A person is legally classified a serial killer if he or she has murdered three or more times, no matter the means. I believe that a serial killer is someone who not only kills many times (In some cases thriving on the violent means of killing) but also enjoys the aftermath of his kill by doing unimaginable things to his victim's dead body. It would take a couple of books to write all the details of serial killers to date so I am just going to look at the childhood and the actual crimes committed. I have two reasons for doing this. One is for the interest of others and the second reason is study notes for my book I plan to write.
Before looking into the lives of various serial killers, I have to mention the infamous Jack the Ripper. Jack the ripper surely set a new standard for the modern day serial killer to follow. The noticeable difference between him and other serial killers was that he committed a burst of violent sexual murders and then disappeared. He was like a bad storm that hits fast and furious then suddenly subsides leaving destruction behind. Because of this, Jack the Ripper escaped the legal system. There are many assumptions about who he was and what made him do these awful crimes but Jack the Ripper remains an interesting and unknown subject for psychiatrists and authors around the world.
Jack the Ripper played with the police sending them notes signed Jack the Ripper, a name that has passed the lips of millions spoken with horror and disgust. He targeted prostitutes in their 40's until his last victim who was 25 years old. The London police were aghast when Jack the Ripper's first victim was found. The body of his first victim had her throat slashed, belly slit and her vagina mutilated with stab wounds. The police thought they had seen the worst murder ever until they found his next victim a week later. The second victim suffered with malnutrition and consumption that added to the horror of the scene. Jack the Ripper severed his victim's neck muscles and almost sawed through her spinal column leaving her head dangling from her body. He also disemboweled her.
Jack the Ripper went into a crazy frenzy when interrupted by the sound of a truck approaching. In a hurry he slit his third victim's throat, disfigured her face, cut her body in half from her rectum to her breastbone, then removed her entrails and took her left kidney. His forth victim he took his time disemboweling, leaving her without a nose and breasts and slicing pieces of flesh off her legs. Suddenly the murders stopped, it was over. Jack the Ripper faded into the shadows leaving the horrors behind him for the world to deal with. What a demonic inspiration for the serial killers that followed him!
Hamilton Fish started to call himself Albert Fish when he turned 15 because he hated the name Hamilton and was tired of his nick name “Ham and eggs”. Before Albert was born seven of his relatives suffered with severe mental disorders. This leads me to think that his gruesome acts were the result of a heredity disease. After Albert's father died, his mother placed him an orphanage. Albert proved to be a problem child running away often and wetting his bed every night until he turned 11. As a young adult, Albert drifted around as a house painter and decorator. He married a woman nine years his senior and fathered six children. His wife left with their boarder but after a while returned to Albert keeping her lover in the attic even though Albert stipulated that he would only accept her back if she got rid of her lover. When he found out about her lover in the attic, there was a stormy fight and his wife left forever. The whole affair seemed to set him off. Albert was prone to hallucinations often screaming that he was Christ. Obsessed with sin, sacrifice and penitence through pain, he would make his children and their friends beat him on his buttocks until he bled. He also inflicted pain on himself by inserting needles into his groin and sometimes loosing track of them. When he felt this pain was not enough to prove his penance, he would soak cotton wool in alcohol, insert it in his anus and set it alight. Although he stated that he did not enjoy the pain he was inflicting on himself, he gained sexual gratification through the pain, blaming his need for atonement that forced him to find different means of inflicting worse pain on himself.
The murders, I believe, were associated with Albert's gruesome sexual desires. He started to enjoy the beatings on his buttocks in the orphanage. His desired need to pay for his sins was actually a way to gain sexual enjoyment. Albert was careless criminal. He was arrested a number of times and spent time in jail for grand larceny and even spent time in a psychiatric hospital but was soon released being diagnosed as sane but having a psychotic sexual personality. Two years before his hospital treatment there was an unsolved case of the murder of a young girl of 12. Her body was dismembered and different parts of her body was used to make stew. The young girls name was Grace Budd, the daughter Mr. and Mrs. Budd who Albert befriended under the synonym of Mr. Howard. Albert was compelled to boast about his murders and wrote a confessional letter to Mrs. Budd telling her all the details of his gruesome killings, including the murder of her daughter Grace. The thing to note was that he first tied up his victims, beat their buttocks, tortured them before killing them and then making a stew out of their body parts to eat. His victims were all young boys or girls because he believed that “God” ordered him to castrate young boys and punish young girls. Prosecutors believed he molested and/or killed over 100 children. Albert being a sadomasochism, enjoyed sexual perversions like eating human excrement, torture, pain, murder and eating human flesh. Albert was sentenced die in the electric chair. The first jolt of electricity short-circuited because of all the needles he had inserted into his body, and he died on the second jolt.
