The Different Types Of Serial Killers By Richard Ramirez

According to Richard Ramirez,“Normal, ordinary people do not think like a serial killer. They have no conception of what is going on in a killer’s mind, how he operates”. Ramirez was a notorious serial killer who killed at least 14 people and tortured many more. Serial killers like Ramirez are why for many years psychologists and law enforcement officials have been trying to figure out just why people behave in this way. It is a very common fact that normal people do not think the same way that a serial killer does which is why it makes figuring out why they do what they do so much harder. While it is very hard to figure out the minds of serial killers, psychologists and criminal justice officials have worked together to try to answer this

Many people have a lot of trouble trying to understand exactly why serial killers do what they do, but in the killers minds they have certain motives that make sense to them. Holmes and DeBurger were two men who characterized serial murderers based on their motives. They “explain that the reward for killing is generally psychological even though some killers may benefit materially from their crimes” (Hickey, 2002). The first type of serial killers they described were the visionary type. These killers would be motivated by the commands,voices, or visions of some type of good or evil force. These killers usually suffer from some type of psychosis. The second type is the mission-oriented type who think it is their mission to rid the society of certain groups of people. The third type is the hedonistic type. These are the killers that get some type of thrill from killing their victims. The last type that Holmes and DeBurger categorized is the power/control-oriented type. These killers don’t get pleasure sexually, but rather get pleasure over simply having control and power over the helpless victim. The FBI has also tried to categorize killers by using profiling into “organized” and “disorganized” killers. The organized killers are often highly intelligent, charismatic, lives with a partner, and has controlled emotions during the crime. Unlike the organized killers, disorganized killers are very often below-average intelligence, live alone, high school dropouts, and have high anxiety during crimes. Although there is many different ways to categorize serial killers, they have been categorized both in a psychological perspective and also profiled by the