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Every Mistake Parents Made That Created Serial Killers · The Mind of a Man

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Edmund Kemper. His mother told him no woman would ever
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  Speaker 1: love him, so he found a way to make sure
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  Speaker 1: they'd never leave. Edmund Kemper was just 8 years old
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  Speaker 1: when his mother started locking him in the basement every night.
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  Speaker 1: She said it was to protect his sisters from him.
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  Speaker 1: She called him a real weirdo, loud enough for him
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  Speaker 1: to hear through the walls. She told him he reminded
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  Speaker 1: her of his father, and that was never a compliment.
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  Speaker 1: By 10, Kemper had buried the family cat alive, then
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  Speaker 1: dug it up, then cut off its head and mounted
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  Speaker 1: it on a stick. At 14, he ran away to
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  Speaker 1: find his father, but his father had remarried and didn't
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  Speaker 1: want him. They shipped him off to live with his
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  Speaker 1: grandparents on a remote California ranch. His grandmother treated him
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  Speaker 1: the same way his mother had, constant criticism and constant control.
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  Speaker 1: On August 27, 1964, 15-year-old Edmund Kemper shot his grandmother
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  Speaker 1: in the head with a rifle. When his grandfather came home,
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  Speaker 1: he shot him too. When police asked why, Kemper said
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  Speaker 1: he wanted to see what it felt like to kill grandma,
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  Speaker 1: and he killed grandpa so he wouldn't have to find out.
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  Speaker 1: Kemper spent five years in a psychiatric hospital. Doctors said
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  Speaker 1: he was rehabilitated. They released him into his mother's care.
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  Speaker 1: The argument started immediately. Screaming matches so loud the neighbors
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  Speaker 1: called police. His mother told him he was worthless, that
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  Speaker 1: college girls would never look at him twice, that he
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  Speaker 1: disgusted her. Between 1972 and 1973, Kemper picked up six
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  Speaker 1: young female hitchhikers. He killed them all. But these weren't
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  Speaker 1: random victims. They were college students, the same women his
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  Speaker 1: mother worked with at UC Santa Cruz, the same women
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  Speaker 1: she said would never want him. After killing one victim,
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  Speaker 1: Kemper buried her head in his mother's garden, facing her
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  Speaker 1: bedroom window. She always wanted people to look up to her,
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  Speaker 1: he said. On April 20, 1973, Kemper finally did what
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  Speaker 1: he'd been building toward his whole life. He killed his
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  Speaker 1: mother with a hammer while she was sleeping. He decapitated
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  Speaker 1: her and used her head as a dartboard. Then he
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  Speaker 1: called the police and turned himself in. The killings were over.
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  Speaker 1: He'd destroyed the thing that created him. Jeffrey Dahmer When
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  Speaker 1: Jeffrey Dahmer was 18, both his parents left. His father
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  Speaker 1: moved out. His mother took his younger brother and left.
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  Speaker 1: No forwarding address, no phone calls. Jeffrey was alone in
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  Speaker 1: an empty house. He would later say that was the
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  Speaker 1: moment everything fell apart. Dahmer's childhood looked normal from the outside.
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  Speaker 1: Suburban Ohio, two-parent household, a little brother named David. But inside,
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  Speaker 1: the family was fracturing. His mother suffered from depression and anxiety,
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  Speaker 1: swallowing pills by the handful. His father buried himself in work,
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  Speaker 1: chasing a PhD in chemistry while his marriage collapsed. The
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  Speaker 1: two fought constantly, screaming matches that echoed through the walls.
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  Speaker 1: No one noticed their older son slipping away. By age 10,
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  Speaker 1: Jeffrey had started collecting roadkill. He'd strip the flesh from
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  Speaker 1: dead animals and keep the bones. His father thought it
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  Speaker 1: was scientific curiosity. He even taught Jeffrey how to bleach
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  Speaker 1: and preserve the skeletons. He never asked why his son
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  Speaker 1: spent hours alone in a backyard hut, surrounded by jars
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  Speaker 1: of formaldehyde and tiny skulls. By 14, Jeffrey was drinking
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  Speaker 1: whiskey before school. Teachers noticed. His grades dropped, but no
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  Speaker 1: one intervened. By the time his parents divorced, Jeffrey had
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  Speaker 1: already learned the lesson that would define his life. People leave,
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  Speaker 1: everyone leaves, and there's nothing you can do to make
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  Speaker 1: them stay, unless you make sure they can't. Between 1978
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  Speaker 1: and 1991, Dahmer killed 17 young men. He drugged them,
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  Speaker 1: strangled them, and kept their bodies for as long as
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  Speaker 1: he could. He posed them, photographed them, slept beside them.
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  Speaker 1: He later told investigators he wasn't trying to hurt anyone.
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  Speaker 1: He just didn't want to be alone. The only way
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  Speaker 1: I could keep them with me, he said, was if
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  Speaker 1: they couldn't leave. Dahmer was beaten to death in prison
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  Speaker 1: in 1994. He was 34 years old. His parents had
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  Speaker 1: spent years fighting over who was responsible for what their
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  Speaker 1: son became. In the end, they both abandoned him, and
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  Speaker 1: he never stopped trying to fill that emptiness. John Wayne Gacy.
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  Speaker 1: His father called him stupid, called him a sissy. called
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  Speaker 1: him a failure. John Wayne Gacy spent his entire childhood
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  Speaker 1: trying to earn approval that never came. His father was
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  Speaker 1: an alcoholic machinist who beat the family regularly. At four
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  Speaker 1: years old, John was whipped for accidentally moving parts in
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  Speaker 1: his father's car engine. At nine, a family friend began
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  Speaker 1: abusing him. John never told anyone, terrified his father would
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  Speaker 1: blame him. The message was clear. Everything wrong was John's fault.
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  Speaker 1: He tried everything, worked hard in school, joined community organizations,
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  Speaker 1: built a successful business, hosted neighborhood parties, even dressed as
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  Speaker 1: Pogo the Clown to entertain children at hospitals. But nothing worked.
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  Speaker 1: His father kept calling him worthless. Then, in 1966, something changed.
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  Speaker 1: Gacy had married, had children, was managing restaurants in Iowa.
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  Speaker 1: His parents came to visit, and for the first time
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  Speaker 1: in his life, his father shook his hand and said, Son,
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  Speaker 1: I was wrong about you. Three years later, his father
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  Speaker 1: was dead. When Gacy heard the news in prison, where
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  Speaker 1: he was serving time for sexually assaulting a teenage employee,
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  Speaker 1: he collapsed to the floor. His request to attend the
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  Speaker 1: funeral was even denied. Between 1972 and 1978, John Wayne
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  Speaker 1: Gacy murdered at least 33 young men. He lured them
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  Speaker 1: to his home with promises of construction jobs, handcuffed them
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  Speaker 1: with a magic trick, assaulted and tortured them for hours,
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  Speaker 1: strangled them slowly with a rope tourniquet he called the
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  Speaker 1: Rope Trick. Then he buried them in the crawlspace beneath
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  Speaker 1: his house. 26 bodies were stacked in trenches he dug himself.
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  Speaker 1: When police finally searched his property, the stench of decay
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  Speaker 1: had been seeping through heating vents for years. Gacy showed
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  Speaker 1: no remorse. At trial, he joked about his victims. He
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  Speaker 1: blamed an alter ego named Jack, said the dead were
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  Speaker 1: just male prostitutes and liars. He was executed in 1994.
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  Speaker 1: His father never lived to see what his son became,
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  Speaker 1: but every victim buried under that house was someone's child too.
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  Speaker 1: killed by a man still trying to prove he wasn't worthless,
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  Speaker 1: Albert Fish. His mother couldn't afford him, so she gave
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  Speaker 1: him away. Albert Fish was five years old when his
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  Speaker 1: father died of a heart attack. His mother, unable to
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  Speaker 1: support her children alone, made a decision that would echo
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  Speaker 1: through history. She placed young Albert in St. John's Orphanage
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  Speaker 1: in Washington, D.C. She thought she was saving him. Instead,
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  Speaker 1: she was creating a monster. The orphanage was a house
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  Speaker 1: of horrors. Teachers beat the children constantly, whipped them until
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  Speaker 1: they bled, and forced the others to watch. It was
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  Speaker 1: meant as discipline. For Albert, it became something else entirely.
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  Speaker 1: He discovered he liked it. The beatings triggered excitement. Watching
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  Speaker 1: other boys suffer excited him. Pain and pleasure fused together
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  Speaker 1: in his developing mind, wiring connections that should never have existed.
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  Speaker 1: By the time his mother finally retrieved him five years later,
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  Speaker 1: the damage was permanent. Fish spent the rest of his
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  Speaker 1: life chasing that feeling. As an adult, he embedded needles
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  Speaker 1: into his own groin. 29 were found lodged in his
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  Speaker 1: pelvis when doctors finally x-rayed him. He beat himself with
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  Speaker 1: a nail-studded paddle. He soaked cotton in lighter fluid, inserted
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  Speaker 1: it into his body, and set it on fire. But
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  Speaker 1: his own pain wasn't enough. He needed to hear children scream.
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  Speaker 1: Between 1924 and 1928, Fish murdered at least three children.
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  Speaker 1: He strangled them, dismembered them, cooked them, He even sent
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  Speaker 1: a letter to one victim's mother describing how he ate
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  Speaker 1: her 10-year-old daughter over nine days. Every detail, every recipe.
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  Speaker 1: Psychiatrists identified 18 different sexual abnormalities in him, more than
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  Speaker 1: any case in medical history. Fish claimed God commanded him
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  Speaker 1: to sacrifice children, like Abraham with Isaac. The jury found
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  Speaker 1: him insane, but they executed him anyway. In 1936, Fish
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  Speaker 1: walked to the electric chair and reportedly helped position the
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  Speaker 1: electrodes himself. His last written statement was so depraved, his
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  Speaker 1: own lawyer refused to release it, calling it the most
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  Speaker 1: filthy string of obscenities I have ever read. The child
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  Speaker 1: his mother abandoned to save money had grown into America's
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  Speaker 1: most disturbing killer. Henry Lee Lucas. His mother dressed him
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  Speaker 1: as a girl. Then she sold him. Henry Lee Lucas
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  Speaker 1: was born in 1936 in a one-room dirt floor cabin
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  Speaker 1: in Virginia. His mother, Viola, sold herself to strangers and
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  Speaker 1: made her son witness things no child should ever see.
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  Speaker 1: If he looked away, she beat him. If he cried,
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  Speaker 1: she beat him harder. But the watching wasn't the worst part.
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  Speaker 1: Viola dressed young Henry in girls' clothes, with dresses and
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  Speaker 1: long hair. She paraded him through town like that for years.
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  Speaker 1: But why? Because in this way she could sell him
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  Speaker 1: to her clients, to men, to women, to anyone willing
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  Speaker 1: to pay. His father was a legless alcoholic who sold
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  Speaker 1: pencils on the street. He couldn't protect Henry. He couldn't
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  Speaker 1: even protect himself. One night, trying to escape the horror
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  Speaker 1: inside that cabin, he crawled outside drunk and froze to
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  Speaker 1: death in the snow. Henry was beaten constantly. When he
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  Speaker 1: was seven, his mother smashed a wooden plank across his skull.
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  Speaker 1: He spent days unconscious. When he was ten, his brother
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  Speaker 1: slashed his face with a knife. The wound got infected.
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  Speaker 1: His mother ignored it until a teacher accidentally struck the
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  Speaker 1: damaged eye. It burst and had to be surgically removed.
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  Speaker 1: Henry learned that he was worthless, something to be used, sold,
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  Speaker 1: and discarded. In 1960, during a Christmas visit, his mother
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  Speaker 1: demanded he move back home to care for her. They argued.
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  Speaker 1: She hit him with a broom. and he stabbed her
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  Speaker 1: in the neck. She died instantly on the floor. Lucas
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  Speaker 1: was convicted of her murder and spent years in prison.
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  Speaker 1: When authorities released him early due to overcrowding, he warned them,
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  Speaker 1: I'm not ready to go. They released him anyway. That
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  Speaker 1: same day, Lucas killed a woman within walking distance of
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  Speaker 1: the prison gates, his gift to the people who set
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  Speaker 1: him free. He was eventually convicted of 11 murders. He
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  Speaker 1: confessed to hundreds more, though many were later proven false.
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  Speaker 1: The truth of his body count may never be known,
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  Speaker 1: but one truth is certain Long before Henry Lee Lucas
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  Speaker 1: killed anyone, his mother had already murdered the child he
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  Speaker 1: might have been.