A quick answer would be yes and no, but I did a paper similar to this about a year ago so I’ll go into some detail on this. I’m going to use the serial killer Carl Panzram as my example for your question. He committed many crimes, including 21 murders and more than 1,000 rapes of young boys and men, that he admitted to committing. He was not charming, like many other infamous serial killers appeared to be. He was brutal and direct in his opinions and actions. In his autobiography he says, “For all of these things, I am not the least bit sorry,” and “I hate the whole d*mned human race including myself.” As experts studied him, they found the possible roots of his actioned could be traced back to his youth. Panzram’s father abandoned his family when he was about 8 years old. Soon after, Panzram landed in a reform school called Red Wing for a string of burglaries. Red Wing schooled Panzram in sadism, punishing him with beatings and rapes, which led him to a realization: “‘The world is this sh*thole, and I’m going to go through the world and wreak havoc in it,” he wrote in his autobiography.
After graduating, he spent years sleeping on freight trains. During one ride in a boxcar, he was gang raped by transients — leaving him “a sadder, sicker but wiser boy,” Panzram wrote. In 1915, he traveled through Idaho, California and other states along the Columbia River, burning and burglarizing buildings and raping countless young men and boys. Around the same time, Panzram was sentenced to seven years at the Oregon State Penitentiary for burglary. To punish his unruliness, the wardens hung him from the rafters for hours, turned a hose on him, and kept him in solitary confinement for weeks, leaving him to feed on cockroaches. Not long after escaping in 1918, Panzram committed his first murders. In New York, he hired sailors to work on a yacht bought with his robbery bounty, lulled them to sleep with alcohol and shot them dead — all 10 of them. Soon after, he set sail for Angola, raping and killing a young boy. In 1928, Panzram was arrested for a series of burglaries and jailed in Washington, D.C. After a warden found out that he had tried to escape, the guards handcuffed and suspended him from a beam, beating him unconscious. Panzram was sentenced to 25 years at United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth in Kansas. There, he crushed laundry foreman Robert Warnke’s skull with an iron bar, landing a spot on death row and refusing human rights groups’ efforts to spare him from the gallows.
In conclusion on this, perhaps if he had been raised properly, shown the proper affection a child needs, and was spared the torture he was forced to endure as a child, it is possible he could have grown up to live a life similar to yours or mine, and would have never formed the harsh opinions about the world that he had.
At the same time, there are theories that differences in serial killer’s brains and genes may predispose them to violence. Maybe he could have had a similar fate to the one he met, even with a proper upbringing. Maybe not as malicious, but nonetheless, still evil. It truly is a gamble. I really hope this helps a bit, I went as in depth as I could without writing a whole book for you to read, lol. Good luck on your paper!
