Having watched both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, one can’t help but wonder what drives serial killers to commit such atrocious crimes. I usually take the Freudian approach and search for the answer in their troubled childhood. This person had to somehow be brought up differently to lead him or her to not have the same emotions as us, same sense of morality.
Pedro Alonso López is considered to be one of the most infamous murderers of all time. He is said to have killed over 300 victims. I learned that his mother, a prostitute with 13 children, caught him fondling his younger sister when he was eight years old. She threw him out of the house. He was then picked up by a pedophile, taken to a deserted house and repeatedly sodomized. Later, he was taken in by an American family and enrolled in a school for orphans. He allegedly ran away, either with a teacher from his school, or because he was molested by a teacher. Furthermore, at 18, he was gang-raped in prison. There’s no justification for what he did, but this certainly gives us some insight into how tragic events shaped his character.
However, what incites more fear is facing a serial killer that is seemingly normal but leads an alternative life full of murder and cruelty. One that gives no explanation for his actions, no warning signs. One such famous murder was Richard Kuklinski – “the Iceman”. He was an ordinary man. He had a job, a wife, children, and as we later find out a hobby! In the following interview with him, we can see how he got his nickname, having had no feelings as he committed the crimes.
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A couple of weeks ago I was browsing the internet in search of some scenery pictures of the city I am from in Ukraine. I kept coming across references to the “Dnepropetrovsk maniacs”. I thought they are some local band or maybe a motorcicle gang. I then found out that it was a group of guys who murdered for fun. They started with stray dogs and later moved on to humans. They tortured and then killed their victims and recorded it all on camera to keep as memories. What’s more is that they would attend their victims’ funerals and desecrate their gravesides. I was disgusted to find out that these teenagers came from fairly wealthy families and simply took this up as a hobby. I searched for answers; I tried to blame their parents. In interviews, they denied that their children could commit such things, claiming that they were framed by the police. But there are endless pictures and videos showing them committing the crimes and enjoying them! Here is some news footage.
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A video of one of the murders made it onto the internet. Movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween dont scare me much, so I began to watch the movie out of curiosity. You can easily find the video online and www.ohlookaforum.com has a whole lot of information on it. But I urge you not to. I am not exxagerating when I saw that it took me days to recover from it, and the images linger in my mind to this day. The three murderers attacked a middle aged ma, a recent cancer survivor. They used a hammer and a screwdriver to slowly kill him, but what made the video most tragic, is that the poor man wouldn’t die for the longest time, suffering slowly. Some say this is the most gruesome video available online and anybody who dares to watch it, please respond with some feedback. Perhaps it was the raw realism of the footage, perhaps its because it occured in my own city, but I swear that I have never been more horrified in my life…
Interesting post Maria. Personally, I hate all things disgusting, gruesome, and/or scary. It is really scary to think that people would do such things to other people. My mom would try to keep me from going out as much as possible because “I don’t know what kind of people are out there.” I feel like it’s not sufficient to call murderers crazy and just to leave it at that. Sometimes there is a mental imbalance and other times it’s attributed to the events that occurred to the person in the past that molded his/her behavior. Who knows?
Scary, yet fascinating stuff. This would probably be a good time to bring up the most chilling movie about a serial killer I’ve ever seen – Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, released in 1986. I’m sure few have even heard about it, let alone seen it but it’s exactly what a movie like this should be: raw, cold, and uncompromising. It was actually based on real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, whose transformation could also be chalked up to a troubled childhood. Like Pedro Alonso Lopez, his mother was a prostitute but a violent one who regularly beat and humiliated him.
But what the movie does that makes it so effective is similar to what Maria mentions in her third paragraph here. First, he looks like a fairly regular, normal guy. There’s no mask or disfigurement. And secondly, there’s no real rhyme or reason to his murders. It captures that aspect of a serial killer, which to me is most chilling, exceptionally well.
Sadly I can say I have seen this video before. I have a friend who always finds these types of videos and shows them to me. I have an extremely high tolerance for these type of gruesome videos, but this video is different. I’m not joking in the slightest bit when I say no one should look up this video and watch it. I know saying that is almost like a dare, but nothing good will come of it, if anything all you serve to do spread the fear and legacy these kids wanted to create for themselves. No joke, after seeing this video about three months ago, I get squeamish every time I see a murder in a film. When I saw it I was in a room filled with five of my friends that actually enjoy watching sick videos like this, but when they put this on everyone in the room fell silent and eventually just asked to be driven home. This link recounts what they did and what horrible people they were.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepropetrovsk_maniacs
Yeah, I didn’t provide a link for the video because the images haunt me to this day. It was hard for me to stress the grotesqueness and the dreadfulness of the video without encouraging people to watch it. The reality of the video scares me a million times more knowing that this happened in my own hometown…
This happened in your hometown? That is extremely terrifying, especially when the murders were engaging in random acts of murder. I do not know how people are able to commit such atrocious acts.
It is also interesting to see how money plays into this story. I originally read that the families of the murderers were well off, and the Wikipedia link posted by Andrew reinforces that. One of the fathers was a lawyer and represented his son in court, while another was a pilot, even working for the former president of Ukraine during his years of rise to power (The president is also from the same city).
But Wikipedia also says that the young murderers were often unemployed, showing that they simply wanted cash of their own but maybe didn’t receive as much as they wanted from their parents. The way they were caught was from tracking devices put on the phones of the victims that they were pawning in shops around town. There is also evidence that they were contracted by a wealthy web site operator (the Russian Wiki version says he was American) to make 40 snuff videos depicting the murders.
I began this post trying to figure out the motives for such horrific activities. Upon reading into it, it looks like money played a very important role. The guys’ psychology was the second factor. The Wiki website shows each had particular phobias and personal issues. I think its ironic that the main murderer in the group shares his birthday with Hitler, and was particularly proud of that fact…