Murderabilia

Have you ever thought if you could acquire stuff of a killer, maybe a signed book? or a dirty old i.d from the prison he stayed, well you can, and yes for a price. Murderabilia is form of underground market for those who wanted to buy a serial killer's stuff, from their clothes to just about anything! People usually buy this stuff on the internet which allows them to shop privately and can be hard to catch, one of a site the does this type of business is Darkvomit.com it is run by San Diego dealer Kelly Hutchison.

"The murderabilia trade is mostly legal (only eight states currently have laws regulating or banning it), but Kahan keeps looking for ways to impede it. He has corresponded with killers, including David Berkowitz, to explore how items offered for sale get out of prisons and into dealers' hands. He says he's heard about dealers who work just like sexual predators, grooming killers through the mail and during prison visits. Items are then handed over or mailed, and are often traded among dealers. Profits are sometimes shared with the killers."

I got this from a site called LAtimes.com in a article The unsavory 'murderabilia' market by Caitlin Rother. Of course it's illegal! who would buy such things? Well apparently.. Many. This type of business might sound good for others but it only brings more pain to the families of the victims but there is no good way of stopping, only thing people can do, is to not buy the stuff. What makes this more disturbing is the fact the profits are even shared with the killers, not cool at all. They are in a prison for a reason, they are in there to pay for what they've done not the other way around.

"But the public isn't always looking for lessons. People want to be entertained, and murder has become an abundantly popular subject for novels, movies and TV shows. An entire channel, Investigation Discovery, is dedicated to the topic."

It is everywhere, in my second blog posts I wrote how people are fascinated by violence, on why murder has been an popular subject in this day. Even though murderabilia has been spreading wide there are those who still fight against it. Meet senator John Cornyn. I've read from an article entitled John Cornyn’s Quest To End “Murderabilia” by Dan Solomon in texasmonthly.com, He first attempted to stop it in 2007 but failed due to this reason:

"The [new] bill does cause some concerns," says Marv Johnson, legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. "It's a bit too broad and does raise some First Amendment issues by affecting protected activity."

Everyone had their point, but let's say someone special to you got killed, and you saw his personal belongings or even equipments used to kill your friend, posted on a site for sale, what would you feel?

Psychoanalysis and Profiling

When you think about psychology most often the first thing that would pop up on everybody's mind is Psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud, of course the founding father. As a simple introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud believed that people can be cured by making unconscious thoughts and motivation into conscious resulting in insights, this is commonly used for people with depression and anxiety disorder.

For a Pyschoanalysis process to work a psychiatrist would have a patient lie in a couch to relax, and the doctor sits beside him taking notes while they told him about their dreams and childhood memories. It is a lengthy process and could take up several week to years. According to the article i've read Psychoanalyis by Saul Mcleod in simplypsychology.org

 "Anxiety disorders such as phobias, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder are obvious areas where psychoanalysis might be assumed to work"

 So now we've tackled a bit about psychoanalysis, one thing that baffles me is Profiling and how it is related to psychoanalysis and yet uses a different set of formulas, it is like a different world; in psychoanalysis you have a patient to work with, you ask him/her questions and she/he responds but in profiling or in criminal profiling to be specific, you have to deal only of the evidences presented to you by the "patient", you do not ask questions, pieces of the answer are given to you, that's what make profiling a bit more interesting. In an article i've read entitled Criminal profiling: the reality behind the myth by Lea Winerman for apa.org, they described how profiling work and how it can be useful in solving unsolvable cases, like for Jack the ripper case, they used crime scene clues to make predictions.

There are four phases or questions that profilers uses to gain insight of the personality or behavior of the murderer, the first of it would be what fantasy or plan, or both, did the murderer have in place before the act? What triggered the murderer to act some days and not others? This is more of what influenced that suspect to do such thing. What type of victims did the murderer selects? What were the method and manner? In here it could be anything from shooting, stabbing, strangulation or something more brutal. Body disposal is another fact to consider, Lastly is the postoffense behavior, most of serial killers can't be caught unless they wanted to be caught, this is the time the murderer leaves clues or certain style for them to get recognized. Criminal profiling are usually done by psychiatrist or those with psychology major since it tackles more of the behavior of the suspect.

Serial Killers and Mas Murderers: The Difference

Here's a photo of the infamous Erzabeth Bathory also known as The Countess Dracula, she was accused of torturing and kill hundred of girls and bathing on her victims blood. Honestly, She's my favorite killer of all killers in the history of killers and that's a lot of killers.

 Is she a serial killer or Mass murderer? What is even the difference? Well according to an article I read in Tribe.net by Anci Banci, she wrote a post about The differences between serial killers and mass murderers. She explained that a distinct difference between a serial killer and a mass murderer is the "cooling period" or the interval between killings. She added a mass murder will kill large groups of people at the same time. Examples of mass murders: Columbine High School Massacre, Virginia Tech Massacre and the Amish School Shooting. Mass murderers unlike serial killers, rarely have a sexual motive for their killings. A serial killer will kill, experience a cool down period, and sometime later (days, weeks, months) kill again. Examples of serial killers: Jack the ripper and the infamous Erzabeth Bathory, yes she is a serial killer, she couldn't have killed all of them in the same time, she has a name to uphold and people should not know about it, so she had to do it one by one.

Serial killers and Mass murderers are both dangerous and mentally ill. Though a mass murderer are often triggered by an event not related to his real problem, many of these people are carrying dissapointments, grievance and frustrations. Just like a ticking time bomb until one incident that would make them explode.

Serial killers on the other hand are suprisingly have higher IQ and most likely have a career, they also have a childhood experiences of abuse and are from broken homes, they often develop psychopatic behaviors.

To classify more  these types of killer i've encountered an article: History of Classifications of Serial Killers and Mass Murderers by Ashley Duval for forensicpsych.umwblogs.org. He listed a few points in which to classify if the person is a serial killer or mass murderer; Mass killers appear to suffer from psychosis and should be considered insane. and found little evidence of mental illness among serial killers. Serial killers, in my opinion are very smart people, they long for power, often i read stuff about serial killers having jobs as a doctor. Most serial murderers can be described as obsessive-compulsive because they normally kill according to a particular style and pattern. This is mostly true, they tend to leave a pieces for the police to solve and to somehow catch up with them, cause they wanted them to know, psychopath likes being the talk of the town.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter: Not your kind of doctor

Hannibal Lecter is a product of imagination of author Thomas Harris for the book The red dragon, The silence of the lambs and The Hannibal. So who is Hannibal Lecter? According to Thomas Harris

Dr. Lecter is vivid and terrifying. His eyes are maroon in color, and his voice has a hint of a metallic rasp. His teeth are small and white. A mature man well into middle age, Lecter is small and compact, and moves with unusual grace and silence. He has six fingers on one hand, the middle finger "perfectly replicated... the rarest form of polydactyly.

According to a site smithsonianmag.com in an article entitled The pros to being a psychopath by Amy Crawford, When most of us hear about the work psychopaths we often think of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, but when psychologists talks about psychopaths, we're referring to people distinct set of personality and characteristics, from being ruthless, fearless, mental toughness, charm, persuasiveness, and a lack of conscience and empathy, pretty much sums up Hannibal Lecter.

I'm using the photo of the recent TV series Hannibal it's not that i don't like Anthony Hopkins portrayal of Dr. Lecter, it's just that the recent portrayal of Mads Mikkelsen creeped me out hundred times than the latter.

Now that we know a few things about Hannibal Lecter, i'm sure the author Thomas Haris has some inspiration from where this fascinating character came from. In a article 

The True Story Of Hannibal Lecter: How The Real Life Hannibal Murdered His Last Victim And Tried To Bribe Arresting Officer by Maria G. Valdez in the site Latintimes.com, The name Alfredo Balli Trevino, a mexican doctor who turned out to be the inspiration behind Thomas Harris' infamous character Hannibal Lecter.

Alfredo Balli Trevino was a small, little man with dark red hair and there was a certain elegance about him.

On the afternoon of October 8, 1959, Jesús Castillo Rangel and Alfredo Ballí Treviño got into a fight. Some say that the two men were dating and Castillo Rangel supposedly said he was leaving Ballí Treviño and that sparked the fight.

Then the two got in a fight and ended up by Alfredo killing Rangel, it was said that Alfredo used the old "cloth over the mouth" trick and put Jesús to sleep, then he  injected another drug to make sure he was completely out. He then put Jesús in the bathtub, opened the shower and exsanguinated his victim. Ballí Treviño put the body in a stretcher and sliced it up until he could fit it in a box. It was not long until Homicides chief Eusebio Lara and Commander Alfonso González pretended to be patients and arrested Ballí in his office, Trevino was sentenced to die but was commuted after 20 years in prison. Trevino was also known as the "killer doctor," "the monster of Talleres," and "the vampire Ballí." According to the article he died from cancer in 2009 after spending his days post-prison practicing medicine in the same old office where he killed Jesús Castillo Rangel.

Serial Killer: A Construction

Why are serial killers called serial killers? This is a question a i had in my head when i was in a bus about to go home. Is there a specific reason in why they would name a killer or murderer a "serial killer", I mean why not just call it killer or murderer or crazy knife stabbing guy, So i looked it up and found an article entitled
Serial Killers Introduction by Maria on twistedminds.creativescapism.com. She said that the original term "Serial Killer" came from a former FBI special agent and one of the founding member's of Bureau's elite science unit aka "The Mind Hunters" or "The Psyche Squad", Robert Ressler:

In his 1992 memoir,Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler writes that, in the early 1970s, while attending a weeklong conference at the British police academy, he heard a fellow participant refer to “crimes in series,” meaning “a series of rapes, burglaries, arsons, or murders.” Ressler was so impressed by the phrase that, upon returning to Quantico, he began to use the term “serial killer” in his own lectures to describe “the killing of those who do one murder, then another and another in a fairly repetitive way.” However, there is a problem with this story, since there is a documented proof that this expression existed at least a dozen years before Ressler supposedly invented it. First documented use of this term is traced back to 1961, and is used in Merriam Webster’s 1961 Third New International Dictionary. However, it was Ressler who altered the phase from serial murderer to serial killer.

But there is no clear definition invented to define a serial killer however there is three important elements to describe a Serial Killer:

Firstly, the person should have at least killed three people. The place of the murders should all be different locations and lastly, time, there should be a "cooling off period" an interval between murders that could range from hours to years. However, the problem with this that it is too broad and overly narrow, but the people from the National Institutes of Justice formulated a more flexible and accurate definition by which the authorities regard as more suitable.

A series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time ranging from hours to years. Quite often the motive is psychological, and the offender’s behavior and the physical evidence observed at the crime scenes will reflect sadistic, sexual overtones.
-National Institutes of Justice

Recently, i acquired some knowledge about Killings way back in the 19th century and thought it would be a great example for this article. I found it at crime.about.com entitled Jack The Ripper by Charles Montaldo. You might have already know who Jack The Ripper is, if you don't let me tell you a bit about him; A serial killer murdered and mutilated at least five prostitutes in the East End of London in 1888, No one was ever arrested until today 128 years later, so now you know who he is, but  who is he actually?

"Jack The Ripper" is the name given to unknown killer due to correspondence at the time from someone claiming to be the killer signed with that name. But while the murders were taking place, the assailant was know as the Whitechapel Murder or "Leather Apron."

It is extremely impossible that anyone would uncover who Jack The Ripper is, even though people are still uncovering material that can help the case, the discovery of something unarguable has to be regarded as a long-shot.

Violently attractive: Kick Ass 2 and Jim Carrey

I'm a film-maker and I love watching movies, I'm sure mostly everyone do. I love drama, romance, comedy, horror, suspense and action.

I recently watched a film called Kick Ass 2 it's a 2013 British-American superhero action-comedy film based on the comic book of the same name and Hit-Girl, both by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr. It's about a guy named Dave Lizewski "Kick Ass" retired from fighting crimes, he begans training with his old friend Mindy Mcready to become a proper hero. Meanwhile they're enemy Chris D'Amico was plotting a revenge against Kick Ass. It was a good movie, a superhero who fights crime and saves the day, who doesn't right? One thing that worries me was the amount of violence in it, though people watching it in the cinema didn't mind, I thought Why are audiences attracted to bloodshed, gore and violence?

I came by an article entitled Jim Carrey condemns violence in his own movie Kick-Ass 2 by Ben Child from the Guardian.com, Jim Carrey, part from the cast, he plays the vigilante colonel stars and stripes, he said the he could no longer support the film  due to a shooting massacre at Connecticut's sandy hook elementary school after the film.  He wrote: "I did Kick-Ass 2 a month before Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to others involve[d] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart."
But still why are audiences attracted to bloodshed, gore and violence? I am curious about what is so compelling in watching violent movies like Kick Ass 2? and particularly to when it is to the extreme and involves an helpless victim dying or getting saved.

In one study made by Anne Bartsch of University of Augsburg, Germany and Louise Mares, University of Wisconsin-Madisonin, an article entitled What attracts people to violent movies? on sciencedaily.com , "It suggested that audiences are not necessarily attracted to violence per se, but seem to be drawn to violent content because they anticipate other benefits, such as thrill and suspense."

So we are not really attracted to violence but how the characters in the movie faces the violence we perceive it as a moving and meaningful acts of courage and motivation in the face of violence.

Anothe article about Violence questioning if leads to the real life situations, entitled Does Media Violence Lead to the Real Thing? by Vasilis K. Pozios, Praveen R. Kambam and H. Eric Bender for the site NYtimes.com. The articles question how violence can lead to the real thing that they have done a researches that can actually prove that it is true but some tends to differ. Exposure to violent imagery does not preordain violence, but it is a risk factor.  It is however in my opinion, true, It is a risk factor but that does not mean if you watched a lot of movies you will be a serial killer, that's like saying if I smoke cigarettes I would eventually have lung cancer.

Everyday, debates about media violence raises pertaining the balance between public safety and freedom of speech, even though it can cause real life situation, we, people should be the one willing to regulate this violent content .

Murder 101

It was an early morning of sunday, Monique a 24 year old, business woman, decided to wake up early to buy groceries. She woke up feeling happy, excited that it would be a good day. In the store, she picks up Milk, Cereals, fruits and everything she likes, even bought a few paint for the wall she wanted to paint in. She goes to the cashier. "Good Morning" said the cashier, "It is!" replied Monique, as she was about to pay, a man hurried at door in front of them, too their shock the man was holding a gun, "You cheated!" said the man, Monique was confused then a loud bang was heard, Monique dropped dead on the floor. Obviously it was not a good day for Monique, it was unfortunate, but the question is why did he killed Monique? What was his reason?

There are few factors that could answer why the man did it. According to an article:
Why do people kill? A Typology of Violent Offenders by Paul G. Mattiuzzi, PH.D of Everyday
psychology.com.
There are different description of most killers and most of violent people:

He wrote in his article a handful of different types or personalities of violent offenders, one given would be
the traumatized type this is in my opinion the most common personality any offenders has, they might have been abused when they were young or have experienced something bad that may start an aggression when experienced again. Another usual trait of violent offenders are being very obsessive, they are the type of individuals who crave for attention, also paranoid which is somewhat related to being obsessive, they are those who believes their other partners are unfaithfully thus for the crave of attention. These personalities are inter-linking to each other it is possible for a person to have all of these behavior/personality.

Given the facts provided by Paul G. Mattiuzzi, PH.D , we can actually already make a conclusion of why the man did it, remember that the man said; "You cheated!" which makes us think that Monique and the man was a couple. So if you think about it, if Monique really cheated we can say that the man was "Traumatized" he was hurt, his manhood was hurt, we can also say that he was obsessive, Monique was taken away from him. Then Paranoid, he believed that Monique was unfaithful. To sum it up, the man was at least three of the given descriptions.

One thing people should know, that everything is done for a reason.

Another article named Serial Killer's Psychology by Chaitra Suraj Saxena of Buzzle.com she mentioned that a serial killer's psychology lies far beyond the grasp of normal human understanding. A serial killer is defined as a person who murders 3 or more people, in a particular fashion, in a gap of few days. The pattern of killing or the modus operandi is what gives serial killers their name.

 There is always something in common in the murders - the use of a particular weapon, the race of the people killed, the age or gender, the profession, and at times, even the symbols on the body of the victim. The motive for killing nearly always consists of an element of hatred and fear, which may have its roots in the killer's childhood.

One thing I can say about serial killer is that they are obsessed with the idea of power, sexually and in general life as well, Are they psychopaths, well, in my opinion yes, mostly they are, usually the cause of this is because of being mistreated in an early age, child abuse is an indication, dysfucntional family, this would make the child mentally sick and might end being a psychopaths or serial killers, but we can all go to these experience and might not end up like a murderer, so how do we distinguish one from another? There are traits that we should notice to any serial killers or psychopaths, one they are very cruel to animals and are obsessed with fire, mostly all examined psychopaths have these traits.