Original subtitles

William George Heirens.

Lonnie David Franklin Jr.

Albert Fish.

Harvey Murray Glatman.

Clifford Robert Olson Jr.

James D'Angelo.

Sheila LaBarre.

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer.

Ordinary names, but for serial killers,

ordinary names are never good enough.

We have to give them names that capture

their dark souls, names that capture the evil

they have become.

Capture the rare, unthinkable.

The Lipstick Killer.

The Grim Sleeper.

The Brooklyn Vampire.

The Lonely Hearts Killer.

The Beast of British Columbia.

The Golden State Killer.

The Avenging Angel.

The Milwaukee Cannibal.

- When we hear about somebody who moves from community

to community calculating who to kill next,

which prostitute to get.

These crimes shock the conscience because they

are so out of the ordinary.

They are so different from what, sadly,

we've become quite used to.

The more ordinary rape, the more ordinary assault,

the more ordinary robbery,

the more ordinary kidnapping.

There are these crimes that just shock the conscience

and so I fully understand why the public

is preoccupied with them.

I think they are so outside the box that

we have this understandable need to try to grasp,

why would somebody do that?

That's human nature.

Why would somebody take a rifle,

sit behind a barricade, and wait for innocent victims?

Why would somebody do that?

Why would somebody look for vulnerable children,

kidnap them, torture them sexually, and kill them?

It's hard for us to wrap our minds around

these kinds of crimes, and it makes complete sense to me

that the average human being would be both

fascinated by this, horrified by this,

mystified by this, and preoccupied by this.

Why, why, why?

- True crime.

Americans, particularly women, love true crime,

a non fiction literature, TV, and film genre

in which actual crimes of real people

are explored in depth.

A genre which exploded at the beginning

of the 21st century.

A genre that focuses on murder.

The more hideous and bizarre, the better.

Cases in point:

the JonBenet murder,

the O.J. Simpson trial,

and Truman Capote's, In Cold Blood.

All showed there was a vast appetite all across

America for such stories, but the biggest

sub category of true crime is the story

of the serial killer.

These stories are the most gruesome and shocking.

At the heart of these stories lay perplexing questions.

Who are these serial killers?

Why do they kill?

How can they keep killing?

And are they a danger to me and my family?

Prior to the true crime explosion,

psychologists and criminal investigators

thought they had the serial killer figured out.

But it turns out the answers are much more complex

and troubling.

Even the profile of the typical serial killer

has changed dramatically.

It is a change in the profile of who

serial killers are, and why they kill.

It is a change that will send chills up your spine.

In the past, largely because of media portrayals,

the serial killer was a white male somewhere between

20 and 40 years of age.

Psychopathic, and probably quite smart.

No serial killer helped to shape that media image

better than Ted Bundy.

- If you ever watch that interview with Ted Bundy,

his last day before he was executed,

the entire time, Bundy is shifting his eyes.

He's watching very carefully around him

because that's what psychopaths do.

Psychopaths are about control, they wanna control

their environment.

Healthy men, we don't try to do that.

We don't try to control our environment,

we just try to survive for ourselves.

We're not trying to control people around us.

True psychopaths, that's what they do.

They control everybody around them, the narrative.

- Theodore Robert Bundy, also known as Ted Bundy,

or The Genius of Death, is perhaps the best known

serial killer who ever lived.

A serial killer who broke the mold in many ways.

A man who was estimated to have killed anywhere

from 30 to 100 women.

A brutal serial killer who told everyone that he

was a rapist who had to kill in order to stay free.

Mysteriously, Ted Bundy appeared to be anything

but a serial killer.

He was a Boy Scout,

a prominent member of the Republican Party

in the state of Washington.

He even volunteered at Seattle, Washington's

suicide hotline.

- Ted Bundy, who killed dozens of women across the country,

also worked on a suicide hotline in Seattle.

He also saved the life of a four-year-old drowning boy.

And whether he was taking lives or saving lives,

he was feeling powerful,

and that's a very important motive among serial killers.

- Adding to his mystique, Bundy was a

brilliant student admired by his college professors.

- I think one of the most interesting things

about Ted Bundy is the image that people have of him.

He is seen as some kind of misguided genius, you know,

really not such a bad guy.

I mean, after all he only killed dozens of women

across the country you know, in Washington, in Utah,

in Colorado, in Michigan and Florida.

And, by the way, he was also a rapist.

His last victim was a 12-year-old girl in Florida,

Kimberly Leach.

He murdered her by shoving her face in the mud

until she suffocated.

You know, I don't see him as a misguided anything.

I see him as a monster.

- As a serial killer, Bundy had a number

of factors working in his favor.

He was an ordinary, good looking guy.

A guy who used all the glad handing skills he has learned

during his days of associating with politicians.

- I think there's a myth that is propagated because

Ted Bundy was a charming, handsome guy.

It was easy for him to lure his victims.

He didn't look like the monster that he was.

He was extraordinary ordinary in his appearance.

He looked like the last person you'd suspect,

not the first, and that I think colored the image

that we have or serial killers ever since the 1970s.

- It is the myth of the evil

serial killer genius.

The serial killer genius brilliantly portrayed

by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 movie,

The Silence of the Lambs.

But with Ted Bundy, what appeared to be genius

may have been dumb luck more than anything else.

- One of the things about Ted Bundy that I think

sets him apart, besides the sheer number of women

that he killed, was his chutzpah.

This was a guy who was very brash in many

of the things that he did and committed crimes that were,

that took a great deal of risk to perform.

In one case, he went to a very popular recreation area,

Lake Sammamish, and wore a fake cast on his arm

and elicited the help of two different young women

to help get a boat onto or off of his automobile

and then actually got him to accompany him to

another location where twice in the same day,

he raped and murdered these two women,

in the same location.

They were both kidnapped from a very public place.

Numerous people saw him that day,

were able to provide descriptions of him that day,

were able to provide a description of his automobile,

and yet he wasn't apprehended after that.

- Bundy was born in Burlington, Vermont

at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers.

The identity of his father was never known,

though relatives were suspicious about his grandfather

who was abusive and violent to his mother, Louise.

Raised by his grandparents, he believed his mother

was really his sister.

Indeed, the truth about Bundy's young mom

was hidden for the next 20 years.

In 1950, Louise and Ted moved to Tacoma, Washington

where she married Johnny Colpepper Bundy.

Throughout his childhood, and into college,

Bundy remained shy and never fit in socially.

While attending the University of Washington,

he met a vivacious young coed, Stephanie Brooks,

who later dumped him because of his immaturity

and lack of ambition.

But Bundy wasn't through with her.

In fact, in a macabre fashion, he would never

be through with her.

In 1968, Bundy changed.

He became more ambitious,

a man who wanted to be in charge.

He rekindled his relationship with Stephanie.

Then, just after New Years 1974, he abruptly broke it off.

A few days later, he began his violent attacks

against women.

Once Bundy began killing, he became an insatiable murderer.

His signature was his brutality.

All his victims, except the last, were killed by

a savage blow to the head.

At the same time, all his victims looked like

his ex-girlfriend.

- Ted Bundy, he chose his victims, I think because of

appearance of his girlfriend.

If you look at photographs of his victims,

all of them had the long, dark hair

and usually it's parted down the middle

and there's a very similar appearance

to each one of them which is very similar

in appearance to his girlfriend.

- Bundy's first known murder victim

was a 20-year-old college student, Lynda Ann Healy.

Bundy snuck into her apartment, knocked her unconscious,

wrapped her in a sheet, and carried her out

of the apartment.

Her skull was found a year later.

Now, Bundy's frenzy for rape and murder

dominated him completely.

For the next year and a half, Bundy murdered at least

27 women as he traveled through Oregon,

Colorado, and Utah on a brutal killing spree.

Police in each state reported female victims,

all young and attractive.

He was finally captured in Granger, Utah,

after a botched kidnapping.

Bundy was sentenced to 15 years,

but escaping from jail, he made it to Florida

where he killed at least three more times

before he was caught and sentenced to death

in Florida's electric chair, Old Sparky.

On January 24, 1989, the so-called Genius of Death

was himself finally dead.

So, what is the truth about who are serial killers?

Criminal psychologist Dr. Erik Hickey

updates the serial killer profile.

- There are thousands of movies done about

white serial killers, but there's only one that

was ever done about a black serial killer,

and according to FBI definition,

over 50% of all serial killers are African American.

- For example, Lonnie Franklin was

a black serial killer who lived in Los Angeles.

He was known as the Grim Sleeper.

The nickname was due to a 14 year hiatus in the murders,

from 1988 to 2002.

The murders occurred in Los Angeles.

- He was going after black women, okay,

and they're prostitutes, low hanging fruit.

Easy to get to, people aren't gonna miss them.

He wasn't going after middle-class black women

or wealthy women, he was going after black prostitutes

who really were kind of faceless

and that really kind of made him invisible.

The only reason he came back to light

was because it had been 14 years and they made a connection.

Did he kill other people?

Possibly.

They have not made that connection yet.

Some day they actually might make that connection

because he was kind of hiding in plain sight.

He was right there.

Police went by him all the time.

- Neighbors described Franklin as friendly

and quiet.

He would sometimes stop to chat with people

in the neighborhood and was frequently seen

working on cars in his front yard.

Lonnie openly spoke with contempt about prostitutes

and said they deserved to die.

He showed friends photographs he had taken of women

in sexually explicit poses.

A fried of Franklin's said,

"He would have violent fantasies.

"He was putting the girls down, saying,

"'Someone is going to kill these girls.'

"Saying they were going to wind up dead."

Interestingly, Franklin used the same small caliber

revolver to murder his victims

after assaulting and strangling them and then kept

photos of his victims as trophies in his home.

His known victims included Debra Jackson,

Henrietta Wright,

Barbara Ware,

Bonita Sparks,

Mary Lowe,

Alice "Monique" Alexander,

Lachrica Jefferson,

Enietra Washington,

Valerie McCorvey,

Janecia Peters,

and Princess Berthomieux.

Franklin was apprehended when DNA evidence linked him

to the murders.

He was arrested on July 7, 2010

at his home in the Manchester Square neighborhood.

He was finally convicted for the deaths

of nine women, and a teenage girl,

and was sentenced to death on August 10, 2016.

Another less known black serial killer

was the Milwaukee North Side Strangler,

a name given to Walter E. Ellis

who raped and strangled seven female prostitutes

in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin

between 1986 and 2007.

- Usually he was kind of in that seedy underbelly

of the city and he'd grab women off the streets

and he'd take them to abandoned, filthy buildings

and kill 'em and then leave their bodies.

They finally caught him after, I think, 12 years.

And what they did was, they got DNA from him on a victim

and they charged the DNA, the donor of the DNA

to keep the case open so when they arrested the guy,

the sexual assaults wouldn't have run out

because of time limits.

So they charged that DNA.

It was a great move, great move.

- On February 24, 2011, Ellis was given

seven life sentences.

Two years later, he died in prison.

Notice that the killing pattern here

fits the mold of many white, male serial killers.

Men hiding in plain sight,

while at night brutally killing female victims

lost to the world through prostitution,

drugs, and homelessness.

FBI agents now know that Hispanics also fit

the profile of a serial killer.

The most notorious was Richard Ramirez,

known as the Night Stalker.

Born in Texas in 1960, Richard Ramirez was

a Hispanic American serial killer who murdered at least

14 people and raped and tortured at least two dozen more

mostly during the spring and summer of 1985.

After developing epilepsy as a child,

he became a heavy drug user and cultivated

an interest in Satanism which became a calling card

for investigators at his crime scenes.

His fall into complete evil and a life of killing

began in California at age 24.

He lived in LA, where petty theft and burglaries

bankrolled his drug habit.

Then, stealing turned to murder.

- One of the things that sets him apart

a little bit is the fact that he was a home invader.

You know, that's a little bit different.

But again you have a guy who I think got caught up in the

mythology of it and the attention of it.

He loved it.

He played into it.

He specifically tailored his acts to attain

additional attention.

- Jenny Vincow, age 79,

was an elderly woman, a grandmother.

In June 1984, Ramirez broke into her room

and when he couldn't find anything of value,

rage took over.

He stabbed her and then, like Jack the Ripper,

he slit her throat and mutilated her corpse.

This began his terror up and down

the coast of California.

- When Ramirez would attack middle class families

in the middle of the night,

he was seen as a tremendous threat to the residents

of Los Angeles.

He was seen as what he was:

a guy who could attack anyone,

which means that you could be next.

And that terrified the people who lived there.

- He was the worst of them all.

He entered where people thought they were the safest,

their homes.

He shot some, he stabbed some,

and he kicked some to death.

He mutilated the bodies of many.

In the end, 14 were dead, and who knows how many others

he raped and sodomized.

But one of these victims escaped.

Apprehended in August 1985, Ramirez was sentenced to death

at the conclusion of his trial in 1989.

He spent the remainder of his days

at California's San Quentin Prison before dying

from cancer on June 7, 2013 at age 53.

But not all serial killers take women as victims.

Some prefer boys, and young men.

Such was the case of John Wayne Gacy,

the Clown Killer, a disreputable, homosexual serial killer.

This overtly macho man with the name John Wayne

would kill at least 33 young men and boys

between the age of 15 and 21.

John Wayne Gacy was born in Chicago, Illinois

on March 17, 1942 and like most serial killers,

he had a troubled youth.

- John Gacy apparently had a very overbearing father,

a dominating father.

They make a lot of the fact that he would disappear

into his basement you know after drunkenly raging

upon the family, he would then disappear into a basement

to which the children were not allowed.

But essentially, Gacy was a man who lived,

in his day to life, as sexually straight.

He had a wife, he had children.

He was a known person in his community.

He dressed as a clown and did children's parties

and things of this nature, yet,

he obviously had within him not only the violent desire to

control and murder people, but he controlled

and murdered boys.

His homosexual nature of his crimes was in stark

contrast to his day to day life where he lived

as a straight man and an upright model of the community,

but he apparently used the lure of kind of a party,

like hey, you know in my basement you can

watch porno movies, you can smoke pot,

you can get drunk even though you're not old enough.

And he apparently had something that he called

the handcuff trick, where he would show that he had

this trick pair of handcuffs and he'd put 'em on

and then show how they came off,

and then he would either switch the handcuffs

to a different pair or use the same pair but not

share the trick of how to get off them,

put them on, and once he had control of the victim,

he gave into his, the darkest of inner demons,

and tortured his victims, apparently, at length,

and over an extended period of time before killing them

and then ultimately depositing them in his basement

with lime as well to hasten the decomposition

of their bodies.

- Typical of a blossoming serial killer,

Gacy's perverted behavior surfaced in his mid-20s.

He was prosecuted for sodomizing two teenage boys

in Waterloo, Iowa in 1968.

He probably committed more criminal acts

for which he wasn't caught.

After two years in prison, he was paroled

and moved back to Chicago, where, hidden from his friends,

family, and social community, he continued his

perverted actions, sodomizing young boys.

Then in 1975, he crossed over the line and began killing.

He chose to kill, knowing full well that it was wrong.

His targets were young men and boys who have

been defined by criminologists as the "less dead."

Men and women who live on the fringes of society.

People who, if killed, would not be missed.

In Gacy's case, young male prostitutes

and homeless runaways.

- There was actually a reporter in Chicago who had

sort of had connections within the gay community

and there was talk amongst the gay community,

the prostitute community at least,

that an awful lot of boys were going missing without

you know, being known.

And in fact, there was a case of one boy who had been taken

to Gacy's house.

He had played the handcuff trick on him,

he choked him, he had liked repeatedly forced

his head underwater in a bathtub and let him breathe

and then put him back underwater, almost to death.

And then for reasons known only to Gacy,

he let him go, and this young fella remembered

the type of car that the rapist had,

and sort of what the exit looked like that he

got off the highway and his family waited there at

that exit, waiting for someone to come who had

a car that looked like what he said the car looked like.

They found it, they followed him to his house,

they reported it to he police, the police came,

they investigated, but did not believe the boy's story

and Gacy was able to continue his activities

for several years.

- But like many serial killers,

John Wayne Gacy became cocky and overconfident.

- He had abducted a boy who had just left a drugstore

where he'd picked up some photographs that had

been developed.

When the boy disappeared, Gacy's name came up.

Gacy had some record, I mean he did have a record of

having, you know, of some sexual crimes

and so that was a red flag for the cops.

They came to his house, they searched his house,

and they found the ticket for those photographs

and so they knew that the boy had been in his house.

- He was pretty bold in the way he

committed his killings.

He seemed to think that if put lime on there,

no one was gonna smell the dead bodies deteriorating,

and basically that was his fallibility because

a police officer who had been actually

having dinner with Gacy, Gacy had been playing a game

'cause he'd been under surveillance for a long time after

a lieutenant in the Des Plaines Police Department

had taken more time with this missing persons case

because his boy was the same age as the boy

who was missing.

And they had had him under surveillance for a long time

and Gacy just invited them up for supper.

So they went and he couldn't get this feeling

of smelling something and he didn't know what it was.

And for days, he couldn't figure it out

and it finally dawned on him, it was autopsy smell.

So that's when they got a warrant,

based on a police officer's nose and, you know,

Gacy was done, right then and there.

- The Gacy case so incredible,

killing and burying 30 young victims

right in his own home.

So terrible and so sensational,

that serial killers began gaining celebrity status,

almost lionized as anti heroes.

But John Wayne Gacy was anything but an anti hero.

He was no more than a pathetic man who chose

to kill again and again.

Just as ethnic minorities and homosexual men

joined the recognized ranks of serial killers,

so did women.

Perhaps their number of victims even exceed that of men.

- We've certainly had females who are more aggressive

than some male serial killers.

There isn't a way to say there's a female type

of serial killer because some kill for gain.

Quite often they kill for gain,

they kill their husbands, they, you know, for insurance

or whatever the husband has.

They might kill their children because the children

are a burden or they're looking for attention

or they have a mental illness.

Quite often, you're going to find something

like Munchausen syndrome by proxy in that group

or borderline personality disorder

or something like that.

But we still do have predatory females who are

looking for personal gain.

They don't tend to kill for reasons of lust,

but some have.

I have actually seen statements where there is

no such thing as a female lust murderer

and that's just not true.

- There was the case of Gail Graham

and Catherine May Wood.

- There were two who worked together in an

elder care facility in Michigan and they would

together kill patients and then, as part of their sex games,

and then wash down the bodies and have sex

in a vacant room

- The two women met at the Alpine Manor

Nursing Home shortly after Graham had moved to Michigan

from Texas.

They quickly became friends, and then lovers, in 1986.

Two years later, they both were facing murder charges

for allegedly smothering five elderly patients

as part of a love bond.

Wood claimed Graham murdered the patient to

relieve her tension.

Wood was described as the psychopathic manipulator,

and Graham as a susceptible woman with

a personality disorder.

Graham in serving a life sentence and Wood was given

early release from prison.

So not only are women part of the expanded profile

of the serial killer, but also gay women.

So, serial killers are not just white males.

In fact, serial killers are represented by a full spectrum

of gender and racial diversity.

But what about the idea that serial killers

are all clever, intelligent, even brilliant?

That idea came from an early sample of interviews

with white, male serial killers.

- The early profilers in the behavioral science unit

as it was called then, it's now the

behavioral analysis unit, but they went around

and did some prison interviews which were not

in any way representative.

It was white, incarcerated, articulate serial killers

who agreed to talk to them.

That is not a representative population by any means.

So, from that, they generated notions about serial killers,

and if you pick the ones who are articulate and smart,

it's going to seem as if serial killers

are smarter than the average person.

But we know that that is not true.

There is diversity in their intellect,

in their range of IQ scores just as there is

everything else about them.

So unfortunately many of the early ideas

that ended up in criminological textbooks

and other kinds of mass media books about serial killers

came from studies that really weren't representative at all

of serial killers.

- Interestingly, the definition of the

serial killer has changed over the recent decades as well.

- The concept of a serial killer has evolved from being

someone who kills in at least three locations,

at least three incidents with a cooling off period,

to now someone who kills in at least two incidents

without any of the psychological framework and so

that makes a difference in terms of what

we think about what goes on in the mind of a murderer.

Generally speaking, we tend to focus on what's usually

called the classic serial killer, which is generally

driven by lust.

- Indeed, for many psychologists

and law enforcement investigators,

having a sexual component to the serial killings

was believed to be essential motivation behind

these cruel acts.

- Many serial killers have used sex as a vehicle

for gaining a sense of power and control

and dominance over their victims.

It's not just taking their lives.

It's making their victims suffer.

They maximize the pain, and it's not enough to view

the pain and suffering of their victims.

They personally are responsible for it

and that gives them a sense of superiority.

The more their poor victims scream and beg for mercy,

the better they feel about themselves.

And that's part of the motivation of a serial killer.

Sex is the medium through which they feel

great accomplishments.

What you and I might see as dastardly,

as hideous, as grotesque,

these serial killers see as their greatest

achievements in life.

- The sexual component in serial killings

can take many forms.

Gary Ridgway, Washington state's Green River Killer,

strangled his female victims, and dumped their bodies

in forested and overgrown areas of King County, Washington.

Later he returned to the bodies to have

sexual intercourse with them.

Notorious Son of Sam, David Berkowitz,

appeared to be an exception.

- Berkowitz, the.44 Caliber Killer or whatever

he's referred to, is also referred to as Son of Sam

because of the dog that he supposedly heard from

that told him to commit these acts,

which he claimed at one time...

I think killed because he enjoyed it.

I think he's just one of those people that was enraged

and probably had some trauma in his background.

That was primed to go out and start shooting people.

He may have been lonely, you know, there are a number

of explanations that you can give because there's not

a whole lot of detail known about Berkowitz

prior to the killings.

But as to what makes him tick,

I think it's,

I don't know, I think it's trauma

and the trauma that caused the rage that finally

broke out into what he considered his fantasies

which was shooting people, shooting couples,

with a weapon,

a.44 caliber revolver.

- Most serial killers are up close and personal

with their victims.

They use their hands.

They strangle, they stab,

they mutilate, and that's what makes them feel good,

it's the control that they have over the pain

and suffering of their poor victims.

But Son of Sam was different.

David Berkowitz used a fire arm to kill his

sixth victim, so he actually distanced himself

from them and it's that fact alone

that makes you wonder what his motive was.

- The Son of Sam was born

Richard David Falco in Brooklyn, New York in 1953.

The adopted son of Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz,

he was an odd and aloof child.

He delighted in setting fires.

Berkowitz joined the US Airforce and served

from 1971 to 1974.

As he matured, a dark and compulsive need to kill

took over his body.

A need he could not suppress for very long.

His reign or terror lasted from July 1976

to July 1977.

He shot unsuspecting victims from point blank range,

killing six and wounding seven.

During this time, the New York Police Department

erupted with eyewitness accounts of a mysterious

and elusive assailant.

Terror engulfed the city.

Berkowitz especially loved young, attractive women

with long, brunette hair,

and many frightened girls dyed their hair blonde.

He also enjoyed sending letters around the city,

taunting police.

"Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli,

"I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon hater.

"I am not.

"But I am a monster.

"I am the 'Son of Sam.'

"I am a little brat.

"Police let me haunt you with these words:

"I'll be back!

"I'll be back!

"To be interpreted as bang, bang, bang!

"Yours in murder, Mr. Monster."

Berkowitz is now serving six life sentences,

but where was the sexual component?

- Berkowitz is a serial killer, you know that,

and he was basically in one place, a neighborhood,

where he killed lovers, ladies, okay.

Well how is that a serial killer?

What's the sexual component to that?

Well the sexual component is he would come back

to the crime scene and masturbate.

So there was even a sexual component to

what Berkowitz did, even though his murders

were not hands on.

He would fire into the car.

- However, 21st century serial killer experts

no longer believe there has to be a sexual component

to serial murder.

- When we're talking about male serial killers,

especially here in the US, about two thirds of them

have a sexual component to their murders and there's

sort of a myth about that that there,

if you're a serial killer you must be a sexual predator.

Well, there's some truth to that, obviously,

when we say about two thirds do that.

And it's a variety of sexual things that they do

with their victims.

But there's the other third that, you know,

they might do it for money.

They may do it for you know, power, or simply that

it's a racial issue.

But for that two thirds, yeah, it's a pretty

interesting group.

- There can be anything from glory or fame to lust

to paraphilias, which is a special type

of sexual deviancy which results in weird

kind of rituals.

It could also be for profit.

It could be philosophical.

We had a couple of serial killers who are

killing for existential kinds of reasons.

So the mind of a murderer really depends on

what's going on with a particular killer.

- Within the group of serial killers

that are sexual predators,

some are sadistic like John Wayne Gacy,

and torture their victims before they kill them.

- John Wayne Gacy was a very sexually sadistic

serial killer.

I mean, he didn't just kill his victims,

he tortured them to death very slowly.

We know that he would chew off the penises of some

of his victims while they were alive

and he would also put a wire around their neck

and like a stick, he would turn it slowly while he

read to them from his Bible.

So, he really enjoyed, and he had a ball in their mouths

so he could hear them scream but other people

couldn't hear them scream.

So he enjoyed that kind of power over them

and it was very sexually arousing to them to hear them

screaming and crying while they're dying slowly.

He killed 33 young men that way.

- A case of a non sadistic sexual predator

is Larry DeWayne Hall.

Born in 1962, the son of an undertaker,

he was bullied as a youth.

Between 1987 and 1994, he killed at least 54 women.

- And Larry was a necrophile.

And when you find when you interview necrophiles

that they tend to be, they have attachments to people.

They're usually not sadistic.

They're much more into having a relationship

with the corpse and some want them dead immediately,

and so they'll snap their necks or suffocate

them very quickly and have sex with them.

Others will kill them and then bury them,

like the Green River Killer,

and let them cool off for a couple of days.

And then they will have sex with the bodies

and mutilate the corpses.

- One idea about the mind of serial killers,

particularly sexual predators, that there seems to

be some agreement about is the idea that these

vile killers have a rich fantasy life about

their evil deeds.

- Men serial killers that are involved in sex crimes

have a very, very bizarre, strange and violent

fantasy life in their head

and it gets stranger and stranger and more violent

as it progresses, okay?

And it's all encompassing.

It's there almost all the time.

Westley Dodd, who abducted young boys and killed them

said that he dreamt about his fantasies.

They were there 24/7.

How he could maintain a job is beyond me, okay?

And there was a gentleman from Wisconsin,

John Weber, who basically, his fantasies were so intense,

he had to leave his work station about four or five

times a day to go to the bathroom and masturbate at work.

- Westley Dodd, known as the

Vancouver Child Killer, was born in Walla Walla, Washington.

Dodd, one of the worst of the worst serial killers,

was convicted of three counts of first degree murder

of innocent children.

- I would do it again.

I've been molesting kids non stop since I was

13-years-old, over half my life.

Anything happened, I can guarantee I'd do it again

and sooner or later I would kill another child.

I've done it before and at the time, I liked it.

- Westley Dodd is what's called a misoped.

He is an individual that abducts children

for the sole purpose of sexual assault and murder.

They are much worse than pedophiles.

A pedophile might sexually assault a child,

but certainly not kill that child.

But misopeds kill children.

He would pick them up from parks, take 'em home,

keep 'em for a few days.

Torture them, sleep with them, and then he'd kind of

whisper at night, "I'm gonna kill you tomorrow morning."

And the little boy would say,

"No you're not gonna do that."

And he would back from work or wherever he was

and he would kill the child.

He was arrested trying to abduct a young boy

from a movie theater and the boy was putting

up a fight and somebody came over and he said,

"Is this your dad?"

"It's not my dad," et cetera and the police arrested him

and the rest is history for him.

He was executed.

- It turns out serial killers say

in interviews the reality is never as good

as the fantasy, which is one of the reasons that

they keep killing: to fulfill their fantasy.

One of the early debates over serial killers

is the bad seed debate.

Whether the serial killer, like Westley Dodd,

was the worst of the worst, is born evil

or becomes evil as a result of circumstances.

- If you're looking at the bad seed notion that somebody

might be born to be evil,

we do have brain research right now for psychopaths

that suggests there is a difference in their brain.

That does not necessarily translate to

all serial killers.

And we don't really yet know particularly what that

difference amounts to, whether it's causal,

correlational, it's not clear.

So, the idea of is it nature versus nurture,

or the bad seed, it's always a mix of all of them

because you could a certain type of a brain

physiology that tends to be something we see

in psychopaths or predators and yet you were raised

in a loving home with all kinds of advantages

and you did not become a serial killer.

On the other hand, you might not have that

brain physiology, you might even have all kinds of

social advantages and economic advantages

and still become a serial killer for other types of reasons.

So, you really can't say it's a bad seed.

It certainly might be in the mix,

but it's impossible to say how much is nature

and how much is nurture for any given case.

- It's also a myth that serial killers

are crazy, that they don't know what they're doing.

- Most serial killers are not insane

in either a legal or a psychiatric sense.

They generally don't hallucinate.

They don't hear voices in an empty room.

They don't talk to dogs.

They don't suffer from a profound thought disorder.

Most of them know the difference between right and wrong,

they know what they're doing is wrong,

but they choose to do it because it makes

them feel so good because it gives them that sense

of superiority that they crave.

Most of them are sociopaths, or psychopaths,

if you prefer.

They have a disorder of character and personality

that doesn't qualify for the insanity defense.

But they lack a conscience, they lack what

Sigmund Freud called a Super Ego.

They don't feel remorseful when they do the wrong thing.

- Well it's now officially referred to as

anti social personality disorder,

which is kind of a mouthful.

Sociopath and psychopath are used interchangeably.

Probably the best definition came from Robert Hare,

a Canadian who talked about the fact that

they don't have any empathy,

very easy for them to manipulate people.

They see people as objects.

They see people as ways to meet their own ends,

whether they're going to kill them,

whether they're going to climb beyond them

to a higher step in industry.

Not all sociopaths are serial killers.

There's probably a number of sociopaths,

although the business community might call them

Type A personalities, who are, you know,

way up in corporations, and got there because of

their willingness to step over people

and be very ruthless in how they got there.

So, in the context of a serial killer, he doesn't care

about the victims.

He wants them to be easy, he wants them to be vulnerable,

because that adds to his thrill.

He wants power over those people.

He wants to be able to dominate them and control them

for a period of time before he or she kills them.

- Someone like a Ted Bundy.

If you were to interview a Ted Bundy type,

he's a 35 on the PCLR.

The PCLR, and Dr. Robert Hare from Canada,

developed this wonderful scale, zero to 40 points.

Most people are between four and an eight.

Occasional criminals are like 10 to 16, 17.

And then you get sociopaths, I call them sociopaths,

between 18 and 28, 29, and then 30 and above

are true psychopaths out of 40 points.

Ted Bundy is a 35 on that scale, and the higher you

go on the scale, the more psychopathy you have,

the more psychopathic you are,

that means the less attachments you have,

the less conscience you have, the less emotion,

you have no empathy when you're high on that scale.

But if you're a sociopath, you still have

emotional attachments, you still love your mom,

but you commit a lot of crime.

You're still antisocial,

both of them are antisocial, sociopaths and psychopaths,

but the sociopaths are just average

to below average intelligence.

They're not as skillful as the others.

They still love their moms, they're impulsive,

they don't learn from their mistakes,

they have long histories of criminal behavior.

When you look at psychopaths,

they have less histories of criminal behavior,

they don't have a conscience at all.

Scott Jacobs calls them the people of the lie.

They lie when they don't have to lie.

They're very narcicisstic,

they can manipulate, they have a lot of social skills

to be able to con people.

They're social chameleons.

And so, you don't see a lot of those people in prison.

You see a lot of sociopaths in prison,

but not a lot of true psychopaths.

- So serial killers fall on the far end

of the spectrum of behavioral disorders,

as well as the far end of the spectrum of murderers.

Murderers that defy explanation.

- Serial killers, for all the books, all the documentaries

and TV shows, I think it's a little understood crime.

Until the last 20 years, the FBI believed

that they were all sex crimes.

But that's understandable.

The people in the behavioral science unit

were all 50-year-old men and according to Freud,

sex is their whole prism, their whole framework.

It's been true for a long time,

there are multiple causes of serial murder.

You can't generalize, of course, a population

of serial killers because their motives are so different.

Some believe they are ridding the world of bad people.

Others want that power over somebody.

Many wanna communicate or get attention,

some want revenge, some have political or religious

axes to grind, so in my perception,

the multiplicity of serial killer motives kind

of frustrates an understanding and you can't use

one cookie cutter and understand all of them

because they're just so very, very different.

- Two things that haven't changed in the

study of serial killers are the concepts of

modus operandi, and signature.

- MO, modus operandi, is what is necessary for a killer

to complete the job, or any criminal for that matter.

You go in through the broken window,

you jimmy a door lock and you get in, okay?

The modus operandi can change depending on the job

and what's happening in the killer's mind.

The signature is something that is not necessary

for the completion of the crime.

It's something that the killer does in his mind

to help with the fantasy.

The signature never changes, ever.

For example, somebody breaks into a house,

they tie a woman up,

they take her money, they stab her a couple of times.

He might have done that a number of times,

but he might put some writing on the wall

or writing on the refrigerator.

That's the signature.

That never changes.

So there's the difference.

- For example, the Night Stalker,

Richard Ramirez, always left an upside down

pentagram somewhere at the scene of the crime,

sometimes on the body of the victim.

It was always drawn with the victim's own lipstick

and was even drawn on the inner thighs of a victim

who had been sexually assaulted before death.

So why do serial killers kill?

Why do some people fantasize about killing,

but never go through with it?

Sadly, there is no silver bullet answer.

There is no one reason why serial killers kill.

Each case of serial killing has its own story to tell.

Perhaps that is why the evil of serial killers

has held us so firmly in its grip.