Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer | Michael Stone | Big Think

Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer

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Dr. Stone explains what motivates men who commit serial sexual homicide and whether or not they are born evil.

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MICHAEL STONE:

Michael Stone is professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. From 2006 to 2008, Stone hosted the series Most Evil on the Discovery Channel, for which he developed a "Gradations of Evil Scale" to rank homicides from 1 to 22 based on their level of evil. He has written 10 books, including The Anatomy of Evil.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is it like inside the mind of a serial killer?

Michael Stone: Well, men who commit Serial Sexual Homicide, which is what the public usually is referring to when they talk about serial killers as opposed to nurses and doctors that kill patients in hospitals, “Angels of Death,” etc. The serial killer, like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, and David Parker Ray, and those people, almost all of them, more than 90% meet criteria, hard criteria for psychopathy. Almost all of them are sadists. Meaning that they meet criteria for sadistic personality as it had been described in the official psychiatric manual, where there’s enjoyment of the suffering of others as a key quality, and a love of control and domination of others, etc. Half of them are loners, men that can’t make long relationships with others. So in effect, some of them use serial killing as a way of having a one-night stand where they rape the woman and then kill her to destroy evidence; dump their body along the road or whatever, like Ed Kemper out in California. And then go on to the next because they are incapable of sustained romantic, intimate relationship.

Some of them, seeking revenge—revenge is a motive in some of them, like Debarr Labon in Texas who had been brutalized by his father and his mother... so they're constantly getting back at the parents who abused them or neglected them. That would probably be true of Leonard Lake that had this torture place he built in a remote area of California.

And another motive... killing a specific parent over and over, but not actually killing the parent. For example, when I interviewed Tommy Lynn Sells on death row in Texas, he had been neglected, abused, neglected again by his mother, never knew his father; terrible, terrible childhood. And he went around killing about 70 people, most of them women. And when I asked him, I said, “Tommy, you know, it sounds to me like maybe these women were like symbols or duplicates of your mother. Did you ever have a thought about, you know, killing your mom?” And he told me, ”Anyone touch a hair of her head, I’ll kill them in a minute. You only got one mom.”

So that was a very important point that I see over and over in these men. They have the same kind of loyalty and love of a parent even if the parent was abusive and horrible, that you can whip and hurt and yell and scream at a child, but if you’re the mom or you’re the dad, there still going to love you. They may hate you as well, but they’re going to love you. So, he never touched a hair of his mother’s head, instead he did symbolically get back at her through these other murders.

Question: Are serial killers born or created?

Michael Stone: Important question because there’s no one simple answer. There are a few serial killers, six or seven in my very large series, who were adopted at birth into normal homes, never abused, never neglected. But who, from adolescence on became violent and then in their 20’s embarked onto the career of serial sexual homicide that you can only ascribe to some genetic flaw along the lines of deficits in the amygdala or the prefrontal cortex that I had spoken about. Gerald Stano would be an example of such a person who killed 40 women and was finally executed in San Quentin.

There are other men who were raised in fairly good homes, or even rather normal homes, but who suffered a head injury that affected these key areas in the frontal lobe, such as Richard Starett in Georgia. He was raised in a wealthy home. He went around killing 10 women after he had married and had a daughter...

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