According to Greek mythology, Medusa, a Gorgon, was a beautiful maiden who was raped by the Greek god Poseidon, in a temple of the goddess Athena. Athena punished Medusa by turning her hair into snakes and anyone looking at her was petrified and turned into stone. Theseus, a Greek hero, managed to trick Medusa by […]
The sensational reporting of Jack the Ripper terrorising Whitechapel London in the late 19th century, can serve as an archetypical portrayal of the dichotomous troubling relationship between the press and serial killers. The public craved all the details of the murders of the prostitutes and the press complied with gory descriptions, accompanied by a sketch […]
In 1886, the sexologist Kraft-Ebbing treated the Marquis de Sade’s work as a compendium of sexual pathologies and gave the term ‘sadism’ its clinical definition. The Marquis de Sade Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814) was an 18th century French nobleman and author, who wrote several books when he was imprisoned for […]
In the previous two articles of this trilogy I explained how serial killers’ fixations in Freud’s psychosexual developmental phases led to the acting out of their fantasies on crime scenes. Yet the serial killers are not unique in developing subconscious sexual and aggressive fantasies, as Melanie Klein theorizes that all children could have them. Childhood […]
This article is the second of a trilogy series on my signature theory on the origin of serial killers. In brief, in the first part I discussed how fixations in one or more or Freud’s psychosexual developmental phases plant the seeds of sexual and aggressive fantasies in a serial killer, which are then acted out […]
Attending a murder scene, a detective usually asks the question: Who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit this crime and once that is figured out, it narrows down the suspect list, usually to a single suspect, or no more than a few. The motive could be greed, lust, revenge, or rage and is […]
During the Middle Ages, the gruesome discovery of sporadic mutilated corpses of villagers, and the telltale footprints of a hound on the scene, raised the spectre of a werewolf at large. No-one in the village would ever have suspected that it could have been the cobbler’s son – an as yet unidentified serial killer – […]
Some old classmates remember serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer as the one who was clowning around at school. Dahmer was referred to as a “goofball”. Children may defend their fragile ego’s by pretending to be the Fool, when they are already cast in the role of the Fool by others, in order to be […]