He said he had a great upbringing.” It should be noted that Fallon has never been able to physically examine a serial killer’s brain - either via a brain scan or other methods - as they have refused his requests. All the people I’ve ever studied, every murderer and every dictator, every one of them was either abandoned or abused between birth and three years old - except Pol Pot. It’s the interaction of these two that predisposes you to these radical, aggressive, antisocial behaviors. “So, it’s not just the early environment by itself. “We all know people who are abused early in life who don’t turn out this way, but they may not have the genes that make them susceptible in the first place,” Fallon says. Those disorders can remain relatively mild if someone had a good upbringing - as Fallon says, he’s never even been to jail - but if you bring a dad with PTSD, a dominating mother, or abuse into the picture, all bets are off. In his studies, Fallon has found that people with psychopathy, sociopathy, and other serious personality disorders are basically coded for aggression and violence, low emotional empathy, low anxiety, low reactivity, etc. He’s more interested, however, in figuring out why these particular people became killers when the majority of wartime babies went on to live relatively peaceful lives. Neuroscientist James Fallon - a self-diagnosed psychopath and author of The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain - agrees with Vronsky and Holes when it comes to serial killers being the children of war. And I’m wondering if DeAngelo was also stimulated,” Holes says. “I could see somebody like Phil - when he sees this violence being inflicted on his sister - he is not being traumatized. But thinking about another predator that I know, Phil Hughes, by that age he was already having violent sexual fantasies against girls and women.” Hughes killed at least three women in California in the Seventies. “Now, would that cause that boy to become a sexual predator by itself? I doubt it. “Certainly, to a normal boy, that would be traumatic,” Holes says. Yet his father was in the Air Force and, according to family members, DeAngelo witnessed his sister being raped by two soldiers when the family was stationed in Germany. So, there’s this tendency to go, ‘Aha! You caught the serial killer and so that must be what created the serial killer.’ “ĭeAngelo was in the Navy he never saw combat. Most men had some affiliation with military because of the war, and they were drafted. “When I was working Golden State Killer, I was looking at a lot of men from that time period and their backgrounds. “It’s an over-simplification,” he tells Rolling Stone.
In short: These children who were already predisposed to violence were raised in potentially violent, likely broken homes. “In cases like, for example, the BTK killer, Richard Cottingham, their fathers were returning war veterans with PTSD, which the Eighties,” he says. As such, he looked back at what was happening in the world when murderers like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy were growing up, and discovered a link: They were all born during wartime. Over the course of his work, which began in 1979, Vronsky has deduced that serial killers generally develop the personality and compulsion befitting a killer when they’re young - by the time they’re 14, they’re basically fully formed they generally start killing in their late twenties. The reason behind this is manyfold - encompassing everything from sociological changes, to biology, to technology, to linguistics. “It’s an era that was coined as the ‘ golden age of serial murder‘ by Harold Schechter, who was a crime historian,” Vronsky tells Rolling Stone. Why were there so many serial killers during this brief period? And where did they go?Ĭriminal justice expert Peter Vronksy, whose new book American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years looks to answer just that question, says that more than 80 percent of known American serial killers operated between 19.
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