Four Categories Of Serial Killers

There are four categories that serial killers can be organized into as it relates to describing their murders, motives, and patterns. These categories are visionary, mission, hedonistic, and power/control. Each one gives a different perspective to a serial killer; some serial killers can even be considered to fall into more than one of these categories, while other serial killers can arguably be considered to not fall into any of these categories.

A serial killer who is considered to be visionary is one that experiences a break from reality, and this leads to their crime of murder. This being said the motive would be seen as the break from reality, which could range from the individual having auditory and/or visual hallucinations to the individual

Mission killers commit murders in the name of the greater good as they see it. They are ridding the world of undesirable people and to them there is a stone cold reason or excuse for why their victims must be murdered. This being said a mission serial killer is seen as having an intrinsic motivation to their personality. They are also seen as choosing specific victims, having a more planned method of killing, and murdering within a general location.

Because mission killers are killing for “the greater good” or to eliminate undesirables it makes sense that their victims would be specific individuals that go along with what they considered undesirable and their acts would be more planned than that of a visionary killer. Murders of some mission killers might even have the same way of murdering victims that can be seen as a signature of that killer. Their murders occur within a general location because they tend to be a resident of the area and do not wish to leave the area that they are familiar

These people are specific individuals that are committing the sins from the killer’s perspective. He kills all of his victims in different unique ways depending upon the sin he believes they have committed. An example of this is the individual he killed for the sin of gluttony. In this case he tied the individual to a chair and force-fed the individual to death. He kills another individual for the sin of sloth by restraining them to their bed for months keeping them barely alive so that by the time law enforcement reaches him he would already be on the verge of death.

His belief that these individuals must be killed for what he perceives as their sins, pushes him toward mission killer. He does not go outside of the realm of killing others that do not fit into any other sins or does not relate to his end goal of eliminating all seven sins. He does end up killing the wife of one of the detectives but that is to fulfill the sin of wrath and get the detective to shoot him in the