Christopher Berry-Dee - Talking With Serial Killers 2. The Worlds Most Evil Killers Tell Their Stories

W ith 5 per cent of the worlds population, the United States produces more serial killers than the rest of the world, accounting for 76 per cent of the total. Europe produces the second-highest number of serial killers at 17 per cent. England leads with 28 per cent of the European total, followed by Germany with 27 per cent.

California has the highest serial homicide rate in the USA, followed by New York, Texas and Illinois, while Maine has the lowest.

Over 90 per cent of serial killers are white males, usually from low- to middle-class backgrounds; these men are usually intelligent but, as students, have generally had difficulty in focusing. Most have experienced a traumatic childhood, often having been abused psychologically, physically or sexually. Typically, they may have been raised in unstable families, often with criminal, psychiatric and alcoholic histories. As a result, children raised in such families often spend a great deal of time on their own with many of them indulging in animal cruelty at a very young age.

Most people who suffer as children grow out of it and become upstanding, decent human beings. But serial killers such as John Cannan, Kenneth Bianchi and John Gacy, who all suffered as children, repeat the same mistakes over the course of their lives. They cannot make their transition into adulthood; they have trouble making the transition in middle age and, at the very time they feel they should be reaching the pinnacle of success, they find they are sliding downhill fast. They want to feel important, they want to feel special; they crave the sense of power, dominance and control. But they simply cannot achieve it in any respectable way, so they kill, torture, sodomise and dismember, and this makes them feel good about themselves.

The typical sado-serial killer appears extraordinarily ordinary. Hes a white, middle-aged man who has an insatiable appetite for power, control and dominance, and he kills not for money, nor for revenge, but because it makes him feel good. He does it because he enjoys trawling for prey, entrapping them, restraining and torturing them; he has fun killing, because he likes the thrill, the excitement and the exhilaration that he gets from squeezing the last gasp of breath from his dying victims body.

Killers such as John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Bianchi, and most of those who appeared in the prequel to this book Talking with SerialKillers, enjoy the suffering on the part of the victim, and they try to make it slow and painful. It makes them feel superior to the extent that it makes their victims feel inferior.

Sixty-five per cent of serial homicide victims are women. In the USA, there are, at most, 200 victims of sexual serial killers a year. That number, although very large, pales into insignificance compared with almost 18,000 single-victim murders in the USA on a yearly basis. The problem is not serial murder, it is domestic violence, or workplace homicide, or two guys going into a bar, where one takes out a gun and shoots the other.

The problem, on the other hand, is that serial murderers amass a large body count a small number of men who do a lot of damage. They may kill five, ten or even twenty or more. Some of them have killed hundreds, and that is enough to terrify anyone.

Randy Kraft drugged many of his victims and then inserted cocktail sticks into their penises, or car door handles into their bodies, and flayed them alive. And, as we will soon learn, John Wayne Gacy, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono also inflicted terrible, extended suffering upon their hapless prey.

It is this sadistic impulse that feeds the real and fragile ego of the sado-sexual serial murderer who desires so much, so desperately, to achieve a sense of power over other human beings sexual sadism is the means by which that happens.