#BTK SERIAL KILLER VICTIMS SERIAL#
Hale (1994) discussed the role of humiliation in serial murder. It seemed he could never please this man. When Gacy became involved in politics, working as an assistant precinct captain for a candidate in his neighborhood, his father called him a patsy. A high school friend recalled several instances in which Gacy’s father ridiculed or beat him without provocation. John Wayne Gacy, the killer of 33 (or more) young men in Illinois during the 1970s, likewise experienced early traumatic shame. Given his developmental issues and the fact that the woman who’d reported him had undermined his control, his subsequent brutality to his murder victims might well have reassured him of his dominance. He said that, with Long’s fragile ego, the combination had created a Jekyll/Hyde syndrome. John Money testified about the negative impact of this condition, including shame over having breasts as a teenage boy. He’d been born with an extra X chromosome that had produced abnormal amounts of estrogen during puberty, along with enlarged breasts.ĭefense expert Dr. Long was a “power assertive rapist,” according to the FBI’s classification system, which means he acted out to assert his manhood. During adolescence, he began envisioning “girl traps” and ways of binding women that later shaped his acts as a serial killer.įlorida rapist and serial killer Bobby Joe Long confessed to ten murders, and said he’d started killing his rape victims after a woman reported him. But in interviews with me that spanned several years, Rader kept returning to his experience of anger and helplessness at the hands of females.
#BTK SERIAL KILLER VICTIMS SERIES#
With no trauma or abuse in his background, criminologists were at first mystified by what provoked his series of murders. Instead, the humiliation festers, feeding their view of a hostile world that hinders them and justifies payback.ĭennis Rader, the “BTK Killer” in Wichita, Kansas, from 1974 to 1991, identified incidents in his childhood when his mother shamed or humiliated him as motivators for his fantasies of controlling and punishing women. It’s no excuse for murder, but for some people, humiliation runs deep-depriving them of self-esteem, a sense of control, and feelings of accomplishment. She was shocked-but in a later interview, she excused him by claiming that his victims had treated him badly. Upon his arrest, he was allowed to speak to his mother about his crimes. He also kept the girlfriend of one victim chained in a shipping container for two months. He pleaded guilty to the mass murder of four people at a motorcycle shop in 2003, as well as the murders of three more people whom he buried on his 95-acre property. I recently watched a special on the ID Network about South Carolina serial killer Todd Kohlhepp.