Peter Vronsky > Quotes

“Few would disagree that Herbert Mullin, who thought he was saving California from the great earthquake by killing people, and Ed Gein, who was making chairs out of human skin, were entirely insane when they committed their acts. The question becomes more difficult with somebody like law student Ted Bundy, who killed twenty women while at the same time working as a suicide prevention counselor, or John Wayne Gacy, who escorted the first lady and then went home to sleep of thirty-three trussed-up corpses under his house. On one hand their crimes seem "insane," yet on the other hand, Bundy and Gacy knew exactly what they were doing. How insane were they?”
― Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

“Suddenly a million males, most of whom had been raised under the tenets of Western Judeo-Christian values but had rarely ventured beyond their hometowns, were catapulted thousands of miles overseas among strangers into a savagely primitive world of warfare stripped of the rules and inhibitions of civilization. It was a mini Stone Age war but with machine guns and flamethrowers, in which our soldiers were called upon to behave like our primitive ancestors in a reptilian state of killing for survival.”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“(It can be argued that the current rise of serial killers can be perhaps attributed to a new evolutionary prerogative for the demise of our species; Mother Nature’s little way of saying, in among several other ways, that there might be too many humans on the planet.)”
― Peter Vronsky, 2014 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology

“Primitive humans developed a neurosis, an irrational or imaginary fear, one not caused by an actual threat: necrophobia—a fear of the dead.”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“Werewolves had been so rationalized and medicalized by the year 1000 that they became subject to a medieval type of “heroin chic” romanticism in literature, in which they were frequently portrayed as attractive, lonely, suffering, victimized, self-sacrificing, chivalrous heroes in fictional and mythological tales emerging during the Grail romance era. The “chivalrous werewolf” narratives often feature a noble knight or prince who transforms into a werewolf to protect the subject of his romantic love, but while he is a werewolf she betrays him by stealing his transformative device—either a potion, a ring, a belt or his clothes—trapping him forever in his lovelorn werewolf state.25”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“For the media covering serial murder it is not the number of victims that counts anymore. But their celebrity status or credit rating. The trade off these days is one upscale SUV in the driveway for every 10 dead hookers in a dumpster.”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“Most modern authors dealing with Erzsébet's life and crimes have produced works of fiction, including Jozo Niznansky's The Lady of Čachtice (1932); Kálmán Vándor's Báthory Erzsébet (1940); La Comtesse sanglante, by Valentine Penrose (1962), Alejandra Pizarnik's Acerca's de la Contessa sangrienta (1968); Comtesse de Sang, by Maurice Périsset (1975); Andrei Codrescu's The Blood Countess (1995); Ella, Drácula, by Javier García Sanchez (2002); Alisa Libby's The Blood Confession (2006); Alexandre Heredia's O Legado de Báthory (2007); The Countess, by Rebecca Johns (2010); Maria Szabó's Én, Báthory Erzsébet (2010); and The Blood Countess by Tara Moss (2012).”
― Peter Vronsky, 2014 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology

“Zombie,” which he’d adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s 1995 novella by the same name. She, in turn, had based her work partly from the life and crimes of cannibalistic serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.”
― Peter Vronsky, 2015 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology: Volume 2

“The definitive characteristic of the sexosophy of Christendom is the doctrine of the split between saintly love and sinful lust. This doctrine is all-pervasive. It penetrates all the institutions of contemporary Christendom . . . The cleft between saintly love and sinful lust is omnipresent in the sexuoerotic heritage of our culture. Love is undefiled and saintly. Lust is defiling and sinful. Love exists above the belt, lust below. Love is lyrical. Lust is lewd. Love is heralded in public. Lust is hidden in private. Love displayed is championed, but championships for lust are condemned. Love is candid, and speaks its name. Lust is clandestine and euphemizes its name. In some degree or other, the cleavage between love and lust gets programed into the design of the lovemaps of all developing boys and girls.12”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“for example, the post-9/11 notion that we now need to sacrifice some of our deeply held beliefs in individual liberty and privacy in the name of collective security against terrorism. It is not reaching too far to compare our current fear of terrorists with our past fear of witches. For example, the chance of an American being killed by a terrorist is an extraordinarily unlikely 1 in 20 million, compared to being killed in a car accident (1 in 19 thousand), drowning in their own bathtub (1 in 800 thousand), or being struck by lightning (1 in 1.5 million), yet society is in an acute state of anxiety over the terrorist “threat.”26 It’s not about logic but perception.”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“In June 1996 she published a book Out of the Shadows: Fred West’s Daughter Tells Her Harrowing Story of Survival.”
― Peter Vronsky, 2015 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology: Volume 2

“It was only in the mid-1970s, after Ted Bundy started abducting and killing middle-class white college girls at schools, shopping malls, ski chalets, national parks and public beaches, that the media suddenly began paying close attention.”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“Jim Cavanaugh, from the Isaac Ray Center in Chicago, invited Dr. Kent Kiehl into the proceedings. Kiehl recorded their initial meeting in his book, The Psychopath Whisperer.”
― Peter Vronsky, 2015 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology: Volume 2

“Northern Kentucky University's criminal sociologist J. Robert Lilly, looked closely at the statistics of wartime rapes committed by American GI's serving in Britain, France and Germany. To everyone's horror, Lilly reported that American liberators raped 14,000 to 17,000 women between 1942 and 1945 in those 3 European countries alone.”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“The 60s just felt more murderous than the 50s. It seemed like a man made plague of violence in the middle of an apocalyptic siege, with serial killers being catapulted like diseased carcasses over the protective walls of civilization harboring the tattered remains of the illusory innocent America we had believed in the decade before.”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“While a facilitator, detective magazines or porn on their own do not necessarily make people into serial killers.”
― Peter Vronsky, 2014 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology

“It is a bit unnerving sitting across from a convicted serial killer. But”
― Peter Vronsky, 2014 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology

“Add to that the age-old principle of Ockham’s razor in problem-solving: “If there are a number of possible solutions, the simplest one, based on the fewest assumptions, is most likely to be correct.”
― Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present

“At this time, there was a superstition among upper class women that the blood of young children helped keep the bloom of youth and that young fat helped conserve a young skin. There was also TB raging through the city; at that time, it was a disease that was one hundred percent fatal, as in those years there was no penicillin, but there was a popular belief that ingested human blood soothed and healed tuberculosis. Enriqueta now began kidnapping children of all ages, some for prostitution and some to be killed to create her healing tonics and “facial crèmes.” Everything that she possibly could she used from these children: the blood, bones (that she pounded into powder), and the fat.”
― Peter Vronsky, 2015 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology: Volume 2

“She did not kill anyone, Perry insisted, because at the time of the 1990 murders, “Donna” did not exist. Whatever evidence the police had was associated with Douglas Perry, her former male incarnation.”
― Peter Vronsky, 2015 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology: Volume 2

“she married a laborer named Charles Freeman and then promptly poisoned him and her son for the twenty-pound payout from a burial club she had enrolled them”
― Peter Vronsky, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters

“Mothers began to bet on their sickly children’s lives,”
― Peter Vronsky, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters

“Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (1988) by John Douglas,”
― Peter Vronsky, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The True Story of the Ken and Barbie Killers

“Psychopaths also show abnormal balances of chemicals currently linked to depression and compulsive behavior: monoamine oxidase (MAO) and serotonin.”
― Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

“Unlike our scattered dead that Ernie Pyle saw on distant foreign hillsides, we are collectively seeing ours here at home. We are looking into the abyss of a new American Noir like the one in 1940s but worse. This time there will be no solemn homecoming flotillas of the dead in flag-draped coffins from overseas; they are already here with us in mass graves like New York’s Hart Island and in refrigerator trucks in hospital and funeral home parking lots.”
― Peter Vronsky, American Serial Killers: The Deadliest Years 1950-2000

“shack-dwelling,”
― Peter Vronsky, 2014 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology

“When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. —MARK TWAIN”
― Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

“Policemen would tell you that most murderers, when they killed, did not know that they were going to kill. They killed in the heat of an argument, in a jealous rage, or sometimes accidentally while committing another crime. And cops would tell you that if you were going to be murdered, it was statistically likely that your killer was somebody you already knew and knew well.”
― Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

“unidentified serial perpetrators on the loose like the “Long Island Killer” suspected in as many as thirteen recent murders, the “Bone Collector” linked to thirteen murders in New Mexico, or the “February 9 Killer” who has killed at least two women in Salt Lake City on the same date in different years.ix The”
― Peter Vronsky, 2014 Serial Killers True Crime Anthology

“Whether there are any links between the nature of the serial murders and the collapse of the two regimes is an open question at this time.”
― Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters