Name: Are People Born Evil? Criminologist Answers Questions | Honesty Box
Uploaded: 2026-01-06T13:39:58.000Z
Duration: 28 min 3 s
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Seven out of ten murder victims in the United Kingdom are men.

Nine out of ten perpetrators of murder are men.

But the main reason people commit murder in this country is because in five minutes of madness, a young man will lash out at another young man whom he feels has disrespected him.

I'm emeritus professor of criminology and I'm here to answer questions in the honesty box.

Psychopaths don't have horns on their head or a long pointed tail.

You know, if it was that easy, it would be easy to spot a psychopath.

But psychopaths are very good at mirroring your behavior.

Psychopaths are very good at being plausible.

Psychopaths are very good about being charming.

But effectively you spot a psychopath because the psychopath needs to get close to you as quickly as possible.

Because if he gets close to you and learns about you, he's able to use that knowledge to manipulate you.

Because by manipulating you, he's able to live off you.

They don't want to expend too much energy and therefore they can live off you by knowing the buttons to press, the way to impress you, the way to get money out of you.

The label gets used to very commonly in our culture, but

only one in a hundred people would be clinically diagnosed as a psychopath.

And of those, one out of every hundred who would be diagnosed as such, 9 out of 10 would be male, as opposed to female.

So this is a very, very rare phenomenon as opposed to the way that we just talk about it, but

Often it's because, in my experience, they like power.

And often it's a sense of power that they feel is denied to them in other aspects of their lives.

And therefore by killing, they are exercising a godlike power.

They decide who should live and who should die.

It's not so much that one should be asking, it's why are some serial killers killing cycle longer than other serial killers killing cycle?

That's about the fact that we've got to care.

That's about the fact that we've got to understand that serial killers will target particular groups in our culture who are vulnerable to attack.

And it seems to me our responsibility is to try and lessen those vulnerabilities.

Is it true psychopaths mimic emotion and the answer to that is, yeah, that's exactly what they do.

Psychopaths have defective emotional experiences.

They don't know what sadness is, they don't know what happiness is.

They know that you're sad or you're happy because they're very good at reading you.

So if you're crying, they understand that sadness.

If you're smiling and happy and you're ha ha, laughing, they understand that's a different emotion.

But they don't feel those emotions, they merely mimic those emotions.

So they want to get close to you, they want to make you feel that they are like you.

So they are very good at mimicking emotions.

I mean, one of my best friends is a clinically diagnosed psychopath and he always, he's called Noel.

And Noel always says to me, you know, I didn't know why people cried at the end of Titanic.

He doesn't have those emotions, but he knew everybody else was sad, but he didn't feel that sadness.

I mean, imagine not being able to have genuine joy, being able to experience what being joyous really feels like.

Everybody loves thinking that their boyfriend, their girlfriend, their next door neighbour is a psychopath.

You know, this is such a good question because even though I'm not religious, I have a secular view of evil and I do believe in evil and I've certainly met people that I would be happily, I would happily label as such.

We're into one of the classic questions of forensic psychology or indeed criminology.

I always answer that question by saying it's a messy combination of the two.

And we might be born in a way that we have a propensity for violence, but

how we are nurtured, how we are raised, the relationship that we have with our parents, with our siblings, with our extended family, with friends, how we are nurtured can ameliorate those things that we are born with.

Or indeed it can make them, it can aggravate them, it can make them much worse.

I thought about that question relatively recently because of Axel Ruda Cabana.

And it was quite clear that when he was younger, his parents had been able to manage, control, help with the problems that this young man had.

But when he became a teenager, when he was no longer under the influence of his parents, as he had Once been, the more problematic aspects of his personality were given full reign.

Well, she said very little publicly because of course she's pleaded not guilty and is still maintaining her innocence after her conviction.

And therefore it's very difficult to know enough about her to be able to do her psychopathy check list on her.

The interesting thing I feel about Lucy Letby is just how polarizing she is.

There are still people who are maintaining her innocence and a lot of those people are professional people.

They're doing it with the best intentions.

They believe there's been a miscarriage of justice.

And of course, in terms of the research that I did about nurses that will kill in a hospital setting, she is an outlier.

You know, she didn't make her colleagues feel particularly nervous to be around her.

With one or two exceptions, she doesn't quite fit in terms of the red flags that one would normally associate with nurses that would kill in the hospital setting.

And, you know, she's middle class, she's nice, she's got a sing songy name.

Even one of the detectives who worked on the case described her as beige.

And I think people find it difficult to get their head around the fact that she could possibly be a serial killer.

Our most prolific serial killer was a trusted local GP in Manchester who murdered 215, perhaps as many as 260 of his largely female elderly patients.

You know, when Harold Shipman was first arrested and charged with murder, the other patients in his practice set up a Harold Shipman legal fighting fund to pay for his legal expenses.

Again, it's interesting to me because of the argument that I made about, you know, the vulnerability of some groups to be attacked by serial killers.

The service he was offering that no other doctor offered in Manchester was home visits.

Harold Shipman was often the only person who was visiting those elderly people from one week to the next.

Which is also one of the reasons why so often when they were murdered in their home, they were wearing their best clothes.

They dressed up because the doctor was, was coming to call.

So I don't know, I wouldn't be able to diagnose if Lucy Letby is a psychopath, but

she is quite clearly our most recent female British serial killer and our most recent male British serial killer is Stephen Port, who murdered gay men.

What is something all serial killers have in common?

Well, they all have in common that they'll target specific groups of people.

You know, I've worked with so many serial murderers that People always are fascinated.

You know, did they have the McDonald triad of bedwetting fire starting, being cruel to animals?

Is there something in the biology of the individual serial killer?

But actually, what's more interesting is who it is that they're able to kill.

I move from that medical, psychological tradition to a structural tradition that looks at the people that get targeted by serial murderers.