading or watching television, not paying the best attention to her boys. All this is nothing notably traumatic but there are signs of slight neglect on the parent's part. Before he became the BTK killer, he acted out different sexual fantasies. Dennis showed signs of zoosadism, hanging, torturing, and killing small animals when he was young. He watched other people engage in intimate behaviors, known as voyeurism, “A sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions of a private nature” he participated in autoerotic asphyxiation, “The intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for the purposes of sexual arousal. Used when a person does the act to themselves,” and often spied on the women in his neighborhood while he was
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Henry Lee Lucas, labeled as America’s most prolific killer, was full of contradictions and false confessions but the label stuck. He was born in Virginia to a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father. When he has ten he lost his eye to an infection after a fight with his brother. He displayed frighteningly strange behavior to gain attention, as mentioned by a childhood friend.
His mother, Viola, would force her son to watch her engage in sex with her clients and would cross-dress him in public against his will so she could pimp him out to men and women alike. In
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December of 1949, his father, Anderson Lucas, died of hypothermia after drinking and passing out in a blizzard. In sixth grade, shortly after his father's death, he dropped out of school and ran away from home, he claimed to have committed his first murder two years after the death of his father. A seventeen-year-old Laura Burnsley refused his sexual advances and was then strangled.
However, with most of his confessions, he later retracted this confession. According to a