PSYCHOPATHY: ARCHITECT OF CRIMINAL MINDS & NORMAL MINDS & ALL MINDS IN BETWEEN

Professor Jacobs' new book presents a new paradigm for understanding the vigorous brain condition of spectrum psychopathy. Chapter headings are:

CONTENTS

Homage to “The Pulps”

Introduction to Neurotruth

Acknowledgment & Organizational Matters


PART I. Vigorous Brain Conditions
Introduction to Spectrum Psychopathy

Introduction to the Five Parts: Prime Time Psychopathy

Chapter 1. The Playing Field: American Psychopathy—Seeing Is Believing
BIO & Brainmarks of Bridgette: “A Wild-Hearted Girl”

Chapter 2. Cinematic Evolution of Big Screen Psychopathy
BIO & Brainmarks of Veronica: “The Person I Used to Be”

Chapter 3. The Good, the Bad, & the Very Ugly: Neurochemical Variations
Merge with Experience Producing Brainmarks
BIO & Brainmarks of Vivien: “Almost Too Much to Handle”

PART II. The Brainmarks Paradigm
Distinctive, Ostentatious, & Psychopathic

Chapter 4. Prince Charmers & Lady Wow-Wows:
Special Weapons & Tactics Spell Trouble From the First Kiss
BIO & Brainmarks of Elizabeth: “A Scar on My Young Heart”

Chapter 5. Female Brain VS Male Brain: What A Difference a Brain Makes!
BIO & Brainmarks of Natalie: “Weakness”

PART III. Evolutionary Psychopathy
Modern Multitasking Brain Sculpted from Ancient Survival Scripts

Chapter 6. Maturation of the PFC: The Savior of Sapient Brains
BIO & Brainmarks of Spencer-Paul: “Road Trip”

Chapter 7. Hot Seconds: Phenomenology of Adolescent Brains
BIO & Brainmarks of Audrey: “Something’s Not Right”

PART IV. Neurotruth & Neuroscience
SANE Brain & DANE Brain

Chapter 8. Cool, Calm, Collected & Confident: The Serotonin Brainmark
BIO & Brainmarks of Marilyn: “Hard Lessons from Bad Boys”

Chapter 9: Skin Hunger: The Dopamine Brainmark
BIO & Brainmarks of Lana: “If I Could I Would Change Some
Things.”

PART V. Love & Hope
Turbines of Adaptability & Survivability

Chapter 10. What’s LOVE Got to Do with It?
BIO of Lauren: “Love Means Everything!

Chapter 11. What’s HOPE Got to Do with It?
BIO & Brainmarks of Hope: “HOPE Means Everything!”

PART VI. Becoming Brainwise
25 Neurotruth in the 21st Century

Chapter 12: Honest Neurons: Neurotruth Behind “Primed” Natures
BIO & Brainmarks of Grace: “From Caterpillar to Butterfly”

EPILOGUE

Armed with Neurotruth, Where Do Sapient Brains Go From Here?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

440 pages

INTRODUCTION: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF AN OLD DISORDER

Considering the long history of viewing psychopathy as a disorder only is the FIRST basis that the following chapters present psychopathy in a new light. The New Paradigm, based upon my Brainmarks Paradigm (2009)interprets psychopathy to be both a...

normal neuroadpative and congenital brain condition, and a

severe "toxic" personality disorder .

In this spectrum view, order (normalcy) may, by gradation (degrees), become disorder expressed as Psychopathic Personality Disorder observed as a mix of obsession, violence, and sexuality producing violent sexual predators.

I can't emphasize enough how the brain is programmmed by principles of evolutionary development (Evo-Devo)to thrive and survive by manifestations of what we know to be "psychopathic traits". A brain equipped with clusters of psychopathy--self-absorbed narcissism, "bullet-proof" entitlement, & deception--will find a way to survive life's considerable onslought of slings and arrows.

The time has come in our 21st Century understanding of psychopathy to revise the current Cluster B Personality Disorders presented in the Diagnotic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) as I have indicated in the following chapters.

CHAPTER ONE: ADAPTIVE PSYCHOPATHY

PSYCHOPATHY: A NEW PARADIGM

"NEUROPSYCHOPATHY"


CHAPTER ONE of four chapters

By: Don Jacobs, Chair

Forensic Psychology & Forensic Science

Weatherford College, Weatherford, Texas USA

djacobs@wc.edu

This chapter addresses:

Simple & Changeable Beauty of Scientific Theory

Evo-Devo, Evolutionary Psychology, & Psychopathy

Parenting-In and Parenting-Out

Behind the Monster’s Eyes

Adaptive Personality Traits in Everyday Psychopathy



CH 1: “Adaptive Psychopathy”

Peer-review:

"The chapter on Adaptive Psychopathy, written by Don Jacobs, explores a concept that has existed for many years in the field of anthropology. Anthropological thought maintains that the Homo sapien brain is adapted for life 100,000 years ago. His skillful rhetoric and amazing insight alerts us to the fact that this 100,000 year old brain evolved mechanisms for adaptation and survival...

If our non-human primate cousins with which we share 98% of our DNA can use deception that provides others with false information (Cheney and Seyfarth, 1990), kill members of their own species for no reason except war (Goodall 1986), and hide physiological manifestations of anxiety from a rival (de Waal, 1982) why should Homo sapiens not process these same qualities. Well, of course they do as Mr. Jacobs so aptly points out...

What Don Jacobs has done in this chapter that no one else has is bring forth the astounding theoretical evidence of psychopathology as an adaptive mechanism.

I applaud this insight."

Peer Review: Dr. Susan Wallace
Associate Professor (retired)
Baylor University


Today, issues surrounding the scientific theory of evolution and evolutionary development—Evo-Devo—has no logical reasons whatsoever of being issues at all. If issues exist, they must be emotional or due to misunderstanding. What does all this “evolutionary talk” have to do with criminal mind analysis in the 21st century neuroscience? It has a lot to do with it, but first a look at what makes scientific theory so simple and so changeable.
—Don Jacobs
________________________________


Simple & Changeable Beauty of Scientific Theory

According the Kenneth Miller (2007) in Finding Darwin’s God, evolution is both a theory and a fact. As a theory, it has been denigrated and misunderstood from the day Darwin allowed the contents of Origin of Species (1859) to spill into publication, thereby sending his life’s work into the atmosphere of public opinion and peer review. Through it all, and nearly 150 years later, the theory and fact of evolutionary development (Evo-Devo) is today the backbone of modern biology.
However, even this could change, but not likely.
“In the real world of science, in the hard-bitten realities of lab bench and field station, the intellectual triumph of Darwin’s great idea is total. The paradigm of evolution succeeds every day as a hardworking theory that explains new data and new ideas from scores of fields. High-minded scholarship may treat evolution (and it should) as just another scientific idea that could someday be rejected on the basis of new data, but actual workers in the scientific enterprise have no such hesitation—they know it works as a historical framework that explains both present and past.
—Kenneth Miller
Finding Darwin’s God (2007)
.

That’s the simple and changeable beauty of scientific theory. Theory is not carved into stone tablets. With fresh scientific insight, theory changes until it becomes as sure as gravity, an indisputable, rock solid fact. Today, more scientists than not, agree that Evo-Devo is rock solid. Many citizens from all walks of life, are still unsure, or dodge the issue completely (as I did for 40 years); some contend that “evolution is just speculation” or “evil,” while others aligned with a scientific pedigree summarily agree “if it’s a theory, it’s a really good one”.

Maybe it’s time to get over all of the histrionicism of theory versus rock solid and move forward into the wonders of 21st century neuroscience. This can done by observing a lingering fact: Natural scientists have documented that living is a natural biological process that embraces modification, variation, and change. That’s evolution in a nutshell. No more, no less.
Modification

Ironically, this same lineup of evolutionary “first teamers”—modification, variation, and change—can be applied to another less understood construct known as psychopathy. Joined to the hip of Evo-Devo, it can be wrapped around a compelling theory to explain how individual brains come equipped by their genes to thrive and survive. More moderate versions of psychopathy may survive just north of what’s legal, or maybe not.

But first, let’s talk about a lightening rod.

In the past and continuing today, this natural biological process of change through modification has been, and continues to be, a lightning rod for those who are simply ill-informed, or those laden with personal beliefs and emotional agendas far afield from natural cause and effect—the twin pillars of science.

First off, let’s straighten out one of the most misunderstood Evo-Devo faux pas straight away: Homo sapiens (“smart people”) setting atop the food chain, DID NOT descend from apes or monkeys, but Darwin never said they did. Like racial and religious discrimination in western societies, evolution has been plagued by fanatics, radicals, and garden-variety moderate psychopaths; or those simply misinformed who misinterpret scientific theory and spread falsehoods around as though cataloging urban legends.

Evo-Devo: Eventually, We All Die Trying

Let’s take the pathway that evolution is a theory, and a really good one. Fundamentally, the theory of Evo-Devo is about three BIOLOGICAL processes amenable to modification in living tissue, namely,
• Heredity. Heredity injects genetic traits into familial gene pools that pass on traits to progeny generation after generation;
• Natural selection. Natural selection is a biological dynamic that favors helpful traits staying in the gene pool geared toward survival of the fittest;
• Descent by modification. This dynamic is explains adaptability and shows astounding variety in biological tissue of related species

The square peg of biological Evo-Devo was never intended to fit the round hole of theology, creationism, or any variation thereof. One requires biological pedigree while the other is sustained by rigorous, often passionate, belief systems.

Today, natural dynamics of Evo-Devo are robust and found everywhere in nature. Since the process is remarkably slow and tedious, it’s hard to comprehend ramifications in one’s lifetime; to help here are instances of speedy varieties:
• a disgusting worm in its pupa “changing room” morphs into a beautiful butterfly
• a stolen appendage regenerates back to life in a few weeks after a sea crab’s legs are separated from its body by the talons of a predatory bird
• birthdays chronicle how individuals age and change in physical and mental ways.

When genetically “selected” for long life, old timers get wrinkled and stooped nearing 100 years of age as bodily tissue wilts and brain tissue dements; genetic “good luck” allows some to continue, while others “died trying”.

Eventually, we all die trying to live.

Again, evolution is not a menace to celestial, theological, philosophical, or teleological (or an end-all debate issue) realms; it’s about a natural, biological process observed in living tissue documented in bones.
Beliefs Trump Science

Why would opponents of Evo-Devo (and its upstart sidekick, evolutionary psychology) try to make evolution more than it is? The answer is deceptively simple: it’s why beliefs trump science.

So, beliefs exude more powerful effects than facts?

Here’s a good example: smokers who know beyond any reasonable doubt that habitually smoking those disgusting ‘coffin nails’ will eventually kill them, so why not do the simple thing and just quit? Reason: smokers’ don’t want to. Harmful addiction aside, they have developed an emotional connection to the cylindrical tubes of nicotine-laced tobacco. The sensation that the poison (nicotine) produces becomes integrated into personality like a living appendage; it becomes part of the living tissue of brain at receptor levels. Just try telling a smoker otherwise; they get very defensive and very nasty, very quick.

So, beliefs become connected to emotion and reside in the brain and at one end of the spectrum of human experience, while theory and science are joined to the synapse of reason and logic and reside at the opposite end.
Earth’s Fossils: A Matter of Record

As all Homo sapiens should know, the study of evolutionary biology began in the mid-nineteenth century (1850s) with research into the earth’s fossil record suggesting diversity among living organisms. In the intervening years, evolutionary biologists (and increasingly, evolutionary psychologists) developed and tested theories to further explain cause and effect in species-wide variation—variation so striking it’s observable in side-by-side comparisons by anyone who cares to notice.

By empirical methods alone, scientists were summarily convinced that organisms did in fact change over time. Changed from what? This implies descent from a prior condition, that condition being common ancestors. Over extended periods of time, the fossil record documented this evidence beyond question—that’s stone cold fact, not theory. Biological evidence has today transformed evolution into a biological lab and fossil gathering field science—a kind of forensic fossil science. As everyone knows, life, at times, becomes violent when trying to survive; therefore, fossils have similarities to crime scenes.

In the early days of Evo-Devo, the mechanism driving species’ change and diversity remained unclear. Then, almost simultaneously, the theory of natural selection was independently proposed by Charles Darwin and fellow naturalist Alfred Wallace. Natural selection, a neuro-adaptive process, determines biological variation in light of helpful traits becoming more common in the genes (genotype—one’s inherited genes) in deference to harmful traits in phenotypes—observed physical characteristics—that may or may not encourage species to thrive and survive.

Advantageous traits, therefore, are more likely to be repeated. Natural selection is the biological process that drives and reinforces helpful traits—characteristics that increase chances of survival by passing on helpful genes to succeeding generations through familial gene pools.

Therefore, Evo-Devo can be summed up as descent through modification of living tissue guided by natural selection driving the engine of development over time. In contrast to natural selection, another genotype possibility, genetic drift, is a pure chance roll-of-the-dice, whether or not a given trait will be scattered into one’s gene pool; yet another way to explain biological diversity.

How could naturalistic and developmental aspects of species survival be outrageous or blasphemous to anyone? To borrow a college campus “map of buildings” metaphor, cherished belief systems reside in one building on campus—the theology building—while theory and science reside in another—the science building. Students freely walk across campus to receive instruction in both, one, or neither. One discipline—Evo-Devo—demonstrates how we biologically thrive and survive, while the other extols the virtues of being favored in created by a supreme and how personal choices determine, in part, our address for eternity.

Life is too grand (and short) to put every divergent idea into a cognitive “pressure cooker” for the sake of winning an argument (who’s right or who’s wrong). Ultimately, it wastes living time. What of substance has been accomplished by all the bickering over Evo-Devo?

As descent by modification aligns with biological sciences in living organisms, it does not apply or fit anywhere else in modern discourse, nor should it. It’s a gene thing. It’s a double helix Crick and Watson, DNA thing. It’s what allows one of psychology’s new products of mind, evolutionary psychology, to finally become a branch of neuroscience and part ways forever with the gothic novelist, Sigmund Freud, on the one hand, and pop psychologist Dr. Phil on the other.

Developmental modifications produced in any one generation (or over many), are indeed minuscule; but, differences accumulate over long spans of time (millennia) show substantial and observable modifications in a given species—a process that can result in the emergence of an entirely new species. That process is a logical outcome of natural modification in biological development. Life cannot survive and thrive without change! Imagine infants retaining their small and underdeveloped bodies and brains well into their 20s? Change is absolutely necessary as there’s always a next phase in development.

Physiological similarities among species suggest that all known species are descended from common ancestors developmentally “sculptured” through the biological process of gradual divergence. This is the crux of Evo-Devo. Therefore, over many generations, adaptations occur through a combination of successive, small, and often random changes that tend to encourage variations best suited for survival.

Since we’re living in a natural environment with competition at every turn, humans need as many biological advantages as possible to survive and thrive or, we “die trying” just like dinosaurs.

At the end of the day, Evo-Devo is nothing more than a neuro-adaptive, biological process of genetic inheritance that constantly introduces common or rare variations (gene mutation or genetic recombination) producing astounding variety. This does not threaten cherished belief.

Darwin’s Dilemma

In 1859 upon publication of Origin of Species, the fossil record was poorly understood as Darwin himself acknowledged: “Lack of transitional fossilization is the most obvious and most grave objection against my theory.”

Even Darwin acknowledged his own theory as theoretical. Today, of course, the fossil record of evolutionary change is evolution’s most compelling and affirming argument. In fact, Archaeopteryx, representing a classical transition between dinosaurs and birds, appeared just two years later in 1861 from Origins publication date of 1859. Many more transitional fossils have since been discovered and are considered other examples of the abundant evidence of how major groups of species are tangentially related and documented in transitional fossil remains.

The real story leading up to publication of his theory at age 50 years of age showed that Darwin (February 12, 1809 to April 19, 1882) was afraid to publish his landmark comparative biology book, On the Origin of Species (1859). He held on to what his research told him from over twenty years of gathering samples of beetles and everything else he could catalogue. Recipient of a theology degree himself, he once considered the ministry, but being a naturalist was his passion, so he followed his emotional connection.

Darwin’s greatest fear was the misinterpretation of his findings, which is exactly what happened. Again, we did not evolve from apes or monkeys, a preposterous and dead-wrong interpretation. In fact, we evolved AWAY from them, a fact that should be great news to those still fuming over the mere mention of the most misinterpreted word in the history of linguistics.

More than any one single factor, the loss of his daughter at age ten, moved him to such grief that the gamble of unleashing his theory could be tolerated; how could grief from his writings be more palpable than the loss of his beloved child? This one event changed him forever. He went ahead with Origins.

Yet, even in Charles’ lifetime, the gamble proved to be a worthy one. Everywhere, scientists overwhelmingly accepted the scientific validity of Origins; today, Evo-Devo has become the central organizing principle of biology driving research and providing a unifying explanation for the diversity of biological life on earth.

Upon his death, Darwin was entombed in Westminster Abby next to Sir Isaac Newton, who are universally considered by scholars and educated members of the general public to be two of the most influential men in history of human thought.

Evolution also documents the importance of brain nutrients: good nutrition, physical activity, bonding through socialization—components that promote healthy offspring that grow even stronger in loving families. In the process, good genes passed on generation after generation continues to survive and thrive in those individuals. In the end, Life finds many ways to survive—success or failure of which—is ultimately documented and preserved in the earth by anthropologists and archeologists.

That’s the beauty, simplicity, and changeability of scientific theory.
“Less than half of the U.S. public believes that humans evolved from an earlier species.”—Kenneth Miller in Finding Darwin’s God.

Evo-Devo, Evolutionary Psychology, & Psychopathy

“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important than research. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. {If I may, “capacity of gradation” is precisely the point of the “mental power” of psychopathy for the sake of survival.}
—Charles Darwin

The quote above forecasts what has been hidden in plain sight over millennia. We can only scratch our heads in collective amazement: “How could we have we missed it”? One plausible answer for not making the connection earlier might be a kind of negative halo effect associated with all the flack that continues to swirl around anything remotely associated with evolution; a fact not lost on evolutionary psychology, a struggling academic relative to Evo-Devo and neuropsychology.

First, to set the stage for the conclusion of this pivotal chapter; let me offer an example, prefaced by a question:

In the struggle to thrive and survive, which of the following individuals would most likely survive?
• Would it be Lex, a person filled with narcissism and grandiose entitlement, who ultimately cares about no one but himself? He hides his true feelings under a handsome veneer using deception and lying to manipulate outcomes.
• Or is it Rex who is filled with empathy for the trials and tribulations of fellow humans? He goes out of his way to help others ease tears and fears of living?

Asked another way, who is the most vulnerable in a dangerous society characterized by competition and the absolute need to adapt to survive?

Recall that Rex puts himself last and the interests of others for whom he cares about, first. Recall that Lex displays only superficial interest in others while secretly targets others as prey by a carefully crafted persona of deception intended to manipulate other with compulsive lies.

The answer is easy—the person most likely to thrive and survive into old age is Lex—the individual displaying characteristics of psychopathic personality. This is true, of course, unless he never learns from experience (which some psychopaths never do) and becomes “unsuccessful” psychopaths.

Like everyone else, over my entire career in higher education spanning almost 30 years as a psychology professor, I had been trained to perceive psychopathologies, such as depression and anxiety, and more profound dysfunctions such as personality disorders, as dysfunctions by virtue of criteria within the pages of the DSM.

But missing from this academic training was the fact that I never understood evolutionary theory, not really. So, recently I started to wonder what if some of the characteristics in personality disorders were not disorders at all but neuro-adaptations mandated by survival strategies genetically packed within the brain against the competitive slings and arrows of life? Up against Evo-Devo and on balance from the new 21st century tools of criminal mind analysis, connecting all three together—evolutionary development, evolutionary psychology, and spectrum psychopathy—comprise the glue of neuro-adaptability.

Only appearing to care about others arm individuals with a deceptive ruse hiding darker intentions; gaining advantage (or getting ahead) by manipulation and subterfuge. Who’s more likely to survive? Predator or prey?

Look no further for examples than normal children and adolescents.

How narcissistic and self-absorbed do they appear? Five year-olds have to be taught to share, especially boys. Adolescents wear their narcissism and entitlement as “tribal badges.” From 2 year olds to 21 year olds, behavior characterized as mild can be documented everywhere.

For example, writing a personal biography about oneself was one of my longest running assignments for students in Introductory Psychology. I must have read 150,000 papers through the years. Students were instructed to share influences in their lives that they considered influential in how they viewed themselves. Lying and deception were common themes in biography, for instance:
• How parents had lied to them about certain events in their past (such as out of wedlock pregnancies).
• How students lie to parents about what they really did at parties versus what they told them.
• How “two-faced” friends spread lies to bring “friends” down
• How a boyfriend or girlfriend lied repeatedly about involvement with others.
Parenting-In and Parenting-Out
Must mild to moderate psychopathy be “parented-out” somewhat in childhood with firm and consistent discipline to guard against the brain developing more moderate versions? Also, does learning to get away with lies make deception, ironically, a positive personality trait? Might adolescents get really good at deception? How many troubled teens—deep into addiction, lying, stealing, elopement from school—must ultimately be turned over to agencies after fed-up parents throw in the towel on their own children?

It appears from anecdotal evidence alone that adolescents can get so entrenched in tribal kinship, punctuated by psychopathy among high school peers, they lose themselves. Parents and school administrators must stand resilient with courage to show them the way home.

Why would young adults (20s to 30 years of age) with brains naturally wired with narcissism and entitlement (and perhaps coddled as “the favorite child”) desire to change circumstances in adulthood? They have learned by now (as charming cons) they are far better equipped to survive in a highly competitive and dangerous world armed with deception than doing an “about face” and telling the truth.

Due to the genetic wiring of a mild psychopathic brain, enhanced by the tribal influence of older peers, young (mild) psychopaths are shown how deception and lies lead to acceptance and popularity (thriving and surviving). In this way, parent and child are dangerously disconnected; some bad decisions are inevitable make parenting of adolescents one of the stressful phases of life.

Coincidental to the connectivity of spectrum psychopathy to Evo-Devo is the perfect match to core premises of evolutionary psychology (Buss, 2001):

1. Manifest behavior depends on underlying psychological mechanisms, information processing housed in the brain, in conjunction with the external and internal inputs that trigger activation. {If I may, this information processing would be a dynamic mechanism strong enough to mold personality, such as psychopathy}.

2. Evolution by selection is the only known causal process capable of creating complex organic mechanisms {if I may, this premise suggests the complex construct (species-wide spectrum psychopathy) could be genetically wired into brains selected for survival}.

3. Evolved psychological mechanisms are functionally specialized to solve adaptive problems that recurred for humans over evolutionary time {If I may, psychopathy solves adaptive problems of living through the strategies of survival by deception evidenced in self-interest, entitlement, and lying that assure success through manipulation}.

4. Selection designed the information processing of many evolved psychological mechanisms to be adaptive influenced by specific classes of information from the environment.

5. Human psychology consists of a large number of functionally specialized evolved mechanisms, {If I may, spectrum psychopathy}; each sensitive to particular forms of contextual input that is combined, coordinated, and integrated with each other to produce manifest behavior.

Adaptive Personality Traits in Everyday Psychopathy

It is our theoretical perspective tied to my Brainmarks paradigm, that mild psychopathy has been there in the brain all along as a normal and neuro-adaptive constituent of brain evolution.
“The consensus among researchers in this area is that psychopathy stems from a specific neurological disorder which is biological in origin and present from birth.” {If I may, I agree that severe varieties (as well as cerebral trauma and developmental glitches) cause severe psychopathy, but mild psychopathy appears to be mandated by survival dynamics.}
—Robert Hare, Ph.D.
“Certainly, the traits and behaviors that define adult psychopathy begin to manifest themselves early in childhood, in some cases as a combination of two diagnostic categories—conduct disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder”.
Violence & Psychopathy
—Adrian Raine Ed. (2001)
Psychopathy of Everyday Life

In Psychopathy of Everyday Life, Kantor (2006) suggests a similar contention that psychopathy of the “everyday variety” (his term) deceives others by carefully crafted deception and thrives just below the radar of criminality; it’s observed everywhere, everyday. However, Kantor stops short of connecting spectrum psychopathy with evolutionary development, as a natural brain condition mandating survival. (There is no reference to evolution in Kanto’s references, nor can similar references be found in Hare’s publications.) But, even in a tangential acceptance of their views, our notion is written between the lines as suggested by Kantor who refers to a quote by Professor Robert Hare in his book, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us:
“Sub-criminal psychopaths are every bit as egocentric, callous, and manipulative as the average criminal psychopath; however, intelligence, family background, social skills, and circumstances permit them to construct a façade of normalcy and to get what they want with relative impunity.”
—Robert Hare, Ph.D.

It is clear from current theoretical and research-oriented literature unsuccessful psychopaths are the ones who attract the most attention from researchers; being unsuccessful, they end up warehoused in prisons and mental hospitals. Safely confined, clinicians meet with them and file reports that rival those generated by personality traits of the highly successful ones—the ones thriving and surviving—often more so, in fact, than individuals whose mild psychopathy has been “parented out”, so to speak.

Clinicians may never meet the ultra successful ones, who in “many-splendored ways” bilk hundreds of investors out of millions before being imprisoned as occurred with investment advisors Bernard Madoff and Alan Stafford. Or, through deception by the con of lying to manipulate—their genetic gift from psychopathy—actively participates in the following everyday activities, often punctuated by outrageous successes and influences:
• Cheating on taxes, if they pay them at all
• Billing insurance carriers for services not actually rendered
• Being professional “hired guns” who can argue just as easily for one side as the other thereby reaping big paychecks
• Religious televangelists who use fear of eternal damnation as a means to a rich and lavish lifestyle admonishing followers with this proviso: “God wants his children to be rich”
• Highly questionable business or marketing practices as a hedge to profiteering such as Anheuser-Busch “sponsoring” fraternity parties and “Drink Responsibly” advertising
• Professional politicians, lawyers, doctors, therapists, coaches, accountants, CEOs, and managers who use deception, masquerading as legitimate practices, so that lies and/or intimidation underlie procurement of a deal, service, or piece of legislation
• Most profiteering can be easily traced to M & M psychopathy
• Neighbors who appear “too good to be true” on the surface, yet who secretly spread hurtful gossip or rumors about neighbors
• Telling “white lies” to appear more trustworthy or honest
• Cheating on a spouse
• Mistreating children, peers, and pets
• Sexual lotharios (or adolescent Don Juan characters) who feign love in return for sexual favors only to abandon prey when a pregnancy occurs
• Substance abusers have been repeatedly shown to be M & M psychopaths
• Self absorbed life styles made possible by media celebrity
• Femme fatales: attractive and seductive females who cry “sexual assault”
• with a celebrity who can pay to keep her quiet
• Poison pen letters sent anonymously where self-righteous indignation is masked by “Christian principles”

With Evo-Devo principles underlying biology and reinforced by evolutionary psychology’s premises, it’s not a big leap in logic to posit spectrum (mild) psychopathy to be a genetic mechanism for adaptation and survival. Ample evidence for this theoretical assertion, some of which was presented above, exists everywhere in everyday life.

It is our view that pathology enters the equation with severe versions of psychopathy where psychopathy is mixed with violence and/or sexual sadism where violent psychopathic predators prey on others conning them out of their lives. This extreme version of psychopathy represents a perversion of nature’s intent.

The Late Arriving Prefrontal Cortex and Consequences

What genetic process might the brain engineer internally to stop the advance of psychopathy into young adulthood, especially in reference to rearing children? The answer is the maturation of the orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex. This may not occur until mid-20s to early 30s. My former student, now collaborator and colleague, Ashleigh Portales reaches a similar conclusion in her excellent paper closing out the chapter.

Behind the Monsters’ Eyes

The Role of the Orbitofrontal Cortex in Sexually Psychopathic Serial Crime

By: Ashleigh Portales Edited by: Don Jacobs
Decision Science News (2006) defines the orbitofrontal cortex as
“a small area of the brain located just behind the eyes. It is involved in cognitive and affective functions such as assessing emotional significance of events, anticipating rewards and punishments, adapting behaviors to changes in rule contingencies, and inhibiting inappropriate behaviors.”

In the dynamics of the prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is the decision-maker, deciding whether or not to carry out the plans brainstormed in the adjacent dorsolateral cortex after emotional input from the ventromedial region.

As stated by Mackenzie, (Jacobs & Mackenzie, 2006) “individuals who have had damage to [this] area can observe social situations, but fail to respond to these situations in an appropriate manner.” Given this information, it is easy to see the implications of the OFC’s involvement in violent varieties of predatory psychopathy observed in adults with OFC lesions and other issues not the least of which might be lax parenting.

The Making of a Psychopath

In courtrooms and clinics across the globe, the debate has a long and drawn out conundrum over the cause of psychopathy: Is it due to nature or nurture? Are psychopaths born with genetically inherent tendencies or made by socialization in milieu? The most logical answer has always been both. While a person may be born more prone than another to develop a psychopathic personality, the way in which they are raised and their experiences in the world could trigger those already primed switches within their genetic code to produce what popular culture knows as a serial killer. This assertion is duly supported by research in the area of the orbitofrontal cortex.

Regardless of the severity, my theoretical position is psychopathy was already there from birth.

In his landmark neuroimaging study of 41 murderers, Dr. Adrian Raine found that, in an overwhelming majority, the prefrontal lobes of the murderers were underdeveloped and functioning far below normal levels required for self-responsibility tied to social behaviors. While the reasons for the cerebral malfunction in their brains were various (head trauma, physical abuse, emotional neglect, antisocial (toxic) parenting), the result was expected: stagnated prefrontal development and/or function showing a direct correlation to violent criminality. (Raine, et. al., 1994)

McDonald’s Homicidal Triad is a well known list of three major “red flags” of psychopathy shown in early adolescence: enuresis at an inappropriate age, cruelty to children and/or animals, and obsession with fire-starting (pyromania). While these impulsive actions may originate deep within the brainstem and midbrain/limbic system (MLS), the fact that the brain regions are interconnected one with the other implies dysfunction in the area charged with keeping such impulses at bay: the prefrontal cortex, specifically the orbitofrontal.

Studies have confirmed enuresis as a direct side effect of decreased function or injury to the orbitofrontal cortex. In the 1920s, 30s, and 50s, multiple researchers documented the commonality for patients with known orbitofrontal injuries to freely urinate or even defecate on themselves, not only while sleeping, but while watching television, eating in restaurants, or conversing with friends. More recently, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used fMRI technology to image the brains of (a) six people with and (b) six people without good bladder control while filling and withdrawing liquid from their bladders. Those with good bladder control exhibited increased activity within the orbitofrontal cortex while those without it showed little activity. However, those with poor bladder control did register activity in other parts of their brain, evidence to support the theory that more primitive parts of the brain (for example, the brainstem) may take over with the intended “controller” is inhibited.

The other two criteria of McDonald’s Triad are repeated cruelty to children and/or animals and pyromania, both of which suggest a blatant disregard for consequences of one’s actions. This is often displayed by serial murderers who will return to the scene of the crime despite the knowledge that it is being watched, or who continue in their murderous ways even though they are under surveillance, believing their intelligence to be greater than that of the law enforcement officers In their grandiose sense of entitlement, they think they can get away with anything including multiple murder. But is there more to it than simple arrogance? Research suggests that there is: they have never been conditioned to behavioral suppression with fear of punishment as the consequence. According to Sabbatini (1998),
“normal humans learn very early in life to avoid antisocial behavior because they are punished for it and because they have the brain circuits to associate fear of punishment (feeling emotion) for behavior suppression…When there is no punishment, or when the person is unable to be conditioned by fear, due to a lesion in the orbitofrontal cortex, for example, or due to lowered neural activity in this area, then antisocial personality is developed.”

Due to the effects of antisocial or negligent parenting, they have developed the inability to register the severity of the consequences that their actions could bring and, as a result, their actions are governed by whatever whim they feel at the time. To quote New York University neurophysiologist, Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg,
“Orbitofrontal damage robs people of the ability to anticipate the consequences of their actions.”

Planning Crimes and Selecting Victims
Extensive research has shown that damage to the prefrontal cortex in general results in poor planning and judgment skills, which most would agree applies to just about anyone who seriously breaks the law. But could the word “poor,” when compounded by various risk factors, be substituted with “deviant” planning? Look at the sexual predator. With the planning mechanisms of his (or her) brain set to antisocial tendencies, a violent sexual crime is meticulously designed, step-by-step, in preparation for the day it will be carried over from fantasy into reality.

Running on the tracks of aberrant neurocognitive maps laid down by a steady diet of hardcore pornography and other sexually explicit and degrading materials, they go with what they know. As a corollary to Evo-Devo and psychopathy, sexually psychopathic violence has evolved from foundational brain wiring of M & M psychopathy to a superstructure of obsession mixed with the cement of violence and sexuality without the evolutionary brake afforded by the orbitofrontal cortex.

Once the plan is hatched, the perfect victim must be found. It has been suggested (Jacobs, 2003) that the selection of a specific victim hinges on whether or not that person peaks the phenylethylamine (PEA) of the predator. PEA is the neurotransmitter that creates the “romantic rush” we feel upon initial attraction to an individual. In the deviant mind of a sexual psychopath, the characteristics he desires in a victim triggers PEA. Once he decides, there is no turning back. Evidence suggests that the orbitofrontal cortex plays a large role in the selection of that victim. It has been documented that patients with damages to this area become very stimulus-bound and, once their interest is peaked by a certain object, they cannot shift focus to alternatives. This behavior is congruent with the sexual predator that will stop at nothing but fulfillment of his fantasy once he has set his eye on the prize (his desired victim). Only that victim will do.

Neural imaging studies confirm this assertion finding that the orbitofrontal cortex is activated in subjects who were presented with several desirable food choices and asked to choose the one most desirable to them. The orbitofrontal cortex seemed to be weighing the prospective incentive value of the stimuli in order to choose the one that would produce the most satisfaction. This is just how sexual predators select one victim from a world of many by assessing how well each one will fulfill his fantastic desires. (Arana, et. al., 2003, Tremblay & Schultz, 1999)

The results of this study are supported by a 2004 study on rats with orbitofrontal cortex lesions. These rats were able to resist less desirable but immediate stimuli when they knew that a more favorable alternative with a greater reward would come if they denied their impulses just a little while longer. Even when punishments were assigned to choosing the greater reward, the rats with the OFC lesions were unable to resist choosing (Winstanley, et. al., 2004) suggesting that a psychopath would be unable to resist his specific victimology stimuli regardless of the consequences associated with his choice. It is the orbitofrontal cortex that keeps the predator focused on his victim, according to the dynamic filtering theory proposed by Rule, Shimamura, and Knight (2002).
“The Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) initiates control via reciprocal efferent projections that are used to maintain task-relevant activations and inhibit irrelevant or inappropriate neural activity.”

In a sense, the predator develops tunnel vision, able only to see his chosen course of action with the chosen victim on center stage. Thanks to his orbitofrontal cortex, which is already predisposed to sexually deviant stimuli, all other distractions are inhibited from reaching his attention until he completes that which he has set out to do.

The Thrill of the Kill
For the sexual predator, the actual commission of murder is the magical point where fantasy meets reality. Like all other aspects of his crime, this too can be scientifically linked to dysfunction in the orbitofrontal cortex. As reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry,
“patients with orbitofrontal lesions displayed behaviors that were more impulsive and inappropriate.” (Berlin, et. al., 2005) There is no behavior more socially inappropriate than the sexual torture, mutilation, and murder of an innocent victim. Also in the Berlin study, those with orbitofrontal lesions reported a faster perception of time (overestimated time) than did the healthy comparison subjects. Many serial killers have reported an unclear perception of the passing time as they committed their murders, almost as if they blacked out or were in a trance.

Interestingly, the orbitofrontal cortex may have a connection to yet another, more uncanny aspect of sexualized serial crime. In many cases, the offender will cannibalize parts of his victims either in an effort to keep some sort of a “trophy” with him or to completely control and devour the symbolic will and resistance of the victim. As reported by Joseph (2000), orbitofrontal damage can have adverse affects on the appetite. Some patients experienced insatiable cravings for all sorts of food, stuffing themselves even to the point of death, while others experienced the need to eat “non-nutritive objects.” It is not a large jump to see the correlation between these results and the need of a predator to cannibalize of his victims. Maybe, given the knowledge that the killer’s prefrontal cortices are functioning abnormally, these bizarre behaviors become logical.
Aftermath: No Regret and No Recovery

In a study by Camille, et. al. (2004), regret is defined as
“a cognitively mediated emotion triggered by our capacity to reason counterfactually. Regret is an emotion strongly associated with a feeling of responsibility.”

Sexual psychopaths do not experience this common human emotion because they do not feel that what they did was their fault; the victim had it coming. In the Camille study, subjects who had orbitofrontal lesions did not report feeling regret over their choices regardless of the outcome. When they did report experiencing emotion, it was with considerably less contrast than that seen in the normal test subjects. This effect of orbitofrontal dysfunction is mirrored by the Dull Hypothesis (Jacobs, 2006) which accounts for an “under-stimulated psychopath brain by a genetic predisposition for low autonomic arousal threshold.”

Psychopaths simply do not experience emotion the way normal individuals do, and lack the capacity either to perceive how their actions affect the lives of others, or to care how it affects them. Self-stimulation is their only concern.

Due to the fact that the brain does not regenerate, by the time the psychopath kills his first victim, he is too old (and by then too deep into severe psychopathy) to ever develop the brain regions in which he is lacking. Therefore, there is no chance that he will ever begin to feel the emotions of he now lacks. There is no hope of recovery or rehabilitation. Talk therapy actually make them worse.

From Samenow, (1987), it is impossible to be rehabilitated to something one was never habilitated to in the first place. However, because they are psychopathic and therefore inherently crafty cons, they have the ability to exhibit what is defined in the prison system as “good behavior” in order to obtain an early release so they can resume the only activity that brings them the perverse pleasure they crave: conning another person out of their life. As quoted in Joseph (2000), “if a patient (or orbital-lesioned animal) is purposefully distracted, e.g. via a novel stimulus, this pattern of attention is momentarily halted and the ability to shift response and attention is briefly regained.” However, evidence suggests that once the strict pattern of purposeful distraction is gone the focus returns again to the initially desired stimuli. This is perfectly applicable to prison life. When placed in a highly structured environment with no available source of stimuli, a psychopath often functions as a model prisoner, deceiving authorities into believing he is a changed man who is sorry for what he has done. Yet once he is released into society, he will return as quickly as possible to the stimulation his brain was always conditioned to: serial sexual homicide. Because brain anatomy is at the core of behavior, the rapacious mind will always be rapacious.

In the current age of neuroscience, it would be analogous to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand to deny the role of the brain and its anatomy in behavior, especially behavior that is sexually psychopathic in nature. Research has shown that right behind the eyes of the psychopath, which have ironically been romanticized as the windows to the soul, lies the orbitofrontal cortex, a prime agent in the development of psychopathy and the exhibition of its related behaviors.

Evidenced by the research of Dr. Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD, the prefrontal regions of the brain are the last to develop, and extensive evidence exists to show that the brains of sexual predators, for any of a myriad of reasons, never reach that final, most crucial stage in neurological development. According to Canadian scientist Dominique LaPierre, “Both the psychopath and the orbitofrontal (or ventromedial frontal) patients show an exaggerated preoccupation with sexual matters, acting in a promiscuous and impersonal maladaptive way. Both are remarkable for their lack of social and ethical judgment. Both neglect long-term consequences of their actions, choosing immediate gratification over careful planning”.

What lies behind the eyes of such a monster is the key to his severe psychopathy.

CHAPTER TWO of four chapters

“Sexual Psychopathy”

By: Don Jacobs, Chair

Forensic Psychology & Forensic Science

Weatherford College, Weatherford, Texas USA

djacobs@wc.edu

This Chapter addresses:

Psychopathy & Sexuality

Violent Criminal Psychopathy

Profundity of Sexual Psychopathy

Joel Rifkin: Sexual Perversion



"It is worth noting that the historical link between psychopathy and violence is not peculiar to Western psychiatry. Indeed, psychopathy is a disorder that apparently occurs in every culture, and the potential for violence usually is considered symptomatic of the disorder”.

Violence & Psychopathy
Adrian Raine (Ed.)

________________________________________________

Rewording the above quote to maximize our theme of adaptive psychopathy…

“It is worth noting that the historical link between
psychopathy and adaptability is not particular to
Western psychology. Indeed, psychopathy
as a natural adaptive dynamic occurs in every culture;
without it, the potential of thriving and surviving
would be considered symptomatic of a brain not
fit to survive.”
Don Jacobs (2009)
Architect of the Brainmark Paradigm


Psychopathy & Sexuality

The relationship between extreme psychopathy and sexual offending has been empirically established, but is little understood (Meloy, J. Reid, 2002). The construct of spectrum psychopathy—a psychological theory of deception in personality masquerading as normalcy, expression of which, is due to a variety of related influences with biology the strongest; the construct has a long history of clinical concern, and of late, more precise forensic and research protocol since the 1990s (Millon, Simonsen, Birket-Smith, & Davis, 1998).

This resurgence of information is due primarily to the pioneering research of Robert Hare, Ph.D., author of Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (1993, reissued 1999), a professor at the University of British Columbia, and associates, who followed in the academic wake of Hervey Cleckley’s landmark book, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (1941, reissued 1988 5th Ed).

(Interestingly, Cleckley, an M.D. and psychiatrist, co-write with Corbett Thigpin Three Faces of Eve, a pop culture look at multiple personality disorder (now, dissociative identity disorder. The book became a hit movie upon its release in 1957. Actress Joanne Woodward as “Eve White,” “Eve Black,” and “Jane” earned the Academy Award® as Best Actress for her performance in the film.)

A psychiatric disorder, once characterized as moral insanity (from Latin manie sans delire, or the French folie raisonnante), psychopathy is theorized to be composed of {among other characteristics} aggressive narcissism (Meloy, 1992) and chronic antisocial behavior (Hare, et al., 1990).

Violent sexual psychopaths are indeed a breed apart; they are qualitatively different from any human personality formation on earth; mindless behavior of wolves and sharks rival violent psychopathic behavior.

Perhaps a common dictionary definition best characterizes what unsuspecting persons, perhaps chosen victims, will encounter when they are confronted by the cowardly monster hiding behind the “mask of sanity”:

“Psychopathic personality is an emotionally and behaviorally disordered state characterized by clear perception of reality except for an individual’s social and moral obligations, and often by the pursuit of immediate personal gratification in criminal acts, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.”

Criminal Personality & NCAVC
Continuing our discussion from chapter one of psychology’s new products, in the same decade that Samenow was doing his pioneering research into criminal personality, John Douglas (1977) became a member of the FBI’s new Behavioral Science Unit. Teaching applied criminal psychology at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia his audience was comprised of FBI agents and police officers from across the nation. Subsequently, Douglas created and managed the FBI’s Criminal Profiling Program and later became unit chief of the Investigative Support Unit of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC).

Traveling transcontinental instructing police officers and detectives in the latest FBI criminal apprehension techniques (called “crime schools”), Douglas and fellow agent Robert Ressler, began interviewing incarcerated violent sex offenders to determine personality characteristics. Gathering this data had never been attempted before. This study produced inductive evidence—a database of habits, patterns, parental influences, social and incarceration histories, mental health factors, and addiction—that could be applied to larger populations in the future. While deductive logic (based upon educated guesses—the method of Holmes) is good, inductive evidence compares a small sample to a larger one to connect know offender characteristics, a step necessary toward empiricism required of hard science.

(Ironically, at the time, the FBI was not initially interested in methods of criminal profiling rather their focus was on apprehension of offenders.) The result of this singular endeavor produced Douglas and Ressler’s book, Sexual Homicide: Patterns & Motives (1988). Soon after, Crime Classification Manual (1992) appeared. Clinical forensic psychologists as expert witnesses in forensic amicus curiae and forensic neuropsychologists armed with brain scans were just around the corner as new products for the 21st century.

In 1995, following retirement from the FBI, Douglas gained international fame as the author of a series of books tracking serial killers with information considered to be some of the most insightful works written on the minds, motives, and operation of society’s most elusive predators.
Accuracy in Profiling

The FBI foursome of Teten, Mullany, Douglas, and Ressler were responsible for the accuracy that today is commonplace in criminal profiling. In 1973, they needed one blockbuster case to draw attention to criminal profiling as a viable investigative tool. (A similar case would be played out on a worldwide stage six years later when John Douglas and fellow FBI agent Roy Hazlewood would proffer an accurate profile of the serial killer of young black youths in Georgia (Atlanta Child Murders,1979-1981). Atlanta resident Wayne B. William was identified as the serial murderer from an extremely accurate profile. He is now on death row.)

Prior to that seminal event, in 1973, a young girl was abducted as she slept in a tent in the Rocky Mountains. The FBI-inspired profile declared the abductor to be a young white male, likely a Peeping Tom, who sexually mutilated victims to harvest body parts as souvenirs. The accuracy of the profile led to the arrest of David Meirhofer, a local 23-year-old single male who was a suspect in a similar case. Even though Meirhofer killed only two victims, he became recognized as the first psychopathic serial killer to be captured due to an accurate profile.

Showing the evolution of this new investigative tool, criminal profiles were once called psychological profiles and later psycho-behavioral profiles in the movie Silence of the Lambs. Today, by FBI standards, a killer must kill three or more victims with cooling off periods in between to be correctly called a “serial killer”.

Intermittently, in 1974, homicide detective Robert Keppel used profiling methods to aid in the capture of serial killers Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, (the identification of which had stressed out profiler John Douglas with a viral infection almost costing him his life.)

Specifically, the profiling team of Douglas and Ressler became well-known among the early founders of criminal profiling. In the early 1980s, Ressler and Douglas interviewed thirty-six (36) incarcerated serial killers as part of their coast-to-coast “crime schools” mentioned above. They succeeded in discovering parallels between criminal mens rea (sexually-driven motives) and horrendous, often “toxic” parental-child upbringing as well as other familial and social factors. Douglas and Ressler were the first to interview, study, and apply what they deducted from convicted serial, sexual predators creating the “organized” and “disorganized” typologies still in use today.

Ressler, Douglas, and Hazlewood, and others were instrumental in Vi-CAP startup (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) consisting of a centralized computer database of information on unsolved homicides. Knowing the nomadic lifestyle of serial killers who often kill a “string of strangers” with no apparent motive, similarities in personality began to arise as well as victimology and MO—modus operandi). The goal of Vi-CAP is to watch for pronounced similarities even though they occur across different jurisdictions and across the nation.

Ressler retired from the FBI in 1990 and is the author of best-selling books on sexually psychopathic serial killers. He remains active on lecture circuits providing insight into criminal minds to students, new FBI agents, and police officers.

The perfect segue from criminal psychology into forensic psychology came from this rich tradition of reliance upon both inductive and deductive logic connecting mens rea with the crime (actus reus) merging at horrific crime scenes. All of which is sure to enter criminal court. Recall that where psychology and law interact, forensic psychology is always there. When victimology, MO, and signature—the cri de coeur or emotional connection from offender to victims—are infused into the investigation, the chase is on in what becomes a strategic chess game of wits between the good guys and the bad guys.

Violent Criminal Psychopathy

“What is missing in psychopathy are the very qualities that
allow a human being to live in social harmony.”
—Robert Hare

Toward the close of the 1990s, it became the consensus of researchers that the roots of violent psychopathy were due to a severe, underlying psychopathic personality disorder. It was considered pervasive enough to be conceptualized as the most severe example of spectrum psychopathy—the continuum (gradation) that produced garden-variety (mild to moderate versions) to the severe variety—the violent and sexually psychopathic serial killers.

Yet, ironically, the DSM-IV-TR (2000) does not address criteria in the differential diagnosis of Psychopathic Personality Disorder directly; in fact, the word ‘psychopathy’ is mentioned once under Antisocial Personality Disorder and not listed at all in the glossary. Instead, diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder is listed and often confused with the construct of spectrum psychopathy and of course violent sexual psychopathy.

As previously mentioned, from experience with the psychopathy construct, we know that Psychopathic Personality Disorder is not the same quantitatively as Antisocial Personality Disorder, not by a long shot.

Based upon a study that appeared in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Vol. 66/3: The “Polymorphously perverse psychopath: Understanding a strong empirical relationship (2002) by J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D., the following behavioral characteristics are known to lie behind spectrum psychopathy, pronounced and robust in severe varieties of violent sexually psychopathic serial criminals.
1. It is well known by researchers and clinical forensic psychologists that psychopaths do not emotionally bond to mates as normally observed in committed relationships. Instead, sexual victimization is the overriding intention while mate and parental responsibilities are ignored or marginalized.
In his early attachment research, John Bowlby labeled such individuals “affectionless” (1944). The modus operandi of psychopaths in these matters is documented and predictable—they abandon numerous children of self-absorbed sexual liaisons so that moms are left alone in single-parent, broken homes. One of the first clues that relational bonding will never be consummated with a psychopath is the red flag of constant bickering and verbal (possibly physical) triads with jealousy a constant theme. Also, sexual behavior gradually becomes more sexually perverse often by demands for anal intercourse.

2. Although not initially shown or suggested in demeanor, psychopaths eventually display a callous disregard for the rights and feelings of others (Hare, 1991). If social bonding suggests the ability to empathize, both are lost on the psychopath. An extreme (and violent) example of callousness is pathological sadism where pleasure is derived from a victim’s suffering and degradation, yet another red flag.
Psychopaths attempt to control, not affectionately relate, to others; therefore, it is predictable that psychopathy and sexual sadism would be positively correlated. Criminal sexual sadists prefer anal intercourse (Dietz, et al., 1990), a sex act that dominates and controls another from behind to further dehumanizes victims; this is directly opposite the preferred sexuality of normal adults, where face-to-face intimacy stimulates emotional exchange (Janus & Janus, 1994).

3. Interdisciplinary research over the past 50 years confirms that psychopaths as a group are sensation-seekers. (Quay, 1965, Eysenck, 1967; Farley & Farley, 1967; Hare & Cox, 1978; Zuckerman, 1978). They often engage in dangerous activities in preadolescence and adolescence. This characteristic is likely due to peripheral autonomic under-stimulation or hyporeactivity (Hare & Cox, 1978). This biological predisposition predicts early onset, violent criminality in adults (Raine, Venables, & Williams, 1990). It provides incentive for forbidden and risky sexual adventure so appealing to the brain of violent sexual psychopaths, with serial rape and pedophilia as examples.

4. Grandiosity, evident in the inflated sense of self-worth in psychopathy, and the fuse to entitlement is the banner (and red flag) of pathological narcissism. Entitlement is the deep-seated feeling that psychopaths have the right to take whatever they desire from victims, including their lives. A grandiose sense of self-worth is showy, ostentatious, pretentious, and ultimately a deceptive ruse designed to attract attention to one’s self, or to demonstrate how much smarter the psychopath is in comparison to everyone else in the room. There is no give-and-take, only “take”, in the orbit of psychopathy; therefore, psychopaths continually manipulate others as accomplished compulsive liars.

Predictably, there is a wide chasm between the psychopath’s real life failures yet reported (imagined or exaggerated) as successes. Grandiosity, entitlement, and compulsive lying project the desire for control—observed eventually in sexual abuse of girlfriends to the abduction and violent sexual sadism characterized in sexually psychopathic serial crime (Dietz, Hazlewood, & Warren, 1990).

5. Sexual predation is inherent in the construct of spectrum psychopathy. In violent sexual psychopathy, researches expect to identify the following characteristics in serial offenders:
• low levels of anxiety and autonomic hyporeactivity,
• chronic emotional detachment (and lack of empathy),
• sensation-seeking,
• a fearless demeanor,
• hiding a manipulative, controlling nature
• focus on deception and compulsive lying,
• criminal versatility,
• lacking guilt or remorse, and
• a shallow affect (often manifested as blunt affect or inappropriate affect).

Novelist Patricia Cornwell states in her book Jack the Ripper: Case Closed:
“These people are extraordinarily cunning and lead double lives. Those closest to them usually have no idea that behind the charming mask there is a monster who does not reveal himself until—as “Jack the Ripper” did—right before he attacked his unsuspecting victims. Psychopaths are incapable of love. When they show what appears to be regret, sadness, or sorrow, these expressions are manipulative and originate from their own needs and not out of any genuine consideration for another creature. Psychopaths are often attractive, charismatic, and above average in intelligence. While they are given to impulse, they are organized in the planning and execution of their crimes. While they continue to harm others right up until they are captured, upon incarceration there is no cure.”

Profundity of Sexual Psychopathy

The art and science of criminal profiling is most useful to criminal investigators when the crime scene reflects a perpetrator with a profound degree of sexual psychopathy. The justification for the efficacy of profiling a select group of crimes will be addressed throughout the material; for the time being, the guiding principles of profiling predators who commit sexually driven crimes display the following psychosexual deviance: Perpetrators (UNSUBs) display a sexually depraved mind mixing sexuality, violence, death, and possibly necrophilia, a severely flawed character absent altruism and restraint (or conscience), and/or the disability of preventing their emotionally-charged imagination from becoming “acting out” behavior and a distinct emotional apathy toward victims.

According to Holmes & Holmes, and verified by FBI statistics, criminal profiling is the most accurate and offers the best chance of targeting the probable offender relative to the following crimes.

1. Sadistic Crimes (often involving torture)
According to Dr. Richard Walter, a forensic psychologist at Michigan State Penitentiary, the “Three Ds” of sexual sadism is the manifestation of psychosexual dysfunction observed in the protocol of “dread, dependency, and degradation” by the perpetrator upon victim. Breaking the victim’s will to resist by sadistic torture as well as breathing life back into the victim with the express purpose of prolonging the rape/torture/degradation as long as possible is a benchmark. When death comes to rapidly or by accidentally delivering a major trauma, the sexual sadist feels cheated and may brutalize the body further with overkill and/or necrophilia.

2. Evisceration
“Jack the Ripper” type crime scenes best exemplifies evisceration defined as disembowelment or removing the entrails or organs of another in slaughterhouse fashion with the total destruction of mind, body, and soul of the victim.

3. Postmortem “slashing, cutting”
Stopping short of evisceration, postmortem “slashing and cutting” alternatively referred to as overkill denote sexual crimes within the context of repressed anger, rage, and hostility observed in mutilation-type crimes such as the first serial psychopath “Jack in the Ripper”. Sexual impotence and/or genital deformity of the UNSUB may be suspected.

4. Pyromania
A malicious fire-starter according to the DSM is a person who experiences “tension or affective arousal before setting the fire and has “fascination with, interest in, curiosity about, or attraction to fire” and receives “pleasure, gratification, or relief when setting fires, or when witnessing or participating in their aftermath”. The DSM stops short of using the words “becomes sexually excited” as a fire-starter but this aspect cannot be ignored by evidence from extreme severe psychopaths (serial killer) who were fire-starters before launching “careers” in serial crime.

5. Lust/mutilation murders
Sexual crimes involving mutilation of the genitals, breasts, or evisceration of internal sexual organs as trophies (or non-sexual organs) comprise the clinical forensic picture of the lust/mutilation murderer driven by rage, impulsive, and lack of conscience or remorse typical of the extreme severe psychopath (serial killer or sexual psychopath).

6. Rape
Through the years, researchers and criminal investigators have variously analyzed rape as a crime of power, control, and degradation but in serial crime such as serial rape and serial murder, rape takes on a strong sexual connotation. When the UNSUB’s signature (or emotional connection to the crime) is uncovered it shows strong elements of sexual dysfunction and deviant cognitive mapping often marked by an obsession or addition to violent pornography.

7. Satanic/ritualistic crimes
Crimes involving satanic worship or “devil worship” crimes are often ritualistic in process showing marked sexual dysfunction (as in the sacrifice of virgins and blood-drinking) and obsession with a nihilistic and sadistic view of life.

8. Pedophilia
The obsession and compulsion to commit sexual acts with children or under-aged teenagers (the DSM’s term is “prepubescent child, generally age 13 years or younger) has long been observed as severe disorder in the DSM and is among the most reviled criminals (even by the prison population) convicted of the crime and set to lockup. The DSM defines a pedophile as a person who “must be age 16 years or older and at least 5 years older then the child”). So-called “pedophilic pornography” contains themes awash with excuses (rationalizations) involving the plethora of sexually arousing activities of pedophiles that purport that sex has “educational value to the child or the child was sexually provocative indicating his/her desire for sexual pleasuring”. The deviant cognitive mapping of pedophiles is confirmed by deviant websites, photographs, and literature recovered at the residence of pedophiles.

Due to the heinous nature of serial crimes indicated above and the societal unrest engendered by serial rapes and murders—rapacious crimes—human predators must be captured and incarcerated for life. There is no treatment.

Sexual Perversion in Joel David Rifkin

By: Ashleigh Portales Edited by: Don Jacobs

Time Span of Crimes

March 1989 to June 28, 1993

Offenses Prior to Serial Murder
Soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman (August 1987)

Quoting Rifkin
“I will not go away as a monster, but as a tragedy.”

Preferred Prey
Rifkin killed drug-addicted prostitutes who were in their twenties and thirties, not because they were prostitutes, but more likely because they were the only kind of women he could attract and ultimately control.
Society’s Outcast

Rifkin was born January 20, 1959 into the Baby Boomer generation in much the same way he would spend most of his life: unloved and unwanted. His mother, who bore him as the illegitimate child of a college romance, gave him up for adoption. By Valentine’s Day, the infant had gone to Bernard and Jeanne Rifkin, a childless couple living in upstate New York who christened him Joel David Rifkin. The Rifkins adopted a daughter three years later, and the seemingly happy family moved to East Meadow, Long Island.

Rifkin began the first grade in 1965, the birth date of GEN Xers. From the very beginning, Joel found school a nightmare. He was an immediate outsider and a favorite target for bullies who called him “The Turtle.” The name came from his slow walk and slouch, which accentuated his neck and head so that it resembled a turtle’s head thrust from beneath its shell. He suffered constant physical assaults and had his head pounded into concrete on more than one occasion. At other times, bullies forcefully stripped him of his clothing in the hallway and left him partially nude. At still other times, they stole his books and lunch.

Joel’s failure to socialize with peers carried over into the classroom where he flunked his courses due to undiagnosed learning disorder (dyslexia), despite a tested IQ of 120. To add insult to injury, Joel’s father was a member of the East Meadow School Board and saw his son as little more than a major disappointment. He often ranted at the boy, “Why can’t you do anything to please me?” Though Joel’s mother shared her love of gardening and photography with him, she was the model of incompetent parenting (emotional apathy) and completely oblivious to the hell her son suffered in school. Later she stated that she just “thought of him as a loner.”

By the time Joel reached high school, things only had gotten worse. One of Rifkin’s many tormentors recalled him as “an abuse unit . . . who was subtly obnoxious . . . his presence annoyed you.” In a desperate attempt to fit in, Joel joined the track team where his only reward was the moniker “lard ass.” Teammates routinely hid his clothes and shoved his head into the toilet. Determined to win over a few friends, Rifkin invited them to his home to drink and watch TV, but as one classmate later stated, “No one wanted to associate with him . . we used him, to be blunt about it . . . he was easy to make fun of.” Abandoning the track team, Joel turned his talent for photography into a position on the yearbook staff where his camera subsequently got stolen. Still he slaved to produce the yearbook, but, despite his efforts, the staff excluded him from the year-end wrap party.

Rifkin failed even more with romance. Rifkin’s track teammates destroyed one date by holding Joel prisoner in the gym and pelting him with eggs. He had to call his father. On another occasion, Rifkin and his date arrived at a local pizza parlor, but school bullies chased them out and pursued them until the couple reached safety inside a public library.

Rifkin’s parents gave him a car in his senior year. While it did nothing to boost his popularity, it did allow young Joel to cruise the streets at night, picking up prostitutes in the nearby town of Hempstead and later in Manhattan. According to Robert Madinich, author of From the Mouth of the Monster,

“Joel’s fantasies included ‘some bondage’ and ‘some rape’ plus ‘a gladiator type thing with two girls that would fight to the death.’ He raped and stabbed women in some daydreams, but his fantasy victims were silent, ‘just passive about it.’”

He fixated on strangling prostitutes after a 1972 viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, loosely based on London’s “Jack the Ripper” homicides of 1888.

Rifkin graduated at the bottom of his class in 1977 and looked forward to the prospect of life after high school, which he assured himself could only get better. Unfortunately, he was wrong. He proved an academic failure again at Nassau Community College on Long Island, where he completed only one course his first year due to constantly skipping class. Rifkin then transferred to the state university at Brockport, where similar behavior as well as rejection by his first real girlfriend resulted in his dropping out. From there, Joel drifted back home to his parents and subsequently failed at a second attempt at Nassau Community College. He again attended only sporadically and earned only twelve total credits before dropping out
of school for good in 1984.
Rifkin’s life continued its downward spiral from there as he bounced from job to job. According to Court TV’s Crime Library,
“poor hygiene, chronic absenteeism, and general ineptitude” blocked the road to advancement. His employer at a local music store described Joel as “a total piece of work—this guy couldn’t even count to ten.”’

Rifkin aspired to be a famous writer, but his bleak verse did not suit publishers. While he actively pursued his interests in photography and horticulture, neither produced a paycheck, and Rifkin soon found himself back at home with his parents. In Joel’s own words,
“I couldn’t put two nickels together,” and most of what he did earn went to prostitutes. “The whole focus of my life was on the streets.”

Even on the streets among the lowest of the low, he proved unfit. On at least a dozen occasions, hookers or pimps robbed him; he fell for the same trick twice from the same girl who made off with his money before having sex with him.

Successive failures spelled depression for Rifkin. The depression deepened, as did his commitment to sexual deviance, when his father committed suicide in 1987 to escape the pain of prostate cancer. In August that same year, Rifkin got arrested in Hempstead after soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman. He escaped with only a fine that, though substantial, suggested to his damaged brain that he could act against society with minimal repercussions.

For a brief period in his life in 1988, Rifkin experienced success in his horticultural pursuits. After graduating with straight A’s from the State College of Technology in Farmingdale, New York, he received an internship at the renowned Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay, New York. His inadequacy with women once again proved his downfall though. Infatuated with a co-worker who did not reciprocate his feelings, Rifkin created an elaborate fantasy affair. Her blatant rejection of his numerous advances finally pushed him over the edge. Payback time had come.

The Outcast Fights Back

Rifkin took matters into his own hands for the first time in March 1989 at the age of thirty. The first murder coincided with the second anniversary of his father’s death and Rifkin later noted that most of his killings connected in some way to a number of personal anniversaries.

During this particular time, his mother was traveling out of the state, and Joel was home alone. While cruising Manhattan for prostitutes, he picked up a woman he remembered only as “Susie.” She asked Rifkin to take her out to buy drugs after having sex because she was a hard-core crack addict. However, Rifkin began beating her instead, later recalling, “I just lost control. I stopped when I got tired.” But Rifkin had “gotten tired” before his victim died. When he attempted to move Susie, she retaliated by severely biting into one of his fingers. Angered, Rifkin began strangling her. This would become the killer’s modus operandi. In Rifkin’s words, he would “just grab and hold on, basically till my hands got tired.” When the girl finally died, Rifkin put her body in a trash bag and cleaned up the mess he had made of his mother’s living room before falling asleep. When he awoke, he took the body in the bag down to the basement where the washer and dryer became an autopsy slab. He dismembered the girl with an X-acto knife, an event that Rifkin recalled was “reduced to biology class.”

Fearing the body still could be identified he then removed the girl’s fingertips and pulled out her teeth with pliers. He placed her severed head in an old paint can and the other parts in various garbage bags before loading them into the back of his mother’s truck. Driving across the state line to New Jersey, Rifkin deposited the head and legs in the woods before returning to Manhattan, where he threw the arms and torso into the East River. He believed that his actions would erase the possibility of detection, and maybe even the crime altogether, but a golfer playing a course that backed up to the New Jersey woods proved him wrong by stumbling upon the paint can containing Susie’s head.

Rifkin closely followed media coverage of the discovery and suffered an anxiety attack when he learned the girl had tested HIV positive. He felt pleased though when police efforts produced no positive identity. “Susie’s” identity and her murder remained unsolved until Rifkin’s 1993 confession.

More than a year passed before Rifkin’s mother left town again, leaving him free to kill again. He chose prostitute Julie Blackbird because of what he called her “pseudo-Madonna look,” and took her back to his mother’s house where they spent the night. Upon awakening the next morning, he beat Blackbird with a table leg and then strangled her. This time, however, he determined that the body remained buried, so he took a trip to the store and returned with cement and a large mortar pan before once again dismembering his victim.

He modified his MO by weighting several buckets with the concrete and placing Blackbird’s head, arms, legs, and torso in separate ones. He then loaded the buckets into his car and drove to Manhattan where he threw those with the head and torso into the East River and dumped the arms and legs into a Brooklyn barge canal. Rifkin’s attempt at concealing his crime worked; no one ever found Blackbird’s body. In fact, authorities only discovered her murder upon Rifkin’s confession and through details written in a diary found in his room.

In April 1991, Rifkin went into the landscaping business for himself and rented a space at a nearby nursery to store his equipment. Though the business proved a failure, the storage area proved the perfect place to keep bodies before permanently disposing of them. However, he would not store his next victim there. He wrapped thirty-one year old Barbara Jacobs in plastic, folded her into a cardboard box, and dumped her into the Hudson River. Rifkin did not dismember her body because he was “put off” by the thought. Though someone found her body, she went unidentified until Rifkin’s confession two years after her death.

A few months after Jacobs, Rifkin picked up twenty-two year old Mary Ellen DeLuca and drove her to a seedy motel. Rifkin says that she rushed through their sexual encounter, complaining all the while. He contends that he asked her if she wanted to die and complied with her affirmative response by strangling her. He alleges she “did nothing, just accepted it.” Her murder was “one of the weird ones.” Because of the public location of her murder, Rifkin feared simply dragging her body across the parking lot to the car. Reenacting a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, he bought a cheap steamer trunk, transported his latest victim to a rest stop in Orange County, and dumped her body there. When discovered on October 1st, the body’s advanced state of decomposition foiled attempts at identification. Authorities buried DeLuca in an unmarked grave, like Jacobs before her, until they learned her identify from Rifkin’s confession. Rifkin used the same trunk for his next victim, thirty-one year-old Yun Lee. He strangled her after she made fun of his inability to attain an erection after he picked her up. Her ex-husband’s identification saved her from an anonymous burial.

“Number six” remained unidentified, as Rifkin could not recall her name. After strangling her during oral sex, he stuffed her body in a fifty-five gallon oil drum and rolled the drum into the East River. Pleased with the success it gave him, Rifkin purchased three more oil drums to serve as the coffins of victims seven through nine. Number seven was twenty-eight year old manic depressive Lorraine Orvieto. Rifkin killed her in December, 1991 and dumped her into Coney Island Creek, where no one discovered her until July, 1992.

One week after the Orvieto murder, on January 2, 1992, thirty-one year old Mary Ann Holloman met her fate at Rifkin’s hands. He dumped her inside her designated oil drum in Coney Island Creek, where someone discovered her two days before Orvieto. However, Holloman’s dental records identified her, and authorities returned her to her family for burial.

The last of Rifkin’s oil drums went to a prostitute he remembered only for her tattoos. Rifkin dismembered her body before disposing of her in Brooklyn’s Newton Creek. Her discovery would not take place until May, 1992, and she would remain unidentified.

Rifkin picked up victim number ten, twenty-five year old Iris Sanchez, on Mother’s Day of 1992. After strangling her during sex, he hid her body under a rotting mattress close to a runway at JFK airport. Police discovered her remains in June, 1993 using a map Rifkin had drawn during his confession.

Soon after Sanchez’s murder, on Memorial Day weekend, Rifkin killed thirty-three year old Anna Lopez and dumped her body along I-84 where a motorist discovered her the next day.

Rifkin had not brought one of his girls home in almost a year. After strangling twenty-one year old Violet O’Neil, he mutilated her corpse in his mother’s bathtub, wrapped the various pieces in plastic, and deposited them in several Manhattan waterways. Her arms and legs appeared in an abandoned suitcase. Thirty-one year old Mary Catherine Williams was a former homecoming queen, college cheerleader, and ex-wife of a pro football player. After failing as an actress in New York, she had turned to drugs and prostitution, which led her to Joel Rifkin on October 2, 1992. He dumped her body in Yorktown where its discovery occurred two months later. Authorities buried her as a Jane Doe. Rifkin’s confession also identified her.

“The toughest one to kill,” twenty-three year old Jenny Soto, broke all ten fingernails in her fight to live, a fight she lost to Rifkin on November 16, 1992. The following day her body appeared in the Harlem River, which authorities identified by her fingerprints taken on a recent arrest.

The first victim of 1993 was twenty-eight year old Leah Evans. Rifkin strangled her after she started to cry when he refused to give her privacy while undressing. He drove to a wooded area in Long Island and buried her in a shallow grave where hikers found her unearthed hand on May 9th.

Rifkin claimed two more victims before capture, one in April and one in June. He strangled twenty-eight year old Lauren Marquez before sex, yet her body, discovered after Rifkin’s arrest, showed signs of battery. Rifkin could not remember beating her.

Tiffany Bresciani was Rifkin’s last. He picked her up in the early morning hours of June 24th, his fourth hooker in half as many days. After strangling her, he stowed her body in the backseat of his mother’s truck and drove home, stopping to purchase rope and tarp. He wrapped her in it and moved her to the truck bed. Immediately upon his arrival home, his mother took her keys from her son and went shopping, never knowing there was a dead prostitute in the back. After his mother retired for the evening, Rifkin relocated Bresciani to a wheelbarrow in the garage where she remained for three days. He then loaded her back into the truck and drove fifteen miles to Melville Public Airport, where he intended to dump the body. This time, however, luck was not on the side of Joel Rifkin.

The Outcast Cast Away

At 3:15 A.M. on June 28, 1993, two New York State Troopers noticed a Mazda pickup truck with no rear license plate driving along Long Island’s Southern State Parkway. The troopers activated their lights in an attempt to make a routine traffic stop. When the driver did not pull over, they ordered him to halt over the loudspeaker. Instead, the truck sped away down the next off-ramp, and the chase was on. The troopers called for backup, and soon five patrol cars joined the ninety mile-per-hour pursuit, which ended when the Mazda’s driver missed a turn and crashed into a telephone poll at 3:36 A.M. The driver did not resist when police removed him from the vehicle. They found an X-acto knife in his pocket upon frisking him. The man’s driver’s license identified him as thirty-four year old Joel David Rifkin of East Meadow, Long Island. The thick layer of Noxzema smeared across the man’s upper lip puzzled officers, as well as the reason he fled to avoid the minor citation for having no rear license plate. They got their answers when, searching for the source of a rather pungent odor, they pulled back a tarp covering the truck bed and discovered the decomposing body of a naked woman. Confronted with the discovery, Rifkin replied, “She was a prostitute. I picked her up on Allen Street in Manhattan. I had sex with her, then things went bad and I strangled her. Do you think I need a lawyer?”

Back at headquarters, Rifkin embarked upon an eight-hour confession, identifying Bresciani as “number seventeen.” Though police never recorded any part of the confession, they took a written transcript as well as various sketches of body locations and victim lists Rifkin made.

Throughout the entire proceeding, Rifkin acted emotionally detached and smiled when describing the most grisly of details, displaying characteristic blunt and inappropriate affects. He responded to questions about how he felt during the murders by indicating he felt no hesitation or remorse. “I’m not sure I felt anything, it’s just something that happened.” He stated that, in the moment of murder, he was “behaving mechanically, autopilot.” When he omitted Williams’ name from one of his lists, it confused police, who falsely elevated the death toll to eighteen. Rifkin found this humorous, saying that “the clumsy cops had counted Williams twice.”

Police obtained a search warrant for Rifkin’s home and served it around 8:00 P.M. that evening. Jeanne Rifkin had no idea what was going on until she saw news reports of her son’s arrest on TV. The search of her residence, specifically Joel’s room, yielded at least two hundred and twenty-eight “trophies” he had taken from his victims, including clothing, jewelry, IDs, and makeup. Investigators also confiscated literature on the Green River Killer and Arthur Shawcross.

Rifkin went on trial for the murder of Tiffany Bresciani on April 20, 1994. He pled not guilty by reason of insanity and, judging by the way he slept and snored through the prosecution’s arguments, he expected to get off. However, prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, who had testified against Arthur Shawcross, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Hinckley, found that Rifkin was “sick but not insane. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he did it.” The jury agreed and convicted Rifkin of murder and reckless endangerment (for the car chase), sentencing him to twenty-five years to life.

In subsequent trials for the murders of Evans, Marquez, Sanchez, Orvieto, Halloman, and “Jane Doe,” Rifkin received one hundred and eighty-three years. The New York Supreme Court rejected Rifkin’s appeal in 2002, and he currently is serving two hundred and three years to life in the Clinton Correctional Facility, isolated high in the Adirondack Mountains. He will become eligible for parole in 2197.
Aftermath

Rifkin has spent most of prison life in solitary confinement, labeled “involuntary protective custody,” where he is confined to his cell twenty-three hours of every day. Here he has amused himself with civil suits filed by the victims’ families. When the Orvieto family sued him for wrongful death, he responded with a handwritten note labeling his victim an AIDS carrier who “may be responsible for the eventual deaths of numerous individuals” and suggesting her surviving relatives shared responsibility for “what might have been.”

Rifkin sells his paintings from prison to compensate his victims’ families. While most are scenes of flowers or wildlife, one work, entitled Guardian’s Failure, depicts an angel weeping over a bare foot clad with a coroner’s toe tag.

Perhaps the greatest irony occurred in August, 1999 when Rifkin revealed to the public his plans for “Oholah House,” a shelter for prostitutes seeking rehab, counseling, medical care, and job training. Rifkin claimed the project was so named because “Oholah” was both the Hebrew word for “sanctuary” and the name of an Old Testament prostitute who suffered a gruesome end. (The spelling of the latter name actually is “Aholah.”) In Rifkin’s own words, this gesture was “a way of paying back a debt, I guess.” This attempt at deception did not fool prosecutor Fred Klein. He had the plan promptly dismissed on the grounds that Rifkin had included in the plans a “Motivation Room” where residents of the house would be “scared straight” by viewing photographs of prostitutes murdered while tricking. His reasoning for such callous treatment: “These girls think, ‘I can’t be touched.’ Well, seventeen girls thought that, and now they’re dead.”

CHAPTER THREE of four chapters


"Res Ipsa Loguitur"

By: Don Jacobs, Chair

Forensic Psychology & Forensic Science

Weatherford College, Weatherford,Texas USA


This chapter addresses:

Psychopathic Personality Disorder

Brakes on Criminality: The PFC

First Degree Psychopathy: Mild Spectrum Psychopathy

Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)

Third Degree Psychopathy: Sexually Motivated Male Serial Killer



Clearing Up the Muck

“In 1930, G.E. Partridge proposed that the title of psychopath be changed to sociopath, for he viewed this illness as a social problem instead of a mental illness. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) acted on this suggestion by officially replacing the term psychopath with the term sociopath. But to this day, the two terms are used interchangeably (Culwell, 1998).
In 1968, the APA again changed the title of this illness and merged the two previous terms—psychopath and sociopath—under the label of antisocial personality disorder (APD). According to the DSM III (1980), DSM III-R (1987), and DSM-IV (1994)—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—diagnostic manuals, which have been used by psychologists and psychiatrists through the years, the antisocial personality disorder refers to an individual "in which there history of continuous and chronic antisocial behavior in which the rights of others are violated" (Culwell, 1998, p.2).
The World Health Organization (WHO) labeled this disorder in the ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, 10 Ed.) as dyssocial personality disorder (Sabbatini, 1998). These terms group the psychopath and sociopath into a single personality disorder—the antisocial—that can be tested and measured.”
—Rebecca Horton (1999)

_________________________________________

Semantics Charade

Historically, it was predictable that two highly political organizations—The American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the World Health Organization (WHO)—would leave academics, clinicians, scientists, and educators confused over diagnostic criteria used to define, categorize, and diagnose potentially violent individuals by a charade of clinical taxonomies—
• psychopathy
• sociopathy
• antisocial
• dyssocial

Experimental neuropsychology (cutting-edge clinical research utilizing high-resolution brain imaging (neuroscans), and reliable psychometrics, such as Hare Psychopathy Checklist) were not so summarily confused. Hard evidence from research does not confound neuropsychologists who pay little attention to the inaccuracies evident in ongoing qualitative differences between psychopathy, antisocial, and dyssocial terminology in the DSM and in The International Classification of Diseases, 10 Edition (ICD-10).

Today, research literature supports the spectrum psychopathy pedigree while the terms “sociopathy” and “dyssocial” wholly reflective of social influences and pop culture zeitgeist, while welcome in discourse, are substantially unnecessary with what we know about psychopathy. So called “interchangeable” terms are confusing and unnecessary.

It’s beyond time for forensic scientists to wake up and smell the human species—a smart, heavy-brained species with survival criteria prewired in the brain that has been and continues to be subject to empirical study. Why would brains not come factory-wired with a neurochemical and cortical advantages for surviving?

Psychopathic Personality Disorder

Criteria for violent psychopathy (Jacobs, 2010) represent a 180-degree gradation away from nature’s strategy of thriving and surviving by committee of facile deception, lying, and manipulation of others. As a disorder and perversion of normal psychopathy, violent sexual predators display a lifelong rapacious mind characterized by violent predatory behavior. As indicated below, criminal minds “marked” with severe gradations of spectrum psychopathy are quantitatively different and far removed from representing the apparently intended brilliance of species Homo sapiens.

Here’s are the major qualitative differences between DSM criteria for “personality” disorders versus spectrum psychopathy from the neuro-adaptive variety across to moderate varieties and terminating with severe psychopathy as a personality disorder using the exact lexicon in the DSM’s personality disorders section on Personality Disorders: “Only when personality traits are inflexible and maladaptive and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute Personality Disorders” (DSM-IV-TR, pg. 686, 2000). This definition of DSM authenticity in diagnostic evaluation of personality disorders (such as Narcissistic, Borderline, or Antisocial personality disorders) entirely misses the mark in all gradations of spectrum psychopathy.

Here’s our argument: First, in mild gradations of psychopathy, the umbrella of deception, intended to manipulate outcomes, is entirely flexible and highly adaptable; this adaptability is characteristic of psychopathy across the spectrum accounting for advantages in survivability. For example, successful con artists thrive and often get monetarily rich with deceptive behavior, while “unsuccessful ones” get caught and pay for their crimes often with a “slap on the hand.”

In severe types, Ted Bundy presented a deceptively engaging persona (a law student on his way to a thriving career in politics). No one but his prey “saw” the real Ted. Months after his capture, former attorneys who knew Bundy said publically “You have the wrong guy!”

If psychopathy were inflexible and maladaptive, it would never serve the brain as an agent in evolution for thriving and surviving.

Psychopathy as a natural condition and as a disorder may never be detected or through use of cleaver ruses may dodge detection for years.

In another extreme example, John Wayne Gacy presented himself as an outstanding and involved citizen as chapter president of his town’s National Organization of Jaycees; he deceived others by seeming to be community involved by employing youthful workers, many of whom ended up dead and buried in the crawlspace of his modest home.

The list of violent psychopathic personalities (especially of the organized typology) contain similar deceptions of engaging and socially adapt individuals appearance-wise, yet all the while, deceiving others out of reputations and/or their lives due to their facile deception as a gift from evolutionary development.

Second, psychopaths across the spectrum are not functionally impaired, nor do they experience subjective emotional distress. Far from it, they feel a grandiose sense of entitlement—a “bullet-proof vest” for life doing whatever they chose feeling guiltless and remorseless in the process; they know “down deep” targeted prey “had it coming”. This psychopathic mindset amounts to the complete phenomenological opposite of the DSM’s definition of personality disorder, for example, antisocial personality disorder, where the antisocial is saturated by subjective distress knowing that capture means “hard time”. The antisocial may feel real regret for committing the crime knowing he faces incarceration yet again.

In contrast, psychopaths remain guiltless, free from the burden of conscience and free to kill again.

While the antisocial variety of criminals often have “careers” punctuated by long stints of incarceration, psychopaths often have long undetected careers, in some cases, spanning thirty years before apprehension as occurred in the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway and others.

Here’s one key to understanding our persistent paradigmatic shift away from accentuating sociologically-inspired etiologies: whatever bad treatment (or good treatment) may have occurred in social milieu including drug abuse, the same influences must still be expressed as chemical analogues of behavior in the brain as fuses to action. So at the end of the day, social factors alone must be merged with the brain’s nature within the construct of spectrum psychopathy.
Brakes on Criminality: The PFC

In normally wired prefrontal cortices (PFC), this region becomes the default setting for mitigating or restraining inappropriate behavior woven into action from emotional and reward centers of the midbrain limbic system—perhaps the prime activation center for evolutionary psychopathy.


Prefrontal Cortices: Orbitofrontal (OFPFC), Dorsolateral (DLPFC), &
Ventromedial (VMPFC)

The adult brain with strong PFC control trumps the dangerous impulsivity of the adolescent-oriented MLS. According to neuroscans of the brain, brainstorming—creating cognitive ideas and then mulling them over—occurs primarily in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) inside the frontal lobes. Adding an additional layer of feelings about possible options comprises the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC); deciding and choosing behavioral action by “doing it” is the function of the orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex (OFPFC).

If psychopathy across a spectrum is indeed wired by gradations into Homo sapient brains from birth, the only sure way to mitigate or lessen impulsivity, narcissism, entitlement, deception, and lying is by precocious development of the PFC and then by degrees, its full maturity with age. By age 25-30, adult responsibility emerges as the way our central nervous system learns from experience through maturation.

To be sure, when crime scene investigators and profilers don’t understand the brain, they really don’t understand the criminal. They fail to account for how powerful psychopathy can be in directing behavior into endless scenarios of lying and deception.

Deviant Sexual Fantasies

While it is true that both psychopathic and antisocial-personality prone individuals habitually perform acts that are deceitful, hurtful, conning, or manipulative for personal profit and pleasure, here’s the difference between severe psychopaths and antisocial criminals: In contrast to the antisocial criminal, the severe psychopath is characterized by possessing deviant sexual fantasies earmarked by obsession, and eroticism often associated with hypersexuality characterizing crimes as sexual homicides committed by serial killers. Interesting, these perverse fantasies have roots in the mildly psychopathic brain as evidenced by the rich imagination of children. Children are notorious for creating imaginary friends and “telling parents things that did not really happen,” further proof of the central importance of fantasies in spectrum psychopathy in early in development.

Neurological glitches suggested by blunt affect (an expressionless face), and/or histrionic affect (or inappropriate facial expressions such as smiling at sad news when an expression of sadness would be appropriate), signal the requisite lack of positive regard for anyone—a kind of misanthropic psychopathy—the hallmark of severe (violent) psychopathy.

Although psychopaths account for about 15 to 20% of the total prison population, they nonetheless, count for more than 50% of violent crimes. In violent crime, learning to see the true self beyond deception is the challenge of modern interdisciplinary forensic scientists.

According to Jose Sanmartin in (Violence and Psychopathy, Raine, Ed., 2001): “Psychopaths have a peculiar, striking affect disorder—superficial pleasantness, facile lying, and the capacity to kill in cold blood. In some cases, cold blood best captures what is most characteristic about the violent psychopath.”

First Degree Psychopathy: Mild Spectrum Psychopathy

Representing evolutionary mandated behavior geared toward survival of the fittest—what we call “First Degree Psychopathy”—absent other pathologies, individuals who present mild gradations of psychopathy possess the prototypical brain best suited to thrive and survive in competitive society. They, themselves would not recognize this powerful evolutionary dynamic inherent in their deceptive charms in social interactions; for sure their own glitter is self-evident—they anticipate getting whatever they want by just being themselves; but in the process they miss the glue, that is, the reason why they’re doing it—they just do what comes natural.

Hubristic Psychopathy

As researchers have consistently shown, psychopathy exists across a spectrum, ranging from the non-violent (or mild) garden-varieties to violent (or severe) types. My term for mild to moderate varieties of psychopathy is hubristic psychopathy. (Hubris is defined as an overbearing arrogance woven into the fabric of personality (and, of course, the brain) characterized by misuses of power—political, celebrity, or otherwise to victimize “prey” for sexual stimulation, or as easy “marks” for financial abuse or philandering escapades.) The recent philandering exploits of pro golfer, Tiger Woods, “living a lie” in his words, is a salient example of hubristic psychopathy. Besides Woods, poster boys for hubristic psychopathy can be visualized to have personality characteristics of Bill Clintonesque persona of lies and deceit characterized his relations with female acquaintances, notably publicized antics with Paula Jones, Jennifer Flowers, and Monica Lewinsky.

Hubristic psychopaths won’t kill you, but they will disgust you…when all the facts are disclosed. Hubristic psychopathy (Jacobs, 2004) shows that not all psychopaths are violent, not by a long shot, but they are deceptive.

In spectrum psychopathy as the gradation dial moves just beyond the moderate varieties, darker designs of personality emerge such as “an abusive nature” or cold-blooded violence without remorse or guilt. The “moderates” in the middle will seldom if ever display physical violence, but may display verbal abusive and become architects of toxic relationships. But seldom are they incarcerated as “unsuccessful psychopaths”. Paul Babiak refers to hubristic psychopaths as “psychopaths in suits” acknowledging deceptively “smooth operators” in corporate America who “smile in your face, then stab you in the back” all the while lying compulsively and stealing whatever they want as observed by “wealth manager” Bernard Madoff who swindled investors out of $65 billion never publically showing remorse.


Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)

Professor Robert Hare, Ph.D. and colleagues are perhaps the researchers most responsible today for our current understanding of spectrum psychopathy. In this second presentation of psychopathic traits, we factor into the standard 20 measurable items Factor I traits (Interpersonal) and Factor II traits (Social Deviance).

Source: Hare psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)

Factor I: Interpersonal/Affective Expression

Factor One Traits
1. Glibness/superficial charm
2. Grandiose sense of self-worth expressed as pompous
arrogance
3. Pathological (compulsive) lying
4. Conning & manipulative
5. Lack of remorse or guilt
6. Shallow affect (lack of emotional depth)
7. Callous & lack of empathy
8. Failure to accept self-responsibility

Additional Factors

9. Promiscuous sexual behavior
10. Criminal versatility

Factor II: Social Deviance

Factor Two Traits
11. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
12. Parasitic lifestyle (living off others)
13. Poor behavioral controls (unpredictability; never learning
from mistakes)
14. Early behavioral problems
15. Lack of realistic, long-term goals
16. Impulsivity
17. Irresponsibility
18. Juvenile delinquency
19. Early exposure to criminal justice system
20. Many short-term marital relationships


Moral Depravity

English physician, J.C. Prichard (1835), viewed psychopathy as “a form of mental derangement in which intellectual faculties were unaffected, but moral principles of mind were depraved or perverted”. Furthermore, he viewed psychopathy as a personality disorder “consisting of a morbid perversion of natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, moral dispositions, and natural impulses without any remarkable disorder or defect of interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusions or hallucinations. Obviously, Prichard embraced the negative symptoms of extreme psychopathy.

Therefore, the violent sexual psychopath is impaired morally, affectively (emotionally), and sexually, but not intellectually. (The connotation of word “moral” in the 19th century denoted more of a psychological implication rather than an ethical one.)

Female Partners of Spectrum Non-Violent Psychopaths

Consensual sex partners to spectrum psychopaths (mild to moderate varieties) may or may not leave, even when sexual abuse or general spousal abuse become chronic. On occasion, psychopaths can show restraint. Even serial killer Ted Bundy’s girlfriend raised her young daughter around the apartment she shared with Bundy. While the girlfriend was often subjected to “kinky sex,” Bundy never harmed her daughter as far as anyone knows.

It took eight years for Mary Jo Buttafuoco to leave her husband Joey after his underage sexual paramour Amy Fisher shot her in the face on the stoop of Mary Jo and Joey’s home. In her book, Getting It Through My Thick Skull (2009) she “tells all”—why she stayed, what she learned, and why millions of people involved with sociopaths (her term) need to know. (A ‘sociopath’ from an earlier section is a similar term from sociology to the preferred term ‘psychopath’). On her website, Mary Jo describes the experiences of her husband, Joey Buttafuoco, an obvious spectrum psychopath, whose affair with Amy Fisher, “The Long Island Lolita”, eventually led to Amy’s attempted murder of Mary Jo:

“My ex-husband, Joey, denied the affair, admitted the affair, went to jail, got out of jail, got caught soliciting a prostitute, went back to jail, got out of jail, got divorced (from me) plead guilty to insurance fraud in California, went back to jail, got out of jail, got remarried (I won't even go there!) violated probation and went back to jail, got out and made a porno tape, so far.

Within the cocoon of violence mixed with sexuality, coercive males report a focus on casual sexual relationships with women. They report a strong sex drive without regard to partner intimacy that are often “short and stormy”; they display authoritativeness, show less empathy and more hostile masculinity, prefer sexual variety and uncommitted sex; they view dating as sexual opportunities (Lalumiere & Quinsey, 1996). All the while, they deceive female prey as committed lovers.

Women who stay with spectrum psychopaths are suspected of displaying characteristics of Dependent Personality Disorder much like co-dependent females who stay with abusive alcoholic husbands, and women who profess love for serial murderers often marrying incarcerated sexual predators (such as Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez) who remain behind bars for life. The women must know deep down they will never be allowed to touch their romanticized husbands.

Could it be that females are capable of doing ANYTHING for love, while males are capable of doing ANYTHING for sex?

Third Degree Psychopathy: Sexually Motivated Male Serial Killer

An Interdisciplinary Monster

By: Ashleigh Portales Edited by: Don Jacobs

Introduction
In 1888, the gas lit fog of London’s Whitechapel district cloaked the identity of a monster who roamed shadowy alleyways in search of the perfect prey. Time and again, daylight cleared the fog to reveal the bodies of prostitutes, murdered and mutilated by an unseen hand. As the aptly named “Jack the Ripper” kept at his gruesome work, fear and fascination spread like wildfire through the city and around the globe. The modern serial killer was born. Ever since, this enigma has held lured the public into its deadly grip and refused to let go. A plethora of books and movies feed society’s hunger for entertainment with plots centered around fictional fiends with a thirst for blood and as many more books and websites exist, giving glimpses of the real thing, spouting information gleaned from trial transcripts and interviews given behind bars. But no matter how many Hollywood horrors are seen or read, the question always left echoing in the public mind is, “Why?”

What makes a man into a murderer who kills multiple victims without any obvious reason or remorse? Who are these men and what is their ultimate motivation? This question has confounded lawmen and laymen alike for more than a hundred years. The historic question between warring disciplines has been that of nature versus nurture; are serial killers born or made? Scholars from various disciplines have put forth explanations for a piece or two of this complex puzzle but have fallen short of interlocking the disjointed pieces into a unified ‘big picture.’ What many are lacking is the ability or desire to search for the answer beyond the confines of their own disciplinary boundaries. The interest and knowledge generated by multiple disciplines has failed to comprehensively address and explain this deadly problem looming within society (Repko, 2005). More than just a weekend blockbuster, serial killers are a genuine threat America, and the world, cannot afford to ignore. It is precisely this situation in which the interdisciplinarian flourishes.

Before the problem can be tackled it must be clearly defined. While a wealth of information exists on the topic of serial murder, the definition of such can vary greatly between studies. It would be dangerous to apply generalizations made about one type of killer to another, so the range of focus must be narrowed in order to deal appropriately with each individual type of killer. This paper will focus specifically on sexually motivated, male perpetrated serial homicide, which will be defined as the unlawful killing, by a male, of three or more victims with a ‘cooling-off’ period separating each offense. The length of the ‘cooling-off’ period varies from one offender to the next, and can be as short as a few days or weeks or as long as several months or years.

The sexual aspect of the murders can be seen, either overtly or symbolically, in the condition in which the offender leaves the crime scene. Positioning of the body, sexual assault of the victim, method of killing, and the taking of trophies are all examples which reveal the offender’s underlying motivations for the killings (Jacobs, 2003; Knight, 2006; Myers, Husted, Safarik, & O’Toole, 2006; Salfati & Bateman, 2005). While serial killers can certainly be female, both their methods and motivations tend to differ greatly from those of their male counterparts. As such, they should be dealt with separately so as to provide the most accurate analysis and to avoid inaccurate and irrelevant generalizations.

One area where the gender of the killer does not carry as much weight is in the emotional cores of the public. Whether the killer is male or female, ‘murder’ is a thing which literally stops us dead in our tracks. Perhaps one reason the word ‘murder’ resonates so deeply within people is that it takes one from a position of control to one of victimization in which the consequences are most dire: an abrupt, unplanned, and often untimely cessation of existence. For this reason, the most logical approach to sexualized serial murder would be from those disciplines dealing most directly with that same human life and existence in all its various facets, namely biology, sociology, and psychology. It is the general assumption of all these disciplines that these types of killers lie at the extreme end of the psychological diagnosis of psychopathy.

Psychopathy manifests in emotional detachment, a display of glib superficial charm, lack of guilt and/or remorse, and a callous attitude toward others. He is egocentric, manipulative, irresponsible, and lacks behavioral control (Blair, 2007; Dembo, Jainchill, Turner, Fong, Farkas, & Childs, 2007; Jacobs, 2003; Keeney & Heide, 1994; Knight, 2006; Muller 2003; Roberts & Coid, 2007). Psychopaths are cognizant of the legality their behaviors but fail to grasp moral and ethical acceptability within society. According to Raine and Yang (2006),
Regarding basic cognitive processes involved in moral decision-making, at a fundamental level there is little question that almost all criminal and psychopathic individuals know right from wrong…Psychopaths show excellent (not poor) moral reasoning ability when discussing hypothetical situations – their real failure comes in applying their excellent moral conceptual formulations to guiding their own behavior (p.209).

Therefore, the term sexual psychopath is synonymous with sexually motivated serial killer and sexually psychopathic serial killer and the terms will be used interchangeably throughout this text.

Biology is, by its very definition, a ‘life science.’ Concerned with the physiological mechanisms of living organisms, the biological discipline explains the inner workings of a killer at the neurological level. Beginning from the base of existence, biology begins with the neuron to address both proper functioning in brain regions as well as the ways in which dysfunction can interfere with normal behaviors. To the biologist, the efficiency of an organism’s structural foundations and chemical processes predetermine much of the potential for that life. Biology also attempts to find a genetic link for homicidal behavior. Information in this area is still highly experimental and sketchy, however, and so will not be covered here.

Sociology, a social science, adds the next layer of understanding by focusing on group dynamics and characteristics. Sociology ascertains the demographics of serial killers based on factors such as socioeconomic status, familial history of abuse and neglect, and the general state of one’s environment, to name just a few. To the sociologist, an individual is born as a ‘blank canvas,’ the purpose and identity of which is to be defined and influenced by factors largely beyond the individual’s control. People are, in a sense, slaves to their environment. Behaviors are geared toward to acquisition of social status. For serial killers, this can either be to attain a status he never had, whether within the killer’s own family group or a cult-like celebrity media status, or to regain that which he feels was taken from him.

Psychology, a behavioral science, deals with the inner thoughts and feelings, and behavior of individuals. As applied to serial murder, psychology deals with the killer from the inside out. Knowledge is gained by delving into the offenders’ deviant thought processes and deciphering how these cognitive deficits explain both predatory and crime scene behaviors. A psychologist sees the killer as an independent individual entity who considers and chooses his behaviors based on personal desires and motivations.

In the interdisciplinary arena, these disciplines will converge on the topic of sexualized serial murder to address the question of “Why?” To catch a killer you must become deeply aware of who he is and anticipate his next step before he even knows he is going to take it. This cannot be done without an adequate interdisciplinary comprehension of the male sexually motivated serial killer. This knowledge will be gained through an exploration of current disciplinary literature and expertise addressing serial murder and its perpetrators, resulting in an integration of the disciplinary insights to create a deeper and more holistic understanding of these killers and where they come from.

Background
Since Cain killed Abel in the book of Genesis, humans have known that murder existed. However, the sexualized serial form of this utmost transgression would be a crime hidden in myth and folklore for many centuries yet. Ancient ancestral legends tell of werewolves, hideous creatures and prowlers of the night who, armed with supernatural power and a thirst for blood, crouched ready to pounce on any unsuspecting victim. To find such a creature, one must simply follow the path of bloody crime scenes and mutilated corpses left in his wake. Documentation of these horrific tales dates back to at least sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, where the apex of knowledge lay in religion and superstition. Such murders were attributed to shape shifting human-wolves, men by day and creatures by night, attacking victims one after the other while most of the town slept blissfully.

In 1573 in France, one such werewolf and hermit was hunted down by a mob of villagers after killing and cannibalizing a number of the town’s children. Gilles Garnier was ultimately burned at the stake for being a werewolf (Jacobs, 2003). The next century marked the twenty-five year murderous time of Peter Stubbe in Cologne, Germany. His shape shifting abilities were documented by local historians as being such that his “eyes [became] great and large, which in the night sparkled like brands of fire; mouth great and wide, with sharp and cruel teeth, a huge body and mighty claws” (Jacobs, 2003, p.4). Like Gilles before him, Stubbe was eventually executed as a werewolf, but not before it was learned that he used his daughter, with whom he had an incestuous relationship, to aid him in luring victims to their death.

Today, we know these “creatures” were not mythical human/animals and that this tale belief most likely rose out of a combination of a fear of wolves who lived in the woods surrounding the villages as well as a genuine psychiatric condition known in modern times as lycanthropy, in which patients actually believe themselves to wolves. As such, they howl at the moon, run on all fours, and generally engage in wolf-like behaviors (Jacobs, 2003). While the supernatural nature of these killers was only a myth, the killers themselves and their crimes were all too real, and unfortunately not just a historic occurrence.

The likes of Gilles and Stubbe have carried on from generation to generation. With the advent of modern mediums of information such as the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and internet, knowledge of these modern serial killers spreads quickly around the world. Though Jack the Ripper was one of the first, he has certainly not been the last. From Ed Gein (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s Norman Bates and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre) to Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, modern serial killers are somewhat of a household name Popular culture even assigns them catchy monikers like “The Night Stalker,” “The Green River Killer,” and “BTK” (an acronym for this particular killer’s method: bind, torture, kill).

Thankfully, not every murder is a serial one and, in the grand scheme of all crimes committed, serial killers actually represent a very small fraction. Yet they are by far the most fascinating and, however rare, they have the ability to capture public attention and strike fear in the hearts of millions like no other criminal can. The fact is, they do exist. According to FBI estimates, at any given moment in the United States an average of fifty serial killers are operating in various stages of their careers (Jacobs, 2003).

While each killer may prefer his own specific type of victim, no one is initially excluded from the possibility of falling prey to one of these modern monsters. Who are these monsters and where do they come from? In search of an informed, intelligent answer void of the superstitious ignorance of the past, we must look to the current disciplinary literature.
Disciplinary Perspectives, Evidence, and Insights

Biology
To function intelligently, living organisms must possess a brain, the advance and complex functioning of which sets humans apart from all other creatures on the planet. Yet just as the power and capacity of the brain places humans at the top of the biological order of life, it may be this very same organ which likens some humans more to the predatory animals which they are supposed to rank above. Mounting biological evidence suggests that parts of the brain, especially the regions of the frontal cortices, located at the front of the brain behind the forehead and eyes, and the amygdala, a more ancient structure lying toward the center and back of the brain, play a significant role in the adaptation of a serial killer. The frontal cortices are divided into several smaller areas, all of which aid in the experience, integration, and expression of emotion (Blair, 2007; Hoaken, Allaby, & Earle, 2007; Vollm, Richardson, McKie, Elliott, Dolan, & Deakin, 2007).

The amygdala helps to associate, through experience and learning, which actions and objects have positive social connotations and which are to be avoided (Blair, 2007). Such roles suggest these areas, relative to normal control subjects, will be significantly dysfunctional in the psychopathic brain. Neuroscientists are testing this theory in two ways: structural and functional MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging). Structural MRIs depict the actual anatomy of the brain while functional MRIs (fMRIs) are able to display activation of specific brain regions in response to stimuli by color-coding blood oxygenation levels and glucose consumption (Vollm et al., 2007). These MRIs create tangible evidence of the psychopathic killer’s characteristic deficiency in emotional interpretation and moral reasoning, propensity toward illegal and impulsive actions, and the amount of overkill left behind at their crime scenes.

Biological dysfunction in moral reasoning and emotional interpretation. In a study by Kiehl et al.(2004), normal and criminal psychopathic subjects were presented with words of both concrete (e.g. legal, illegal, etc.) and abstract (e.g. morality, fault, justice, compassion, etc.) content while undergoing fMRI analysis. Criminal psychopaths “fail[ed] to show the appropriate neural differentiation between abstract and concrete stimuli” in the frontal cortices (p. 297). These alarming results explain serial killers’ lack of remorse, believing their actions were not wrong (an abstract concept) even though the killer knew at the time that such actions were illegal (a concrete concept). If the processing areas for abstraction are dysfunctional, psychopaths’ conceptions of morality are abnormal, and therefore killing for pleasure is not deemed ‘wrong’ in their minds.

According to Blair (2007), “healthy individuals distinguish conventional and moral transgressions in their judgments from the age of 39 months” (p. 387). However, psychopathic brains are dysfunctional in regions concerned with moral reasoning and measuring others’ emotions and distress. This dysfunctionality “disrupts the avoidance of actions leading to emotionally aversive consequences (e.g. actively killing another person) shown by healthy individuals in moral reasoning paradigms” (p. 391). This dulled response to what is normally considered right or wrong and to the pain inflicted on victims allows the sexual psychopath to murder purely for his pleasure.
In another study, participants were asked to identify the emotion being displayed in a photograph of a facial expression. The group of violent offenders tested showed significantly more errors in identifying such emotions than did the normal controls (Hoaken et al., 2007). A serial killer’s blunted sense of emotional perception finds victims’ emotions irrelevant, allowing him to use victims to satisfy his own sadistic desires. The psychopath’s dulled responses to the anxiety and suffering his action cause is precisely why he can murder and enjoy it; his brain never lets him feel bad about it because it fails to register any emotion but his own perverted elation. Additionally, in faces displaying a neutral expression, violent offenders were more likely to incorrectly identify the emotion as disgust (Hoaken et al., 2007).

In retrospect, sexually motivated serial killers will often say that, before killing them, they felt their victims looked down on them or were disgusted by them, furthering the killer’s anger. Hoaken’s (2007) results suggest these killers may have a neurological basis for the misinterpretation of such facial expressions.

Interestingly, biological evidence exists to suggest that this extreme type of psychopathy begins in infancy rather than later in the developmental process. According to Raine and Yang (2006), acquired psychopathy arises from accidental brain damage suffered in adulthood and produces some psychopathic behaviors without the loss of moral judgment. However, in infants with brain damage/lesions occurring within the first 16 months of life, the subsequent psychopathy includes a lack of moral reasoning. Both children with a psychological diagnosis of early-onset conduct disorder and incarcerated psychopaths have shown structural deficits in temporal lobe volume. The precursors for psychopathy and serial killing can often be seen in childhood, if anyone is paying enough attention to notice. These findings lend credit to the idea that serial sexual homicidal psychopathy is a disorder which begins to rear its ugly head earlier in life, continuing on a track of gradual progression to adulthood, where full fruition is realized in the form of literal human monsters.

Biological propensity toward illegal and impulsive actions. A 2005 study by Yang et al. (2005) used a structural MRI to image the brains of unsuccessful psychopaths (those who had been caught), successful psychopaths (those who had evaded capture), and normal individuals, focusing on the amount of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. The results indicated that unsuccessful psychopaths had significantly less prefrontal gray matter than did their successful counterparts. This lack of prefrontal matter, when combined with “poor decision making [and] reduced autonomic reactivity to cues predictive of punishment [could] render unsuccessful psychopaths less sensitive to environmental cues signaling danger and capture and hence be more prone to conviction” (p.1106-1107). Moreover, the prefrontal gray volume of the successful psychopaths did not differ greatly from that of the normal subjects. This could account for a successful psychopath’s “cognitive resources to manipulate and con others successfully, as well as sufficiently good decision-making skills in risky situations to avoid legal detection and capture”(p.1107).

It is noteworthy that this study was structural and not functional. While a lack of prefrontal gray matter may explain unsuccessful behaviors, a successful psychopath’s gray volume does not imply proper functioning. Instead, the successful sexual psychopath uses this volume to perfect the art of murder and evasion. Frighteningly, such monsters have the neural capacity to be highly intelligent and cunning, sometimes evading capture for decades. Examples of this can be seen in the cases of Dennis Rader, “BTK,” and Gary Leon Ridgeway, “The Green River Killer,” both of whom managed to evade police and continue killing victims for multiple decades. Though such serial killers know their actions are illegal, faulty frontal cortices intended to be the ‘brakes’ of social inhibition allow murderous impulses originating in more primitive brain regions to pass into action.

Impulsivity, a hallmark of psychopathy, causes “individuals [to] focus on the prospect of reward even if environmental cues indicate possible later punishment”(Vollm et al., 2007, p.152). FMRIs showed no significant response to reward stimuli in the prefrontal cortices of criminally psychopathic individuals. Additionally, a negative correlation existed between one’s level of impulsivity and the strength of prefrontal response (Vollm et al., 2007). Dopamine, a chemical neurotransmitter in the brain, produces pleasure when released. Sexual activity, either normal or deviant, is one of the means by which humans experience a flood of dopamine (Kalat, 2004). Unable to experience pleasure and reward by normal means, the sexually motivated serial killer finds his dopamine rush in sexualized serial murder.

Biological underpinnings for aggression and overkill. As with anything, sensations reach a saturation point at which pleasurable highs are no longer produced without an increase in the level of the stimulus. In the case of sexually psychopathic serial killers, this creates an ever increasing need for higher intensity stimuli to produce the desired feelings, resulting in a progression of violence as the killer continues his career. This level of violence is often described as overkill, meaning that much more was done to the victim than was required to end his or her life. In an fMRI study subjecting such psychopathic individuals to positive images(e.g. happy couples, puppies) and negative images (e.g. heavily wounded people, threatening animals and faces), results indicated “deficient function of the emotion-related brain circuit” (Muller et al., 2003, p.157). Specifically, negative images activated areas of hyper arousal, suggesting intense focus, and a potential correlation between the psychopathic killer’s deviant obsession with creating grotesque and sadistic crime scenes.

Furthermore, positive images evoked responses in areas associated with antagonism, possibly reflecting the intense anger felt toward victims representative of the positive existence the killer cannot attain for himself. This hatred then manifests in overkill.

Another reason for overkill is the release of pent-up frustration felt by the killer, which has also been shown to have neurological roots. In an experiment where rewards for correct responses were delayed and unpredictable, psychopaths showed increased activity in the amygdala, an area linked to feelings of frustration. The same study also revealed a greater overall sensitivity to, and frustration with, loss of an expected reward (Vollm et al., 2007). A key element in serial crime is the offender’s frustration in his own life. He seeks the control he has never had by dominating over another in death, a behavior which could be fostered by the amygdala’s reaction to his frustrations.

Summary. Overwhelmingly, the evidence suggests that brain regions, especially the frontal cortices and amygdala, are dysfunctional in sexually psychopathic serial killers. “Taken together, the best replicated brain imaging abnormality found to date across a wide variety of antisocial groups, across structure and function and across different imaging methodologies is the PFC” (Raine et al., 2006, p. 205-206). Mounting scientific evidence also suggests widespread structural and functional impairments in the amygdala, hippocampus, temporal cortex, anterior cingulated, and angular gyrus (Raine et al., 2006).Yet no one brain region stands alone. Rather, the brain develops in a ‘bottom-up’ fashion, beginning with the most primitive, reptilian regions and continuing upward to the newer, more sophisticated areas of functioning. Such development creates interdependence among brain regions. For this reason, it is not surprising that multiple areas function abnormally in a killer’s brain. In the opinion of Raine et al (2006), the likely culprit for the serial killer’s development of psychopathy is not one single brain region, but rather in the factor that “the greater the number of neural impairments across different cognitive and affective domains related to an antisocial lifestyle, the higher the likelihood of an antisocial outcome” (p.206).

The whole brain is engaged in psychopathy.

This makes perfect sense, as we know that each brain region is interdependent on others. Once introduced, sexual psychopathy spreads like a disease, finally overtaking its host. By adulthood, psychopathy has infected every part of the dysfunctional brain; it grew there and was perpetuated upward.

Sociology
In stark contrast to biologists, who find roots for psychopathy and eventual serial killing in the basic structures and functions of the human body, “sociologists reject any emphasis on the genetic roots of crime and deviance” (Schaefer, 2008, p.194). According to Schaefer (2008), sociology defines deviance as behavior that is not necessarily criminal but “that violates the standards of conduct or expectations of a group or society” (p.190). Every human is born into a society. It is this society, in all its facets, which shapes who that person will become, how he will think, feel, behave, and perceive himself and others. This shaping is done primarily through the process of socialization, in which members of a particular culture learn what is normal and acceptable in the way of attitudes, values, and behaviors (Schaefer, 2008). Socialization can come in many forms, the most prominent of which is family, followed by school, peer groups, mass media, the workplace, religion, and the government. For any given individual, a list can be developed of the specific influences that made him who he eventually turned out to be.

Sociologists have developed just such a list of environmental factors which perpetuate a breeding ground ripe for male sexualized serial killers. According to sociologists, these unique criminals are often illegitimate children from broken, adopted, or dysfunctional families in which alcoholic and/or drug addicted parents subject their children to a life of abuse and/or neglect. Fathers are often absent, either from a literal or physical standpoint, with the physically present ones generally characterized as harsh and controlling. Mothers tend to swing in one of two directions: either they smother and overpower the child or reject him completely, treating him with hatred and contempt. Many of these killers begin to abuse alcohol and/or drugs themselves at an early age and ease into a criminal career with early petty crimes. They are commonly of low to average intelligence levels and exhibit behaviors consistent with the MacDonald Homicidal Triad (enuresis at an inappropriate age, fire starting, and cruelty to animals) which will be discussed in further detail later (Knight, 2006; Singer, 2004). Current disciplinary literature focuses on two components of the childhood and adolescent years as principal indicators of later serial killing behavior: a history of childhood abuse and/or neglect and the early display of criminally deviant behavior.

History of childhood abuse and/or neglect. There is no debate that murdering innocent victims in a serial fashion is an antisocial behavior. But the answer to where that behavior originates has multiple possibilities. According to a study by Beaver and Wright (2007), “the origins of antisocial behavior are found very early in life – well before adolescence” (p.656). From the earliest point of life, a child is with his family, an entity which many sociologists contend is a prime factor in the development of sexually motivated serial killers. According to the functionalist view of the family, six integral functions are to be played by this small group: reproduction, protection, socialization, regulation of sexual behavior, affection and companionship, and provision of social status (Schaefer, 2008). In fact, the family is considered the primary agent of socialization and the most important influence in the development of the self. When this primary support system and source of personal identity fails, the results can be long-lasting and devastating.

For a child to develop normally and healthily, the primary caretakers must do two crucial things: take and express joy in the child, which develops self-esteem, and support the child when negative experiences occur, which lays the foundation for healthy coping strategies (Knight, 2006). Knight (2006) further states that:
As a child the serial killer would not have discovered his or her ‘capacity to light up the mother’s face’ and thus there would have been no sense of visibility and ‘recognition in the eyes of the other.’ These children would have experienced a profound sense of rejection and low self-esteem (p.1197).

It would not necessarily take harsh physical abuse to retard normality in these key developmental areas. All that is required is an emotional vacancy on the part of the parent. Physical presence without the companion of love and attentiveness are just as, if not more, devastating to a child than a slap or a punch. This says to the child that he is not important to the parent and therefore has no worth as a person. In the role of the serial killer, this feeling of invisibility and inadequacy remains from childhood. The killer is saying to his victim, “Notice me. Be aware of who I am and what I can do.” In essence, the victim is paying for the crimes of all those who failed to give the killer the recognition he feels he deserves (this may be either real or fantastic). The kill is his moment to stand up and be counted, pacification for all the times he was overlooked and unappreciated.

As previously mentioned, sexually motivated serial killers lie at the extreme end of the psychopathological spectrum. Such a continuum also exists for parenting styles and abilities. At the extremely negative end of this spectrum lies antisocial parenting, defined by Jacobs (2003) as:
The most damaging and destructive type of loveless and hateful parenting most often observed in the development of sexual psychopathy. Antisocial parenting is characterized by a combination of physical, sexual, and/or verbal abuse, alcoholism, poly-drug abuse, where compulsive viewing of pornography, prostitution, and spousal abuse occur routinely (p.234).

Knight (2006) states that “ adults who had been physically, sexually and emotionally abused as children were three times more likely than were non-abused adults to act violently as adults” (p.1199). In the lives of serial killers, violence is a learned behavior which becomes a reaction of distress over what has been unjustly done to them. The killer accomplishes two things through violence: he displays the behavior that has been modeled for him and he attempts to alleviate some of his distress by acting out and displacing some of his pain onto a victim. Further research is emerging to suggest that, of all the horrific factors possibly suffered at the hands of antisocial parents, neglect may be the most detrimental to a child’s future and the most likely to gear him toward a future of antisocial behavior and serial killing. This could possibly be because neglect directly affects cognition, with these effects being generally both more pronounced and more permanent than with other types of abuse (Grogan-Kaylor et al., 2003).

Deviant behaviors and MacDonald’s Homicidal Triad. The results of a childhood of violence and neglect emerge as deviant behaviors, a subset of which is MacDonald’s Homicidal Triad. Developed by MacDonald in 1961, the Homicidal Triad represents three key adolescent behaviors considered to be highly predictive of future criminality, especially in the area of sexual psychopathy and serial murder. The Triad consists of enuresis (bedwetting) beyond the age of five, pyromania and fire-setting, and cruelty to animals (Jacobs, 2003; Singer & Hensley, 2004; Wright & Hensley, 2003). Jacobs (2003) further extrapolates that “a cavalier disdain for structure and responsibility is inherent in the triad” (p. 62).

While the presence of one of these behaviors alone may not necessarily indicate a future as a serial killer, it seems to be the culmination of two or more of the behaviors that drastically increases the propensity that a child will develop into sexualized serial murderer. Contemporary researchers are beginning to delve deeper into the individual components of the triad to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of these deviant behaviors, mainly focusing on the behaviors of fire-setting and animal cruelty.

Following in the footsteps of sociologists before them, Singer and Hensley (2004), argue that Social Learning Theory can be applied to the behavior of fire-setting and ultimately to serial murder. In the context of Social Learning Theory, situations in an individual’s life translate into either reward or non-reward experiences, the latter of which bring humiliation and frustration and is thus avoided as much as possible. However, the childhood experiences of serial killers consist mainly of non-reward situations, primarily at the hands of the parents, such that the child learns to anticipate humiliation and frustration in all circumstances and lose the ability to accurately differentiate between the positive and negative.

The problem for serial killers further arises in the fact that, as children, they are under the control of the source of their humiliation and frustration: either one or both of their parents. Therefore, they feel helpless to retaliate in their aggression, an act which would serve to permanently alleviate their frustration anxiety. The fledgling killer is forced to find alternative means for relief, and he finds it in fire-setting, an act which “may be a stepping-stone from which an offender may graduate to more serious forms of aggression and perhaps eventually escalate to murder” (Singer et al., 2004, p.466). This is why the offender must choose alternate victims as representational figures. They cannot retaliate against the primary aggressor in their situation, so they must substitute the next best thing. However, because they are not eliminating the ultimate, original source of their humiliation, the stress always returns, provoking the need for an endless cycle of victims which ends only with the offender’s capture or death.

The next member of the triad behind fire-setting is cruelty to animals. Scholars also believe the Social Learning Theory to be applicable to this behavior for much the same reason, with the release of frustration anxieties being accomplished through the torture and murder of animals the child is able to overpower. Wright & Hensley (2003) further this explanation by applying the Graduation Hypothesis, which states that “animal abusers later progress, or graduate, to more serious forms of violence against humans” (p.75).

In their 2003 study to investigate this hypothesis, Wright and Hensley found not only that violent offenders were considerably more likely to have committed adolescent acts of animal cruelty, but that the specific ways in which they abused the animals mirrored the methods they later used against their human victims. These behaviors, learned in childhood, simultaneously caused the killers to become desensitized to such violence while familiarizing them with the experience of pleasure associated with another being’s pain and suffering.

A supporting study by Hensley and Tallichet (2009) found that the younger the inmate was when he began to commit acts of animal cruelty, the more likely he was to commit multiple acts throughout his childhood, and to have choked the animals he was torturing. Death by asphyxia, or strangulation, is a major factor in sexualized serial murders. This could be a behavioral basis for a later choice of causing deaths in human victims. Other methods examined in this study, such as shooting, hitting, or kicking animals are much less ‘close-up’ and personal than asphyxiation, which involves literally holding the power over another’s life and death in one’s own hands. This is exactly what the serial killer is ultimately searching for—power over that which they have always been subject to. This adolescent behavior could be highly predictive of what is to come later in life for this offender, with the type of victim changing as the offender tries greater and greater things in futile efforts to overcome the frustration with life he has felt since childhood. The Hensley study (2009) also found that “drowning and having sex with an animal were significantly predictive of later repeated aggression toward humans” (p.156).These early behaviors tie sexual pleasure with pain and murder. This experience is then carried into adulthood, the aftermath of which is seen at the crime scene.
Summary. Sociology contends that serial murder is a learned behavior, predicated or caused by factors beyond the control of the individual during the formative years of life. Devastating failures within the familial unit to properly socialize and orient children to themselves and the world around them plant the seed of deviance and psychopathy. That seed is then watered by neglectful, antisocial parenting, which causes the behaviors seen in MacDonald’s Homicidal Triad. In the development of a sexually motivated serial killer, red flags are raised. Warning signs exist. Whether or not they are recognized and properly dealt with is the key to the future of this potential offender and his many victims. Unfortunately, the killer in his infancy is already at a disadvantage where this is concerned because, were he in a situation where abnormal behaviors were noticed and properly treated, then he would not be in the type of environment for the development of those behaviors in the first place.

Psychology
Today, psychology as a neuroscience is the science of mind via analysis of brain. To professionals in this field, behavior is the result of thought processes and patterns, conditioned by the individual over a period of time, perhaps even years, which converge in an instant to produce action. In psychology, all human behaviors fall on a continuum, a spectrum in which normal lies at the approximate middle. Extremes at both ends are considered abnormal and indicative of various disorders and diagnoses. At the extremely severe end of the spectrum of psychopathy and violent crime lies the sexually psychopathic serial murderer. His crimes are especially callous and committed solely for the purpose of reaching personal highs and goals firmly established within his deviant neurocognitive mapping system. As previously described, psychopathy is the condition in which an individual acts without conscience or remorse such that others exist solely for the purpose of pleasing the individual. Others are viewed, used, and abused as simply a means to a pleasurable end for the psychopath. (Blair, 2007; Dembo et al., 2007; Jacobs, 2003; Keeney et al.,1994; Knight, 2006; Muller 2003; Roberts et al., 2007). It is the contention of the field of psychology that sexually psychopathic killers are not insane, but rather perfectly cognizant of the legality of their actions; they simply to murder because it brings them pleasure (Jacobs, 2003; Raine et al., 2006). The ‘gold standard’ for assessing psychopathy is the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) devised by disciplinary pioneer Robert Hare (Roberts et al., 2007).

Psychologists seek to understand the thoughts and feelings inside the mind of the serial killer by such techniques as personal interviews after incarceration and/or by a technique known as “criminal” or “psychological profiling.” Defined by criminal profiler B. Turvey (2006), the term refers to the “process of inferring distinctive personality characteristics of individuals responsible for committing criminal acts from physical and/or behavioral evidence” (p. 681). In the view of a psychological profiler, the offense of murder is not as important as the way in which the crime is committed (Turvey, 2006; Salfati & Bateman, 2005). In the words of Turvey (2006), “the act of homicide is not a motive. It is a behavior that expresses an offender need…The act of rape is not a motive. It is a behavior that expresses other offender needs beyond those of pure sexual gratification” (p. 514). These motivations can often be determined through an evaluation of a specific killer’ “signature,” offender behaviors not necessary for the mechanical completion of the crime but necessary to the offender for the fulfillment of his emotional and/or psychological needs (Jacobs, 2003; Turvey, 2006, Salfati et al., 2005). A unique signature, though it will most likely continue to develop as the offender grows into his killings, will continue to be left at each of the homicides in a series, if the offender is not hindered in leaving it for some reason. If he does not complete this specific behavior, the killing will not be ultimately fulfilling to him. In these behaviors the psychology of the sexually psychopathic serial killer are revealed: his motivations and the ways in which he ‘signs’ these motivations on each crime scene he leaves in his wake.

Offender motivations for sexualized serial murder. Central to the psychological view of serial murder is the idea that sex by itself, just as in rape, is not the major motivation. Rather, sexual gratification have become intertwined in the mind of the killer with power, control, and domination as a result of layer upon layer of deviant cognitive mapping (Jacobs, 2003). A decade ago, Holmes and Holmes (1998) developed a classification system for serial killers that centered on motivation as determined by clues left behind at the crime scenes. These typologies, while insightful, may create so much overlap as to be indistinguishable at times. Further analysis has revealed a central theme of power and control running throughout. “Power and control...are not typical of any one type of serial killing but of serial killings in general” (Canter & Wentink, 2007, p.508). In the killing of another individual, the serial killer is able to claim the power and status he has never been able to grasp in his own life. By becoming the harbinger of life he has elevated himself to god-like status, a position of ultimate power. The sexually psychopathic serial killer derives sexual gratification from the domination of another individual in life and death (Jacobs, 2003). Aside from the visionary killer, who is clinically insane, a serial killer is a sexually psychopathic monster by his very nature. The differences in murder styles, techniques, and behaviors displayed at crime scenes do not necessarily denote a different type of killer but rather a killer whose sexual arousal requires different stimuli than another. The killer does not have to have sex with a victim for the kill to be sexually satisfying to him.

It appears that the specifics of a serial killer’s deviant motivation arise early in life. According to Whitman and Akutagawa (2004), “formative events and experience within the backgrounds of the killers culminated in a cognitive structure necessary to commit murder” (p. 694). Like the discipline of sociology, psychology buys into the idea that neglectful antisocial parenting is critical to the emergence of a serial killer. However, psychology focuses on the inner thoughts and feelings produced by this atrocious upbringing. In general, serial killers have failed to experience essential emotional bonding with the mother since the moment of their birth. According to Whitman et al. (2004):
Extreme deprivation not only causes anxiety, which is countered by destructive urges, but also is a dehumanizing experience in which the child perceives himself as unacceptable, unwanted, and without value. The extent to which a child has been thus dehumanized – as well as through deprivation and physical or sexual abuse – shapes the child’s own capacity to value others as individuals of worth” (p. 697).

Thus begins the development of a “deviant egocentric mindset” (Jacobs, 2003, p.173). Aggression and violence are evident in these killers very early on, even in childhood play (Whitman et al., 2004). MacDonald’s Homicidal Triad is also observed. As the child moves into adolescence and early adulthood, larger sensations than those offered by setting fires and torturing small animals is needed to produce an effect. The answer is often found in pornography, which quickly progress to the hard core variety (Jacobs, 2003).


Since the sexual psychopath has never been truly loved or taught how to properly reciprocate love, he is incapable of having a normal romantic relationship with a partner. This relegates him to more solitary means, which are often initiated by the viewing of such pornography. Masturbation and paraphilias are essentially self-fulfilling satisfactions. Indulging in these practices does not require the participation or enjoyment of another party for the event to produce the desired result. The offender and his fantasies grow and develop in unison, with each deviant thought further establishing the homicidal cognitive map. He can never get enough. Like any other addiction, his brain cries out for more and he is too far gone to resist. The commission of murder is not a sudden ‘snap’ in behavior but rather a final destination in the journey from vivid deviant fantasy into reality. Once this bridge has been crossed there is no return. Murder is forever eroticized in his mind and he is irreversibly changed by this (Myers et al., 2006).

Many people do things for emotional reasons, for example, overeating, over-exercising, and obsessively cleaning. These behaviors are all attempts to fill an emotional void in the life of the person demonstrating the behaviors. In essence, serial killing is a means to the same end, a futile attempt to fill an emotional hole. Just as no amount of food ever creates emotional fulfillment for the obese overeater, no amount of torture, degradation, and murder can do the same for the serial killer. This explains why the violence and overkill often increase with subsequent murders. The fantasy is never made completely real, so the offender tries harder every time to attain perfection and in the kill. This would both increase his status and help to attain the ultimate orgasm he seeks. Yet he can never quite make fantasy and reality meet, so he continues the search for perfection.

Anger has often been postulated as a motivation of serial murder. However, Myers et al. (2006) believe that anger may not be a physically possible motivation for these killings as the biological pathways and neurotransmitters, specifically norepinephrine, enacted by feelings of anger are the same ones that are directly antagonistic to the rigid erection response required for sexual arousal and orgasm at a crime scene. Serial sexual murderers may indeed appear angry at interview. However, this may not be the initial motivation for their crimes but rather a reaction to the normal societal restrictions to their preferred behaviors which are being forced upon the offenders by way of incarceration. The anger may be derived from the very fact that they are not being allowed to hunt and kill freely. When sexually frustrated, even ‘normal,’ non-homicidal men exhibit anger and aggression in their interactions with people. Once again, the issue of an extreme on a behavioral continuum must be considered. Rather than anger as the primary motivation for serial homicide, the cruelty and aggression may be more of a means to an end in that sexual arousal and emotion cannot be attained through any other behaviors. For these killers, anger fuels the fantasy and further perverts the pleasure.

Signature. The signature of a sexually motivated serial killer is just that: a unique behavioral mark left at the crime scene that fulfills some aspect of a specific killer’s psychological fantasy and is essential for his emotional gratification (Jacobs, 2003; Salfati et al., 2005; Turvey, 2006). According to Turvey (2006), an Australian criminal profiler, four basic criteria exist for determining whether or not a behavior is signature in nature:

Takes extra time to complete, beyond more functional MO behavior [modus operandi; the general operating behaviors necessary to the commission of the crime].

Unnecessary for the completion of the crime.

Involves an expression of emotion.

May involve an expression of fantasy (p. 285).

Some example signature behaviors are positioning of the body, the taking of trophies or mementos of the murder including victim possessions or body parts, or pre- or postmortem acts committed against the victim (Jacobs, 2003). Analysis of a killer’s signature provides insight into who the killer is and what he is thinking. “Signature behaviors, therefore, are best understood as a reflection of the underlying personality, lifestyle, and developmental experiences of an offender” (Turvey, 2006, p. 283). It is the ‘why’ behind the ‘what,’ the reason sexually psychopathic serial killers feel compelled to commit horrendous acts of murderous violence against unsuspecting innocent victims. The special care taken with the victim, the specific manners in which the killer binds, tortures, mutilates, or assaults, mean more emotionally to the offender than the death itself. Simply killing without the ‘foreplay’ holds little to no value or satisfaction for him. It is the specific process, scripted out by his individualized deviant cognitive maps, that must be followed if he is to attain the most possible satisfaction from his killings.

The inner hunger to display signature behaviors and bring deviant fantasy to life drives the killer on to murder after murder.

Aside from a killer’s perpetual emotional need, psychologists believe there to be another logical basis for the behavioral repetition of signature: the “cognitive-affective processing system (CAPSP that guide how one processes the features of a situation to produce the resulting behaviors (Salfati et al., 2005, p. 136). Research has revealed that an individual’s CAPS are reliably stable in guiding behaviors such that a person will react in a similar fashion each time he is presented with an analogous set of circumstances (Salfati et al, 2006). CAPS dictate how a person acts in a given situation. If these CAPS have developed on a deviant scheme, an individual will display inappropriate behaviors. Furthermore, if the individual relishes the resulting feelings produced by such behaviors, he will seek to create that situation over and over again in order to re-attain the previous emotional high. Thus, when considering serial murder, what is created is a predator who repeatedly seeks to satisfy himself by forcibly recreating situations from the past where his behaviors have produced sufficient, if ultimately fleeting, satisfaction.

There are some important variations to signature, one being that different offenders may display the same core behavior for completely different emotional and psychological reasons (Turvey, 2006). Each killer is unique in his upbringing and experiences and the crime scenes he creates are likewise. Some behaviors may also arise dependent on the situation and the reactions of the victim. For example, were a victim to scream the killer may introduce the use of a gag whereas he might choose to bind the hands and feet of a victim who attempted escape. However, the underlying theme of each of these behaviors suggests the overall need for control both of the situation and of the victim. Additionally, the goal of the offender may change from one crime scene to the next. Having attained one goal or realizing one part of his fantasy at a previous scene, he may want to attain another, a perverse sort of ‘To-Do List.’ Psychologists must also take into account the mental state of the killer during the commission of the crime. Drug and/or alcohol use may decrease his ability to behave as competently and efficiently as he has in the past. Furthermore, over-confidence and cockiness may cause him to be careless or more risky in his behaviors, ultimately leading to his capture (Salfati & Bateman, 2005). It is the daunting task of the psychologist to sift through the behavioral evidence left at a crime scene to determine motivations specific to a certain killer.

Summary. Rather than rest with the boundaries of quantifiable, tangible physical evidence found at the crime scene, within the anatomic makeup of the killer, or in his past history, psychology attempts to step into the unseen realm of the mind and what takes place in the thoughts of a sexually motivated serial killer. Power and control become abnormally intertwined with sex and eroticism in the deviant minds of these killers such that one cannot be sufficiently attained and enjoyed without the other. The individual emotional and psychological motivations of the killers are left behind at their crime scenes in the form of signatures. Each offender of this type has one, and it can be found if the psychologist is willing to step inside the minds of such monsters in order to seek it out.

Integration and Conclusion
Is it nature or nurture? This great question has plagued mankind since the first ‘werewolf’ struck in the villages of Europe (Jacobs, 2003). Today we are confidently able to say that the answer is ‘both.’ The evolution of sexually motivated serial killer is a complex process begun at birth and spread out over a lifetime. The greatest argument for this reasoning may best be postulated by Knight (2006), who states that “many individuals have negative experiences in childhood and do not become addicts or angry and revengeful serial killers” (p.1201). This is because sociological milieu alone is simply not enough to create a psychopathic serial killer. Indeed, humans do not enter the world as a blank slate, as champions of this discipline would have us believe. Any mother with more than one child will tell you each of her babies was completely and totally his or her own individual personality from the moment that child entered the world. Personality is dually influenced by the internal makeup of temperament and by the external experiences of the environment (Whitman & Akutagawa, 2004).

Without a doubt, there must exist additional biological precursors which are either suppressed or fostered into activity by environmental stimuli. Much like automatic headlights on an automobile turn on when the darkness outside reaches a certain level predetermined by the manufacturer, so the sexual psychopath comes into the world with preset personality traits that lend themselves to the business of serial killing. Were these individuals to be raised in atmospheres of complete sunshine and harmony it is highly unlikely that such tendencies would ever be triggered to the ‘on’ position. While mild traits of generic, garden variety psychopathy might develop, the chances are very slim that individual would ever cross over the one-way threshold into homicide. However, when met with the right atmosphere of toxic circumstances, the darkness around the individual becomes just thick enough to flip the switch and release what has always been stored away in the recesses of the mind. Dysfunctional brain regions are rendered additionally dysfunctional by antisocial, neglectful conditions. This spurs the focus of the individual to sexually deviant fantasies which in turn add to the dysfunctionality of his already bereft brain. Consequently, the vicious cycle continues revolution after depraved revolution until satisfaction lies only in the transport from fantasy into reality.

That these killers display every imaginable criterion for psychopathy is without question. In stark contrast to the crazed killer who has lost his grip on reality, psychopaths are quite sane, a fact which makes them exponentially more frightening. These cold and calculating monsters choose sexualized serial murder because of the emotional reward they feel when their neural pathways are satisfactorily activated through torturing, mutilating, and taking lives. They simply do not operate by the sociological credo which suggests that drastic illegal behavior will be avoided because the risk involved outweighs the possibility of reward (Hoffman, Wolf, & Addad, 1997). They know killing is illegal and are well aware of the stigma capture and conviction bring. However, they kill because they want to. Sometimes the promise of public infamy even sweetens the pot. For the sexual psychopath the reward outweighs the cost. Coupled with the grandiose sense of self from the psychological perspective, society is left with a monster who kills for the joy of it and believes his is so superiorly intelligent that he will be able to continue to do so indefinitely without being detected.

This fact is essential when considering incarceration of these criminals. Someone who enjoys murder can never be allowed to return to mainstream society, as he will return to his favorite pastime as quickly as possible. For a criminal to be rehabilitated, they must have initially been normally habilitated. This has never occurred in the life of the sexually motivated serial killer. Therefore, all rehabilitative efforts will be rendered completely futile. False, and very dangerous, appearances of success arise only from the fact that the psychopath is clever enough to manipulate the system. He learns what to say to please who he must so that he can be released back into the wild to stalk, hunt, and savagely devour his prey like the predatory beast that he is. Only incapacitation or death can stop him, just as only these two factors can remove a wolf from the hunt. Lifelong incarceration or execution is the only options.

The answer to the mystery of sexually motivated serial crime does not lie in a neatly packaged box. There are many facets, reflecting a myriad of influences in the development of these predators without consciences. Unfortunately, this extreme version of psychopathy is an iceberg whose tip we are only beginning to uncover. There exists an undeniable need for further research in this area. Studies similar to the ones referenced here should be replicated, with appropriate updates as needed, to include larger sample sizes and/or longer serials of homicides. Additionally, personal interviews with incarcerated killers are potentially vast resources of information, if conducted by professionals trained to differentiate between truth and the toying and manipulations of such psychopaths.

While the idea of spending large amounts of time with these killers may be repulsive at first, these circumstances are prime opportunities to increase our knowledge of serial killers and as such should be tapped for every amount of resource possible. The idea is to arm law enforcement with every weapon available to capture these criminals as early in their careers as possible and save the greatest amount of lives. For this reason, as much background information about these killers should be obtained to further develop our knowledge of the ‘red flags’ of behavior and circumstances which can serve as early warning signs which, when recognized and properly handled, could avert a serial string of killings before it begins.

The ultimate goal is saving lives, and we must never allow the victims in our studies to become so depersonalized that we forget the tragic loss that has occurred with their murder. The victim, not the killer, is the most important reason for studies of this kind. Victims past and future deserve the best efforts of the professional world to combat their killers, ideally before they ever have the chance to victimize. “Human behavior is complex …Our scientific knowledge of serial sexual murderers remains limited and the need for ongoing research in this area is crucial in light of the grave societal consequences produced by their crimes” (Myers et al., 2006, p. 906).

References

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Additional Sources
Buss, D.M. (2005). The murderer next door: Why the mind is designed to kill. New York, NY: Penguin Press.
Jacobs, D. (2003). Sexual predators: Serial killers in the age of neuroscience. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.