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Serial killings have been reported at least since the time of Gilles de Rais, a French nobleman who served under Joan of Arc, and the English serial killer, Jack the Ripper, in the 1880s. Accounts of serial killers have been a source of fascination to the readers of newspapers and fiction. Serial killers have been reported in Duesseldorf, Germany, in the 1930s, in Stalinist Russia, and in the United States. The increasing number of serial killers apprehended during the last two decades is a consequence of both increased cooperation among law enforcement agencies and increases in the actual number of serial killers (Norris, 1988). What kind of a person is capable of such heinous acts?
Serial murders are sharply distinguished from ordinary murders. Motivations for ordinary murders are extremes of humanly understandable motivations, such as greed, jealousy, revenge, gain in status, power, or prestige, rage, or self-defense. To want to act murderously is within the range of our fantasy or wishes. However, a serial killer deliberately kills strangers, for no apparent motive, except fulfillment of a private fantasy (Lachmann and Lachmann, 1994). Previously, we discussed the motivation for the serial killings in terms of specific fantasies of total control over another person, “to redress … painful early experience by reversing roles, temporarily revitalizing deadened feelings, and momentarily restoring a traumatically depleted sense of self” (p. 22). When the intended victim of the serial killer behaves so as to shatter the fantasy, the serial killer loses his resolve and the victim might then escape. To Fromm (1973), for whom evil consisted of the total domination and subjugation of another person, we added an absence of “humanly understandable” motives and a specific rigidly organized fantasy as attributes that make the serial killer the personification of evil.