WARNING! GRUESOME THINGS AHEAD. ONLY READ IF YOU ARE 100% SURE ABOUT IT.

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\"It was an urge. . . . . A strong urge, and the longer I let it go the stronger it got, to where I was taking risks to go out and kill people--risks that normally, according to my little rules of operation, I wouldn\'t take because they could lead to arrest.\"

-- Edmund Kemper

Where does this urge come from, and why is so powerful? If we all experienced this urge, would we be able to resist?

Is it genetic, hormonal, biological, or cultural conditioning? Do serial killers have any control over their desires? We all experience rage and inappropriate sexual instincts, yet we have some sort of internal cage that keeps our inner monsters locked up. Call it morality or social programming, these internal blockades have long since been trampled down in the psychopathic killer. Not only have they let loose the monster within, they are virtual slaves to its beastly appetites. What sets them apart?

Serial killers have tested out a number of excuses for their behavior. Henry Lee Lucas blamed his upbringing; others like Jeffrey Dahmer say that they were born with a \"part\" of them missing. Ted Bundy claimed pornography made him do it. Herbert Mullin, Santa Cruz killer of thirteen, blamed the voices in his head that told him it was time to \"sing the die song.\" The ruthless Carl Panzram swore that prison turned him into a monster, while Bobby Joe Long said a motorcycle accident made him hypersexual and eventually a serial lust killer. The most psychopathic, like John Wayne Gacy, turn the blame around and boast that the victims deserved to die.

They must be insane -- what normal person could slaughter another human, for the sheer pleasure of it? Yet the most chilling fact about serial killers is that they are rational and calculating. As the \"British Jeffrey Dahmer\" Dennis Nilsen put it, \"a mind can be evil without being abnormal.\"

What They Are

Before we look at who they are, we must first describe what they are. In his book The Killers Among Us, Steven Egger defines serial murder:

• A minimum of three to four victims, with a \"cooling off\" period in between;

• The killer is usually a stranger to the victim -- the murders appear unconnected or random;

• The murders reflect a need to sadistically dominate the victim;

• The murder is rarely \"for profit\"; the motive is psychological, not material;

• The victim may have \"symbolic\" value for the killer; method of killing may reveal this meaning;

• Killers often choose victims who are vulnerable (prostitutes, runaways, etc.)

Statistically, the average serial killer is a white male from a lower to middle class background, usually in his twenties or thirties. Many were physically or emotionally abused by parents. Some were adopted. As children, fledgling serial killers often set fires, torture animals, and wet their beds (these red-flag behaviors are known as the \"triad\" of symptoms.) Brain injuries are common. Some are very intelligent and have shown great promise as successful professionals. They are also fascinated with the police and authority in general. They will either have attempted to become police themselves but were rejected, or worked as security guards, or had served in the military. Many, including John Gacy, the Hillside Stranglers, and Ted Bundy, will disguise themselves as law enforcement officials to gain access to their victims.

Who They Kill

Serial killers choose victims weaker than themselves. Often their victims will fit a certain stereotype which has symbolic meaning for the killer. Bundy brutally murdered college-age women with long brown hair. Was he killing, over and over again, the upper-class fiancee who broke off her engagement with him? David Berkowitz, aka \"Son of Sam,\" was not so particular -- he hated all women: \"I blame them for everything. Everything evil that\'s happened in the world--somehow goes back to them.\" Gacy savagely strangled young men, some of them his own employees, calling them \"worthless little queers and punks.\" Some believe that Gacy\'s homicidal rage was projected onto the boys who represented his own inadequacy in the eyes of his own domineering father.

With rare exception, serial killers objectify and humiliate their victims. Bundy deliberately kept the conversation brief -- if he got to know the victim and saw her as a real person, it would destroy the fantasy.

Serial killers are sadists, seeking perverse pleasure in torturing the victim, even resuscitating them at the brink of death so they can torture them some more. (\"How\'s it feel, knowing you\'re going to die?\" Gacy asked his victims as he strangled them, even reciting the 23rd Psalm, urging them to be brave in the face of death.) They need to dominate, control, and \"own\" the person. Yet when the victim dies, they are abandoned again, left alone with their unfathomable rage and self-hatred. This hellish cycle continues until they are caught or killed.

Why Are They So Difficult to Spot - Getting Away with Murder

We think we can spot lunacy, that a maniac with uncontrollable urges to kill will be unable to contain himself. On the bus, in the street, it is the mentally ill we avoid, sidestepping the disheveled, unshaven man who rants on over some private outrage. Yet if you intend to avoid the path of a serial killer, your best strategy is to sidestep the charming, the impeccably dressed, polite individual. They blend in, camouflaged in contemporary anonymity. They lurk in churches, malls, and prowl the freeways and streets. \"Dress him in a suit and he looks like ten other men,\" said one attorney in describing Dahmer. Like all evolved predators, they know how to stalk their victims by gaining their trust. Serial killers don\'t wear their hearts on their sleeves. Instead, they hide behind a carefully constructed facade of normalcy.

Mask of Sanity

Because of their psychopathic nature, serial killers do not know how to feel sympathy for others, or even how to have a relationship. Instead, they learn to simulate it by observing others. It is all a manipulative act, designed to entice people into their trap. Serial killers are actors with a natural penchant for performance. Henry Lee Lucas described being a serial killer as \"being like a movie-star . . . you\'re just playing the part.\" The macabre Gacy loved to dress up as a clown, while the Zodiac suited up in a bizarre executioner\'s costume that looked like something out of \"Alice in Wonderland.\" In court, Bundy told the judge \"I\'m disguised as an attorney today.\" Bundy had previously \"disguised\" himself as a compassionate rape crisis center counselor.

The most coveted role of roaming psychopaths is a position of authority. Gacy was an active, outgoing figure in business and society, became a member of the Jaycees. Many joined the military, including Berkowitz who was intensely patriotic for a time. Playing police officer, however, is the most predictable. Carrying badges and driving coplike vehicles not only feeds their need to feel important, it allows them access to victims who would otherwise trust their instincts and not talk to strangers.

Yet, when they are caught, the serial killer will suddenly assume a \"mask of insanity\" -- pretending to be a multiple personality, schizophrenic, or prone to black-outs -- anything to evade responsibility. Even when they pretend to truly reveal themselves, they are still locked into playing a role. What nameless dread lies behind the psychopath\'s mask?

\"What\'s one less person on the face of the earth anyway?\" Ted Bundy\'s chilling rationalization demonstrates the how serial killers truly think. \"Bundy could never understand why people couldn\'t accept the fact that he killed because he wanted to kill,\" said one FBI investigator.

What Makes a Serial Killer Tick?

Just as these killers rip open their victims to \"see how they run\" (as Ed Kemper put it), forensic psychiatrists and FBI agents have tried to get inside the killer’s mind. Traditional explanations include childhood abuse, genetics, chemical imbalances, brain injuries, exposure to traumatic events, and perceived societal injustices. The frightening implication is that a huge population has been exposed to one or more of these traumas. Is there some sort of lethal concoction that sets serial killers apart from the rest of the population?

We believe that we have control over our impulses -- no matter how angry we get, there is something that stops us from taking our aggressions out on others. Do serial killers lack a moral safety latch? Or are they being controlled by something unfathomable? \"I wished I could stop but I could not. I had no other thrill or happiness,\" said Dennis Nilsen, who wondered if he was truly evil. Serial killers are undeniably sick, and their numbers seem to be growing. Are we in the midst of a serial killer \"epidemic,\" as Joel Norris describes it? If this is a disease, what is the cure?

That was the first part. It wasn\'t really all that offensive, but the worst part is yet to come. Why did I post it? I felt it was important.

I dunno what makes them tick, I\'ll ask Necro the next time I see him though.

Meh, serial killers.

Already dealing with a certain serial killer popping back up in my hometown. ¬¬ I wish he\'d drop dead or something.

Some mass murderers might want to set a new body count world record, while others would have religious, political or philosophical reasons to do so, I guess...

Well its simple, They have a Pschological impulse and Hormone imbalance that makes them a little crazy. And maybe they can\'t control it. Other times (like that mass murderer guy who is sending letters to the cops) Do it for fun, for a sport, like human life was not precisous.
1 out of every 3 people is crazy, think of your 2 best friends, if they are\'nt crazy, then you are.

Hm......yup, that\'s odd. Mega Masta, 3 out of 3 of my friends (counting me) are crazy. Everybody has a slight dose of insanity. Without it, life would be all black and white. One of my friend\'s mom was almost killed by a serial killer. In fact she was that start of 2 or 3 deaths (I forget). She broke up with her boyfriend and he killed 2/3 people who looked exactly like her. It\'s a pretty creppy subject.

WARNING! DISTURBING!
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Are serial killers truly a 20th century bogeymen?
Is it our modern times that creates them, or have they been in operation before we classified them as a phenomenon? Although the term \"serial killer\" was coined in 1971, early fables of human/monsters reveals that there has always been danger in straying too far, or in accepting the help of strangers. The carnivorous characters in Grimm\'s Fairy tales become vivid metaphors of human bloodlust. Gruesome stories of Bluebeards and their bloody chambers, big bad wolves, trolls under the bridge and witches in the forest, all of whom make meals out of unsuspecting innocents, remind us of our contemporary monsters. These cautionary tales may represent an early, pre-psychological way of understanding the sadistic side of human nature.

Wolfmen

\"Lycanthropy,\" a combination of the Greek words \"wolf\" and \"man\", was another early concept created to describe the horror of senseless sexual murder. In The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Harold Schechter and David Everitt describe the lycanthropic madman as sexual predators who terrorized 16th century peasant villages, so much that the authorities \"regarded it as one of the most pressing social problems of the day.\" Among the most notorious of these medieval \"wolfmen\" was Gilles Garnier of France, and the German Peter Stubbe, both of whom attacked children, ripping them apart and cannibalizing them. Stubbe even went so far as to savagely mutilate his own son, gnawing at his brain.

The wolfman myth is still popular today -- we still hear how a full moon can bring out the crazies. Albert Fish, the notorious cannibal killer of children, was called the \"Werewolf of Wisteria,\" and enjoyed dancing naked in the full moon. Other lunar lunatics include Ed Gein, who also frolicking in the moonlight, dressed in his mothersuit made from the skin of women. Unlike Gein, Bobbie Jo Long did not appreciate being adorned in female body parts -- at puberty he had his abnormally enlarged breasts surgically removed. Even after the operation, Long claimed to be affected by the moon\'s cycles through his own bizarre \"menstrual\" cycle.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydes

The 19th century gave rise to another chilling predecessor to the serial killer\'s persona -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson created a literary man/monster who embodied the Divided Self -- appearing civilized and rational on the outside, while inside a wretched brute struggled to break loose.


John Wayne Gacy (TRIBUNE/AP)
One of the most intriguing peculiarities of serial killers is their benign, \"Dr. Jekyll\" appearance. They look and behave like everyman or any man -- \"abnormally normal\", as Mark Seltzer says. If they come across as potentially dangerous in any way, they will neutralize it in their behavior. The imposing 6\'9\'\' Edmund Kemper cultivated a \"gentle giant\" routine, which helped him to lure female hitchhikers into his car. The charming Ted Bundy wore a cast, looking meekly pathetic, and asked for help. The young women who gave him a hand must have thought of it as a random act of kindness. What resulted was a senseless act of murder. The notorious Gacy entertained hospitalized children in his Pogo the Clown costume. \"You know, clowns get away with murder,\" he once said. Gacy used rope tricks from his performance to strangle unsuspecting young men, who thought the worst they would have to endure would be some hokey entertainment. With many serial killers, the hidden Hyde comes out only after the victim is lulled into complacency.

Frankensteins

As a man obsessed with recreating a human being from dead body parts, Mary Shelley\'s Dr. Frankenstein was seeking the same ultimate power of creation as God Himself. While Dr. Frankenstein attempted to compose a man, our modern day Dr. Frankensteins are more gifted in the decomposing arts. Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen both tried to create companionship in corpses. Dahmer operated on his victims, hoping for a own love-zombie who would never stray. In his own attempts to create the perfect companion, Nilsen said, \"I think that in some cases I killed these men in order to create the best image of them. . . . . It was not really a bad but a perfect and peaceful state for them to be in\" (As if he were doing them a favor!) \"I remember being thrilled that I had full control and ownership of this beautiful body,\" he mused. Many believe that Ed Gein was attempting to reconstruct his mother by stealing body parts from a nearby cemetery.

Vampires

And of course, one of the most popular monster monikers for serial killers is \"vampire.\" In Gothic drama, vampires represented the repressed sexuality of straitlaced Victorian society, creatures of the night driven by beastly desires. The vampire motif is so frequent that we see localized vampires (\"The Vampire of Dusseldorf\" Peter Kurten; \"The Vampire of Hanover\" Fritz Haarmann; \"The Vampire of Sacramento\" Richard Chase.) Kurten claimed that his \"chief satisfaction in killing was to catch the blood spurting from a victim\'s wounds in his mouth and swallow it.\" Another deeply demented vampire killer, John Haigh, claimed that disturbing dreams created his unquenchable thirst for human blood: \"I saw before me a forest of crucifixes, which gradually turned into trees. . . Suddenly the whole forest began to writhe and the trees, stark and erect, to ooze blood. . . . A man went to each tree catching the blood. . . . \'Drink,\' he said.

Early killers: How did they explain their evil?

The Baron Gilles de Rais

This15th century French aristocrat murdered hundreds of peasant children. Gilles blithely declared that torturing the innocent was \"entirely for my own pleasure and physical delight, and for no other intention or end.\" Gilles was unbelievably bold in gathering victims -- he would send servants out to round up children and haul them back to his castle, as if he were collecting his rightful harvest from the peasant population. Why would a military hero and companion to Joan of Arc torture children? Gilles\' excuse is precociously modern -- he blamed his parents. They didn\'t physically abuse him, however; the monstrous aristocrat whined that he was the hapless victim of their amoral attitudes. While lax parenting doesn\'t sound like a familiar prerequisite for today\'s serial killer, it was an arch offense by Medieval standards -- one had to be a diligent guard against the Devil\'s cunning ways. As a child Gilles said evil descended \"when I was left uncontrolled to do whatever I pleased and to take pleasure in illicit acts.\"

Was Gilles de Rais the sole sadistic multiple murderer of his era, or were there others who used more discretion, choosing victims who were less likely to be missed? It is impossible to say. Some, like Elliott Leyton, argue that \"the curious phenomenon of the murder of strangers is extremely rare in so-called \'primitive\' societies,\" and that it is primarily in \"modern, industrializing societies that stranger-murder becomes a major homicidal theme. \"We can only speculate. It can be said, however, that the major archetype of the serial sex slayer emerged in the grimy, gaslit streets of industrialized 19th century London.

Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper\'s infamous Whitechapel murders baffled the police and terrorized London. As the first sensationalized serial killer, the Ripper became the prototype of the lust murderer. The mystery of his identity paralleled the mystery of his motive. Nothing like this was seen before -- why would anyone go lurking in the dead of night, eviscerating poverty-stricken prostitutes? Clearly the Ripper was insane, thought the police. They explored the insane asylums, looking for a raving, woman-hating madman. Crazed immigrants, lunatic butchers, and even syphillis-ridden royalty were suspect. Most believed Jack the Ripper had to be an immigrant (Americans were a favorite suspicion) because no Englishman would commit such horrid crimes. The Ripper\'s bladework had some speculating he was a deranged doctor. In any case, as the insane asylums were searched and suspicious whispers echoed in respectable bourgeois homes, it became clear that the Ripper could be anyone. The uncivilized monster behind Victorian society\'s prim veneer had acted out in the ugliest of deeds.

Popular explanations

In the 19th century, civilization stopped looking to the Devil as the sole force behind violent, sadistic behavior. Instead, scientists and writers began searching for the beast within. As Fred Botting points out, the inhuman was now seen as \"in-human\". Darwin\'s theories on evolution bridged the gap between beasts and man. How far are we from our grunting, rock-throwing apelike ancestors? Not very far at all, according to 19th century criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau, who believed that violent men had \"primitive\" faces with heavy jaws and low foreheads. By measuring the foreheads of Italian criminals, Lombroso believed he could target the violent criminal.

Although Lombroso and his measuring tape have long since been discredited, the concept of a lingering animalistic brutality is still popular today. As we move forward, becoming more technologically advanced, there is something that refuses to budge, some primitive holdout of the darkest recesses or our psyche. Is it the caveman within, as some contemporary paleopsychologists say, the vestigial beast that got us through the \"survival of the fittest\" when we needed it, but now that we live in a civilized society, it is no longer needed.

Franz Josef Gall promoted \"phrenology.\" By feeling the bumps on a person\'s head, Gall believed that he could predict their character and level of intelligence. Physiognomy, developed by Johann Kaspar Lavatar, claimed to read a person\'s character in their facial features.

These theories were all the rage when Herman Mudgett (aka H. H. Holmes) stood trial for running a deadly boarding house that put the Bates Motel to shame. In Depraved, Harold Schechter describes how the public, eager to know why Holmes was such a fiend, flocked to see maps of the killer\'s head shape, as if a certain pattern in the bumps of his skull would spell out \"murderer.\" Holmes himself described his own evil metamorphosis: \"My features are assuming a pronounced Satanical cast. . . My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil--that the similitude is almost completed. In fact, so impressed am I with this belief, that I am convinced that I no longer have anything human in me.\" This\' \"devil made me do it\" routine was a transparent attempt to avoid the hangman\'s noose. This devil was eventually hanged for his misdeeds.



[Edited on 12/6/2004 by Mega X.exe]

I\'m double posting for the sake of putting in another section.

AGAIN DISTURBING
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\"I have several children who I\'m turning into killers. Wait til they grow up\" - message scrawled on David Berkowitz\'s apartment wall, with an arrow pointing to a hole in the wall.
Are some children just born \"bad\"? Some serial killers are precociously demented, fascinated by sadistic violence at a very early age. As a child, Ed Kemper was already beheading his sister\'s dolls, playing \"execution\" games, and once told his sister that he wanted to kiss his second grade teacher, but \"if I kiss her I would have to kill her first.\"

One of first places our society looks to for an explanation is the serial killer\'s upbringing. \"So many of us wanted to believe that something had traumatized little Jeffrey Dahmer, otherwise we must believe that some people simply give birth to monsters,\" Ann Schwartz has written.

In some cases, the abuse of children by their parents is barbaric, and it seems little wonder that anything but a fledgling serial killer would come from such horrible squalor. As a child, the \"Boston Strangler\" Albert DeSalvo was actually sold off as a slave by his alcoholic dad. Many sadistic murderers portray their childhood as an endless chain of horrifying sexual abuse, torture, and mayhem. Some stories of torture may be exaggerated for sympathy (it is always to the killer\'s advantage to concoct wicked parents as an excuse) but some have been corroborated by witnesses. Even families that appear healthy on the outside may be putting on an act. Children can learn the \"Jeckyl and Hyde\" routine from parents who are outgoing and social with neighbors and co-workers, but who scowl at their kid\'s inadequacies when they get home.

As we examine childhood abuse as a possible key to the serial killer\'s behavior, we must remember that many children have suffered horrible abuse at the hands of their parents, but did not grow up to be lust murderers. Childhood abuse is not a direct link to a future in crime. And while many girls are victimized as children, very few grow up to be sadistically violent toward strangers. Childhood abuse may not be the sole excuse for serial killers, but it is an undeniable factor in many of their backgrounds.

In his book Serial Killers, Joel Norris describes the cycles of violence as generational: \"Parents who abuse their children, physically as well as psychologically, instill in them an almost instinctive reliance upon violence as a first resort to any challenge.\" Childhood abuse not only spawns violent reactions, Norris writes, but also affects the child\'s health, including brain injuries, malnutrition, and other developmental disorders.

Some parents believed that by being harsh disciplinarians, it would \"toughen\" the child. Instead, it often creates a lack of love between parent and child that can have disastrous results. If the child doesn\'t bond with its primary caretakers, there is no foundation for trusting others later in life. This can lead to isolation, where intense violent fantasies become the primary source of gratification. \"Instead of developing positive traits of trust, security, and autonomy, child development becomes dependent on fantasy life and its dominant themes, rather than on social interaction,\" writes Robert Ressler, Ann Burgess and John Douglas in Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives. When the child grows up, according to these authors, all they know are their fantasies of domination and control. They have not developed compassion for others. Instead, humans become flattened-out symbols for them to enact their violent fantasies.

In looking to the parents for explanations, we see both horrifying mothers and fathers. The blame usually falls on the mother, who has been described as too domineering or too distant, too sexually active or too repressed. Perhaps the mother is blamed more because the father has often disappeared, therefore \"unaccountable.\" When the father is implicated, it is usually for sadistic disciplinarian tactics, alcoholic rants, and overt anger toward women.

Monstrous Mothers

\"We\'re still blaming mothers.\" - Joyce Flint, Dahmer\'s mother

It all seems to begin or end with Mother. Henry Lee Lucas launched his murderous career by killing his mom; Ed Kemper ended his by killing his mom. Even the Shakespearian multiple murderer Hamlet had an unnatural obsession with his mother\'s sexuality. \"Serial murderers are frequently found to have unusual or unnatural relationships with their mothers,\" notes Steven Egger in his book The Killers Among Us. In our culture, the imposing image of \"Mother\" looms large in our collective psyches, and some writers easily accept that these killers are lashing out at maternal tyranny. If these murderers are still dominated by Mother (Hitchcock\'s Norman Bates is the archetype), then it is easy to dismiss them as \"mama\'s boys\" who never fully matured. Perhaps we find comfort in this cliche -- the mother is a readymade excuse, particularly in our contemporary era of obsessive parenting. Yet, as we look at some of the techniques of the serial killers\' mothers, we are inclined to see a deadly link between the womb and the tomb.

Uptight Moms

In an effort to keep their children chaste, some mothers have linked sexuality with death. Ed Gein\'s religiously fanatical, notorious mother convinced her son that women were vessels of sin and caused disease. In some sort of twisted misinterpretation, Gein made literal vessels out of women, using their skulls for bowls, and other domestic objects. Ed\'s body may have escaped from sexual disease, but his mind was clearly contaminated.

Joseph Kallinger was adopted by sadistic, Catholic parents, and after a hernia operation at age 6, his mother told him that the surgery was to keep his penis from growing. Kallinger never questioned her, and as an adult believed it had been stunted. A strict disciplinarian, Kallinger\'s mother forced him to hold his open hand over a flame, beating him if he cried. Kallinger later grew up taking extreme pleasure in torturing others, and became a sadistic parent himself. After taking an insurance policy out on his 13-year-old son Joey, he slowly drowned him, deaf to his own son\'s pleas for mercy.

\"I certainly wanted for my mother a nice, quiet easy death like everyone else wants,\" said Ed Kemper. His idea of an easy death is markedly unusual -- after beheading his mom, he shoved her vocal cords down the garbage disposal, raped her headless body, and, by some accounts, placed her head on the living room mantel and used it as a dartboard. Admittedly, Kemper\'s mom was a shrill, tyrannical nag who locked her young son in the basement when he grew too large and frightened his sisters. As an adult, Kemper and his mother fought constantly, yet he chose to live with her. Why not just move away and don\'t take her calls?

\"Hillside Strangler\" Kenneth Bianchi\'s adoptive mother was pathologically over-protective. When Ken wet his pants, she took him to the doctor to have his genitals examined. One protective agency wrote that Bianchi\'s mother was \"deeply disturbed, socially ambitious, dissatisfied, unsure, opinionated and overly protective . . . had smothered this adopted son in medical attention and maternal concern from the moment of adoption.\" As a child Bianchi was very dependent on his mother, yet harbored a deadly hostility beneath the surface.

Loose Moms

Some serial killers had their sexually uninhibited mothers to blame. These mothers overstepped the boundaries, exposing their children to inappropriate sexual behavior. Bobby Jo Long killed women he characterized as whores and sluts, who he said reminded him of his own mom. She had frequent sex (according to him) with men in the same room where Bobby slept. According to Long, he shared his bed with his mother until he was 13 years old.

Charles Manson\'s prostitute mother Kathy Maddox, indifferently declared his name as \"No Name Maddox\" for his birth certificate. She hoisted him off on relatives, and in one story, famous but probably untrue, she traded the infant Charlie for a pitcher of beer. When he was sent to live with his aunt, his uncle told him he was a sissy, and punished him by sending him to school dressed as a girl.

Henry Lee Lucas also suffered gender confusion as a child, courtesy of his mother\'s sadism. She was a heavy drinker and bootlegger. For unknown reasons she dressed him as a girl until he was 7. \"I lived as a girl. I was dressed as a girl. I had long hair as a girl. I wore girl\'s clothes.\" She senselessly beat him after he had his hair cut because his teacher complained. At one point, his mom struck him on back of head with a wooden beam, fracturing his skull. Lucas was also apparently exposed to his mother\'s sexual activities. He killed his mother in 1951.

Deadly Dads


Albert DeSalvo (AP)
It is usually the sadistically disciplinarian father that pops up in the serial killer\'s family tree. John Gacy\'s dad berated his son, calling him a sissy, queer, and a failure. A violent alcoholic, Gacy\'s father beat his mother, and shot his son\'s beloved dog to punish young John. When Gacy later strangled his young victims, he encouraged them to stay brave while facing death. \"Through this ritual, Gacy sought to reassert his own vision of a masculine identity that had been squashed down by his father,\" wrote Joel Norris.
Albert DeSalvo\'s father would bring home prostitutes and brutally beat his mother, breaking her fingers one by one as young Albert helplessly watched. The elder DeSalvo sold his children off as slaves to a farmer in Maine, while his mother went frantically searching for them for six months, as story that has been confirmed by family friends and social workers. \"Pa was a plumber,\" said DeSalvo. \"he smashed me once across the back with a pipe. I didn\'t move fast enough.\"

[Edited on 12/6/2004 by Mega X.exe]