How Are Serial Killers Born Or Made

Madison King

Mrs. Rose

SUNY English 101

22 December 2022

Are Serial Killers Born or Made?

Why do people do the things they do? More specifically, why do they kill? Serial killers have been around since as early as the 1800’s, and over time, they’ve developed new methods and practices making themselves more skilled, unique, and difficult to catch. Why can’t we look away from a car crash? Humans are so fascinated with tragedy, so much that true crime, and police shows make a killing in revenue. The question remains on how to stop serial killers, really the only way is from the source, but what causes these drives and desires to take a life? Maybe they're born with a brain disorder that drives them insane, or maybe they experienced abuse from

Some would say serial killers are neither born or made, that maybe it’s natural selection taking its course turning random people into killers. That's not usually the case, over 70% of serial killers were abused either physically, sexually, or psychologically at a young age. 30-70% percent of killers also have some form of a mental disorder. Very few of them have neither of those factors, but one notorious killer was seemingly normal.

Dennis Rader was an American born serial killer born in 1945, he killed over 10 people over the span of three decades. He called himself the BTK killer because he bound, tortured, and killed his victims. A person might think, what could this man have gone through that could have made him so aggressive and evil? Nothing. He had no childhood trauma or mental conditions, nothing was physically wrong with

No one with a happy and healthy childhood could grow into a stone cold killer, could they? Some of them do, but way over half of them did have some traumatic experiences. A person’s childhood is the time in their life that they are most vulnerable at, their minds are still growing and they are so easy to influence. That's why we are so careful about what we say around children, as it could be something they say or do that sticks with them through life. Most of the killers we know went through some kind of psychological, and/or a physical kind of abuse, “Childhood abuse has also been associated with later cognitive processing problems, which may lead to an aggressive thought pattern – for example, encoding errors, hostile attributional biases, accessing of aggressive responses, and positive evaluations of aggression” (Marono). Cognitive studies have found that “Sexual, physical, and psychological abuse often led to distinct crime scene behaviors” (Marono). For example, a child who has experianced sexual trauma or abuse as a youth, will most likely be drawn to the idea of a power killer. Someone who takes pleasure and satisfaction in drawing the victim into submission, likes the feeling of complete control and power. While abuse as a child already leaves a mental scar, it can lead to overly aggressive behaviors and and in worse