- published: 04 Mar 2016
- views: 21260
A serial killer is typically defined as an individual who has killed three or more people over a period of more than a month, with down time (a "cooling off period") between the murders, and whose motivation for killing is usually based on psychological gratification. Some sources disregard the "three or more" criteria, and define the term as "a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone" or, including the vital characteristics, a minimum of two murders. Often, a sexual element is involved in the killings, but the FBI states that motives for serial murder include "anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking". The murders may have been attempted or completed in a similar fashion and the victims may have had something in common, for example, occupation, race, appearance, sex, or age group.
Serial killers are not the same as mass murderers, nor are they spree killers, who commit murders in two or more locations with virtually no break in between.
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994) was an American serial killer and sex offender. Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with the majority of the murders occurring between 1987 and 1991. His murders involved rape, dismemberment, necrophilia and cannibalism. On November 28, 1994, he was beaten to death by an inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution, where he had been incarcerated.
Dahmer was born in West Allis, Wisconsin, the son of Joyce Annette (née Flint) and Lionel Herbert Dahmer, an analytical chemist. Seven years later, his brother David was born. Joyce Dahmer reportedly had a difficult pregnancy with her elder son. When Jeffrey was eight years old, he moved with his family to Bath, Ohio. Dahmer grew increasingly withdrawn and uncommunicative between the ages of 10 and 15, showing little interest in any hobbies or social interactions. He biked around his neighborhood looking for dead animals, which he dissected at home (or in the woods near his home). In one instance, he went so far as to put a dog's head on a stake. Dahmer began drinking in his teens and was an alcoholic by the time of his high school graduation.
Ottis Elwood Toole (March 5, 1947 – September 15, 1996) was an American serial killer, arsonist, necrophiliac, and cannibal. He was an accomplice of convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. The pair confessed to hundreds of murders and missing persons cases throughout the United States over several decades, knowing details only the perpetrators would know and taking authorities to the crime scenes and burial sites of their victims. Both are alleged to have targeted victims of all ages, races, and genders and to have killed by shooting, stabbing, strangling, and bludgeoning. The pair had no apparent pattern. When the crime wave began is unclear; it ended in 1983 when Toole was arrested on an arson charge and Lucas, a few months later, on a weapons charge. The two confessed to hundreds of murders, though they recanted when they were sentenced to death. Once their sentences were commuted they began admitting to even more murders eventually exceeding 600.
Toole was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. Toole's mother was a religious fanatic; Toole later claimed that she abused him, including dressing him in girl's clothing and calling him Susan. As a young child, Toole was a victim of sexual assault and incest at the hands of many close relatives and acquaintances, including his older sister and next door neighbor. He claimed that his maternal grandmother was a satanist, who exposed him to various Satanic practices and rituals in his youth, including self-mutilation and graverobbing, and dubbed him "Devil's Child". Toole claimed this abuse began when he came out about being gay.