Essay on Serial Killers
Essay on Serial Killers
“I hated all of my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by Mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that I was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten; I was made to do things that no human bein’ would want to do. I’ve had to steal, make bootleg liquor; I’ve had to eat out of a garbage can. I grew up and watched prostitution like that with my mother till I was fourteen years old. Then I started to steal, do anything else I could do to get away from home….but I couldn’t get away from it. I even went to Tecumseh, Michigan, got married, and started livin’ up there, and my mother came up there and we got into an argument in a beer tavern…that’s why I killed her.” Quoted by: Henry Lee Lucas (Norris, 1988)
Henry Lee Lucas was convicted of eleven murders, one death penalty, six life sentences, two seventy-five year sentences, and one sixty-year sentence. He is awaiting death row in Texas. To this day authorities don’t know whether to believe Lucas’s confessions. At one point, he claimed to have indulged in sufficient violence to turn the whole South into a cemetery of his victims. (Ellroy, 1992) Henry Lee Lucas, like other serial killers, belongs to the walking dead. He is a man who dies emotionally and socially before the age of ten and for whom existence had become only a hunt to satisfy his primal urges from each moment to the next. (Norris, 1988)
Serial Killers tend to be white, heterosexual males in their twenties and thirties who are sexually dysfunctional and have low self-esteem. Their methodical rampages are almost always in a sexual nature. Their killings are usually part of an elaborate fantasy that builds to a climax at the moment of their murderous outburst. Serial killers generally murder strangers with cooling off periods between each crime. Many enjoy cannibalism, necrophilla and keep trophy-like body parts as mementos of their work. Serial killers are sadistic in nature. (Norris, 1988) Some return to the scenes or graves of their victims to fantasize about their deeds. Many insert themselves in the investigation of their crimes and some enjoy taunting authorities with letters or carefully planned pieces of...