I believe that it’s a mix of chemical imbalances in their brain combined with any traumatic experience in life. I think that whatever happens to make these people dive off the edge and start to kill others is what they focus on the whole time, something drives them. In other cases, it’s only a chemical imbalance, murderous tendencies can sometimes be found early in children, the signs being if the child is unnaturally interested in death or if they repeatedly kill small animals in gruesome ways. I feel that what people need is to be able to understand that these killers are rationalizing the things they do in some way, so to them it’s not wrong.
Sometimes though I think that some killers find joy in what they’re doing. It’s like a game to them and drawing out their kill is fun, like an animal playing with its food before it eats it, and these are the ones that are truly terrible. The killers that make what they do a game are the ones that pop in to people’s heads as soon as they hear the term ‘Serial Killer’ because to ‘normal’ people that’s the only kind of serial killer. The reason this is the only way that we as a society view these people is because it’s the only way that movie directors depict them, people don’t know many things about real killers so they automatically turn to the things they’ve seen in movies.
There is no rationalization for the things any of these people do, however, the next time you watch a fictional movie about a serial killer. Keep in mind that it’s not how they all think.