Power/Control Serial Killers

Power/Control killers are the psychopaths or sociopaths who derive pleasure from exerting power and control over life and death. They enjoy watching their victims beg for mercy and cower in fear. In fact, they feed off the fear of their victims.

Theodore Robert Cowell (Ted Bundy) was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1946 to an unmarried twenty-two year old mother. He gets his name from his stepfather. His grandparents told him that he was their son and that his mother was actually his sister.

Bundy was a good student but, like many young people, he was devastated when his first love left him. He didn’t deal with grief the way most people do though. He spent years trying to get her back and, when he finally did, he started killing innocent people and then rejected his girlfriend – just as she had rejected him. Authorities speculate that Bundy started killing as early as age fourteen. Many of his victims were said to have a physical resemblance to his first girlfriend. 

Ted Bundy was one of the most infamous power/control serial killers in American history. He was handsome, charming and intelligent, traits which enabled him to seduce his victims. He’s believed to have murdered over one hundred women in several states, including Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Florida.

Bundy had several techniques for luring his victims. He would often fake an injury, with his arm in a cast or sling, to gain their trust. Other times, he would dress as a policeman or fireman. After luring women to his car, he would hit them on their head with a crowbar. He then raped, strangled and mutilated them.

He was also known to engage in necrophilia (sexual attraction/involvement with corpses). He would visit the corpses of his victims several times at the Taylor Mountain body dump site, apply makeup to them and have sex with them until they putrefied.

Bundy’s killing spree lasted from 1974 to 1978. When apprehended, he confessed to forty murders, blaming his addiction to pornography for his actions. This is one of his most chilling quotes. “We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”

Bundy was executed in 1989. His body was cremated and the ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location in the Cascade Range in Washington State. The state of Florida spent eight million dollars to electrocute him. Wouldn’t that money have been better spent letting him live out a life sentence in prison, stipulating that he be subject to intense scientific study? Don’t we need to learn “why” he and other serial killers commit such heinous crimes so that we can figure out a way to stop them?

Pleasure Serial Killers

Pleasure (or Hedonistic) killers are, as the name suggests, people who kill for fun or for satisfaction.  There are three subgroups in this classification: lust killers, thrill seekers and for-profit killers. Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as the “Monster,” is an example of a lust killer.

Jeffrey Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May 21, 1960. His father was an analytical chemist and, as a child, Jeffrey was fascinated with dissecting dead animals. By the time he was in his teens, he was an alcoholic and a loner. He dropped out of college and his father forced him to enlist in the Army. He was discharged after two years because of his heavy drinking. Not wanting to face his father, he moved in with his grandmother and lived there for six years. When he was arrested for exposing himself in public, his grandmother asked him to move out.

Dahmer was first arrested when he was caught fondling a thirteen year old boy in Milwaukee. He was sentenced to one year in a work release camp and, after serving ten months, he was released on probation for his good behavior. That’s when his killing spree began.

He committed his first murder when he was eighteen; the victim was a nineteen year old hitchhiker. For the most part, his victims were boys of Asian and African descent. His murders were gruesome! He tortured, forced sodomy and dismembered his victims, removing their limbs. He also practiced necrophilia (having sex with dead bodies) and cannibalism.

There was talk that a teenaged boy, taken by Dahmer to his house, almost escaped. Allegedly, he wandered into the streets without clothes and with Dahmer in close pursuit. Police found the boy and took him back to Dahmer’s house where Dahmer told him the boy was his partner. Unfortunately, the police believed him and, in spite of noticing a weird smell there, they left without investigating. Soon after, the boy was killed and Dahmer kept his skull as a souvenir.

Dahmer’s rein of terror lasted from 1978 to 1991. He was finally apprehended when a would-be victim escaped and alerted the police. He was convicted of fifteen murders and sentenced to fifteen life terms. He then expressed remorse and wished that he too would die. His wish was granted when he was beaten to death by a fellow inmate and died of severe head trauma.

In his will, Dahmer requested that his body be cremated but his mother wanted his brain to be preserved so that medical researchers could study it. His father didn’t agree and Dahmer’s parents went to court. In 1995, a judge ruled that his will be upheld and Jeffrey Dahmer’s body (and brain) were cremated.

Do you agree with the judge’s decision or with Dahmer’s mother?

Mission Serial Killers

Mission killers believe that it is their duty or destiny to rid the world of certain types of people as a way of cleansing society. Common targets are prostitutes and homosexuals. “Angels of Death,” that prey on patients in hospitals and nursing homes, committing what they call mercy killings, also fit into this category. These killers believe they have a “mission.”

Gary Ridgway (The Green River Killer) was responsible for the deaths of between 48 and 71 women from 1982-1984. When apprehended, he avoided execution by agreeing to help locate the remains of all of those women and providing details. He was sentenced to 48 life sentences and was incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary.

Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and had two brothers. His mother was a domineering woman who constantly berated their father and completely controlled him. Ridgway’s IQ was 80, which signified a slight mental deficiency. He was a troubled adolescent and, when he was sixteen years old, he stabbed a six year old child. For whatever reason, he was always obsessed with prostitutes.

His drama unfolds at Aurora Avenue on the banks of the Green River in the state of Washington, an area frequented by hundreds of prostitutes. The body of Ridgway’s first victim, a sixteen year old prostitute, was found there. She was raped and strangled. He was known to leave a group of dead bodies in clusters. Driving by and remembering them gave him a high.

The “Green River Taskforce” was formed in 1984 when the death toll had reached 26. Police enlisted the help of another serial killer, Ted Bundy, who was on death row, to get insight into the workings of a serial killer’s mind. He gave them several valuable clues up until the time he was executed.

Gary Ridgway was one of the worst slayers in American history, who said he killed more women than any other serial killer. In his words, “I hate most prostitutes. I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away, and might never be reported missing.”

Ridgway was married for fourteen years and he managed two totally separate lives: one the life of a wonderful husband going on romantic vacations with his wife and the other as an infamous serial killer.

Can you imagine how his wife must have felt when she found out that she was living with a serial killer?

Visionary Serial Killers

Visionary (or Vision) serial killers are unstable, possibly psychotic, individuals who claim they hear voices that tell them to kill. Usually, they say it is the voice of God but some attribute it to the Devil. 

 David Berkowitz (better known as the Son of Sam) was born in 1953. His mother, estranged from her husband, Tony Falco, had an affair with a married man. When she became pregnant, her lover threatened to abandon her if she kept the baby – so she gave up her son, David Falco, for adoption. David was adopted by a middle class family who lived in the Bronx. They loved him and treated him well. He seemed to have had a relatively normal childhood.

But David Berkowitz carried a lot of guilt and anger. He felt responsible for the death of his natural mother who, he was told, died giving birth to him. When he was eighteen, his adopted mother died and his father remarried and moved to Florida, leaving Berkowitz behind in the Bronx. He later learned the truth about his biological mother, sought her out and they established a “friend” relationship.

Berkowitz is a classic example of a visionary killer. Between 1976 and 1977, he shot and killed six people and wounded seven others in New York City. After killing a young couple who were parked in a car in the wee hours of a spring morning, Berkowitz left a letter at the scene, personally addressed to the police detective who was investigating his crimes. In it, he wrote “I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam.”

His crimes were famous because of his letters to the media and the police. The reason he killed, he claimed in his letters, was to quiet the demons by doing what they insisted he do. Each night, these demons told Berkowitz to kill and quench their thirst for blood. When he heard dogs howling, he started to believe that the dogs were demons, asking him to shoot and kill women. At one point, his neighbor had a black Labrador, which Berkowitz believed was possessed. He shot the dog.

Berkowitz was apprehended after receiving a parking ticket at the time and near the scene of a murder. When he was apprehended, he received a 365 year prison sentence. He then told the FBI that the real reason he killed was because he hated his mother for leaving him and blamed her for his failure with women. (He felt sexually aroused when he killed them.) He admitted that the letters he’d sent to the media and the police were written to convince them that he was insane.

What do you think? Was David Berkowitz insane?