I believe the term ‘serial killer’ is highly misleading, in that it implicitly suggests to the general public that murder is the paramount object or motivating urge in the mind of the killer … They naturally attribute this motivation partly because they value human life above all else, and partly because, as their endless fascination with the subject suggests, they have a vague conception of murder as being somehow mystical, highly dramatic, or even a nebulously romantic experience, replete with unimaginable connotations of eroticism. And guilt for it must be paid for in full.

Serial killers are not monsters; they are human beings with tortured souls. I will never condone what they do, but I can understand them.

They are not Artificial Intelligence (AI)--generated monsters or Marvel comic book superheroes as often depicted in fictional series. The majority are not mentally ill. They are human beings, they could be your neighbour. Many people would presume that serial killers would be super intelligent, but they are not. They are normal people with average intelligence; few are intelligent and most are not.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

Serial killers exist there, and if one really wants to find them, that is where one has to look. One cannot begin to understand a serial killer's mind if one is unprepared and if one does not know what they feel. One does not have to be raped to acquire empathy for a rape victim. I did not have to kill to understand why others do, but I had to go through some harrowing experiences in order to understand.

Having trained the detectives, I told them that if we think of serial killers as enemies, it will be difficult but if we understand them, we will be a step ahead and able to arrest them. But, it isn’t about just arresting them, it is about gathering evidence to get them convicted.

The motive is settled deep within the unconscious psyche, and the serial killer is unaware of this. By ‘irresistible compulsion’ I do not mean that serial killers have absolutely no power over the urge to kill. Many of them experience the urge as an external force taking control of their own will and forcing them to commit murder, a force they perceive they cannot resist.

Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies.

Fictional serial killers are usually more pretentious than frightening, perpetually quoting Milton or arranging their victims in poses designed to evoke the martyrdom of St Sebastian. What are you, a cold-blooded murderer or the controller of Radio 3?

For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises.

Most psychopaths are not violent (although most serial murderers and serial rapists are psychopaths). They are people, mostly men, who have no moral emotions, no attachment systems, and no concerns for others.5 Because they feel no shame, embarrassment, or guilt, they find it easy to manipulate people into giving them money, sex, and trust.

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

Saying that a state or regime is a murderer is a convenient personification of an abstraction. Regimes are in realty people with the power to command a whole society. It is these people that have committed the kilo- and megamurders of our century, and we must not hide their identity under the abstraction of the ‘state,’ ‘regime,’ ‘government,’ or ‘communist.’

A factor that is almost indispensable to this kind of behavior [serial killing] is the mobility of contemporary American life. Living in large centers of population, and living with lots of people, you can get used to dealing with strangers. It's the anonymity factor, and it has a twofold effect. First of all if you're among strangers you're less likely to remember them, or care what they're doing or what they should, or should not, be doing. If they should or shouldn't be there. Secondly, you're conditioned almost not to be afraid of strangers. Mobility is very important here. As we've seen...the individual's [himself in third person] modus operandi was moving large distances in an attempt to camouflage what he was doing. Moving these distances, he was able to take advantage of the anonymity factor.