Pedophiles and Murder Styles

In my opinion, Albert Fish was one of the most deranged, psychotic serial killers in American history. Not in the sense of how many people he slaughtered, but his personality and his actions towards his victims. For me, it was more difficult to read the section of this book that was about him than other killers. Albert Fish once wrote a letter to one of the victims mothers. It explained what had happened to her daughter, from Albert's point of view. "First I stripped her naked. How did she kick-bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then  cut her into small pieces  so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it" (Schechter  228).  Albert had cannibalized, raped, molested, and strangled his victims, which is not very uncommon for serial killers to do. One killer, H. H. Holmes, had used many different strategies to end the lives  of others, which is very interesting to me because that means he didn't have one specific motive for his murders. Often times serial killers will use a surrogate, meaning whatever trauma caused them to become mentally unstable or psychotic will be reflected by their crimes. For example, if someone was severely abused by their mother as a child, they might target middle aged women to kill. Ed Gein, for example, killed 2 women who looked similar to his deceased mother. If this was true for every serial killer, law enforcement or psychologists could possibly predict the victim of a killer before it's too late. Another thing that interests me about serial killers and this book is a killers MO. MO means modus operandi, which is a characteristic method, or the way someone does something. In the case of crime, its the characteristic way that a criminal will commit their crime. This interests me because you can figure out who or what kind of person you're looking for from the way they execute their crime.