Two of Americas Most Wanted and Renowned Serial Killers, Gary Ridgway Essay

Two of Americas Most Wanted and Renowned Serial Killers, Gary Ridgway and Dennis Rader - Essay Example This paper deals with the lives of two of America’s most wanted and renowned serial killers, Gary Ridgway and Dennis Rader. Both of them have caused a great number of grievances and havoc among the people by killing several individuals and were hunted down by the police with an aim to stop murder from taking place. This paper observes a compare and contrast of the lives of these two serial killers, their motives and the way that they went about murdering people. Gary Leon Ridgway and Dennis Rader were both born in the countryside; Ridgeway in Utah and Rader in Kansas, and only have a four-year gap between each other. They both have gruesome nicknames which have made them quite unpopular among the people – Gary is called ‘Green River Gary’, the ‘Green River Killer’ or ‘The Riverman’ whereas Dennis has adorned the nickname of ‘BTK’ or the ‘Bind, Torture, Kill Strangler.’ Both of them have the commonality of strangling their victims and killing them, then dumping their bodies away in order to dispose of them. Both have been subject to life imprisonment without parole and are hated among people for having killed so many people without any reason at all. The police are still trying to understand their reasoning behind the killings. Delving into the personal lives of serial killers always helps a person understand the atrocities of their past and what made them become the way they are in the present. Ridgway had a very troubled childhood because he often witnessed his parents fighting violently with each other. He was dragged into the fight and abused by his mother for whom he began to develop both anger and sexual feelings. (Prothero, Mark; Carlton Smith ) Rader, on the other hand, had a very normal childhood and graduated from high school and then college. As a child, he loved torturing animals and hated them with all his might. He also had a sexual fetish for women’s undergarment s; this was seen in his killings as he often killed women, stole their undergarments and went about wearing them on his own.