Serial Killers

A power-oriented killer often falls into the organized category. A killer like this may quietly blend in—an apparently mild-mannered good citizen—or may stand out for personal qualities such as intelligence, charm, self-confidence, and the kind of charisma that wins deference from others and can lead to prominence in a local or professional community. Hervey Cleckley, a twentieth-century theorist of psychopathy, had a name for this kind of socially acceptable facade—he called it the mask of sanity.

Götterdämmerung Collapse or disintegration, marked by catastrophic violence and disorder. Literal translation from the German means “twilight of gods”: Götter, plural of Gott (god) and Dämmerung (twilight).

Social process theorists propose that criminals are people who have learned to engage in criminal activity, and that the path to a life of crime gradually opens out from family problems at home, learning problems at school, pressure from peers, and early, relatively minor scrapes with the law. Positive bonds with conventional society are what keep the majority of people from becoming criminals, and the absence of positive bonds with society and its institutions is what promotes criminal activity.

Justice that described what they called “Fractured Identity Syndrome,” which they defined as the condition produced by a specific event or series of events in the childhood or adolescence of a person who later becomes a murderer; such an event is a defining trauma whose impact fractures the developing personality.

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