Serial Killers What's going on in Their Head

Essay by AnitaScott1986High School, 12th gradeA-, March 2004

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Serial Killers

Serial Killers They belong to a newly identified class of criminals called serial murderers, motiveless killers, recreational killers, spree killers, or lust murderers whose numbers are increasing at an alarming rate every year.

In 1983 alone, according to the FBI, approximately five thousand Americans of both sexes and ages-fifteen people a day and fully twenty-five percent of all murder victims-were struck down by murderers who did not know them and killed them for the sheer "HIGH" of the experience. The FBI calls this class of homicides serial murders and there perpetrators recreational or lust killers.

The FBI describes them as most cunning and sinister of all violent people. Almost all impossible to capture, diagnose, or predict using ordinary investigative methods and perversely attracted to the police who are pursuing them, serial murderers dance just beyond their pursuers' reach from state to state, retreating into the background then springing up again in a different part of the country to begin another series of seemingly motiveless killings.

Addicted to the act of murder as if it were a drug, serial killers compulsively and silently troll for their victims amid shopping malls, at twilight, darkened city streets, or country roads in isolated rural communities.

They are motivated by a force that even they don't understand. Once they have sighted a potential victim, they begin to stalk with dogged relentlessness that does not cease until the victim is cornered and the trap is sprung. Like tormented beasts of prey, serial murderers do not commit simple homicides. They often torture their victims, taking delight in the victims' agonies, expressions of terror, cries of despair, and reactions to pain. Then, in a period of marked depression that follows the high of murder, some killers plead for help from police or newspapers.

Always hidden...