Dr. Coltan Scrivner

lost people it would have been horrible to watch but instead the internet blows it up what's happening psychologically there well you know Ted Bundy really did receive a lot of love letters when he was in prison and a lot of serial killers do I think Bundy is sort of an extreme example and that I think he's a classically handsome was a classically handsome guy and so it was easy to justify that

But they're even, you know, I would say less attractive or less conventionally attractive serial killers who still get love letters.

Like, again, Jeffrey Dahmer, who was attracted to men and everybody knew it, got love letters from women as well, even though that's not really his that wasn't his cup of tea.

Right.

uh so i think part of what's going on there is that the best way to learn about someone dangerous is of course to get to know them right but that's a very risky strategy because if you get to know someone dangerous your chances of becoming a victim of violence at their hands goes way up right so the safest is as crazy as it sounds the safest way you could do that so what's going on psychologically is uh to learn about that person by getting to know them

when they can't hurt you, which is when they are in prison or behind bars, right?

So if a serial killer is convicted and they have, let's say, life in prison or they're on death row, there's no chance of them getting out of prison and never having any actual contact with you.

Your mind is probably, some people's minds is telling them that, you know,

if you can create a social connection with this individual, it's a very safe way to then understand the mind of someone who could do something like that.

And maybe that will help you understand the minds of people who might do something like that, that you weren't aware of yet, right?

People who you encounter in your life or you might encounter in the future.

And so your mind's kind of making this trade-off of, I can get to know this person under a very low risk scenario.

It's actually very similar to the kind of trade-off we make when we watch a true crime documentary, right?

We're at home, on our couch, safe.

We're never gonna meet this person, but we can learn a tremendous amount about them by having this sort of parasocial relationship with them through their media.

And so I think it's just a more extreme version of that.

But again,

some of the more extreme versions i mean i think ted bundy got married while he was in prison on death row so some of the more extreme versions again are probably driven by other uh personality traits and and i would say uh psychopathologies that uh combine with curiosity to then lead to these behaviors

You know, that sounds like a really basic question, but until we looked into this a few years ago, nobody had really tried to answer that, even though it's something that people experience all the time.

One of the original sort of answers to that question, the first answers to that question was, well, people do it to get an adrenaline rush, right?