Serial killers are specifically motivated by a variety of psychological urges, primarily power and sexual compulsion. They often have feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness, sometimes owing to humiliation and abuse in childhood or the pressures of poverty and low socioeconomic status in adulthood, and their crimes compensate for this and provide a sense of potency and often social revenge, by giving them a feeling of power, both at the time of the actual killing and also afterwards for power-control killers.
Most serial killers have dysfunctional backgrounds. Frequently they are physically, sexually or psychologically abused as children. There can be a close correlation between their childhood abuse and their crimes. For example, John Wayne Gacy was often beaten by his father and derided as a "sissy" and accused of being homosexual; in adulthood, Gacy would rape and torture boys and denounce them as being "faggots" and "sissies". Gacy was married to a woman and identified......
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