Ross Lynch Quotes

Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.

I'm not one of these guys who sits around saying, 'Gee, I mean, the person had a strange childhood and that's why he's doing this horrible thing. Poor Jeffrey Dahmer. He's just had a bad childhood and that's why he's eating people.' Wait a second! This person should be removed from the planet.

Since 1966, hundreds of books have been published that follow murderers along their paths of destruction. Every serial killer, it seems, now has a biographer or two.

I read extensively about serial killers and all sorts of things people get up to.

Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists.

I wrote my first real murder story as a journalist for the Daytona Beach News Journal in 1980. It was about a body found in the woods. Later, the murder was linked to a serial killer who was later caught and executed for his crimes.

Jim Thompson understood something about the serial killer before the psychology caught up to it, which is that they are detached to it and they do want to get caught.

The accepted definition of a serial killer is a person who kills at least three times with a cooling off period in between his murders.

I read a lot about serial killers.

Most well-known serial killers have victims numbering in the dozens, have sent taunting letters to the police or have done bizarre things to the bodies.

The one noticeable similarity with almost all serial killer victims is their short height and low weight.

It's not terrifying to watch 'Mindhunter,' necessarily, but it's just unsettling. You can find Aileen Wuornos just talking to a camera. It's hard to watch. Her eyeballs, they are just terrifying.

I heard a story about her once,' said James. 'She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.

Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

The Thames Torso murders almost fell into my lap. After deciding to use a real historical crime as the focus for the book, I went to Google and searched for unsolved murders in Victorian London, and they basically popped out at me about halfway down the first results page.

Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?

I studied a truckload of true crime, praying for illumination, but most true crime relies on luridness and voyeurism for effect.

Often I am asked if there is any such thing as a female serial killer.

Violent predators are not like the rest of us. They kill for fun, for sport, for the sake of it. To compare them to animals is an insult to animals. To expect that we can rehabilitate them assumes a will to change.

With a character like James Bulger, you have to approach him as a human. No one wakes up in the morning and says, as they are brushing their teeth, 'I am going to do something evil today.' He was a businessman - in his business, the violence was just part of his job, let's say. It was also the language of the people he associated with and opposed.

My main dream - and I'm trying to get 'Living TV' to do it - is to go into prison and interview serial killers, rapists, murderers, psychopaths.

I had known there had been a serial killer on Mount Tamalpais, and it felt so incongruous in such a beautiful, peaceful spot.

In reality, serial killers are of average intelligence.

While we are being fascinated by the tales of famous serial killers and how they were brought to justice, the real serial killer goes about his business with hardly a thought to being caught.

The book grew out of the introduction I did for Brady's Gates of Janus. I knew that the writing in that introduction had a better than average chance of being read by people involved in Brady's life - parents of victims, police, Brady himself.