(3 of 3)
Nonetheless, the 65 murderers and multiple murderers recently analyzed by Frazier did have some traits in common. They did not "know how to be men" because many had grown up in fatherless homes or suffered "repeated brutalization by a father who was inconsistent or unpredictably violent." Corll, Henley and Brooks all came from broken homes. Mrs. Mary Henley told reporters that Wayne, her eldest son, dropped out of high school in 1970 because his father (now divorced from Mrs. Henley) had beaten him and shot at her.
Other similarities between Frazier's murderers included "loner-type" isolation, episodes of inability to control impulses, periodic buildups of restlessness and anxiety, an unusual familiarity with weapons, a lack of guilt over their acts and "a high incidence of repeated personal humiliation and a sense of powerlessness and personal inadequacy."
Another list has been compiled by Joseph Wepman, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. His "commonalities" among mass murderers: inability to hold a job; no apparent feelings toward the victims; seeing the victims as objects, not people and often not viewing their crime as murder.
Still other experts believe that certain physical abnormalities play an important role in producing a mass murderer. Among them: chromosome irregularities, hormonal imbalances and brain damage. Charles Whitman, for instance, was found to have a brain tumor. Another mass murderer, Richard Speck, who killed eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, suffered severe head injuries as a child. The psychiatrist who examined him prior to trial, Dr. Marvin Ziporyn, believes that he became a killer because of ensuing brain damage.
Ziporyn, who has since written a book on Speck and examined more than 300 other murderers, also contends that they seem "normal" until that "moment when the brakes go"—when the right combination of chemical, physical, psychic and social factors sends them out of control. "In a serial crime like Houston," Ziporyn says, "it's probably safe to say that after the first murder Corll saw it was easy to kill, and the rest of his victims were not people to him, they were like dolls."
* Surpassing the 25 farm-worker victims of Labor Contractor Juan Corona, who were found two years ago in graves near Yuba City, Calif.