These Are the Hidden Signs of a Murderer

"At times we may need to snap in order to protect ourselves and others, but unfortunately snapping for some people happens not in self-defense. As one scientist put it, “The modern world presses on the defense mechanism circuitry in ways that can lead to misfires.” Try to be good people, don’t misfire."

- The Infographics Show

These Are the Hidden Signs of a Murderer is a video on the Infographics Show listing all the hidden and unexpected signs of a murderer or future murderer, including childhood signs, certain behaviors, and even mental illnesses.

Synopsis
Murderers seem to sneak through the cracks of society, they are able to blend in, and remain completely invisible, while secretly plotting to kill. So can you spot a murderer in the making? Check out today's video where we point out the tried and true signs of a murderer.

Transcript
A woman meets a guy online and after the two exchange some sweet words they agree to meet.Fast-forward just a couple of weeks and the scene is a hotel room. A man stands above the body of a woman. She’s been stabbed 30 times. Blood is all over the place. The man, who seems to have murder written into his DNA, will later say he feared the woman was going to reject him. But get this, the authorities knew this man was a killer. In fact, they should have seen the signs he was going to do it again. There are usually signs, and as you’ll see today, they’re not always exactly hidden.

Ok, so we guess we shouldn’t start a story and not fill in the gaps. The crime we just talked about happened recently in Canada. The authorities did take a lot of flak for it, because they really should have known this guy might kill again. Going back to his earliest relationships, he had a history of violence. In fact, he was convicted of assaulting a partner years back. Then in 2006, he ruthlessly beat another partner with a hammer, and then stabbed her as she lay dying. This was murder. He later said he was afraid she was going to reject him. He was of course arrested and sent to prison, but then he went from being high-risk to moderate-risk and in 2019 he was allowed out of prison on day release so long as he followed some protocols.

He was then sent to live in a halfway house. It was around this time that his parole officer said he should be allowed to tend to his sexual needs. Since you know how the story ends, you know that this was an extremely bad idea. What happened is the guy met the woman online on an erotic massage parlor’s website. They met a bunch of times, but then it seems he formed a kind of attachment to her, or more like an obsession. Paradoxically, he killed her because he thought she might leave him. He was obviously a certified loon and a very dangerous man. Ok, so what are the signs something like might happen? Well, in his case there was a history of violence against women, terrible violence, the worst kind of violence. He shouldn’t have even been allowed anywhere near a relationship, or at least his activities should have been monitored more closely.

He was supposed to tell his parole officer about any relationships, which it seems he did. As we said, the authorities were criticized for this and admitted wrongdoing. But let’s say you’re the woman in this case. How would you know this guy had murder on his mind? Well, there are plenty of resources that you can go to where experts tell you about behavior that could turn deadly. This could be behavior of both men and women of course. One thing to notice is controlling behavior. You should know that if someone is excessively controlling - and we don’t mean telling you off for forgetting to brush your teeth at night - alarm bells should be going off in your head. Let’s say someone tells you what to wear all the time. This person keeps saying you dress too sexily. He’s jealous, more than jealous, he’s oppressive. Well, you should get out of that relationship ASAP. This is not normal behavior. It means this person has a problem, likely stemming from his childhood. If the control worsens over time, if the person can’t be talked to or doesn’t take well to criticism, the behavior will only get worse. The endpoint could be violence and even murder, especially if the person feels you are going to leave.

This is quite common. There are a lot of insecure people out there. But at times, they might exhibit other strange behaviors, such as excessive aggressiveness during sex. Then you have stalking, or threats of violence, even threats of murder. We are not talking about serial killer behavior here, that is very different, a whole different world; we are talking about people who cannot control their emotions and anger, people who may not have killed before but have it in them to kill. Perhaps you have a friend who you fear is in this kind of relationship. Sometimes the problem is they don’t talk about it. But if you find yourself saying things like, “She became quiet and withdrawn” or “She acts different when he’s around”, then this could spell trouble.

Have a heart-to-heart with this friend when you get the chance. In all likelihood, if she is in a bad relationship with a controlling person that person won’t want her to meet you. He will be jealous of everyone, even her friends. In fact, research says that jealousy is one of the leading causes of spousal murder. Controlling and jealous people are responsible for a good chunk of murders in this world. You might think that murdering a lover or partner is only for natural born killers, but you’d be very wrong. People kill in explosive fits of temper, so-called normal people, not just maniacs and psychopaths. You probably know that very often murder victims are killed by people intimate with them or friends. Take this case for example, a really famous case in the US.

It involved a NASA astronaut named Lisa Marie Nowak. In short, she liked a man but that man was dating another woman, and this made the space-woman very angry. Nowak was educated to the nth degree. She was well loved, had a happy childhood, had money, fame even, but then one in a fit of rage she set off to meet that woman with what the press called a “kill kit” in her car. That was a bag containing a steel mallet, a long knife, a length of hose, latex gloves, pepper spray, a BB gun, and some garbage bags. You have to ask what she was planning to do with those things. Thankfully, she didn’t kill the woman. She hardly even spent any time in jail, just two days…Yeah, imagine she’d have been poor and uneducated, it likely would have been a different outcome.

The authorities said she was planning “to do serious bodily injury or death.” It was later written that she was jealous and obsessed, and that’s why she had an almost fatal attraction. One expert said about this case, “They may have murderous, rageful fantasies about that person. The difference is, she is acting on these fantasies.” Murder doesn’t happen often as a result of jealousy, but it still happens way too often. You should know the signs. This is a good example of someone falling off the edge. She was controlling, jealous, obsessive.

Unfortunately, these signs aren’t always obvious from the get-go. These types of people tend to hide their problems at the start of a relationship, and then the negative emotions tend to slowly emerge as fangs do from growing tigers. Get out before it is too late, is what experts will tell you. Regular people don't have the equipment that neuroscientists have. They can’t scan images of a partner’s amygdala and hypothalamus as they tell them they think someone else is hot and charming. In such a case, if those parts of the brain show lots of activity, that means they could be extremely jealous. According to the experts, jealous folks in this case might also have a fast-beating heart along with muscle tensing and sweating.

You can try that one at home. We looked at statistics, and while crime is a huge reason for homicides, and socio-political murders are very common, much of the murder in the world is down to interpersonal conflict, meaning people being murdered by people they know because something went wrong. Often, it’s jealousy. When we’re talking about signs of a murderer related to criminal enterprises, well, it’s complicated. Should Joey “Ice Pick” Inzaghi have seen the signs before he was “whacked” by Tony “The Wizard of Odds” Trevisani? Maybe not, because killing is in most mafia guy’s playbooks. Still, as any former mafia guy will tell you, some of those goodfellas were pretty much psychopaths who enjoyed killing. They killed for fun. They weren’t right in the head. What was up with those guys? What are the signs they might display?

Well, in terms of serial killers, be it sexual killers or demented maniacs that enjoy murdering lots of people, there could well be signs in childhood. There’s something called the “Macdonald triad”, which is a controversial theory that people who commit serial serious violent offenses have three things in common when they’re young. Those are bed-wetting until a later age, setting fires all the time and cruelty to animals. Ok, so lots of kids do this and they turn out to be nice people who would not dream of seriously hurting anyone, although excessive cruelty to animals could be a sign that someone is taking their anger out on vulnerable things due to the humiliation they suffered in childhood.

Stable kids don’t generally set cats on fire for fun. Still, this might not be a sign someone will kill humans. They might become very self-aware and ashamed of their act, and begin to understand why they did it. The author Peter Vronsky, who’s arguably the world’s most renowned writer about serial killers, has said with many of the killers he’s researched there are many themes that cross over. “He kept himself to himself” is the refrain you so often hear about serial killers. It’s uncommon for a serial killer to be judged completely mad, at least in court, because people do not want this person ever to see the light of day again on the outside if they’re released from a mental institution.

American serial killer Herbert Mullin, for instance, thought God was telling him to kill people to prevent earthquakes from happening. With one of his victims, he cut out of her organs, and then spread her intestines around branches in some woods. He then inspected them for signs of “pollution”, because he’d been told by the voices in his head that she was infected by the devil. Experts now agree he was without doubt experiencing intense hallucinations because he had a bad case of paranoid schizophrenia. Are there signs when this happens? That’s difficult to say, but if you meet someone who keeps ranting about the end of the world and the fact forces of evil are doing things only they understand, it could be a sign, especially if that person looks lost and what he says is very frightening.

Or they might be a Qanon. Just recently a British man killed his neighbor after a long-time suffering from paranoid delusions. He believed his neighbor was spreading the Covid virus for Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and he also thought he was under surveillance by NASA, the CIA and FBI. In 2019, he was detained under the British Mental Health Act, but he was released in 2020. In 2021, he shot his neighbor to death and later died in a high-speed police chase. This is what his father said about him, “Alex was mentioning NASA, the FBI, the military, in the end I think he thought he was some sort of secret agent. He was always talking about Putin, he got really bad at one point. You could not speak to him without him saying something about torture and that people were spying on him.” So, if you know anyone like this, get them some help, or at least give them a wide berth for a while.

Such signs are something to be concerned about. Then there’s lack of conscience, sometimes for an act someone has done but also sometimes when they have witnessed something terrible. This could be related to psychopathy, and we say could with emphasis, so don’t go thinking just because your friend laughs at news reports in which people die, he could soon be a killer. It’s just a trait of some killers, the fact they don’t seem bothered at all by extreme acts of violence. The question a lot of people ask is are we all capable of murder? It’s a very difficult question to answer. You could take a person who has never committed a severe violent act, but many things came together at the wrong place at the wrong time. A lot of people who’ve killed say they don’t remember doing it, as if they were temporarily blinded by rage. If you look closer, it’s likely this person had been under tremendous amounts of stress.

They might have childhood trauma issues, and possibly due to head injury, their prefrontal cortex might not be working the way other people’s do. Most of you will have the ability to use that bit of the brain and push back more animal instincts, but some people might not be able to do that. There’s a lot of research that says trauma in childhood might affect how the prefrontal cortex develops, and since neglect and violence can be linked to poverty in childhood, this might be one of the reasons why more murders happen among poorer communities. An early sign of this could simply be someone you know who flies off into a rage very easily and seemingly cannot be brought out of it.

We’re not saying they’ll be killers, but it’s likely they have more chance of killing than someone who seems to have solid control over their emotions. We have morals and reasoning and a conscience, but we also have rage circuits in our brains that were developed a long time ago. As many a scientist has pointed out, we are hardwired to snap. Nonetheless, we generally don’t snap and kill. It usually takes that perfect storm, or we should say imperfect storm, to blow into our lives. At times we may need to snap in order to protect ourselves and others, but unfortunately snapping for some people happens not in self-defense. As one scientist put it, “The modern world presses on the defense mechanism circuitry in ways that can lead to misfires.” Try to be good people, don’t misfire.