This is a Research Project I had to do for my English class. Hope you enjoy it! It's about serial killers and what makes them the way they are.

~Mew

P.S. I'll tell you all my grade as soon as i get it xD 

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A Serial Killers Mind

When you think about serial killers, there are many things that come to mind. You think about how they could live with themselves, how they could kill people, why they would kill people. There are many answers to those, but the one at the forefront is their mindset. Their state of mind is usually unstable. There are many, many serial killers out there, raised in normal homes, which have suffered from a deficiency or a head injury and later in life ended up as a serial killer; and there is always some just born that way. "Anyone touch a hair of her head, I’ll kill them in a minute.  You only got one mom." Said by Tommy Lynn Sells, a man that has killed seventy women. He was raised in an abusive home and psychiatrists believe he killed to express his anger at his mother, but, when asked if he would ever kill her, he said these two sentences.

Look at the serial killers in the past. What pops into your mind as soon as you think about them? Crazy, psycho, murders….have you ever thought about the fact they could just have mental deficiencies or head injuries? As a child, or even as an adult, you can have serious trauma to your frontal lobe and this can cause you to become unstable; to think about killing people. These thoughts don’t seem wrong to you. They seem normal. You’re brain is seeing it as a natural thought, it’s not the same as it was before whatever injury happened to you. Killing was wrong before, but now it seems normal. Justified. Right. Michael Stone, a Forensic Psychiatrist from Columbia University, said that: "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.”

This is just one of the many ways serial killers can be created. Yes, created; either from injuries to the simple fact of genetics. Things that affected you in the womb, things you have no control of. “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.” (bigthink). There can be a genetic flaw somewhere in your DNA. "All of my family are as the average human beings are. They are honest and hard working people. All except myself. I have been a human-animal ever since I was born. When I was very young at 5 or 6 years of age I was a thief and a liar and a mean despicable one at that. The older I got the meaner I got." As German child killer, Peter Kurten, who had drowned two playmates by the age of nine. This is just one example of many killers that have suffered from deficiencies of the brain or in your genetic make up.

"After I'm dead, they're going to open up my head and find that just like we've been saying a part of my brain is black and dry and dead," said Bobby Joe Long, who suffered a severe head injury after a motorcycle accident. This man is another victim of injury to the head that has became a serial killer. Mostly all of the serial killers either has an extra chromosome here or there or has had injuries to the temple lobe. “The temporal lobe is highly susceptible to injury, located where the skull bone is thinnest. Blunt injuries, including falling on a hard surface, can easily damage this section of the brain, creating lesions, which cause forms of amnesia and epileptic seizures. Damage to the temporal lobe can result in hair-trigger violent reactions and increased aggressive responses. As a child, Ken Bianchi fell off of a jungle gym, and landed on the back of his head. He soon began to have epileptic seizures.” (truTV).

If you looked up the history of serial killers, you’ll see that many were susceptible to accident, adult content, trauma and even a chemical unbalance within their brain. One child had killed two young boys and castrated them. Her mother was a prostitute that didn’t know her child was watching as she committed acts of sexual pleasure to her clients, most involving pain and abuse. This pain and abuse also transferred to the child and she then killed those two boys, even showing up at one’s funeral and smiling the entire time as she was clad in black with a parasol. This is only one account of crimes committed by people raised in non-stable homes and then there’s an entire other subject about the person’s brain. During the fetus’s time within their mothers womb there are many chemical balances, growing, changing that are going on. One serial killer had an extra women chromosome within him that had made his breasts to grow larger than normal males and invoke bullying during school. He later became a serial killer. There are also cases that involve no human harassment to cause people to become this way. A simple chemical unbalance or a shortage of something, a deformed part of your brain; anything can trigger it really.

Overall, most serial killers are made by problems within their own brain or an unstable environment that has caused things that would usually be wrong to us, but are acceptable to them. It’s the way your raised, the way you think. It can be many different cases that provoke the mindset needed to become a serial killer. The mindset needed to take someone’s life. To take away their dreams, futures, etc. That person is gone forever. And you caused it. It takes a lot to become like this. And their raising as a child, if they ever had trauma to the head, chemical unbalances within your brain. This all causes the insanity most serial killers go through within their mind.

Works Cited

Scott, Shirley. “truTV”. 2012. Web. 29 February, 2012.

“Serial Killers (Part 1)”. 1994-2011. Web. 29 February, 2012

Stone, Michael. “bigthink”. July 27, 2010. Web. 29 February, 2012.

Web Addresses

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/tick/victims_1.html

http://karisable.com/crserial.htm

http://bigthink.com/ideas/21782