Episode 38: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I'm your host Julie Mattson. In this episode, we explore the dark and disturbing realm of serial killers and the intriguing link between head trauma and their genesis. We delve into the research that has been conducted on the subject, examining case studies of notorious serial killers who experienced head injuries prior to engaging in criminal behavior. We also examine the possible physiological and psychological mechanisms that link head trauma to violent behavior, including changes in brain structure and function, and alterations in personality and impulse control. Join me as we unravel the mysteries of the human mind and seek to understand the complex interplay of factors that may contribute to the making of a serial killer. Are you ready? Listen in...
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly True crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:30 I have no idea why I like talking so much about brain injuries.
0:34 But I think it's because like I said before, we see so many at the medical examiner's office, so many deaths that could be prevented if someone would maybe seek medical treatment following a fall and be evaluated.
0:52 They scanned the brains of dozens of rapists and violent men and wife beaters and killers and researchers actually found defects in the brain and those defects make them a little more prone to aggression than the average person.
1:12 Anybody can be born with this.
1:15 I mean, they are saying that serial killers and murderers, their brains differ a little bit from the ordinary man or woman.
1:26 The area that controls their temper and aggression doesn't function.
1:31 Normally.
1:32 A lot of this is caused by mothers who smoked or drank during pregnancy or neglectful backgrounds, injuries, abusive backgrounds or kids who were shaken as babies.
1:49 So, even if you're hit in the head as an adult, on the subject of traumatic brain injuries or even a bad diet can cause changes.
2:01 They scanned over 40 convicted killers brains and kind of compared those against ordinary people and they do have a lower activity in the prefrontal area and that's the area that controls aggression and concentration and regulates impulse control.
2:21 So the average person may think, oh, I'd like to strangle him, but in the serial killer's mind, like they make it happen.
2:30 And a lot of psychopaths have shrunken amygdala, which is the seed of the brain that controls emotion, that means that, you know, they lack empathy, remorse or guilt when they hurt someone else.
2:44 The Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe had most likely suffered that kind of injury when he was younger.
2:53 So he was five days premature and starved of oxygen at birth.
2:58 His 1st 10 days were basically a fight for his life and that can lead to damage in another part of the brain which also regulates aggression.
3:09 In 81 Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and he attempted to murder seven others.
3:17 And they are saying that science can now predict which Children are at risk of becoming criminals by scanning their brains for low functioning in the prefrontal cortex.
3:31 Strangely enough too, they have found that violent offenders typically have a lower resting heart rate.
3:38 So average about 75 beats per minute.
3:42 And so that, I mean, of course, not everybody with a low resting heart rate is a serial killer or a criminal.
3:50 But that is one indicator and it kind of reflects, I guess the lack of fear.
3:56 Those of us who are anxious all the time time tend to have a higher resting heart rate and those people who are just not afraid of anything, they, the heart rate never goes up, they never feel stress from the daily life that most of us are gonna feel.
4:16 They just don't have that fear that holds the rest of us back.
4:20 That makes it easier to rob a store or burglarize a house or even kill a person.
4:28 If you lack fear, then you're not afraid of what's gonna happen.
4:32 You're not really thinking about the consequences.
4:35 You don't care if you get arrested, you're not afraid of anything.
4:39 And so naturally, if that's the case, you're gonna be willing to do a lot more than the average person.
4:47 But they found that with a low functioning prefrontal cortex that, that coupled with a poor background could make for a future offender being brought up in, in a bad environment affects it because if there is abuse or neglect or poor nutrition, it doesn't give the brain a chance to develop.
5:11 And genetics also has a lot to do with that because what pregnant mothers do has a big impact on the unborn child.
5:20 And we've all seen that before.
5:21 We've seen babies who are born to mothers who are addicted to drugs and born to mothers who smoke and drink alcohol.
5:30 And that very much impacts the child.
5:34 Poor nutrition also affects how the prefrontal cortex develops in the womb.
5:42 If a mom smokes during pregnancy, it makes that child 2 to 3 times more likely to offend because that carbon monoxide reduces the oxygen flow to the brain.
5:54 And also poor attachment to the mom after birth can also affect brain development.
6:01 So I find that all very, very interesting.
6:05 We all know Richard Ramirez, he actually was a serial killer.
6:12 So his mom worked at a boot factory.
6:15 She was exposed to chemical fumes at work and all of his siblings had birth defects and those ranged from respiratory issues to bone deformities at the age of two.
6:29 Of course, he's already exposed to these chemical fumes when his mom is pregnant with him just like all his other siblings.
6:37 But the age of two, a dresser fell on his head and of course, that may not have been from neglect, but most likely was and it caused a large laceration on his head.
6:49 And then again at five, he was knocked unconscious from a swing.
6:54 And then at that point, he started experiencing epileptic seizures.
6:59 These are reasons why they do brain studies after death to see what they can study, to determine if certain defects affect someone's behavior.
7:11 Albert Fish was the werewolf of Wisteria and he killed three Children and possibly six more and he always boasted about killing infants, but he had a brain injury after falling from a tree as a teenager.
7:27 Now, David Berkowitz, who was the son of Sam in New York City in 1977 he stalked couples in their cars and killed six and wounded seven.
7:37 He was badly hurt three times.
7:40 So apparently he ran into a wall and he suffered a head injury after this is after he was struck by a car.
7:50 And now he suffered injuries during that time, head injuries.
7:55 And then at the age of eight, he was hit on the head with a pipe and had like a four inch gash in his scalp.
8:04 He had been injured multiple times.
8:07 Henry Lee Lucas, he killed at least three but confessed to hundreds in his lifetime was beaten as a child.
8:14 His mom smashed a heavy plank of wood over his head and abnormalities in his frontal lobes on brain scans were all a result of trauma.
8:26 Fred West fractured his skull at the age of six, 17 in a motorcycle accident.
8:32 And then he became violent afterwards and he began accosting women.
8:38 And two years after the crash, he groped a woman on a fire escape and she punched him good for her and he fell down two flights of stairs and suffered further trauma and brain damage.
8:52 So his behavior, violent behavior began after his skull fracture.
9:00 Now Dennis Raider, who was the BT K killer, spent 17 years breaking into Wichita homes and killing.
9:11 But when he was an infant, his mother accidentally dropped him on his head and he actually stopped breathing, he turned blue and she never took him to the hospital.
9:23 Ed Gein killed and mutilated several women.
9:27 He was badly beaten by his father and suffered blackouts during his lifetime.
9:33 They believe that the blows that he experienced at the hands of his dad caused his speech impediment and his lazy eye.
9:42 Glenn Edward Rogers was the cross country killer.
9:46 We haven't really talked about him yet, but he killed three strawberry blonde women and likely killed more.
9:52 But he used to rock himself violently as a baby and he frequently fell off chairs and would bang his head on floors and walls now as a toddler and this is so sad for us to think about, but he was punched in the head by his red haired mother.
10:12 And a lot of people believe that that influenced the demographic of the women that he murdered because they resembled his mom in some way.
10:23 John Wayne Gacy killed at least 33 men and boys in his deplanes home, but he had a blood clot to his brain at age 11 after being hit in the head with a swing.
10:35 Now, swings are dangerous.
10:37 I can tell you I can't count on one hand the number of times that I was hit by a swing as a kid pushing a friend or they fall off of it and then it swings up and hit me and hit a number of times.
10:50 So that's kind of scary.
10:52 But this blood clot caused by being hit in the head by the swing would cause blackouts and also led to some heart complications.
11:01 He was often beaten by his father as well.
11:04 His father was apparently very violent and when he became an adolescent, he spent a lot of time in the hospital because of complications caused by head trauma.
11:17 There was Alexander Pichushkin who murdered 48 people.
11:22 He wanted to murder 64 which is the number of squares on a chess board.
11:29 Therefore, his nickname was the chessboard killer.
11:33 And he was hurt badly by a swing also.
11:36 And this swing damaged his frontal cortex and drastically altered his personality.
11:42 And after that, he became very moody and very violent.
11:47 And of course, after these injuries is when all of his murders occurred.
11:53 These are just some examples and I'm sure there are many, many more of serial killers who had experienced some form of brain trauma that may have altered their personality and caused them to be more aggressive.
12:08 So I just find that real interesting.
12:11 It's kind of fun to research different things like that, especially after the Connor Sturgeon shooting incident to see that these injuries to the brain actually cause more damage than we realize they can cause the bleeding, they can cause the altered mental status damage to the frontal cortex, which can cause changes in aggression and can really alter the way someone acts and obviously maybe affect the outcome of their entire life.
12:44 I know that when I was first at a nursing school, I worked the neonatal intensive care.
12:49 And I know that there were many kids that were taken from parents because of drug use and those types of things, those babies suffered a lot of complications, not only from being exposed to all those chemicals when their mom was pregnant with them, but issues with separation after they're born, not being with their parents and being adopted and sometimes going through the foster system and, and we all know that that's a little skewed as well.
13:23 Just something to think about that brain injuries can cause a lot of issues.
13:28 A lot of different things can cause brain injuries.
13:31 So there's a large amount of criminals on death row who've been diagnosed with brain disorders.
13:38 So they did a study and said that 20 out of 31 confessed killers have been diagnosed as mentally ill and out of the 2064% actually had frontal lobe abnormalities.
13:52 But then it's also important to remember that brain damage can't be the motivator for all serial killing.
13:58 Obviously, there are a large percentage of confessed serial killers that have had no brain damage and no kind of frontal lobe injuries.
14:08 A lot of them actually admit that they were very well aware of what they were doing during the crime.
14:15 And some even confessed that they knew that it was wrong and actually got a thrill from murdering.
14:24 And many serial killers admitted that the people they killed fulfilled some sort of aspect of a person that abused or taunted them, like maybe being bullied in school.
14:37 And their murder victims actually resembled those who bullied them.
14:42 And they've also done studies that a big majority of the serial killers who were abused as Children were abused by their mother.
14:51 They thought that maybe it was some sort of genetics that could have caused that.
14:56 That's the reason that a lot of serial killers are predominantly male.
15:01 So again, in looking into the Connor Sturgeon, Louisville Killers, this kind of goes back to the fact that he had had so many concussions and been injured so many times playing football in high school.
15:14 I don't know anything about his childhood life.
15:18 And I don't think there's a history of abuse.
15:20 I haven't seen that anywhere, but it just is interesting that all of these serial killers also had some sort of traumatic brain injury.
15:31 And again, we talked about the changes in personality that it can cause the chemical changes and the damage to the brain cells, how it can cause aggression and anger and concentration issues and memory issues.
15:47 It's just interesting to see the link.
15:50 So we're gonna continue to talk in the next episode a little bit about brain injuries and different kinds.
15:56 Just because again, I don't know why they fascinate me because I just see so many people die from them to research them is really interesting because it helps me in my job as well.
16:09 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
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