As far as fiction goes, my hero is Michael Myers from the Halloween series.
Then again, he’s no longer human, and he’s more of a mass murderer than a serial killer, even if his goal is to kill a specific person, or persons that might hinder his progress in killing the one goal person. Still, my answer.
For real life, Edward Gein is an interesting choice. He was totally messed up, loved comic books and was a model prisoner in prison. He’s a good example of how much one’s environment and childhood can fuck you up. Or an estimate of such. Would he have turned out like this if his mom hadn’t been a dick? Probably not, but @DominicX also points out Dahmer. (whom I know not much about)
Not really a serial killer, but I recently learned about a Canadian criminal from Québec, Roch Thériault. I learned about him early this year when he died in prison.
He was a religious cult leader who thought/or told people he was Moses’s reincarnation. He convinced some people to go live off in seclusion with him, and he did to them some of the most horrible shit I ever read. Sexual abuse with his many wives and kids, a cruel hierarchy reigning in his small community, battering up babies and kids so bad that they became mentally retarded, ’‘operating’’ on his followers by pretty much torturing them, and he killed a woman while trying to handle a difficult birth situation. Plenty of other really weird and scary shit.
However, I read a lot about this guy because I kept asking myself shit…why did these people willingly stay with this monster? They could have left anytime, he never shown any signs of restraining them, at least not physically. People often ran off, but they always came back, forgiving ’‘their lord’’ and understanding that God was working through him to teach them all a lesson.
He was apparently very charismatic and everyone loved him. But Jesus Christ, there’s some limits. No matter how much I may love someone, if he treated my kids the way this guy treated his, I’d be long gone.
Although he had a rough childhood, insanity I believe was ruled out because he was very manipulative and much too cognizant of his actions. That doesn’t mean much as far as mental disorders go, but maybe they didn’t wanna go through all the trouble and just stuck him in jail. (Québec made no real attempt to catch him when he ran away to Ontario with his groupies, who he had also abused back in that province)
This Wiki article doesn’t say much, but other stuff I read is hardcore. So yeah, I keep asking myself…those people who followed him, I mean why? How come? They let him dish out all this shit on them, and kept going back. They musta been pretty fucked up themselves, or had REALLY shitty families. When reading about this guy, this is what I wonder about the most. Those poor people. I guess he’s not a serial killer, but he is a murderer, and it is believed that he killed more people than what was reported.
