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‘It looked like I would never be punished by God or Satan, and when we died our lives just flickered out. The sooner a person understands that there’s no punishment after death and allows their own impulses to take over, the sooner they become an unstoppable serial killer. That’s the point I’d reached. It was scary, but it was exciting too.’

Keith Hunter Jesperson, the ‘Happy Face Killer’,

from The Creation of a Serial Killer by Jack Olsen

THIS BOOK ASKS – and tries to answer – the fascinating question: ‘Are we born to kill?’ Within that, many more equally compelling questions are raised: if we are born to kill, does this mean that some of us are destined to be killers and that there is nothing society can do about it? Or can something be done? On the other hand, if it is a case of nurture rather than nature, how are serial killers ‘made’? Do they all follow the same path of development or do different circumstances create different types of serial killer?

When TwoFour Productions put together the idea for the six-part TV documentary series Born to Kill? the original concept was for myself and my co-author Steve Morris to write a book to accompany the series. However, it quickly became clear that any book we wrote could go beyond the scope of the series and really pose some interesting questions about the nature of serial killers. Together with Jason Langley, the Commercial Director at TwoFour Productions, and our publisher John Blake, Steve and I began to discuss putting together what we now believe to be one of the most important books of its kind available today.

The authors’ brief was to follow the format of the TV series, thus we have included the principal characters to form the backbone of the text: Frederick and Rose West, Dr Harold Shipman, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, and Ivan Milat. However, myself and Steve – with his immense knowledge on the subject of sexual serial homicide – soon realised that also including the histories of several other serial murderers in this book would add far greater socio-criminological value, especially when weighed alongside the more recent scientific studies concerning the Nature v Nurture debate.

Wherever you stand on this debate, the one thing to bear in mind is that it is an issue that concerns every one of us, especially anyone with children. We would even go so far as to say that every parent should read Born Killers? because it is a wake-up call and its findings could change the way we look at what makes a killer. It is, we conclude, not a case of Nature v Nurture but Nature and Nurture.

Unusually for a true-crime book, we have set out to devote more space to the offenders’ early histories and less space to their actual crimes. After all, we reasoned, the question really being asked here is: how do these monsters develop into killing machines in the first place? Are they born to kill, bred to kill, taught to kill or trained to kill? Is there really a ‘demon seed’ within some of us that ensures we are pre-programmed to commit serial homicide from conception?

Despite the undoubted wickedness of the killers featured throughout this book, we have shown them some compassion where we feel it is appropriate. In my travels around the world, especially in the US, I have always been mindful of how law enforcement officers, attorneys, the judiciary and even the next-of-kin of the victims often refer to these murderers by their Christian names. My first experience of this came about when I was researching Henry Lee Lucas. I interviewed Sheriff Bill F ‘Hound Dog’ Conway in his office at the Montague County Jail. With his leather-tooled cowboy boots planted up on his desktop, and surrounded by a veritable arsenal of weaponry from six-shooters to assault rifles, ‘Hound Dog’, in his north Texan drawl, always referred quite affectionally to Lucas as ‘Ole Henry’.

No matter who the killer was, no matter what atrocities these people had committed, from state to state, jurisdiction to jurisdiction, it was always the same; Aileen Wuornos became ‘Lee’, and Kenneth Bianchi was simply ‘Ken’. While I was consulting with the Metropolitan Police on the killer John Cannan, DCI Jim Dickie and DI Stuart Ault always called Cannan either ‘Mr Cannan’ or ‘John’. At a temperature of -18 degrees, while interviewing through a misty camera lens inside Russia’s toughest female prison at Sablino, the governor referred to her charges as Victoria, Katya or Svetlana. These women were ruthless serial killers. One of them was even a cannibal - and had bizarrely been appointed head cook in the prison’s kitchens.

You will find in this book that the killers are often referred to by their first names, too. There is a good reason for this. Mindful as we are of the disgusting crimes they have committed, aligned with the heartbreak and distress they have caused to thousands of people, we should also assert that serial killers are, like all of us, human beings too. They were born into the world, for the most part, as innocent children. But unlike the majority of us, almost from the cradle their lives and personalities were abused and distorted by their parents and carers. We cannot blame serial killers for this aspect of their lives at least. This is the approach we have adopted throughout the book. We apportion blame where necessary but we also show compassion or understanding where we believe it is right to do so.

Throughout the book we hope to show how widely different backgrounds and upbringings can lead to the same result – an unrepentant serial killer. The final, lengthy chapter concerns itself with one of America’s most notorious sado-sexual serial killers, John Wayne Gacy. You will see how his boyhood was completely the opposite of someone like Fred West, but how they both became monsters. But at the same time, you will also have seen how others were almost two peas from the same pod. The lesson will be that there is no one route to becoming a serial killer and no easy assumptions to be made. We want our readers to enjoy this often-shocking book, while learning valuable lessons at the same time.

In Born Killers we suggest that by examining the past histories of the offenders included in this study we may learn more about the potential outcomes of a negative and abusive upbringing. We hope that this will go some way to preventing the emergence of serial killers, spree killers and mass murderers in the future.

Christopher Berry-Dee

Group publisher The New Criminologist www.newcriminologist.co.uk May 2006