Certainly sounds likely.

I doubt their brains are like that on the day they are born. My guess is that whatever abnormalities are found develop over time, in response to a variety of factors.

I could buy that. I know from personal experience that brains can be physically and chemically different between different groups of people. I think it would be interesting to see an experiment whereby they compared serial killers brains to other people that have killed, soldiers for example, then other groups where killing hasn’t been involved but they do have physical differences in their brain make-up for what ever reason.

Whilst I could accept that certain differences might make a person more susceptible to becoming a serial a serial killer )or more suited to being one) there has to be much more to it than that. If you are hard wired to kill then could it not be argued that in that instance you don’t know the difference between right and wrong. If that was the case then why hide and evade? It’s because they know it’s wrong. They might not have the same emotional reaction to the deeds as the rest of us but that’s no reason to do it. Even if you pile on compulsion, obsession, addiction, pathology it’s still not good enough for me. There are plenty of people that struggle with some or all of those things in their life and may have brain differences too and they will mess up and fail and start again but they know the difference between right and wrong. Even if they always choose wrong they still the know the difference.

There are also psychopathic and other such disorders that seem to apply to killers. I say killers for a reason rather than serial killers. They might have everything under the sun wrong with them but if they really did have no sense of reality whatsoever then I fail to see how they can be apparently surviving in society, however unstably, but are capable of planning murders and evade detection?

Now, having said that, there certainly could be cases where there is a provable and complete psychotic break. The "didn’t know what they were doing" defense should apply but I think it would be interesting to use brain scanning in that instance to investigate a definite link between that group and then use those results to weed out evil chancers that just try to claim that when in reality they are just morally bankrupt, selfish killers.

I doubt their brains are like that on the day they are born. My guess is that whatever abnormalities are found develop over time, in response to a variety of factors.

I agree, kids subject to physical,mental,or sexual abuse,likely will turn out differently then if they had an abuse free childhood, of course,many people go thru these circumstances without becoming killers…many turn to drugs,alcohol,prostitution, or become abusers themselves

There is evidence that the psychopathic brain is wired differently. I know response to stimuli are dulled in the temporal lobe of psychopaths. Then again, not all psychopaths are serial killers. I’m pretty sure Zodiac would have been psychopathic, but also narcissistic. Now, does Zodiac have both those AND psychosis? Did he have delusions? I think a person can be a moderately functioning citizen (enough to get by, anyway) with psychopathy and narcissism. I think it would be more difficult to stay under the radar with a mental illness like schizophrenia and delusions.