Inside the Criminal Mind

What makes a serial killer?

What drives them towards sadistic murder?

There are many, many reasons why a person can end up being evil.

What are the roots of their cold-blooded brutality?

Hitting this woman over the head with a metal pipe,

slashing her neck to cut her head off.

He lost complete control of what he was doing.

Was it the result of an abusive childhood?

Or was it hard-wired from birth?

It's been questioned now for 250 years.

Is someone born a criminal? Is someone made a criminal?

Now cutting edge research takes us on a dark and dangerous thrill ride.

A remarkable journey, coming face-to-face with pure evil,

and venturing Inside the Criminal Mind.

They may appear to be ordinary,

your next-door neighbor.

In reality they're far from it.

What they all have in common is an unquenchable thirst for murder,

with a total lack of remorse.

They are the embodiment of brutal inhumanity.

They are serial killers.

For someone like Jeffrey Dahmer,

who not only killed but cannibalized his victims,

he received such gratification from that

that he continued to do it over and over and over again,

and likely would have done it forever until he had been caught.

Their names are seared into our collective consciousness

as symbols of unthinkable terror.

Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Joel Rifkin, Jeffrey Dahmer...

Their heinous deeds immortalized by their fearsome nicknames:

Son of Sam, The Zodiac Killer, Green River Murderer,

and the BTK Strangler...

Bind, torture, kill...

We've seen cases in which individuals are held, kidnapped,

held in dungeons, held in basements.

Every aspect of their lives

are controlled by the individuals who are their captors,

which is completely motivated by a gratification...

a need for control, a need for dominance.

Since Jack the Ripper terrorized London in the 1880s,

criminologists and forensic scientists have searched for keys

to unlock the twisted psyche of these monsters.

It's a very complicated question.

It's a tremendous combination of things.

And there are many, many reasons why a person can end up being evil.

In the 1970s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation

added psychological profiling to their arsenal of tools

to capture these killers.

Patrick Mullany and Howard Teten led the first profiling unit.

Psychological profiling in the FBI

began with the opening of the new FBI academy in the early 1970s.

Howard Teten and I started profiling cases,

and we then came to the realization,

"Damn. We're on to something good."

And we continued it, and then broadened it,

and brought in new people as profilers, and actually started teaching it.

What were the common threads between these murderers?

What initially set them off down the road to become serial killers?

There's no one course that makes an individual turn into or become a criminal.

There's no one individual path.

There's different things you want to look at,

and one is the family dynamics,

the relationship with the family, the mother, the father.

Or the relationship the mother and the father had with themselves.

When you take a look at the development of serial killers,

often times they come from homes that are quite broken.

They come from homes where you see a dominant mother and an absent father.

And it always is intriguing in serial killers

that the father influence seems to be missing in their early years,

and there's some sort of a revulsion to the dominant mother image

which is later on taken out on women

during the course of their lives.

Research showed that as children they suffered significant abuse,

sometimes psychological, sometimes physical, often sexual.

There was usually a long history of psychiatric problems, criminal behavior,

and alcoholism within the family.

Often they might share disrupted, broken childhoods,

in the sense that their family lives, their socialization patterns are...

uh, atypical. They're not common.

Perhaps a family breakdown, family violence,

all those sorts of things.

In the 1960s, forensic psychologist J.M. MacDonald

popularized the idea that there are three behavioral red flags

that serial killers exhibited during childhood.

It was dubbed the MacDonald Triangle.

And there's the thing that they refer to as the triad of the homicidal personality.

One element is bed wetter.

Another element is fire setter.

And the last is animal killer.

Those three things will give any person studying an individual

a real lead onto how they have turned violent.

The Macdonald triangle applied to some serial killers.

Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Dennis Rader

were all known to have tortured and killed animals in childhood.

But the theory lost credibility as research evolved.

Actually, the sample he used were people who threatened to act violently.

It didn't even include people who acted violently,

but that became popular culture,

that if you're a bed wetter, and if you set fires,

and if you're cruel to animals,

you have a high propensity to become a serial homicide offender.

There's no link to that.

You want to be careful using those simple demarcation points

for a variety of reasons, cultural and otherwise, to say,

"Well, that person is going to become a serial killer."

The Homicidal Triad was superseded by behavioral studies

that theorized that the serial killer's dysfunctional childhood

created a cold-hearted lack of empathy.

Part of the development of empathy

comes through modeling from the parents,

and also seeing how the mother and father interact with each other.

You have to have the ability to develop relationships.

If you do not have that chance to develop relationships

it's very hard to develop empathy or remorse.

Lack of empathy is a primary characteristic of a psychopath;

this absence of concern for others and the effects of their actions on them.

Certainly, not all psychopaths are criminals,

but it is frequently a trait of serial killers.

The FBI explains psychopathy as a personality disorder

manifested in people who use a mixture of charm, manipulation, intimidation,

and occasionally violence to control others

and satisfy their own selfish needs.

Psychopaths are generally very rare, which is a good thing.

We don't want to have too many psychopaths running around.

It generally is that there's an emotional absence in relationships,

or they don't feel emotions the way others do.

They interact in a very superficial, charming, manipulative, deceptive manner.

There's the absence of remorse.

So it's a combination of the emotional, the interpersonal,

and the behavioral coming together.

Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers in North America

was born to a single mother and brought up by her parents.

He grew up surrounded by lies.

Bundy was told he was the adopted son of his grandparents

and his mother was his sister.

As an adult, he was extremely confused about his own identity,

and is considered a classic psychopath.

Bundy murdered over 30 young women,

and compared his serial killing to stamp collecting.

Another common trait of serial killers is known as paraphilia,

abnormal sexual behaviors or impulses

characterized by intense and recurring sexual fantasies and urges.

These behaviors have been linked to victims of sexual abuse as children.

Lust serial murder is sometimes an outgrowth of paraphilia.

We know that fantasy plays a very important role in some offenders.

They think in their heads about the kinds of sex that they want,

or the kind of ideal victim that they want,

and the sorts of things that they might want to do with that victim.

The infamous murderer and cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer,

claims to have been sexually abused by his neighbor when he was 10 years old.

His parents were in conflict, and divorced when he was 17.

His mother and father moved out, leaving Dahmer alone

with his growing paranoia and terrible fantasies

in what had been his family home.

Clearly what's operating there

is what we would tend to call, these days, a paraphilia.

That kind of sexual preference may not emerge until the teens,

early teens or late teens,

and that partly might be derived from experimentation and so on,

and it might also produce different kinds of emotional reactions.

So the teenage years, the years when we develop our kind of courtship

and our sexual relationships with others,

that can be a very disturbing period, and it can, of course, go awry.

Because of their extreme social isolation

and general hatred of the world and everyone in it,

they profess to have felt suicidal as teenagers.

They display a precocious interest in deviant sexuality

and are obsessed with violence, voyeurism, and pornography.

Sometimes you can find nuggets of information

during their juvenile years where they're entertaining these kinds of fantasies

where there's the fusion of a sexual thought with violence,

and that is arousing, where...

that they're having this extremely violent thought,

or a violent thought, and it becomes sexually arousing to them.

Another frightening trait of serial killers

is that, often, they don’t look frightening at all.

Coming face-to-face with a serial killer will give you two experiences.

First experience it will give you is the surprise that he looks so normal,

and the surprise that he's talkative, polite,

and oftentimes really condescending.

Contrary to the popular stereotype

of a monster living somewhere in a dark corner or abandoned house,

what is very striking is that they are often fathers

and are even successful in life.

The background of serial killers oftentimes tracks very well

with the moderate person in earnings.

It's not really the poor,

and very, very seldom would it be the rich.

They can be well educated, but at the same token,

they turn to serial killing because of an inner thrill

and a fantasy that they're carrying out.

John Wayne Gacy is a case in point.

A born salesman, he could talk his way in and out of any situation.

He rose through a number of jobs in the early 60s,

eventually managing his family's restaurant.

A respected member of the community,

he often performed as a clown at children’s parties.

Later, he earned the nickname The Killer Clown.

As a student in Seattle, Ted Bundy held a variety of part-time jobs.

As part of his psychology studies,