Confessions of a Serial Killer: A Neutralisation Analysis

Abstract

An analysis is offered of a confession given to detectives by a serial killer who, at the time of his arrest, admitted to the murder of 15 men. Qualitative analysis, using Sykes and Matza’s techniques of neutralization as a theoretical base, reveals several attempts to mitigate his crimes and offer some justification to his killings. Through such analysis, it is possible to discern some psychological mechanisms that facilitate the commission of multiple homicides over a period of time, allowing a mentally fit offender to retrospectively rationalize his killings, and even provide some insight into how victims were selected.

Denying the Darkness: Exploring the Discourses of Neutralization of Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer

“…Although serial murder fascinates, we actually know very little about these offenders [1]. Much of the research done on these offenders has used interviews to focus on their psychology and how their pathology manifests through behaviors during the commission of their crimes (i.e., profiling).…”

“…Few studies examine serial murder from a sociological or interactionist perspective [8,[10][11][12][13]. Additionally, inquiries into how serial murderers socially construct their identities, present "normal" selves in the course of regular social interaction, and mitigate the stigma of the "serial killer" label have not been adequately addressed [1,10,12,14].…”

“…Research on serial murder still remains limited due to its rare occurrence and difficulty in obtaining access to offenders [1,2,6,13,[15][16][17]. In addition to these obstacles and despite the proliferation of terms used to define multicide (i.e., mass murder, sexual/lust murder, spree murder, serial murder), there remains debate over the "true" definition of serial murder, which varies along a continuum of very broad to very specific [1,3,4,[6][7][8][9]11,13,15,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Definitions vary with minimum number of victims (i.e., 2 to 4), varying cooling-off periods (i.e., time between murders), and various necessary motivations [3,4,[7][8][9]11,13,15,[17][18][19][21][22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…Definitions vary with minimum number of victims (i.e., 2 to 4), varying cooling-off periods (i.e., time between murders), and various necessary motivations [3,4,[7][8][9]11,13,15,[17][18][19][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. The disparities that exist over the way researchers define serial murder continues to complicate and impede research [1,3,9,11,13,20,[23][24][25].…”

“…In addition to the lack of definition, there is also "no singular theory that explains the phenomenon" [1] (p. 1). Additionally, there is little known about how killers can manage their identities through discourse and thus present positive self-images and minimize stigma through impression management [1,12,14]. It is through social interaction and accounting for behavior, particularly the use of verbal aligning actions (i.e., neutralizations), which allow individuals to maintain specific (and often positive) identities and self-definitions [28].…”