American Evil

The Psychology of Serial Killers

Cullen, Eric

• Publisher: Waterside Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781909976795
• eBook ISBN: 9781910979976
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on clinical experience of killers. Includes a selection of USA/UK serial killer studies. Exposes police and other failings and shortcomings and the perversity of 'defences', 'excuses', etc. Strongly critical of USA gun laws and attitudes or perspectives making for an unhealthy environment, moral vacuum and lack of official/individual awareness and responsibility.The book describes how the author was 'so profoundly moved' by his inescapable conclusions about how serial killers are 'made' that he was compelled to set out his findings. Bemoaning the serial killer 'growth industry', 'unhealthy interest' and ill-informed comment he sets the record straight. Serial killers are made not born.But his central polemic is that serial killers are one of several malign human by-products of a dysfunctional modern permissive society, overwhelmingly American, brought about by modern-day culture in the USA, lax moral standards as also reflected in other countries to the extent that they pursue a comparable way of life.

Introduction

The Perfect Storm

I wrote this book because I was drawn into the sordid and terrible world of serial killers when I was invited to be a consultant to a television series entitled The Voice of a Serial Killer. I have also worked with killers, including serial killers, for over 20 years in my role as a prison psychologist and been an advisor to government as described overleaf on how to treat dangerous personality disordered offenders. Since then, I’ve contributed to three TV series and have, reluctantly, learned a great deal more about serial killing. What I’ve read has left me so profoundly moved by inescapable conclusions about how serial killers are made that I have written this book about my thoughts, findings and conclusions.

Serial killers, and the programmes, films and books about them, are a growth industry, a crowded field. It seems the public, or a sizeable section of it, find the subject morbidly fascinating. My hope is to add to the understanding of this phenomenon rather than prurience.

My main purpose is to put forward the argument that serial killers are one of several malign human by-products of a dysfunctional modern permissive society; and to show that the overwhelming majority of serial killers are the result of how significant numbers of Americans choose to live their lives. To do so I have set-out what I see as the causative elements in American modern life that lead to the creation of serial killers.

Before doing so I should outline briefly my professional experience which I believe qualifies me to speak as I do. In my career, I spent 22 years as a prison psychologist directly involved with treating offenders. I was Head of Psychology at HM Prison Grendon Underwood for nearly ten years. Grendon is a therapeutic community (TC) secure prison for the treatment of severe personality disordered offenders. Most of the prison population of Grendon are murderers. I was directly responsible for the assessment, treatment and evaluation of hundreds of these men. During my time working there, I was also a Wing Therapist for a community of up to 40 residents (inmates) and 12 staff, including psychiatrist, probation officer and prison officers. The work was entirely focused on an unrelenting, intensive therapeutic scrutiny of residents lives, their crimes and their defences, admissions, rationalisations and denials. I was also called upon on a number of occasions, both before and during Grendon, to interview serial killers.

At no time during that ten years of therapy did anyone in the institution — the most famous therapeutic prison in Europe — ever argue that any of the men there had or was suffering from a mental-illness which either mitigated or expiated their culpability. The therapy at Grendon involved staff in obliging residents to take individual and collective responsibility for their past and present acts. I know of no comparable treatment of serious and dangerous prisoners which approaches this level of scrutiny. The average time spent in therapy at Grendon was over two years and research established that, for those who were in therapy for at least 18 months, it was significantly related to reduced offending after release.

I was also an advisor for some years to the Justice Department of the Home Office of England and Wales and later following its creation the Ministry of Justice, as a member of the Correctional Services Advice and Accreditation Panel (CSAPP) until 2014. My brief was to advise the government on treatment efficacy and innovation, with particular reference to personality disordered offenders and therapeutic regimes.

I have subsequently undertaken rigorous and extensive research into serial killing, both using the internet and as an external reader at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. This book is the fruit of that work.

Dr Eric Cullen

June 2020

Chapter One

The Demographics of Death

First principle

Serial killers are made, not born. The overwhelming majority of serial killers are made in the United States of America. This book is an indictment in the form of an extended polemic based on facts, professional knowledge, experience and personal conclusions forged over many years as a forensic clinical practitioner. The simple fact upon which much of my argument is based is that the USA has only 4.25% of the world’s population yet over two thirds of all the world’s known serial killers to date. I believe this is a direct result of the environment in which they are raised.

Among the most salient toxic aspects of this environment is the growth of deviant, permissive and subjective standards for a lifestyle based on personal gratification free from cultural proscriptions or moral absolutes. In the name of liberal enlightenment, those institutions which previously offered or imposed standards of behaviour for the masses have had their influence eroded or abandoned entirely. For large sections of the population of the USA, the commandments of the church are gone, and they have been replaced by hedonistic self-indulgence. Serial killers are the malign human effluence of this dysfunctional and degenerate American sub-culture. I argue that there are clear and explainable factors which contribute to this malaise, and that these factors exist, grow and are sustained in an American environment far more than in that of any other country. Serial killing is an American phenomenon and other countries produce serial killers (in far rarer frequency) to the extent their cultures mirror the American template.

It is essential however to explain that, in arguing that the development of serial killers is predominantly a consequence of the formative influences in their lives, it is ultimately the personal responsibility of every serial killer for his or her own behaviour. No mitigation short of severe mental breakdown diminishes that burden of culpability, and even then, it would have to be closely and compellingly argued.

How serial killers are made

People who kill other people are relatively common. People who kill several other people over a period of time, often years, are statistically speaking very, very rare. The most thorough, authoritative attempt to quantify world totals of serial killers is the Radford University Serial Killer Information Center’s research project, updated in April 2016. This study used the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s accepted definition of serial killing, i.e.“The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender, in separate events”. It recorded a total of 4,743 serial killers in the world since 1900. This is a tiny percentage of the total number of people who have been born since then, approximately ten billion, so less than one in 210 million.

Is it reassuring to know that it is extremely unlikely you will be the victim of a serial killer? They are a tiny minority of the world’s population, yet they seem to occupy an extraordinarily disproportionate amount of public attention. Who are these “monsters”, these purveyors of evil? Where do they come from? How are they made? This book is about finding answers to these questions, and the answers are difficult to accept. As I have already indicated, I believe serial killers are made, not born. There are no people with the genetic predisposition to become a serial killer — although we all have the genetic potential to kill. Serial killers are failures. They are frequently bitter losers and should not be publicised as anything else. They are guilty of the most horrific crimes purely for malign, retributive and self-gratifying reasons.

Having worked with killers for over 20 years and been involved with and studied serial offenders as described in the Introduction, the overwhelming conclusion I have reached is that these offenders are the product of a number of identifiable social/cultural/environmental causative factors. And, most significantly, these factors are found in one country in far greater concentration and intensity than in any other. And that country is the United States of America, the country in which I was born and raised and from which I emigrated to England many years ago.

Serial killer facts

The USA has only 4.25% of the world’s population, but it has over 68% of all known serial killers since 1900. By contrast, India and China, with nearly 40% of the people in the world between them (nearly ten times more than the USA), have had only 3.2% of serial killers (over 20 times fewer). This staggering difference is impossible to simply explain away, though some American apologists have tried, by suggesting it is because America is far more advanced technologically and therefore keeps better records, or that it is such a large country, with so many people, that it is not in fact over-represented. This level of superficial ignorance does nothing to obviate the obvious. All the countries of Europe, with a combined total population greater than the USA, have a far lower total of serial killers, and I would assert, technology for data collection at least as advanced as in the USA and in some European countries probably better.

By way of comparison, the United Kingdom, with the second highest total of 166 serial killers on record, which is 3.5% of the total, while over-represented in terms of its population, comes nowhere near the American total and over-representation. Put another way, the USA, with just over 4% of the world’s population, has more than double the number of serial killers in history compared to the rest of the world. This statistic is so significant there can only be one conclusion. There are so many American serial killers because they are born and raised in America, and the most likely explanation as to why this has happened has to begin with a review of what it is like growing-up and living in modern-day America.

Some basic statistics

Courtesy of the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) in the FBI Academy, US Department of Justice:

• 93% of serial killers are male
• 75% of their victims were female
• 80% of victims are between the ages of 15 and 45
• Serial killer “motivation”: sex 81.5%; profit 5%; anger 3.1%; mental-illness 1.3%; other 5.6%; unknown 3.5%
• Offender/victim relationship: customer (engaged in prostitution) 41.5%; stranger 31.5%; acquaintance 12%; “targeted stranger” 11.7%
• Psychiatric history: 32.6% of the serial killers had a prior diagnosis of psychiatric disorder, with 43% of these being personality disorder, 19% psychotic, 12% developmental disorder and 11% mood disorder
• 24% of all serial killers had a history of alcohol or drug abuse
• Cause of death: strangulation 42.5%; blunt force trauma 16.3%; stabbing 13%; gun 13%.

It is striking that most serial killers in this study were classified as having been motivated by sex, and given most of their victims were females, so many of these were prostitutes. This truly tragic fact brings home the terrible risks that being a prostitute carries in America. It is reasonable to speculate that it was not just the circumstances of risk which created this statistic, e.g. prostitutes carrying-out their profession in far more isolated, private and vulnerable settings than other citizens, but also that they are the victims of a cultural stigma which argues that they are somehow of less value as people, and that the killers would see them as the personification of those qualities or positions of power which most neuter and infuriate them, i.e. the experience is based on a woman having what a man wants and cannot obtain without buying. Hence, the prostitute is in the more powerful position whilst being in what no doubt the killer sees as a lower social status position to himself.

Any serious consideration of understanding the psychology of how a serial killer comes to be by focusing only on their personal, individual biology and character tells significantly less than half the story and is concentrating on the effects rather than the causes. I say again, serial killers are the malign waste product of a dysfunctional environment, a cultural effluent. There are in America today cancerous and growing areas which are landscapes of moral turpitude, sexual degeneration and permissive violence. These sprawling vistas are characterised by miles of neon and cement, no churches, few homes, no cultural centres. Inner cities in many parts of America are virtual no-go areas where even the police only patrol fully-armed and in cars, rarely venturing out on foot: slums where drugs and violence are endemic and attitudes to police and the law are hostile and contemptuous.

I was born and raised in America. I have travelled extensively in the USA and have, for this book, researched those aspects of the large and growing national sub-culture which, I will argue, provide all the influences for making serial killers. The expression which best summarises this is pervasive cultural crapulence. It is possible to drive for miles through cultural and moral wastelands. It is essential to detail and scrutinise this phenomenon to better understand why, as I argue, this is the petri dish for creating serial killers.

Family abuse and fragmentation

Having a family provides essential formative experiences. Your parents have an obligation to raise you in love. They protect, feed and nurture you when you are at your most vulnerable. The formative first years require stability and the reassurance that you are safe. What are the consequences when family fails to provide these essentials, when instead the child sees violence, sees a parent disappear, sees parents arguing and blaming, sees that it, life, isn’t safe? Worst of all, experiences parents who abuse? In fact, it can be a hostile, frightening place.

It is, of course, better to have one loving caring parent than two at war, unstable or abusive. But I would argue that the ideal is to have two loving stable parents. For decades now, the rate of divorce in America has increased. It now stands at over 40% and will no doubt continue to climb. America has the third highest divorce rate in the world. Also, fewer couples marry at all than ever before, and unmarried couples tend to stay together less often than married couples. As a result, there are more and more children being raised in either single parent homes, or in domestic circumstances where there is a male adult present who is not related to the child, and in many instances those relationships will not be good ones.

In these fractured homes, while many may be safe, stable and nurturing, many more will not. Marripedia under “Effects of Family Structure on Crime” (see http:/...

Table of contents

• Copyright and publication details
• Publisher’s note
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• Introduction
• Selected References
• Index