Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are generally believed to test a person’s intelligence or a person’s ability to learn. Some researchers believe that IQ tests can measure how successful a person will be in life because the test measures motivation as well as intelligence. Whatever the case, IQ tests are often given to or sought after for serial killers in an effort to learn more about them.
All types of data are collected on known serial killers. Radford University has charts covering numerous life aspects of over 3,000 serial killers. The data ranges from motives to military service to, of course, their IQ levels. The statistics are frightening, but they portray the general serial killer as having an average IQ of 94.7. That number equals an average intelligence (90 to 109). To be a genius, a serial killer would need an IQ of 140 or higher.
In shows like Criminal Minds and in the portrayal of the fictitious character, Hannibal Lector, we are confronted with the idea of the genius serial killer. He makes the perfect villain for our heroes to battle against in a plot that rises, falls, and then reaches a maddening peak as the hero and villain enter the final battle of wits, motive, and determination.
Does the genius serial killer exist? Yes, but he is not as prolific as the media would have you believe. Out of thousands of serial killers, people who have committed 3 or more murders, there are the only a small handful of actual killer geniuses.
Andrew Cunanan
What would you do if you thought someone had given you AIDS? Serial killer Andrew Cunanan knew exactly what he would do and is quoted as telling his friends that, “If I had AIDS or if someone did that to me I would go on a five-state killing spree and take everyone with me I could.” And that is pretty much what he did.
Cunanan lived in San Francisco’s Castro district and socialized with older, gay men. He spoke seven different languages by the time he turned 21, but he was also drawn to violent pornography, sometimes taking a part in the films. He was also involved with drugs and he would sometimes prostitute himself.
In 1997, he fell into a deep depression. It was believed that at this time he felt he had contracted AIDS. He may have blamed one of his former lovers, Jeff Trail, who became his first victim. Cunanan then went on to kill three more men before surfacing in the Miami, Florida gay scene.
In Miami, Cunanan murdered his final victim, fashion designer Gianni Versace. Police traced Cunanan back to a houseboat and Cunanan shot and killed himself before the authorities could arrest him.
Andrew Cunanan seemed like a bright young man until his darker side showed through. His IQ was 147 and an autopsy after his suicide concluded that he did not have AIDS.
Jeffrey Dahmer
What makes a person become a serial killer? Many of us are led to believe that there was probably severe child abuse in the killer’s past, but that doesn’t fit with the description of Jeffrey Dahmer. In fact, he had a relatively normal childhood, but between the ages of 10 to 15, he started becoming withdrawn and began gaining an interest in dead animals (he dissected dead squirrels in his parent’s basement) and alcohol.
When he was 18-years-old, Dahmer committed his first murder and buried his male victim in the back yard. Nine years later, he would begin killing again. All his victims were men whom he would kill and sometimes molest the dead bodies. By 1991, Dahmer had an idea that he could turn young men into his personal sex slave zombies. Some of his victims were tortured by him drilling holes into their heads and pouring boiling water onto their brains or injecting them with hydrochloric acid.
When Dahmer was finally caught, police discovered severed heads in his apartment and photographs of dead bodies and limbs. A human heart was found in the freezer for a later meal, it’s believed.
How could a boy with a normal early childhood grow up to murder 17 men? What caused him to become withdrawn and begin experimenting with dead animals? Since Dahmer was killed in prison in 1994, we will probably never know the complete picture of who and what Dahmer was, but we do know that his former room master in the Army, Michael Masters, claimed in 1991 that Dahmer was extremely intelligent and probably had an IQ of about 145 or above. Radford University, however, places Dahmer’s IQ at 75, which is borderline deficiency.
Albert DeSalvo
Imagine being captured for one crime, confessing to a more serious crime, and have no one believe you? That was the case for Albert DeSalvo.
DeSalvo, born in 1931, grew up in Massachusetts. He was the son of an alcoholic father and wife beater. With the odds for a normal life already set against him, he spent his youth committing petty crimes and violence. In and out of prison, he eventual moved on to being a peeping tom, breaking and entering, and then onto rape. DeSalvo was finally caught after breaking into a woman’s apartment and molesting the victim. Her description of DeSalvo led to his arrest.
After his arrest, DeSalvo admitted to committing robbery on hundreds of apartments and carrying out multiple rapes. What really shocked everyone is that he also admitted to being the Boston Strangler. He went on to talk about the 13 grisly sexual assaults and murders he committed, but not everyone was convinced DeSalvo was the strangler.
According to many of the old reports, DeSalvo wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and yet there are recent internet reports of the Boston Strangler having a genius IQ of 172. This is because there was another person suspected of being the Boston Strangler, George Nassar. The gossip and evidence that lies between these two men is numerous and confusing. Many believe that DeSalvo was convinced by Nassar, the real genius, to admit to the Boston murders. Some feel that Nassar may have gone as far as to have DeSalvo murdered after DeSalvo recanted his tale about being the killer. Regardless of the actual truth, DeSalvo is long dead and Nassar remains in prison for murdering two people.
Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold
While they committed a murder just for the thrill, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were not technically serial killers. They were, however, both highly intelligent and prone to criminal acts, such as robberies and arson.
Loeb and Leopold were lovers, a major no-no back in the 1920s. The two young men, while driving from Chicago to the University of Michigan in 1923, began to plan out what they thought would be the perfect crime. Loeb wanted the crime to be something that would make all of Chicago talk. He wanted the thrill and the attention.
It wasn’t until May 21, 1924 that they decided to take action. They drove around the South Side of Chicago, looking for a victim when they spotted Loeb’s 14-year-old cousin. They convinced the boy to get in the car with them and Loeb proceeded to kill him. They dumped the boy’s body outside of Chicago, but made one glaring mistake. A pair of glasses fell out of Leopold’s jacket at the dumpsite.
Ten days after the murder, the two young men confessed to the crime. They failed at committing a perfect crime and getting away with it in spite of the fact that they were both highly educated. Loeb graduated from University High School at the young age of 14, but never did well in college because he was so young compared to his older classmates. Leopold graduated from the University of Chicago at age 18 and reportedly had an IQ of 200.
Brian James Dugan
There is nothing remarkable about Brian James Dugan’s crimes. He raped several women and girls and murdered three of them. He’s pretty standard in the realm of killers, but his birth story is enough to send chills down a woman’s back. As the story goes, his mother was at the hospital and Dugan was ready to be born, but the physician wasn’t in the room yet. So, a nurse and an attendant pushed the baby Dugan’s head back inside his mom and strapped her legs together until the physician was in the room and ready to play catch.
Dugan suffered from headaches during his childhood, a condition the family blames on his traumatic birth. He was a bed wetter and there was an incident where he poured gasoline on a cat and lit it on fire. It was a regular serial killer childhood until he turned 15. Then, something interesting may have happened (although the story is officially unconfirmed). Dugan met an older man at a grocery store in 1972. The man offered Dugan a job and Dugan got in the car with him. The man took Dugan to a secluded area and made the boy wear bikini briefs and perform oral sex. Afterwards, the man gave Dugan $20 and dropped the boy off at the grocery store. In 1978, Dugan saw the man’s face on the news. It was John Wayne Gacy.
Dugan is serving two life sentences for his crimes. His IQ is reportedly over 140, putting him in the genius category.
Caroll Edward Cole
It only takes one abusive parent to create a serial killer, as in the case of Caroll Edward Cole. As a boy, his father was drafted into WWII and his mother, left on her own, began to sleep around. She would take the young Cole to her engagements and have drunken sex in front of her son. She would then beat the boy afterwards and threatened him to make certain that he would never tell his father.
To make matters worse, he was constantly teased about having a woman’s name. When he was 8 or 10-years-old, he killed one of the boys who teased him by holding the boy underwater in a lake. The death was ruled an accident at the time, but Cole confessed to murdering the boy years later.
Between being beaten by his mother, even after his father returned from the war, and being teased about his first name, Cole developed an intense hatred for women. Throughout his young adulthood, he had himself committed to mental facilities because he was fantasizing about murdering women. He was released and eventually he started acting out on his fantasies. He would pick women up in bars and have sex with them. Some of the women left the encounter unharmed, but those who were married or somehow reminded him of his mother were murdered.
On his capture, Cole admitted to murdering at least 14 women. He claimed that there may have been more, but he couldn’t remember them all. He was executed on December 6, 1985. His IQ was tested at 152, but, even though he was at a genius level, he never completed high school.
Edmund E. Kemper
Some people just aren’t born right, as in the case of Edmund E. Kemper. While there are no reports of child abuse, Kemper was affected by his parent’s divorce. He lived with his mother, an alcoholic, and two sisters, but was soon sent to live in the home’s basement because his sisters were afraid of him. There were incidents of him cutting the heads off his sisters’ dolls and having his sisters play a game called gas chamber where they would pretend he was dying in a chair. By the time he was 13, he had killed the family’s cat with a knife.
His mother could not handle the situation and sent Kemper to live with his father. That did not work out and he was returned to his mother. He was then sent off to live with his grandparents. Kemper hated his grandparents and at age 15, he murdered them both. He was sent to the California Youth Authority where it was determined that he had a very high IQ, but he was also suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. He was sent to Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and was released when he was 21-years-old.
After getting out, Kemper returned to his mother and seemed to want to change his life around. He took courses at a community college and worked for the California Highway Department. He wanted to become a state trooper, but his weight, about 300 pounds, prevented him from getting the position. After being hit by a car while riding his motorcycle, he was unable to return to work, and suddenly had time to start taking notice of all the female hitchhikers in the area.
Edmund E. Kemper, commonly referred to as The Co-ed Killer, murdered 10 people. Besides his grandparents, he also murdered his mother, one of her friends, and six female hitchhikers. He surrendered himself in 1973 and is currently serving at California Medical Facility in Vacaville. His IQ is ranked at 145.
Rodney Alcala
How could we not have seen it, we ask ourselves as we watch the old footage on YouTube. Rodney Alcala was convicted for five murders, but before the world knew about him as a serial killer, he appeared on The Dating Game in 1978. What’s more, he won the date. Other contestants found Alcala creepy, but that could be because in 1968, prior to The Dating Game, he was convicted for raping an eight-year-old girl. How could the show have missed this?
A few months after Alcala appeared on The Dating Game, he began his life as a serial killer. Alcala murdered five people, or did he? While he was tried and convicted for murdering only five, the Huntington Beach Police Department released 120 photographs of women that had been found in Alcala’s belongings. The police asked for the women in these photographs to please come forward. About twenty women have come forward so far, but many fear that Alcala may have raped and murdered more women than was originally believed.
There is nothing remarkable noted about Alcala’s childhood. He served in the U.S. Army as a clerk from 1960 to 1964, but he had a breakdown and received a medical discharge after being diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. Acala is quick to boast that he is a genius, and it is believed he may actually have an IQ of around 160.
Ted Kaczynski
Anyone born before the 1990s probably has some memory of “The Unabomber”. Ted Kaczynski, between the years 1975 and 1995, made and shipped dozens of homemade bombs to people. In total, his bombs killed three and injured 23 people.
What was the motive behind these bombs? Alton Chase, in an article he wrote for The Atlantic, believes that the Unabomber was created at Harvard. Kaczynski was part of a brutal psychological experiment on students during his time attending Harvard University. The experiments, led by psychologist Henry A. Murray, tested how people react while under tremendous amounts of stress. It was during this time that Kaczynski began to break his belief system down into good and bad. Technology became bad. Escaping into the wilderness and living the lifestyle of a hermit was good. From 1975 to 1995, Kaczynski lashed out at universities and airliners, mailing bombs to professors, an airline president, and a computer store owner.
Kaczynski had a brilliant mind. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a Ph.D. in mathematics and he was a mathematics instructor at Berkeley. His IQ was tested at 167 when he was in fifth grade.
Charlene Williams Gallego
Charlene Williams denies ever committing murder, but she did assist her serial killer husband, Gerald Armand Gallego, who murdered nine women and one man. Williams met Gallego in 1977. It was love at first sight, but Williams soon discovered that Gallego had a dark side. He brought a runaway teenage girl back to their rental one day and began having sex with both women. One day, he came home and discovered Williams in bed with the girl without him. He became angry, threw the teenager out of the rental, and beat Williams. This marked the first of many beatings Williams would receive from Gallego.
By 1978, Williams was desperate to make her man happy. She suggested that they get him “disposable sex slaves” to appease his desire for multiple women. This began a frightening campaign involving kidnapping, rape, sodomy, and murder. The plan was for Williams to lure their victims to them. The first two victims, ages 16 and 17, were raped, bound, and beaten to death with a tire iron. A bullet was fired into each head for extra measure and the bodies were dumped. Their next two victims were ages 13 and 14.
The crimes committed by this pair were atrocious, but because Williams was not a part of the murders, she is walking free among us. Her IQ was tested at 160 when she was in high school. Her husband, Gallego, died of cancer while on death row in prison.
