Serial Killers...The Dark Side of Humanity

My interest in the psychology of serial killers and mass murderers started with the case of Javed Iqbal Mughal. While watching the Canadian news on television on March 17th, 2000, I was quite surprised to find Pakistan the subject of a major news story. The reporter stated that Javed Iqbal Mughal, a resident of Lahore, had been convicted of abusing and killing one hundred children. Judge Allah Bakhsh Ranjha had pronounced the verdict that not only should he be publicly hanged, but also that his body be cut into a hundred pieces and dissolved in a drum of acid, the same drum in which Javed Iqbal had supposedly dissolved the bodies of the children.

The newscast was accompanied by pictures of Javed Iqbal and the judge. There was something very unusual about the images of the criminal and the judge. The more I thought about them, the more I realized that Javed Iqbal looked very calm, peaceful and relaxed while the judge seemed very angry, resentful and revengeful. The criminal did not seem as disturbed, nor the judge as well composed and sober, as I would have expected. There was something about Javed Iqbal’s features, his looks, and his posture that touched me deeply. He had not uttered a word on the screen but his silence spoke volumes. I had an intuition that there was a story behind the story on the news.

To find out the truth, I closed my clinic in Canada and flew to Lahore, Pakistan. During my visit I interviewed Javed Iqbal at length in his death cell in Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore, the same jail where Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was kept prior to his assassination. I then went to see Javed Iqbal’s family and interviewed his brothers, nephews and neighbors. I also interviewed a well- respected Supreme Court judge, Abid Hasan Minto. The more I explored the case, the more bizarre and surrealistic the story became.

Javed Iqbal had written a series of diaries in which he had confessed to killing one hundred children. But when I read the diaries I felt that they were more fiction than fact. During my stay a local magazine announced that four of the children who had been missing had safely returned home. There was also no evidence of the hundred dead bodies. I was shocked to learn that 6000 children were missing in the province of Punjab alone, in no way related to the Javed Iqbal case. Back in Canada, I shared the details of my findings in my book The Myth of the Chosen One.

While I was doing research for that book, I was fascinated with the details of the personalities and lifestyles of serial killers and mass murderers. I discovered the sad reality that the incidence of serial killers and mass murderers has been gradually increasing worldwide in the last few decades. I was further intrigued to find that America has the highest rate of serial killings per capita.

Steve Egger in his collection of essays, Serial Killer, states that “America produces proportionately more of these killers than any other nation on earth.” Elliott Leyton in his book Hunting Humans writes, “…their numbers do continue to grow at a disturbing rate; until the 1960s they were anomalies who appeared perhaps once a decade, but by the 1980s, one was spawned virtually each month. Today, according to unofficial U.S. Justice Department estimates, there may be as many as one hundred multiple murderers killing in America, stealing the lives of thousands.”

For many mental health professionals it is fascinating to observe the evolution of American society over the last century. One can see the best and the worst of the whole world in the United States of America. People from everywhere have being trying to emigrate to America, as though it were the modern “promised land”. In this land of eminent scientists, avant-garde artists and Oscar award winning actors and directors, we also see the worst serial killers and mass murderers. It seems that America is gradually becoming the world of extremes.

The psychology of serial killers and mass murderers is quite different from that of one-time murderers who kill their enemy in the heat of passion and know their enemy intimately. These serial killers are also not part of any religion institution or political organization. The hallmark of modern serial killers and mass murderers is that they kill innocent strangers. The psychiatrist Lunde has made it clear that “the most important single contrast between mass murderers and murderers of a single person is their relationship to the victims, the former killing strangers, the later killing intimates.”

While studying the biographies of serial killers and mass murderers, when I focused on their families, I discovered that they belong to two distinct groups.

The first group consists of individuals who grew up in institutions or were brought up by abusive parents. They never received loving and nurturing care from their parents in a consistent manner. They were exposed to severe neglect and various forms of abuse and had poor role models. They grew up as angry and bitter individuals.

Henry Lee Lucas from Texas, who confessed to killing more than 300 people, described the family environment of his childhood. “That’s the way I grew up when I was a child…watching my mom have sexual acts. She wouldn’t go into different rooms, she’d make sure I was in the room before she started anything, and she would do it deliberately to make me watch her, you know, I got to hate it.”

While Lucas was wrongly treated by his mother, Michael Wayne McGray, the Canadian serial killer, and Albert De Salvo, the Boston Strangler, were abused by their fathers. De Salvo’s father used to beat his wife and son regularly. Albert witnessed his father breaking bones of his mother’s fingers one by one. McGray’s father, who was a violent alcoholic, used to beat animals regularly and encouraged his son to do the same. Peter Kurten, a German serial killer also had a troubled childhood. His father when drunk used to force his wife to have sex in front of their children. Their fathers were angry and cruel men and had serious problems dealing with their sexual and aggressive instincts.

The second group consisted of serial killers and mass murderers who grew up in loving and caring families and were usually spoiled or over-indulged. They were generally successful in school and grew up with high ideals and dreams. But if as young adults their dreams were shattered because of socio-economic injustices or prejudices, they transformed into angry, resentful and revengeful people.

Mark Essex, an American, was raised in a middle class family and loved by his parents. He wanted to become a minister. During his stay in the navy, he faced a lot of prejudice and discrimination and was called a “nigger”. When he finally turned against white people, he killed nine and injured ten more by setting a hotel on fire.

Lay people might consider most modern serial killers and mass murderers “mad”, but in the view of mental health professionals only a small number show signs of schizophrenia; most of them in fact suffer from psychopathic personality disorder. They have no sense of remorse or guilt and are very self-centered and egotistical. Many of them are pathological liars. They are men with no conscience.

Although each serial killer and mass murderer has a unique set of motives, the most common motive is revenge. But their revenge is generalized. Rather than hurting or killing the person who hurt them, they generalize it to an entire group, whether women or whites or blacks or some other group. Edmund Kemper III wanted to hurt rich people, members of the upper class, as he believed he had suffered being poor. Mark Essex’s goal was to kill white people, as be believed he suffered racial discrimination. James Huberty targeted Hispanic people, shooting people indiscriminately in a McDonald’s restaurant in California, blaming them for his unemployment. Hatred towards women seems a common theme with many serial killers. Killers like Albert Desalvo and Theodor Bundy sexually abused women, used them as objects of lust and then destroyed them. It appears that their anger and hatred towards women was very deep rooted.

From a psychological perspective, for serial killers and mass murders, a human being becomes an abstraction, a symbol, a metaphor. They kill for the sake of killing. They turn killing into a destructive art and their hearts turn into stones.

Once that you’ve decided on a killing
First you make a stone of your heart.
And if you find that your hands are still willing
You can turn murder into art
(Synchronicity by The Police, 1983)

Javed Iqbal had written in his diary, “…our hearts have turned into stones”.
Javed Iqbal shared that he had orchestrated that scandal as he knew many secrets of the Pakistani police whom he considered corrupt. He was hoping that his story would receive international attention so that the Pakistani police would be investigated. I was also surprised to discover that many serial killers tell lies to achieve media attention and confess to murders that they have not committed, in order to become notorious.

On October 10th 2001, newspapers worldwide reported that Javed Iqbal had been found dead in his death cell. Some wondered whether he had committed suicide but after autopsy it was found that he had been strangled. It was widely felt that Javed Iqbal knew many secrets and his murder in prison was a safe way for the authorities involved to eliminate the evidence.

Javed Iqbal, like many other serial killers and mass murderers, had created such a web of lies and deceits that it was difficult to separate facts from fiction, fantasy from reality. He gradually transformed into a myth. The stories of Javed Iqbal Mughal and other serial killers and mass murderers offer us glimpses into the dark side of humanity and into the community to which they belong.