Serial killer

Ted Bundy, American serial killer.

The designation serial killer or serial killer designates an individual who murders three or more people in a period of 30 days or more, with a period of of "cooling off" between each murder, and whose usual motivation is the psychological gratification that committing said crime provides, although not necessarily the only one. Serial killers "tend to be selective in stalking their victims and do so driven by some compelling inner need."

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a serial killer's motivations can be anger, thrill-seeking, sexual gratification, financial gain, and attention-seeking. They often follow the same methodology or modus operandi, involving victims who often share some characteristic with the offender, be it occupation, ethnic origin, appearance, sex, or age.

The term serial killer is commonly attributed to FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler in the 1970s, although it had already been described many years before. There is evidence that the German police inspector Ernst Gennat already used this concept in 1930.

Serial killers should not be confused with mass murderers, who murder a large number of victims simultaneously in a short period of time, nor with hit-and-run killers, who commit multiple murders in a short period of time and in different places.

Definition

The term "serial killer" was presumably coined by agent Robert Ressler in the 1970s. The expression serial killer entered popular language largely due to the publicity given to the crimes of Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam"), in the middle of that decade. Though one of the first times that concept was used was with Cleveland's "torso killer."

The term allows criminalists and criminologists to distinguish those criminals, who kill several people over a long period, from those who kill many people in a single event (mass murderers). A third type of serial killer is the hit-and-run killer.

The following are brief definitions of these three types:

• A serial killer is someone who commits three or more murders for a long period of time cooling lapse between every crime. In the middle of their crimes, they seem quite normal, a condition that Hervey Cleckley and Robert Hare call "lamb mask". It often exists — but not always — a sexual element in this type of killer (Fred West, Zodiac killer, Luis Alfredo Garavito).
• A Mass murdereron the other hand, he is an individual who commits multiple murders on an isolated occasion and in one place. Authors often commit suicide afterwards; therefore, the knowledge of their mental state and the reasons behind their actions are often left to speculation. The few mass murderers who have been caught claim that they do not clearly remember the event.
• A Itinerant killer, also known as hiker killer or spree killer, commits multiple murders in different places, within a period that can vary from a few hours to several days. Unlike serial killers, they don't return to their normal behavior between murders.

All of these types of crimes mentioned are usually committed by a single person. But there have been examples in all three categories where two or more perpetrators have acted in concert, such as The Hillside Stranglers and Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. Writer Michael Newton claims that this happens in about a third of cases.

There are other types of mass murders as well, although they are often related to large organizations and not two or three murderers: genocide and terrorist attacks. Mass murderers have been mostly male. Women represent the minority in serial killer statistics. Serial killers are specifically motivated by a multiplicity of psychological drives, primarily lust for power and sexual compulsion. They often have feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness, sometimes due to humiliation and abuse in childhood and/or the pressure of poverty, also low socioeconomic status in adulthood, compensating for their crimes by giving them a sense of power and often revenge, during and after committing the crimes. Knowledge of their actions terrorize entire communities and often confuse the police, consequences that fuel their sense of power. This motivational aspect separates them from contract killers and other serial killers, who are motivated by profit. For example, in Scotland during the 1820s, William Burke and William Hare murdered people in what became known as the "Case of the Corpse Snatcher." They don't figure as serial killers in most criminologist definitions, because their motives were primarily economic.

Serial killers often have extremely sadistic impulses. These annul the ability to feel empathy for the suffering of others, in this way, they are frequently called psychopaths or sociopaths, terms that have been renamed by psychologists as antisocial personality disorder. Some serial killers make use of lust and torture to gain sexual pleasure by mutilating the victim and also slowly killing the victim over a long period of time.

Psychology and development

Most serial killers come from an unhealthy background or mental disorder. It is known that, frequently, they were victims of abuse during their childhood, be it physically, sexually or psychologically, since there is a correlation between the abuses of their childhood and the crimes they commit.

The fantasy element in the development of serial killers is extremely important. They often fantasize about murder during and even after adolescence. They compulsively daydream about domination, subjugation, and murder, often with very specific elements of their fantasies later appearing in their actual crimes. Others enjoy reading stories of sadism, full of rape, torture and murder. But in some cases, these traits are not present.

Some serial killers exhibit one or more childhood warning signs of what is known as the "McDonald Set" or "Psychopathic triad". These are:

• Pyromania, start fires invariably only by the emotion of destroying things.
• Cruelty to animals (related to "zoosadism"). Many children may have cruel behaviors with animals, such as cutting their legs off the spiders, but future serial killers often kill larger animals, such as dogs and cats, and usually for their own delight, even more than just impress their friends.
• Enuresis beyond the age at which children normally exceed such behaviour.

A clarification should be made, this triad, developed in 1963, has recently been questioned by other researchers.

Many experts have stated that once a serial killer begins his criminal acts he cannot stop (or only rarely). Some hold the view that those who are unable to control their homicidal impulses are easier to catch.

Boom

There have been conflicting reports to some extent about the mass murder. The FBI claimed in the 1980s that at one particular time there were only 35 active serial killers in the United States, implying that the mass murderers in question had committed their first crimes but had not yet been apprehended. or detained for other causes (for example, suicide, paralysis, or natural death).

This figure has often been exaggerated. In his book Serial Killers: The Growing Menace, Joel Norris claims that there were 500 active serial killers at one time in the United States, responsible for 5,000 victims a year, which would be about a quarter of all known homicides in the country.

The mass murder before 1900

Portrait in painting by Isabel Báthory.

Although the phenomenon of multiple murders is generally considered a contemporary fact, it can be detected in history, albeit with a certain limit of precision.

In the 15th century, one of the wealthiest noblemen in France, Gilles de Rais, kidnapped, raped, and murdered at least a hundred boys and girls. Hungarian aristocrat Elizabeth Báthory was arrested in 1610 and subsequently accused of torturing and killing up to 600 young girls. She verified in her diary all her murders. Although both de Rais and Báthory were supposedly sadists and addicted to killing, they differ from today's serial killers in that this pair were wealthy and powerful. Based on the lack of an established police force and active media during those centuries, it may very well be that there were just as many mass murderers at that time, who were not identified or not well publicized.

Thug Behram, leader of the Thuggee gang in India, has often been named the world's most prolific serial killer. According to numerous sources, it is estimated that he murdered 931 people by strangulation using a ceremonial cloth (or rumal, which in Hindi means handkerchief), used by his cult between 1790 and 1830, in this way, he possesses the record for the most murders committed by a single person in history. In total, the henchmen overall would have been responsible for approximately two million deaths, according to the Guinness Book of Records.

In Spain, Manuel Blanco Romasanta was sentenced to death in 1853 after confessing to 9 murders, although his sentence was commuted as it was considered a case of clinical lycanthropy.

In his famous book Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing records the case of a serial killer that occurred around the year 1870, an Italian named Eusebius Pieydagnelle who had a sexual obsession with blood and confessed to killing six people.

In Vitoria, Spain, Juan Díaz de Garayo was arrested in 1880 and sentenced to death for 6 murders after his confession. Although he did not kill only prostitutes, and had several failed attempts, he tried to justify the murders by claiming that the prostitutes wanted to charge him too much.

In Mexico there was a serial killer of women in 1880 named Francisco Guerrero Pérez "El Chalequero". He killed 20 women after raping them and then decapitating them, dumping their remains in the surroundings of Río Consulado in Mexico City. The case of Guerrero could be placed in the section of missionary murderer; since he argued that he killed women to prevent them from being unfaithful. He was arrested in 1888, released in 1904, where he again killed an old woman. He was sentenced to death although he died in 1910 of tuberculosis.

The popular anonymous murderer Jack the Ripper slit and disemboweled several prostitutes in London in 1888 (the exact number of victims is unknown - at least four, probably six). These brutal crimes managed to garner enormous press attention because London, at the time, was the capital and center of the world's most important economic superpower.

Joseph Vacher was executed in France in 1898 after confessing to the murder and mutilation of 11 women and children, while American serial killer H.H. Holmes was hanged in Philadelphia in 1896 after confessing to 27 murders.

Types of serial killers

Organized and disorganized

The FBI has, too precisely, categorized serial killers into two different types: organized and disorganized:

• Organized assassins: They are usually possessors of an intellectual coefficient higher than the average (110 below) plan their crimes very methodically so it may take years to carry out a murder. Sometimes they carry out their murders due to derogation or disorders and, to cover up, they can try to involve other people in their planning. They usually kidnap the victims, after gaining their trust, killing them in one place and getting rid of them at another time. Sometimes, this kind of person seeks among his past people who were part of his life and who marked it somehow. They act by deceiving in many ways and, if there are strangers in the midst of their goal, they study them and come to create a whole number of circumstances to turn them against their goal. Sometimes it may take years to separate your target from your obstacle. Once this purpose has been realized, they approach passively and with many lies and deceptions the person of their past. Thus, at last, it manages to achieve its goal, which is to hurt the person who selected as a victim, and its way of acting can be: (A) to kill his victim or cause suffering, such as physical harm to a loved one or loved one, to his environment either be the direct family of the target or to be loved today; (B) to get angry with his initial objective. For example, Ted Bundy put on his arm a fake plaster mold, asking women to help him bring some books to his vehicle, where he was beating them hard by leaving them unconscious, and thus being able to act. Others have as a specific target the prostitutes, who may voluntarily go with the serial killer, believing that he is any customer. These types of murderers have a high degree of control over the crime scene, and generally know well the forensic science that enables them to cover their tracks, such as burying the body or loading it to a river to sink it. Moreover, they scrupulously continue their crimes in the media, and they often pride themselves on their actions, as if they were great projects. The organized killer is usually very sociable and has friends and lovers, very often even wife and children. They are the kind of person that when they are captured, they are described by the known as "a nice guy" who "would not be able to hurt a fly." Some serial killers strive to make their crimes difficult to discover, such as counterfeiting suicide notes; this is the case of Harold Shipman, a British head physician, whose social position and occupation were such that allowed him to simulate the deaths of his victims, considering that they died for natural causes: between 1971 and 1998, he killed at least 250 of his older patients, and until very little before being discovered, none of them were suspected of being suspected.
• Disorganized assassins: With a low/average IQ (between 80 and 95), they commit their crimes impulsively. While the organized killer will specifically go out hunting the victim, the disorganized will kill someone whenever the opportunity arises, and sometimes he will be bothered to get rid of the body, leaving it in the same place he found the victim. They usually carry out "surprise" attacks, assaulting their victims without notice, and typically perform rituals that they believe necessary to perform, once the victim is dead (e.g. necrophilia, mutilation, cannibalism, etc.). They are often insociable people, having few friends, and may have a history of mental problems and be described by their acquaintances as eccentric or even as "a little strange or rare." They have little awareness of their crimes and may block the memories of their murders. One of the most known recent cases that fit this profile is that of Francisco García Escalero, the "Matamendigos" or Jeffrey Dahmer.

A significant number of serial killers simultaneously display certain aspects of the two types mentioned, although characteristics of one type dominate. The behavior of some killers declines from organized to disorganized as their killings continue. They carefully and methodically complement the killings at first, but as their compulsion gets out of control, they lose control, becoming careless and impulsive.

Some murderers suffer from multiple personalities (Dissociative Identity Disorder) which leads them to commit both organized and disorganized murders. Although several psychologists have cited multiple personalities as one of the major causes of murder, it is proven that only a minority of serial killers suffer from this trauma.^{[citation needed]}

Motivations

The organized and disorganized patterns are related to the methods of the killers. In consideration of the motives, they can be placed into five different categories:

Schizophrenia

Contrary to popular opinion, serial killers are rarely schizophrenic or motivated by hallucinations and/or voices in their heads. Many claim to be exonerated by reason of madness. However, there are a few genuine cases of serial killers, who were treated according to such a conception.

Herbert Mullin massacred 13 people after hearing voices tell him the killings were necessary to prevent an earthquake in California.

Ed Gein claimed that by eating the corpses of women who resembled his deceased mother he could preserve his mother's soul in his own body. He killed two women who reminded him of his mother, eating one and being arrested while he was in the process of preparing the second body for consumption. He also used the meat of exhumed corpses to shape a "woman's costume"; for himself, and thus be able to "become" at his mother, while he kept talking to himself in a falsetto voice. After his arrest he was placed in a mental institution for the rest of his life.

Missionaries

The so-called apostolic assassins believe that their acts are justified every time they get rid of certain types of people they consider undesirable, (prostitutes or members of a certain ethnic group), doing them a favor. the society. Robert Pickton, Gary Ridgway, Mark David Chapman, John Bodkin Adams, and Aileen Wuornos are often described as apostolic assassins. Interestingly, in the case of Wuornos, the victims were not prostitutes, but their clients. Apostolic killers differ from other types of serial killers in that their motivations are not sexual.

Hedonism

This guy kills for the sheer joy of it. Some may revel in the "quest" to hunt down and find a victim more than anything else, while others may be primarily motivated by acts of torture and abuse of the victim while she is alive. There is usually a strong sexuality to crimes, even though it may not be immediately obvious, but some killers get a rush of excitement that isn't necessarily sexual, such as David Berkowitz, who got a thrill out of shooting young couples, when these they would meet in his car, he would do it randomly and then he would escape without even physically touching the victims. Among the Hedonist category there are three types of murderer.

1. The first is the emotionally motivated killer: This killer kills for the emotion he feels while his victim dies. The victim has to be aware during the attack so that the killer can get as much pleasure as possible. Sexual acts do not occur after the victim dies. The goal of the thrill-motivated killer is to feel the terror of his victims before they die.
2. The second guy is the lurking killer: This killer is the one who tortures and mutilates his victims. They are motivated by lust and sexual pleasure. The victims of this type of killer are found with evidence of torture and sometimes missing parts of the body. The rape of the victims of the lujury-motivated killer is common. In spite of that, others can kill the injured quickly, almost as a routine and then gratify themselves in acts of necrophilia or cannibalism, as in the case of Lewis Hutchinson.
3. The third type of hedonist killer is the benefit-motivated killer.

Profit

Most criminals who commit multiple murders for material purposes (such as contract killers) are not classified as serial killers, because they are motivated by profit or some kind of financial gain, rather than to be by a psychopathological compulsion. Even so, there is a fine line that separates both types of assassins. For example, Marcel Petiot, who operated in Nazi-occupied France, could be classified as a serial killer. He posed as a member of the French resistance and lured wealthy Jews to his home, making them believe he could smuggle them out of the country. Instead, he murdered them and stole his belongings, killing 63 people before he was finally caught. Although Petiot's main motivation was material, few can deny that a man willing to kill so many people, simply to acquire a few dozen suitcases of clothing and jewelry, was a compulsive murderer and psychopath.

Power / control

This is the most common serial killer. His main objective when it comes to killing is to obtain and exercise power over his victim. Such murderers were sometimes abused as children, feel incredibly powerless, and often indulge in practices that are linked to the forms of abuse they suffered themselves. Many murderers of this type sexually abuse their victims, but they differ from hedonistic murderers in that the rape is not motivated by lust, but by another form of domination over the victim.

Some serial killers may have characteristics of more than one of the above types. For example, British assassin Peter Sutcliffe appears to be both a murderer and a missionary, since he claimed that he heard voices ordering him to clear the streets of prostitutes.

Alternatively, another school of thinkers classifies motives by: need, profit motive or power.

Inside the mind of a serial killer: the phases of his thought process

The capture and imprisonment of large numbers of psychopathic serial killers has allowed forensic psychologists and psychiatrists to analyze firsthand the deviant behavior they display. Although there is no prevailing uniform opinion about how the psychic mechanism that leads an ordinary individual to become a chain homicide works, nonetheless, highly grounded and suggestive statements have been formulated. For example, the scheme postulated by the American psychologist and police investigator Dr. Joel Norris who, after interviewing many serial homicides, developed his theory that during the cerebral process through which this class of criminals goes through, has been widely disseminated. Several mental stages or phases are necessarily present that direct their actions until they lead to a fatal outcome.

The first of these stages is called the "aura phase" and in it an astonishing degree of confusion is visualized in the thought expressed by the individual, which reveals telltale signs of a psychopathy that will quickly become into a true obsession. The psychopathic murderer experiences his fantasies with such virulent lucidity that they become increasingly dangerously mixed with reality, reaching an extreme where the affected subject will not be able to differentiate between the two. The individual gradually becomes dependent on these fantasies, up to a point where they begin to rule him completely. What initially translated into harmless dream games begins to occupy an increasingly essential time and space within his conscious life.

The second stage of this disastrous string deserved the name of the “search phase”. Here the maniac makes the irrevocable decision to perpetrate the crime, and understands that for this he must find a suitable victim for his particular needs. There are psychopaths who, upon reaching this degree, are satisfied with reaffirming their fantasies and imagine that they commit the crime, but do not go any further.

But if the resolution to kill to fulfill his morbidity becomes more powerful, he enters the “seduction phase”, which is the one in which the future murderer establishes contact with possible objects of aggression displaying his individual magnetism and his dialectic. He begins to enjoy his "performance" and seeks to lower his opponent's guard by preparing the way for a surprise attack. Some disturbed people may contain themselves when they reach this stage and are satisfied with having established this contact with eventual victims, and then they go back.

However, most are no longer able to repress or stop and ascend to the next step in this neurosis known as the "hunting phase." In the hunting stage there is an abrupt advance from cautious passivity to feverish activity. The victimizer has already chosen the type of human prey that he considers "appropriate" and is preparing to make decisive contact with it.

Depending on the personality of the aggressor, he will use his charm and personal attractiveness -if he had any- in order to induce the victim to fall into a trap, or he will carry out a succession of encounters inspired by the purpose of winning over your confidence before attacking it. The time taken by this stage of your thinking process can last for weeks or months, or last only a few moments. The truth is that this stage is inevitably always fulfilled before entering the so-called “capture phase”. This phase involves the fifth milestone in the anomalous mental behavior of the criminal. This is when the killer –literally speaking- sheds his mask, and uses force in order to hold his prey or to drive it where he wants. It is a point of no return. The startled victim becomes aware for the first time of the lethal intentions that animated his counterpart, and because of this, now the matador can no longer back down.

Next, the “murder phase” itself is installed, which crystallizes and culminates the previous sadistic or domination imagery. This is when the ultimator loses absolutely any hint of perception of reality and fully embarks on the realization at any cost of his plans and wishes. It has ended in the phase that justifies the existence of all the previous stages. It is the raison d'être of the entire preceding mental process, and the executor –imbued with sick ecstasy- does not hesitate to carry out the dreamed crime with all its gloomy additions.

The last instance of this pathological brain impulse is called the “depression phase”. It is only entered once the physical aggression has effectively been consummated. The excitement aroused by the act of murder has reached its paroxysm. Subsequently, the maniac is overwhelmed by intense depression and apathy, which does not mean that he is capable of recognizing the evil of his acts, much less that he can feel remorse. He understands, yes, that the expected pleasure was not as delightful as he imagined, and can even gauge that the risks are too great compared to the relatively meager fruit harvested. However, in the event that we are really in the presence of a homicidal psychopath, this phase does not last long and, some time later, it systematically goes through the aforementioned process again, which only stops if the culprit gets sick. or incapacitates, or is captured or killed.

The murderer, in short, does nothing but carry out a fantasy of a ritual nature. However, once the assaulted person is sacrificed, the identity that he/she kept within the imaginary of the criminal vanishes. The victim no longer represents what the victimizer assumed at the beginning, namely: the girlfriend who rejected him, the resounding voice of the hated mother, or the crushing distance caused by the absent father. All these ghosts remain recorded in the most vivid way in the executioner's psyche after the crime has been perpetrated, and he has not been able to drive them away from within him. On the contrary, his intangible presence becomes increasingly oppressive and ominous, metaphorically forcing him to repeat the sick cycle that drives him to kill again. The disaster committed does not erase or change the past, because the serial killer ends up hating more. Hence the addictive nature of his mental mechanism and the impossibility of stopping. The climax reached moments ago is only a mirage that fails to compensate for those contradictory feelings, and neither fills his deep emptiness nor does it satisfy the feverish anxiety that overwhelms him.

Serial Killers in Popular Culture

Recorded from the time, by José Guadalupe Posada, which illustrates one of the murders committed by Francisco Guerrero Pérez.

Because of the gruesome nature of their crimes, their diverse personalities and profiles, and their ability to evade detection and kill many victims before being caught and imprisoned, serial killers have quickly become cult figures, and they have been represented in many novels, films, songs, comics, video games, etc.

Public fascination with serial killers has led to the success of many detective novels and films about fictional serial killers, including Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho; and especially The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris and its award-winning film adaptation, whose main antagonist, the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, has become a cultural icon. The character John Doe, from the movie Seven, is another notorious fictional serial killer, and even the movie Scream is based on real cases of serial murders that occurred in Florida. The Family Bones comic series tells the story of the Copeland murders in Missouri.

At the end of 2006, the American channel Showtime began broadcasting a series about a serial killer (who killed other killers) who worked as a forensic analyst for the police: Dexter. The series is based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.

In the series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which was produced by CBS, a group of serial killers with unique recognition have been highlighted, such as Paul Millander "The Bathtub Killer" a corrupt and criminal judge who had Gil Grissom in check for multiple episodes; Kevin Greer "The Blue Paint Killer". He attacked his victims by placing paint on a railing at Western Las Vegas University, forcing them to approach a fountain to remove it, where he attacked them; Natalie Davis (Jessica Collins) "The Miniature Killer" a murderess who made models of her crimes to perfection and sent them to the police; Nate Haskell (real name: Warner Clumsy) a serial killer who drugged kidnapped and murdered young couples in California, Nevada, Arizona and Texas and who repeatedly put CSI Raymond Langston in check, and had a group of accomplices, women that they worshiped his personality, whom he called his girlfriends, whom he tortured and murdered after committing his crimes; the twin brothers Jared Briscop and Paul Wintroup known for kidnapping and murdering college girls in Seattle and Las Vegas, taking on a dynamic from their brotherhood in the style of the Castor and Polux twins, and who put in check the CSI supervisor D.B Russell and the team.

In 2008, CBS also launched The Mentalist, a series in which the protagonist, Patrick Jane, pursues an unknown serial killer who goes by the name of Red John known for murdering primarily women. in California, Nevada, and Mexico, and who murdered Jane's wife and daughter 5 years prior to the start of the series after Jane insulted him on a television show. Discovering the identity of Red John is the main objective of the series and of Jane. Unlike most serial killers, who work alone or with the help of a few accomplices, and similarly compared to CSI killer Nate Haskell, Red John is a criminal mastermind with dozens of assorted accomplices working for him. him, as are civilians, other serial killers and even infiltrators in the Sacramento Police, FBI CBI and possibly other government agencies, making the task of unmasking him even more complicated.

Representation of the time of finding a serial killer victim Jack the Ripper.

D-Tox, a 2002 film, starring Silvester Stallone, shows the story of FBI agent Jack Malloy who is chasing a particular serial killer of police officers, who has murdered his wife and several of his co-workers. Although the film was not commercially successful, it became a cult film for fans of fictional serial killers, for creating in its concept a serial killer who chases and kills policemen, something that has not been presented or even in real life.

Monster, a 2003 film starring South African actress Charlize Theron, tells the story of Aileen Wuornos at the time of her crimes, an Oscar-winning performance.

In Mexico, the case of Gregorio Cárdenas "El estrangulador de Tacuba", inspired Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda to write the play El Criminal de Tacuba, directed by Raúl Quintanilla and starring Sergio Bustamante. Also, the case of the González Valenzuela sisters "Las Poquianchis", inspired the Mexican writer Jorge Ibargüengoitia to write the book Las muertas. Likewise, the story was made into a film directed by Felipe Cazals under the title Las Poquianchis, starring Diana Bracho, Patricia Reyes Spíndola, María Rojo and Ana Ofelia Murguía. Also in fiction, serial killers are represented in the famous telenovela and thriller Cuna de lobos with the central character of the matriarch Catalina Creel, played by actress María Rubio, a villain in the great dramatic tradition of the Alexis Carrington from Alexis Carrington's Dynasty, the J.R. Ewing from Dallas or Abby Cunningham from Knots Landing. Catalina's unnatural devotion to her only son (played by Alejandro Camacho) led her to hide a good eye behind the lie of blindness, committing a series of murders beginning with her own husband, Carlos (Raúl Meraz), then with participate in the kidnapping of Leonora's son (who was played by Diana Bracho). In addition, he was commanding the burning of a nursing home, bribes to hide his murders of the Escudero/Joyero (Jorge Fegan), Gutiérrez (Carlos Cámara), the vice president of the Lar-Creel company, Lucero (Magda Karina), the agency representative of trips, as well as the murder of Inspector Suárez (Humberto Elizondo), the chief investigator of the Lar-Creel company, and the accidental explosion of the plane killing his own son Alejandro and his daughter-in-law Vilma (Rebecca Jones). Cradle of Wolves became so popular in its home country that on the night of the final broadcast, the streets of Mexico City - infamously choked with traffic - were deserted as the venues were packed. in their houses glued to their television screens. It has been seen several times in the United States and Australia in recent years. A new version has been in talks for several years.

The film "El Ángel" was made in Argentina, which is based on the life of Carlos Eduardo Robledo Puch, also known as "The Angel of Death".

In Venezuela, the soap opera writer Martín Hahn writes stories with a serial killer who disguises himself as a popular character invented by themselves, and kills people, but leaving the expectation of who or who are the murderers who disguise themselves and they kill at their convenience, leaving the viewer to play with the plot full of mystery, suspense and the suspects, which when its final chapter arrives in which the country is paralyzed in this case Venezuela and the audience rating is very favorable for the chain that he transmits it to find out the identities of the murderer(s) who committed the murders. The first Venezuelan telenovela of this style of murderous drama was Angélica Pecado from the year 2000, where the murderous character was El Cuervo, Judas's wife of 2002 leads the public to believe that the murderer is Alirio Agüero Del Toro, represented by Albi De Abreu, but where the real Murderer Character was Judas's wife, Estrambotic Anastasia from 2004 Murderous Character El Monje, all of these produced by the RCTV network and then the last 2: The Young Widow from 2011, murderous character The Widow Negra" and My ex wants me from 2012 Character Assassin El Brujo" from the Venevisión network They all enjoyed a very high audience, records in its final chapters where the mystery and identity was revealed. That same year, the telenovela El rostro de la venganza, produced by Telemundo, tells the story of a boy who committed a crime at his school, according to which he killed 7 children but was blamed, while the real Assassin who was thought to be dead turned out to be the one who killed 6 children. When the guilty boy is released from prison 20 years later, the latter reappears and is dedicated to murder. The telenovela is starred by David Chocarro and Marlene Favela, and antagonized by Jonathan Islas and Felicia Mercado, with the special participation of Maritza Rodríguez and Elizabeth Gutiérrez and the leading role played by Saul Lisazo.

The Stranglers, India.

In the Heroes series, the character Sylar (Gabriel Gray) discovers his ability of intuitive aptitude, and is able to know how things and mechanisms work, whether mechanical or biological like the brain. But with his ability comes a hunger for more abilities, more powers and to get them he becomes a serial killer looking for powers to be special, the way he commits his murders, is by using his first acquired ability, telekinesis to holding the person against a wall and proceeds to open his head as if it were a can opener, making an incision in the forehead and pointing his index finger towards the victim's head, after that he devotes himself to observing the exposed brain of the person and learn to use his new ability. In the series, the FBI is looking for him for more than 10 murders against special people and what makes him the subject of more controversy among the police is that, by using telekinesis in his murders, he does not leave fingerprints or physical contact marks, and they find corpses without the top part of the head, without brains, bodies in pools of blood and cruelly leaving the severed part of the head lying, frozen or impaled in situations impossible for a normal person, turning him into a serial killer unstoppable.

Serial killer memorabilia and scholarship is a subculture that revolves around the legacy of several infamous and notorious serial killers. While memorabilia is generally confined to the paintings, writings and poems of these characters, a market has grown since the last decade of the 20th century with encyclopedias, cards and even action figurines.