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連續殺人犯心態之1 - S. Pappas
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Long Island Serial Killer: What Makes Murderers Tick?

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer,

Speculation about who might be the alleged serial killer dumping human remains along beaches on Long Island may be unwarranted so early in the investigation, criminologists say. But despite having diverse motives, serial killers do tend to share certain personality traits, and experts are learning more about what makes these killers tick, including a desire to convince others that they're "good people."

News outlets have reported that police are considering the possibility that some of the killings were committed by a police officer or ex-police officer. One psychic is even claiming credit for predicting (very vaguely) where one of the bodies would be found. But at this stage in the investigation, criminal psychologists and criminologists say, it's too early to jump to conclusions regarding the perpetrator.

"Unless you are directly involved in the case, you've been at the crime scene, you've seen all the files, anyone else is just using the typical white male, mid-to-late 20s profile," said Michael Aamodt, a professor of psychology at Radford University in Virginia who maintains a research database of more than 1,700 convicted serial killers.

When you break down the numbers, Aamodt told LiveScience, that profile accounts for less than one in five serial killers. In research presented in 2007 at a Society for Police and Criminal Psychology meeting in Massachusetts, Aamodt and his co-authors found that of the killers in their database, 90 percent were male and 74 percent were white. But when all of the demographic variables were combined, only about 18 percent of killers were white males in their mid-to-late 20s.

Motives for murder

The problem with profiling the average serial killer is that there is no such thing, said Stanton Samenow, a criminal psychologist and author of the book "Inside the Criminal Mind" (Crown, 1984). [Read: Criminal Minds Are Different From Yours]

Serial killers — the term that generally refers to someone who kills three or more people with a "cooling off" period in between murders, though some experts argue that the definition should include killers with two victims — have many motivations, Samenow told LiveScience. Some kill for money, others for revenge and still others for the thrill of it.

In many ways, serial killers are similar to other chronic criminals, Samenow said.

"These are people for whom life is not acceptable unless they have the upper hand," he said. "They have a view of themselves as being the hub of the wheel around which everything else should revolve."

Charismatic killers

The development of a serial killer is not well-understood, Samenow said, including the role of childhood abuse.

"You can ask eight experts and get 10 opinions on that," he said. His take, he said, is that serial killers come from all walks of life. They often show early personality traits such as a need to be in control and the refusal to take responsibility for wrongdoing, but the factors that create these traits aren't known.

While convicted serial killers often report childhood abuse, Aamodt said, he warned that the refusal to take responsibility for their actions means that serial killers' childhood reminiscences should be taken with a grain of salt.

"It's probably not surprising that serial killers would lie," Aamodt said.

Samenow, who has interviewed multiple serial killers, said the Ted Bundy-style stereotype of a personable — even charismatic — serial killer is often true.

"Sometimes it's even hard to remember while you're talking to them, that they've done the terrible things that they've done, because they can be very winsome and charming," Samenow said.

One thing almost all of the serial killers he's interviewed have in common is a desire to convince him that they're good people at heart, touting their musical or artistic talents or all the good things they've done in life, Samenow said.

"I remember one guy who said, 'Well, just because I killed somebody doesn't make me a bad person,'" Samenow said.

Choosing victims

Police have identified four of the bodies found on Long Island as young women, all of whom were working as prostitutes when they disappeared. The remains of five or six more people have recently been found, but those bodies have yet to be identified. Police aren't yet sure whether the victims are from one killer or several, though they have linked the killings of the four identified women.

"It's a very difficult investigation," said Steven Egger, a serial killer expert and criminologist at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. "It's going to take time."

Egger said the main similarity among serial killers is their choice in victims.

"The victims are vulnerable. That's the key," Egger told LiveScience." I don't care if the killer's psychotic or psychopathic or out for money, they're still going after vulnerable victims."

That makes the Long Island killer or killers' choice of prostitutes very typical, Egger said. Prostitutes are what he calls the "less-dead," people who fall through the cracks of society and are less likely to be looked for or linked together.

Even when a serial killer case becomes famous, Egger said, the victims remain overlooked.

"The highlight, the interest in serial killers is about the killer, it always has been," Egger said. "We come up with names for them, like 'The Hillside Strangler' or 'The Night Stalker' … People forget about the victims."

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas.

Top Ten Unexplained Phenomena 

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Fight, Fight, Fight: The History of Human Aggression

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110414/sc_livescience/longislandserialkillerwhatmakesmurdererstick



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連續殺人犯心態之2 - K. Webley
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Inside the Mind of the Long Island Killer: This Ain't Hollywood

Kayla Webley, 04/13/11

As police continue to search for whoever may have killed as many as 10 people, four of them prostitutes, on New York's Long Island, details are slowly beginning to emerge about where the bodies were found and how the victims were slain. Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, has studied the minds of killers for decades. He recently completed a major research study with the FBI that examined the crime-scene behaviors of some 37 serial sexual murderers in relation to 162 victims. Schlesinger talked to TIME about the gritty details of the Long Island killings, how the public perception of serial killers often differs from reality and why the killer may have made a taunting phone call to the sister of one of his victims.

Who are police likely dealing with here?
This is a serial sexual murderer. I think it is one. Now, there is a report that they may be operating with someone else. That's possible, but it's very, very rare. It's so rare that you can count these guys on your right hand. And usually when there is more than one person, it's a dominant person who brings an assistant along. These are solo events. These individuals that are doing this do this very privately and very much by themselves. Because, don't forget, this is an expression of their sexual arousal pattern. These are sexual murders — the killing, the control and the domination are eroticized. With these guys there's a fusion of sex and aggression, so that the aggressive act itself is sexually stimulating. And that's why it's repeated.
(Watch TIME's video on truck-stop killers preying on prostitutes.)

Which is what makes these killings not only very scary but also very intriguing to the general public, no?
I think everybody can understand murder — it's not hard to understand. The typical motive for murder is anger. The prototype of murder is the Cain and Abel murder case from the Bible. Two people that know each other get into an argument, usually over jealousy, and someone is killed by a direct, violent assault. That's what most murders are. But sexual murder is very difficult to understand. The motivation is very different. The motivation is sexual and he's killing people that he doesn't know, that he has no beef with, and so this is something average people can't understand. You don't even know this person and you're killing them. And so it's a very different motivational pattern.

Why prostitutes?
Prostitutes are very typical targets of serial sexual murderers. The main problem that serial sexual murderers have is the act of abduction, getting the woman to go with them. That problem is eliminated with a prostitute because they'll go with anybody — it's part of their job description. And so that's why they're frequent targets.
(See the top 10 manhunts.)

Why has the location of these murders attracted so much popular attention? Is there a difference between urban and suburban or rural killers?
There's no difference. That is simply where the person lives or where he or she is comfortable. People kill where they have familiarity and comfort. So if somebody is killing in the Long Island area, they have comfort in that area. They know the area. They don't live in Pennsylvania and then commute to Long Island to kill somebody. That almost never happens. And even in serial-killer cases with very high numbers of victims, say, 30 victims, they all live or work in the same area. So if you're killing in an urban area, it's because you live there and you're familiar with it. If you kill in a rural area, it's because you're familiar and comfortable in that area as well.

There have been reports that a man — perhaps the killer — called the sister of one of the victims. If true, what does that tell us about the perpetrator?
These guys are extremely sadistic. Inflicting pain on others is sexually arousing to them. That's what sadism is, it's total domination and control over others. What these guys will do is they'll attach a ligature to somebody, strangle her until she's just about ready to die, loosen it so that she lives and then do it again to prolong sexual pleasure. Calling a relative of someone you just killed is also highly sadistic. There was an interesting New York case back in the 1920s; it was a notorious case of a guy named Albert Fish who befriended a family and was able to abduct their 12-year-old daughter named Grace Budd. He told the family that he was taking the daughter to a birthday party for his niece. And he took her to a house in Westchester County, where he not only killed her, but chopped the body up and ate her, with potatoes and vegetables in a stew, over a 10-day period. They never made an arrest, at that point. I think it went on for close to 10 years, but what happened was Fish sent a sadistic letter to the mother of the child, and that was how he got apprehended.

Is that what we're waiting for here, for the killer to do something like that, slip up and get caught?
No, that's not how they get caught. The No. 1 way serial killers are apprehended is by a surviving victim. Law enforcement needs to assume in every single serial-murder case that there is a surviving victim out there somewhere. The problem is that surviving victims don't want to come forward, because they're distrustful of the police. And plus, they're likely doing illegal things, like prostitution, or drugs, or they were somewhere they weren't supposed to be. And so they're very reluctant to come forward. Especially early on in a killing series, where the offender has not yet perfected his technique and somebody may survive. In almost every case there are surviving victims.
(See the top 25 crimes of the century.)

Does anything about the technology in this case set it apart? The fact that the killer is meeting victims on Craigslist, using cell phones, sending text messages, e-mails?
Technology has its good side, but there's always a downside to it. But really, it's just another way to make contact with people. Using media to get a victim is not new. There was a case back in the '50s of a guy named Harvey Glatman, in Southern California. He put ads in newspapers for models. And he put together a little photography studio in his basement, and a woman would come over and he tied her up and said that they were going to be on the cover of a crime magazine, you know how sometimes women are tied up and stuff. And when he tied them up, he overpowered them and killed them. And so using the media, whether it's a 2010 high-tech Internet or using the classifieds of a newspaper, is really nothing new.

There have been some reports, though, that this killer is using technology smartly: ending calls just before he's been on the phone for three minutes (the time it takes to trace a call), which suggests maybe he has some sort of knowledge as to how the police conduct investigations. Some have suggested he might even be a police officer.
No, that doesn't mean anything. You can get that from watching Criminal Minds or Law & Order. What I would caution against is overhyping this, consistent with the mythology that he's an evil genius outsmarting the police. The likelihood of that is very, very remote. The intelligence level of serial sexual murderers follows the normal distribution, but most of them skew toward the lower end.
(See pictures of crime in Middle America.)

So how is the public's perception likely wrong in this case?
The public wants its serial killers to be evil geniuses, with high IQs, who speak five languages and are connoisseurs of fine wine and literature, similar to Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, when it took 30 years to apprehend Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, the mythology surrounding him was that he was a master of deception and disguise, that he was toying with the police. And when they arrested him, his IQ was 83 and he painted signs on trucks.

When serial killers are apprehended, they are extraordinarily below average, in almost every respect. And so there's a difference between the myth of the serial killer and the reality.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2064970,00.html?xid=newsletter-weekly



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