Serial killers Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Serial killers - Essay Example This research essay will make an earnest attempt to find out what poignantly contributed to the onset of this intricate distorted personality and their violent demeanour which is far more many-sided. Introduction In the modern forensic psychology, serial murders appear to have assumed a pivotal place. According to Burgess, Douglas & Ressler (1983), a serial murder is one who has killed at least three or more victims with a cooling -off period in-between each murder. A serial killer does not have any past connection with the victim and murder seems to be random or unconnected. Further, the murder is mainly on the psychological background or for sex abuse and not for any monetary benefits. Serial killers’ victims will be adolescents, children, prostitutes and women. Dr.Harold Shipman, a serial killer, killed only elderly women who were his patients whereas young women are the choice for Ted Bundy. On the other hand, there was a female serial killer namely Alieen Wuornos who was a prostitute by profession who killed her male clients. Green River Killer practice was to kill the runaways and prostitutes. There are different motives attached to for the serial killing where some killers do the same for sexual pleasure ,some do it due to hatred, some do it for revenge , some do it because their intuition asked them to do it. (â€Å"Thomas, 2010, p.6†). ... and observed that their killings were done without any plan of action , a discovery that corresponds to the apparently random itinerary of spree killing. Casewell and Hollin (1994) defined serial killing as â€Å"many victims who are killed over the period of hours or days or weeks or months in diversified locations by a vagarious killer who seems to make no effort to escape detection. According to Fox and Levin (1998), multiple killings includes instances in which victims are killed either at over a short period of time (spree) or at once (mass) or over an elongated phase of time (serial) and hence, the time frame of serial killing has been detailed as either long or short duration that somewhere conforms to between serial killing and mass killing. (DeLisi et al, 2008, p40). Beauregard and Proulx (2002) examined the offending courses of 36 Canadian killers who were more often impelled by sexual sadism. According to Hazelwood and Warren (2000), sexually violent criminal killers are either ritualistic or impetuous in nature. They also found that impulsive killers are criminally primitive and mostly reactive in terms of crime scene demeanour and victim selection. Fox & Levin (1998) found that serial killers are those who kill their victim with their bare hands without the help or usage of any weapon or instrument. (DeLisi et al, 2008, p41). â€Å"Kinds of Serial Killers† There is no uniformity in defining a serial killer. This is mainly because due to the absence of typologies established to describe between kinds of serial murders. Based on analysis and interviews of more than 400 cases of serial killers, Holmes and De Burger (1988) have offered a complete definition of a serial killer. According to Wilson (2007), Holmes and De Burger, from their research study, they

Adolf Hitler Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Adolf Hitler - Research Paper Example Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler was born to Alois Hitler and Klara Polzl on April 20, 1889 in a small Austrian village of Braunau Am near the German border. Alois was an illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. It is suspected that the father was a Jewish boy of the house where Maria used to work although there is no certain evidence to support this. This is important because Hitler would later in his life go on to start a campaign of eliminating Jews and their lineages, however remote they be. By the time Alois married Adolf’s mother, he already had two kids from previous marriages – a boy and a girl. Adolf was the fourth of the six children from this marriage, the previous three having died before reaching age 3 - so Hitler would get special attention from his mother due to her fear of losing him. Alois, a civil servant, retired after 40 years of service in 1896, the same year as Adolf started attending school at age six. Having been used to strict working life, Alois would often take out his frustration of retirement on the oldest boy in the household - Alois Jr., who was 13.He, however, ran away from home at age 14 which meant that Adolf, at age 7, would now be the subject of harsh words and beating from their father. At this time, the family moved to Lambach, Austria and then to Leonding, near Linz in 1898. Around this time, one day while rummaging through his father’s library, Hitler came across a book on the Franco-German war of 1870-71. He found the book very interesting and soon became more and more enthusiastic about anything related to war. In his memoires, Mein Kampf, Hitler recalls â€Å"It was not long before the great heroic struggle had become my greatest inner experience. From then on I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any w ay connected with war or, for that matter, with soldiering.† When Adolf Hitler completed grade school, he wanted to become an artist but his father forced him to go to the technical school with the wish that Adolf become a civil servant one day just like Alois had been. Hitler did quite poorly in the first year as he wanted to show his father that he was unsuitable for technical school as he wrote in Mein Kampf (Chapter 2) "I thought that once my father saw what little progress I was making at the [technical school] he would let me devote myself to the happiness I dreamed of." But his father refused to listen and persisted with Adolf staying in the technical school which made Adolf perform badly in the school and indulge in various pranks and disobedience of his teachers. Then in 1903, Adolf’s father died of lung hemorrhage making Adolf the head male of the house. This also meant that his struggles with his father over the choice of career would come to an end and there would be no more harsh words or arguing with his father. In 1904, Hitler left the high school at Linz and moved to another one at Steyr, a town 25 miles from Linz. Here, Hitler lived in a small house with another boy and the boys would sometimes amuse themselves by shooting rats. During summer 1905, Hitler suffered from an inherited lungs disease. In September 1905, after passing an exam, Hitler and his friends celebrated it with drinks leading to him getting drunk and being woken up next day in the streets. After this incident, Hitler swore never to drink again. Using his poor health as an excuse, Hitler finally got rid of the school at age 16 and after spending some