Science Vs - Serial Killers: Science of the Lambs

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Starting point is 00:01:14 On today's show, serial killers. And a quick warning before we get started. In this episode, we'll be discussing homicide and sexual violence. So please take care when you're listening to this show. And if you're feeling depressed or you just want to talk to someone, in the US, you can call the National Mental Health Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP. That's 1-800-662-HELP. That number will be on our website along with other resources.

Starting point is 00:01:49 OK, on to our episode. We think of serial killers as relentless predators who kill over and over again. And they seem to relish it. They are the ultimate boogeyman, our worst nightmare. Except that they're real. And one infamous murderer who embodies a lot of our fears about serial killers is this guy named Ed Kemper who killed his victims in the 60s and 70s.

Starting point is 00:02:17 And he's kind of the murderer that we picture when we think about serial killers. Smart, ruthless, and all around just super creepy. So on today's show, we're going to try to understand what makes a guy like Ed Kemper tick. Can you tell us about Ed Kemper? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I can tell you about Ed Kemper. And by the way, you would like Ed, and he would like you. Because I'm female?

Starting point is 00:02:48 Yes, and he would probably kill you. Okay. So that guy is actually a researcher. His name is Eric Hickey, and he's a criminal psychologist at Walden University. And like a lot of people, he is really fascinated by serial killers, guys like Ed Kemper.

Starting point is 00:03:09 Eric told us that Ed started killing early, when he was only 15. He said, one day I just came down for breakfast. I just thought, what would it be like to shoot Grandma and kill her? So I walked up behind her with a rifle and shot and killed her. He killed his grandfather too. And then he turned himself in and ended up in a state psychiatric hospital. But in the late 1960s, Ed was released on parole when he was 21. He was all grown up and back in the outside world.

Starting point is 00:03:40 And Ed looked kind of dorky and unassuming. He wore these thick glasses, but he was really smart and huge. He's 6'9", 300 pounds. He's a big guy. And it didn't take long before this big guy started getting violent again. In May 1972, he picked up two young female hitchhikers asking for a ride. And Ed was charming. They would get in the car because he was such a nice guy

Starting point is 00:04:09 and then you'd take him off in the woods and you would kill them. Ed drove those two hitchhikers to a remote area and parked his car. He then killed them both. After these women, Ed kept going. He killed four more young women within just a few months. Kemper was killing college students as fast as he could. Oh, my gosh. And all the while, Ed was living what appeared to be a perfectly normal life.

Starting point is 00:04:38 Even his psychiatrist was fooled. Eric told us this one story about when Ed visited his therapist. He's sitting down and the therapist started telling him about how pleased they were with the progress he had made. Then he looked at the therapist and said, well, without you, I wouldn't be here. And he thanked the therapist for all their help. During that interview, in the parking lot in Ed Kemper's car, in the trunk of his car, was the head of a college student. Yeah. Ed often decapitated his victims and then kept the heads. Sometimes he had sex with them.

Starting point is 00:05:15 The heads. In total, Ed Kemper murdered 10 people, including his mother, before turning himself into the police. We're telling you this story because Ed Kemper, he's our monster, a cunning predator who lures women into his traps. He's so quintessential that there's a character based on him in the TV show Mindhunter. And the creepiest thing about it is that while Ed is now in prison,

Starting point is 00:05:43 there are other serial killers out there, right now. So what do we really know about them? What drives a serial killer to do what they do? When it comes to serial killers, there are lots of creepy stories. But then, there's science. Science vs Serial Killers is coming up just after the break. Welcome back. So on today's show, we're finding out

Starting point is 00:06:25 what do we really know about serial killers? Researchers estimate that over the last two decades, there have been almost 500 serial killers running around the US, and nine out of ten of them are men. And by the way, according to the FBI, you're considered a serial killer if you kill at least two people in separate events. So our first question is this.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Other than killing, what else do serial killers do? Because on TV and in the movies, they do some weird and twisted things alongside the killing. Like in The Mentalist, the serial killer would always paint a smiley face in the victim's blood somewhere near the crime scene. Drawn in the victim's blood, clockwise, with three fingers of his right hand, wearing a rubber kitchen glove. In fact, there are so many examples of this.

Starting point is 00:07:22 In Silence of the Lambs, the killer would put moths in his victims' mouths and in The Wire, to imitate a serial killer, McNulty tied red ribbons to several dead men. Oh, it's absolutely repeated sort of ad nauseum in television shows and movies on serial killers. This is Wayne Petrick, a researcher of criminology at Bond University in Australia. And Wayne told us that when it comes to the weird stuff

Starting point is 00:07:46 that serial killers do, Hollywood isn't totally off. But it's complicated. So, for example, one study of 90 serial killers analysed the stuff they did other than killing. They wanted to know... Did they steal something from the crime scene? Were there bite marks, for example? Did they disfigure the body or engage in other mutilation behaviours?

Starting point is 00:08:11 And the researchers found that often serial killers did do more than kill. A lot of the time they sexually assaulted their victims, but they did other stuff too, like dismembering their bodies. Researchers found that 40% of the time the serial killers dismembered their victims and 30% of the time they scattered their body parts. So, what makes serial killers do this weird stuff? Well, Hollywood presents it as some kind of master plan or the killer playing out some

Starting point is 00:08:46 creepy fantasy. But Wayne says sometimes the explanation might be a lot simpler. They just wanted to kill someone and now they're covering their tracks. So you might dismember a body because it's some fantasy that you have, or you might dismember a body to help you dispose of the body. Wayne has seen people jump to these fantastical explanations for creepy behaviour, but he says that can be a mistake. And the general rule with this is always function over fantasy. Always consider function before you think about whether or not it has a fantasy element to it.

Starting point is 00:09:21 Still though, it's clear that not everything serial killers do is functional. A study of almost 40 serial killers using data from the FBI found that 70% of them did some things to their victim that would be very hard to explain as anything other than fantasy. Things like carving a pattern into the victim's chest or leaving them in these weird poses. Now, that is just one study, though, so it's not really clear how often this happens.

Starting point is 00:09:51 But bottom line, the movies might get this one right. Serial killers can do weird stuff on top of killing their victims. What the movies get wrong, though, is that most serial killers don't seem to do the same weird thing to their victims every single time they kill. Several studies have found this. More often than not, serial killers switch it up. Those kinds of signature behaviours don't tend to occur

Starting point is 00:10:21 with as great a frequency as we're led to believe. In fact, for a while, there was this popular idea that cops might be able to catch serial killers by looking at crime scenes and finding these very particular patterns. But it usually doesn't work, and a study of 200 serial killers found that the most common way that they got caught was because someone they knew turned them in. I think that the idea that every serial killer leaves like an ace of spades playing card behind at a crime scene

Starting point is 00:10:51 is very different from the reality, which is that they are really just somebody who is inclined to kill multiple times. They are just somebody who's inclined to kill multiple times? What's that about? For many of us, the idea of killing someone is horrifying. And yet serial killers do this over and over again. Why? Well, to get at what drives serial killers, we went back to our criminal psychologist, Eric Hickey, who we met at the beginning of the show. He's the guy who really enjoys his research into serial killers. I just really like the dark side

Starting point is 00:11:35 because I need to know what people are like, what makes them tick. And Eric is kind of the perfect person to talk to about why serial killers do what they do. He's analysed hundreds of cases of serial killers and interviewed about a dozen of them personally. Why do they say they do it? Do they ever have, like, clear reasons? Usually not. Most of them don't have the insight, or they've never really thought about it that deeply. So, for example, Eric told us about the time he tried to understand the motivations of this killer called Larry DeWayne Hall,

Starting point is 00:12:10 who's believed to have killed dozens of women in the 80s and 90s. And so Eric and Larry sat and talked. I'm sitting with my leg. My right leg is touching his left leg. That's how close I am to Larry. And Larry looks like something out of a horror movie. And he's got this long beard and he's got this crazy look in his eyes. And at first, it wasn't clear why Larry had killed so many women until Eric dug deeper. He asked him, so Larry, do you have a girlfriend? You ever had a girlfriend? Have you ever had sex with a woman?

Starting point is 00:12:43 Goes, no, never. So now the big question was, the million-dollar question was next. I said, Larry, have you ever had sex with a dead woman? And he looked at me and he sort of smiled and goes, well, maybe. Larry was killing his victims. And as soon as he killed them, he had sex with them because they were still warm. So to him, it was like they were still alive. Right. A lot of serial killing seems to be sexually motivated.

Starting point is 00:13:09 As we said, a lot of serial killers rape their victims before killing them. While some of them, like Larry, have sex with them afterwards. And although necrophilia among serial killers is rare, it's hardly unheard of. It's not always about sex, though. Some serial killers do this for good old-fashioned greed, like collecting insurance money. Others claim to be politically motivated. But ultimately, two large surveys found that the most common reason

Starting point is 00:13:38 that people do this is because they get some enjoyment out of it, for sexual reasons or otherwise. So take, for example, the Zodiac Killer. He killed at least five people and wrote, I like killing people because it is so much fun. So what made these serial killers this way? How do you become someone who enjoys killing over and over again? Well, that's coming up after the break.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Welcome back. We've just learnt that many serial killers murder people over and over again because they get some pleasure out of it, which is, of course, unnerving. It's one of the things that makes serial killers so scary. So our next question is, what makes a serial killer? How does someone become a person who can do these horrible things? Well, one idea from Hollywood is that serial killers are evil geniuses who get off on killing because they see themselves as higher up in the food chain.

Starting point is 00:15:01 The rest of us are like prey scurrying around for them to catch. Like, here's Kevin Spacey's character describing how he saw his victims in Seven. An obese man, a disgusting man who could barely stand up. And after him I picked the lawyer and you both must have secretly been thanking me for that one. Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. And this idea of serial killers as intelligent masterminds preying upon weaker victims shows up in true crime docos all the time. Malicious masterminds. They are among the most devious and twisted of killers. Their intellectual acumen is their greatest weapon. It enables them to plot elaborate crimes and elude capture.

Starting point is 00:15:54 So let's tackle this idea that serial killers are evil geniuses. To find out if this is true, our reporter Shruti Ravindran spoke to Gwen Adsed, a professor of psychiatry at Gresham College in the UK. And Gwen has been working with murderers and violent offenders for more than a decade. I have to ask, when you find yourself sitting next to a very chatty person on a plane, what do you tell them you do?

Starting point is 00:16:20 Ah, well, I don't usually tell them what I do. I usually tell people I'm a florist. Why a florist? Why a florist? Well, I love flowers and I'd love to be a florist and talking about flowers is usually preferable to talking about murder and violence. But on this show, we prefer to talk about murder and violence. But on this show, we prefer to talk about murder and violence,

Starting point is 00:16:47 and in particular, whether serial killers are smarter than the rest of us. People think that serial killers are these super evil geniuses that are just like diabolically intelligent. Yeah. What do we know about whether that's true? Well, we don't have any evidence that that's true. Gwen told us about this one database where researchers gathered together the IQ scores of more than 300 serial killers, mostly from the US. And while IQ isn't a perfect measure of intelligence, it's one of the best we've got.

Starting point is 00:17:21 Now, the researchers found that most of these serial killers are actually about as smart as you and me. On average, they're probably a little dumber. Another study found that serial killers were a bit above average. So, overall... Most of the people who've been identified as serial killers have been of average intelligence. Average intelligence.

Starting point is 00:17:47 Now, there are some super smart serial killers, like Ed Kemper, the guy with the head fetish. He was said to have an IQ of around 140. That's just shy of genius level. But he is the exception rather than the rule. The idea that there are a lot of evil geniuses running around plotting to kill people is not really borne out by the data.

Starting point is 00:18:12 OK, so when it comes to smarts, serial killers are mostly average. They're not intelligent masterminds. And even this whole Hollywood trope is kind of dumb if you really think about it. I mean, why would being really smart explain away these sadistic impulses? OK, so next idea. Are they just straight up deranged?

Starting point is 00:18:37 Well, what's interesting is that most serial killers aren't diagnosed with any kind of obvious mental disorder. That is, until they're found killing a bunch of people. One study of more than 250 serial killers found that only about 20% of them were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder before getting arrested for their crimes. So it seems like they walk around among us, just blending in. Which brings us to another idea that people reach for to explain serial killers' behaviour.

Starting point is 00:19:14 This idea that they are psychopaths. That is, they seem perfectly normal, but secretly they're manipulative, calculating and without emotions. Think about Christian Bale's character in American Psycho. I have all the characteristics of a human being. Flesh, blood, skin, hair. But not a single clear identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Not a single emotion.

Starting point is 00:19:47 Classic Christian Bale. But seriously, the word psychopath gets thrown around a lot. But a big thing that it signals to a lot of people is the lack of empathy. This idea that serial killers do what they do because they don't feel bad when people suffer. So that's what we're going to focus on. Do these killers lack empathy? When documentary filmmakers asked Ed Kemper about this idea in the 1980s, he said that he did feel bad,

Starting point is 00:20:20 especially when it came to killing his own mother. I looked at her, I said, no. I said, goodnight. And I knew I was going to kill her. You know? It hurts. Because I'm not a lizard, I'm not from under a rock. So that's what Ed said,

Starting point is 00:20:40 but what can the science tell us about serial killers and empathy? Well, there isn't much reliable research on whether serial killers in particular lack empathy, but there is some research on other violent criminals. And our psychiatrist, Gwen, says that on the whole, empathy doesn't seem to explain violence generally. To suggest that you're generally low in empathy on a day-to-day basis in your social relationships, I think the jury is pretty out on that one because there are different studies show different things. So, for example, a review paper of 35 studies

Starting point is 00:21:18 found that while some research showed a link between violent people having less empathy, others didn't see this. And overall, they said that this idea just can't clearly explain violence. This conclusion was also borne out in this kind of remarkable study that followed more than 1,000 juvenile offenders for several years. And it tried to see what's special about the ones who ended up becoming killers.

Starting point is 00:21:45 It found that so-called psychopathic tendencies, a lack of empathy or being callous, that did not predict who would go on to kill. What it did find, though, is that if the kids grew up around violence, well, that did increase their chance of becoming a killer. And Gwen suspects this is true for serial killers as well. I mean, I think it's very likely that a man who becomes a serial killer is likely to have been exposed to violence in childhood. I think it's quite difficult to just start up a career of violence without having been exposed to it in some way. Which takes us to the most concrete clue that

Starting point is 00:22:31 we could find in the literature to help explain serial killers. Serial killers do have a higher chance of being abused as kids compared to other people. And that includes all kinds of abuse, physical, sexual and psychological. And this was true for Ed Kemper, the guy with the heads. He's said to have grown up in an abusive home. His mother would lock him in the basement for hours as punishment. But before you go blaming mum and dad for the whole kitten caboodle, this can't explain everything. Not all serial killers were abused as kids. In fact, one study of 50 serial killers found that about two-thirds

Starting point is 00:23:12 of them had been abused, leaving a third that hadn't. So who knows what's going on there? I think that one of the myths about serial killers is that we know a lot about them. And I'm not sure we do know a lot about them because they're so unusual. So if you break it down, there's been an average of 50 serial killers running around in the US each year for the last few years. 50. These killers are extreme outliers. When you zoom out to the entire American population, there's roughly one serial killer for every 6.5 million Americans. And the fact that they're so outside the norm

Starting point is 00:23:56 makes it really tough for science to explain them. So when it comes to serial killers, what do we know? Well, unlike in the movies, they often don't do this weird ritual thing to every one of their victims. In fact, they switch it up quite often. We also know that many serial killers seem to be driven by sex and they often sexually assault their victims alongside killing them. Plus, serial killers are often not evil geniuses.

Starting point is 00:24:32 Most of them have an average IQ. And Gwen says we can't really say too much more about serial killers than that. It's very hard to say anything very sensible about them because they're such a bizarre and unusual way for people to behave. They're statistically just off the map. Even though serial killers are statistically off the map, they might feel like a threat because they're just all over

Starting point is 00:25:00 our movie screens and they're in the news. But the truth is that your chances of being taken out by a serial killer are super small. Like, if you're a woman, statistically, you're way more likely to be killed by a current or former male partner than anyone else. So while some might be worried about the boogeyman under the bed, really, we should be worried about the person we're in bed with.

Starting point is 00:25:30 But we don't think about that. We would much prefer to think about the homicidal equivalent of ghoulies and ghosties, those strangers or weirdos or people with a funny walk or an IQ in the thousands. So I think that these are distractions. I think we would rather look at stories than we would like to look at the reality. That's science versus serial killers. This episode has been produced by Shruti Ravindran, Meryl Horne, Rose Rimler, and me, Wendy Zuckerman.

Starting point is 00:26:07 Our senior producer is Caitlin Sori. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, additional editing help from Alex Bloomberg. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Music written by Bobby Lord and Emma Munger. Sound design and mix by Emma Munger. A big thanks to all the other academics who helped us out with this episode, including Dr Mike Amott, Dr. Anne Burgess, Dr.

Starting point is 00:26:25 Scott Lillenfield, Dr. Devin Palaskek, Dr. Corey Ryan, Dr. Kim Rosmo, Dr. David Keatley, Dr. Jennifer Lansford, Dr. Gabrielle Salfati, Dr. Claire Ferguson, and Catherine Ramsland. An extra thanks to Sarah McVie, Christopher Suter, Frank Lopez, Rose Reed, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson and everyone at Gimlet who listened to this episode and gave thoughts. Thank you so much. That's it for this season. Boy, that was fast.

Starting point is 00:26:56 We'll be back in the fall with some new episodes. If you want to suggest a topic for us to investigate, you can hit us up on Facebook. We're Science Versus Podcast there. And we're also on Twitter at Science VS. And before we go, here are some of our favorite moments from the season. It's been a lot of fun. If you take away sex from a sex addict, nothing happens.

Starting point is 00:27:18 Nobody ever died in the history of the world from blue balls. I woke up and I could not move half of my face. SETI Institute freeze-dry room. We have all the aliens you need. So how many circumcisions do you reckon you've performed? That's a good question. I think you could say more than a thousand.

Starting point is 00:27:39 That's a lot of willies. Well, yeah. If you like what you've been hearing, please tell your friends about us and review us on iTunes. It really helps more people to find us. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you soon.

Science Vs - Serial Killers: Science of the Lambs

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