Serial Killer Research Paper

Envision a mental picture of a serial killer, what image comes to mind? Presumably one of a relatively young, fairly attractive, and intelligent middle-class white man. Why is this? It is not plausible that every serial killer fits this category, so why do a majority of American citizens immediately picture serial killers as all displaying these characteristics? By the conclusion of this paper, I wish to identify some key disparities between differing groups of serial killers. Is there a certain quality that drastically separates ethnic serial killers from the rest, or a specific trait that differentiates female serial killers from the males? I believe there is an entire spectrum of these murderers who are both alike and unique from one another

I exclusively knew of the more popular and recognized murderers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer--who were both white. Before commencing research for this particular essay, I had never heard of nor read about serial killers like Coral Eugene Watt or Anthony Edward Sowell. Both were black men who, all together, had murdered over thirty women in Ohio, Michigan, and Texas. Considering that I have conducted an extensive amount of research on serial killers in the past few weeks, it is peculiar to me that those names had never been presented in any of the sources from which I had been gathering information--especially seeing as how Anthony Edward Sowell was convicted a mere six years ago on multiple counts of rape, kidnapping, abuse of a corpse, and eleven murders. The mindset or belief that nearly all serial killers are white stem from the fact that the general population receives their information via the news and major news outlets who tend to provide coverage of homicides and missing person cases predominantly involving white victims

The elucidation for this is that, contrasting with the information I have obtained about male serial killers, the females motives for killing are principally related to money or power and are not characterized by a desire for domination, control, or sadistic sexual violence (Kaplan). In a way, they appear to kill from a “sensible” point of view, which may largely contribute as to why the media scarcely covers the few female serial killers to have existed. Concerning their choice of victim and motives, female serial killers are more akin to average killers, whose motivations for killing can be relatable to everyday people, than they are to their male counterparts. Though they vary in their own ways, the males still receive a lot more coverage than the