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#Serial killers the evil inside serial
Our list of serial killers contains many apparently ordinary people. However, when they are finally caught they are revealed to have tortured and killed a string of innocent victims, often in the most gruesome ways imaginable. These are the murderers who baffle and terrify us, precisely because they seem so ordinary and so much – on the surface – 'just like us'.
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These are the murderers that we find particularly disturbing, the 'ordinary' people who could be our next-door neighbours or office co-workers, the individuals who may have a troubled family history but who, on the face of it, have no more reason to kill than the rest of us. However, the phenomenon of the serial killer, who generally works alone and in secret, usually killing victims one at a time, is a different one. In modern times, state-sanctioned atrocities on a grand scale have been committed, for example in Nazi Germany and, more recently, in Rwanda. Hideously cruel methods of torture and killing that we now consider completely inhuman were part of everyday life in many ages and civilizations, from the Aztecs and the Barbarians to early Polynesian cultures and medieval Europe. In some eras, they were kings, queens and princes: think of Vlad the Impaler, Catherine the Great or the mad Ottoman ruler Murad IV. Mass murderers have existed since the beginning of recorded history. Most of all, perhaps, we want to know about the psychology of the serial killer, the individual who acts upon the darkest of human impulses and lets them surface into reality. We want to know about the different ways in which the human body can be destroyed, dismembered and ritually abused about how victims suffer about the links between sex, pain, torture and death. However much we may deny it, we are fascinated by what serial killers do, how they do it and why they do it. At worst, we may encounter some stirrings of recognition in ourselves, some acknowledgement of our own curiosity about death and dying. What do we expect to find there? Unimagined horrors, unspeakable desires, inexplicable compulsions and inhuman cruelty – at best. For most of us, the crazed mind of the serial killer is a closed book, one that we may be curious to open, perhaps, but one that we know will fill us with terror.