Sadistic serial killers: 4 spooky cases
Before starting… Where does the word "sadism" come from?
Sadism: defining the concept
The term sadism (as a synonym of cruelty) emerged with the case of Donatien Alphonse François, more as known "Marqués de Sade" , a Parisian born in 1740. The Marquis de Sade was imprisoned due to his scandalous life, which was full of incidents with prostitutes in which multiple acts of violence and sodomy were reported. After many imprisonments and successive releases, finally He was transferred to the famous Bastille prison . Internal and with few possibilities to go free, he wrote all his controversial works. Finally, the Marquis de Sade managed to escape from prison due to the revolution, but his last years were spent in a psychiatric hospital in Charenton.
Among his most famous works are "The 120 Days of Sodom" (1784), "Justine" (1791), "Philosophy in El Tocador" (1795) and "Juliette" (1797), writings that were censored for many years due to its high and explicit content of extreme violence and violations. Here we leave the link of the filmographic adaptation of one of them.
So, the case of the Marquis de Sade was one of the most paradigmatic in the study of sadism and the psychology of the serial killer, and it was useful to establish the bases of what in the future we would know as Criminal Psychology.
The sadistic profile in the serial killer
Regarding the different psychological profiles of the serial killer, We can find all kinds of personalities and reasons why they carry out their crimes .
There are some serial killers who commit crimes because of their desire to feel powerful, others who perceive themselves as a kind of "vigilante". In other cases, the psychological causes may be due to serious mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, psychotic outbreaks, manic episodes ... but we find those who perpetrate these crimes for the mere pleasure of seeing his victim suffer, that is, the sadists .
Individuals who enjoy the pain of others
The sadistic serial killer is he who feels sexual arousal inflicting pain on another person . It can be physical pain: seeing its blood, hitting, torturing, observing how it agonizes; or psychological: that is, humiliating the victim, lowering their self-esteem to zero, feeling their master, etc.
Sexual rape is considered a form of sexual sadism, although sexual intercourse is not usually the main satisfaction of sadistic serial killers and, in most cases, this type of sexual assault is not reported.
Sexual sadism in the DSM IV
Although it is not a very generalized sadistic behavior, It is convenient to know some important aspects around sexual sadism .
This pattern of sadistic behavior is classified as "Sexual Sadism" in the DSM IV (302.84) in the section on paraphilias, defined as: "During a period of at least 6 months, recurrent and highly exciting sexual fantasies, sexual impulses or behaviors that involve acts (real, not simulated) in which the psychological or physical suffering (including humiliation) of the victim is sexually exciting for the individual ".
Some relevant cases of sadistic serial killers
Gilles de Rais
Gilles de Rais was a French marshal who participated in the 100-year war with Joan of Arc. It is said that Gilles de Rais was deeply in love with her, and when her idolized Juana was captured and burned at the stake, he felt deeply angry with God and he claimed desperately that he would never again be faithful to Christian moral mandates.
Since then, he locked himself in his castle and began to kidnap children, to whom he performed the worst of the atrocities. Tortured, raped and murdered , to then continue committing acts of necrophilia with their dead bodies. We find citations of Gilles de Rais himself in the trial that was made when he was convicted of these terrible acts in the book "The Marshal of Darkness." We quote:
<< I confess that I killed these children in different ways and using different methods of torture: some I separated the head of the body, using daggers and knives; with others I used sticks and other instruments of scourge, giving them violent blows on the head; to others I tied them with ropes and ropes and hung them from doors and beams until they drowned. I confess that I experienced pleasure in hurting them and killing them like that. He enjoyed destroying innocence and desecrating virginity.I felt great delight in strangulating young children even when those children discovered the first pleasures and pains of their innocent flesh. [...]
I liked to see the blood flow, it gave me great pleasure. I contemplated those who had a beautiful head and proportioned limbs, and then opened their bodies and delight in the sight of their internal organs and very often, when the boys were already dying, I sat on their stomachs, and I was pleased to see their agony ...
I am one of those people for whom everything that is related to death and suffering has a sweet and mysterious attraction, a terrible force that pushes down. (...) If I could describe or express it, I probably would never have sinned. I did what other men dream. I am your nightmare. >>
Elizabeth Báthory, the Blood Countess
Belonging to one of the most powerful families of Hungary in her time, Elizabeth holds the Guinness record as the woman who has committed the most murders in the history of humanity , with around 650 tortures and deaths, all of them young girls between 9 and 26 years old.
In addition to a sadistic and sexual perversion, Countess Elizabeth Báthory felt a special attraction for blood, and not only was she content to drink it (as is customary in so-called vampire killers) but bathed in it in order to prevent aging skin over the years.
The figure of Elizabeth Báthory is world famous, especially thanks to different stories about her history and for being one of the main characters of horror games, for example the board game "Atmosfear". Popular culture has given Báthory a prominent role, as the most bloodthirsty and ruthless woman of record.
Movies about this woman have also been made such as The Countess (2009) and Báthory, the Countess of Blood (2008).
Andrei Chikatilo, the butcher of Rostov
This case deals with the protagonist of the macabre photograph of the heading of this article. Andrei Chikatilo , born in Ukraine in 1936, had from adolescence problems of sexual impotence that only exceeded in an extremely pathological way , as he discovered when he had his first strong erection at the moment he cut a naked girl (from which he was going to abuse) with a knife, feeling great excitement when observing the blood.
Andrei murdered 53 women between 1982 and 1990 , being most of them minors. His crimes were perpetrated with an inhuman cruelty: he amputated their nipples and ripped off their uterus and then ate it, among other things.
These words were pronounced by Andrei himself: "In perverse sexual acts I experienced a kind of fury, a sense of debauchery. Especially after contemplating all kinds of sex movies. What I did, I did after watching videos of perverse sexual acts, cruelties and horrors. "
The psychiatrists of the Serbsky Institute argued that Chikatilo was a prudent sadist who suffered no disorder that could throw him back because of the immorality of his actions, since his acts were premeditated. For that reason, he was sentenced to death. In the same trial, protected in a metal cubicle to protect him from the enraged crowd, he took off his clothes and waved his penis shouting: "Notice that uselessness. What do you think I was going to do with this? "
The film "Citizen X" is about the investigation into the murders of Andrei Chikatilo. Highly recommended
On the other hand, a documentary about him was made, we provide the link here:
Ted Bundy
Born in 1946, raped and murdered dozens of women between 1974 and 1978 in United States.
Bundy took advantage of the kindness of his victims to commit his crimes. The He wandered through universities posing as badly wounded, with crutches or some similar trick . It simulated that the books fell to him, reason why the girls picked them up and accompanied it until their car. Ted Bundy seemed too tender and helpless to be dangerous or threatening to the girls who came to help him.
The moment the students approached their car, Bundy hit them with a lever and began his macabre plan. In addition to torture, mutilation and rape, practiced necrophilia . He returned several times in the forests of Seattle where he had buried the corpses, often taking chunks of them home. In all, he confessed to thirty murders, although the actual figure is unknown, probably much higher.
Bundy said:
"It happened in stages, little by little, my experience with pornography in general, but with pornography that presents a high level of sexual violence, once you become addicted to it, and this I see as a kind of addiction like than other types of addiction- you start looking for all kinds of material with more powerful, more explicit, more graphic things.Until you get to a point where pornography goes so far that you start wondering what it would be like to actually do it [...]
I've met people who radiate vulnerability ... Their facial expressions say: I'm afraid of you. These people invite abuse ... Hoping to be hurt, subtly encourage it? [...]
I am the bastard with the most cold blood they have ever known.
We serial killers are his children, his husbands ... and we are everywhere "
