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The nature-nurture debate involves whether human behavior is determined by the environment, either prenatal or during a person’s life, or by a person’s genes. This is an ongoing debate that has been going on for quite a while now. People’s opinions change constantly, and due to this the question can’t be really answered, and recently the nature side of the debate has been gaining more and more attention. Some people relate murders and crimes with nature versus nurture when trying to look for an explanation for criminals’ actions. The question here is whether people are born evil or made evil, which I will try to answer below using the example of two serial killers – Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy.
The coding of genes in each cell in us humans determines the different traits that we have, more dominantly on physical attributes like eye color, hair color, ear size, height, and other traits. However, it is still not known whether such controversial traits like personality, intelligence, sexual orientation, likes, and dislikes are gene-coded in our DNA too. One nature theory is that there may be an existing ‘gay gene’, which explains that gays are actually born that way. An April 1998 article in LIFE magazine titled ‘Were You Born That Way’ by George Howe Colt claimed that “new studies show it’s mostly in your genes”. Another issue is that criminal acts, propensity for divorce, and aggressive behavior causing abuse can be justified by the ‘behavioral genes’ once researchers have proven their existence. Take Jeffrey Dahmer for example. Jeffrey Dahmer was an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, murdered, and dismembered 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991. His mother was a teletype machine instructor, and his father was a chemist. In Dahmer’s early childhood, he was described as being an ‘energetic and happy child’. At just the age of four Dahmer manifested an interest in animals. Friends later recalled Dahmer initially collected large insects, dragonflies, and butterflies, which he placed inside jars. Later, he collected animal carcasses from the roadside, occasionally accompanied by one or more of his few friends. He dismembered these animals either at home or in an expanse of woodland behind the family home and kept their dismembered body parts in their shed. Later on, his mom would give birth to his younger brother, whom he got to name David, and they moved houses. Later on, his mom would give birth to his younger brother, David, and they moved houses. His dad taught Dahmer to bleach and preserve bones – due to Dahmer’s curiosity, he asked his father and his father believed it was just his kid’s scientific curiosity. Dahmer would later use this practice in his real murders. Dahmer committed his first murder in the summer of 1978 at the age of 18, just three weeks after his graduation. He picked up a hitchhiker whom he took to his house, strangled to death, masturbated on top of the corpse, and dissected to pieces his body. He later failed at his attempt at college at Ohio State University and developed an alcohol problem. So he joined the military, U.S. Army to be specific, and rape two of his fellow soldiers. At the time of his first arrest, he stated: “I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure, not as people”. He went on to murder 17 men and boys and commit several offensive crimes. This serial killer is believed to be born evil (nature). He had a pretty good upbringing and good parents who cared a lot for him. But even as a young child, he always found murder, torture, and disfigurement of body parts interesting, and as he grew, his passion for it grew bigger. He could have chosen a different path, but he didn’t, maybe because evil was already in his blood or his genes.
Nurture refers to all the environmental variables that impact who we are, including our early childhood experiences, how we were raised, our social relationships, and our surrounding culture. This is the most common, too, when it comes to criminals, and in general, what shapes most people’s character. An example of a nurtured serial killer would be Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy was one of the most popular criminals in the 1970s. He was known for being very handsome and charismatic. He confessed to killing and to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 through 1978, although his number of homicides is believed to be much higher than that. Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, to Eleanor Louise Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers. For the first three years of his life, Bundy lived in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, who raised him as their son to avoid social shame. Ted was told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. He eventually discovered the truth, although he had varied recollections of the circumstances. He told a girlfriend that a cousin showed him a copy of his birth certificate after calling him a ‘bastard’. In some interviews, Bundy spoke warmly about his grandparents, and mainly he claimed that he “identified with”, “respected”, and “clung to” his grandfather. In 1987, however, he and other family members told attorneys that Samuel Cowell was a tyrannical bully and bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews. Bundy’s grandfather beat his wife and the family dog and swung neighborhood cats by their tails. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient woman who periodically underwent therapy for depression and feared leaving their house toward the end of her life. In 1950, Louise (Ted Bundy’s mother) left Philadelphia with her son to live with cousins Alan and Jane Scott in Tacoma, Washington. She met and got married to Johnny Culpepper Bundy. Johnny Bundy formally adopted Ted. Johnny and Louise conceived four children of their own, and although Johnny tried to include his adoptive son in camping trips and other family activities, Ted remained distant. In mid-1970, Bundy was now focused and goal-oriented, and he re-enrolled at UW, this time as a psychology major. He became an honor student and was well-regarded by his professors. In 1971, he took a job at Seattle’s Suicide Hotline Crisis Center, where he met and worked alongside Ann Rule. Ann Rule was a former Seattle police officer and aspiring crime writer who would later write one of the definitive Bundy biographies, ‘The Stranger Beside Me’. She saw nothing disturbing in Bundy’s personality at the time and described him as “kind, solicitous, and empathetic”. Later he went on to kill multiple people, no one really knows when he started killing or what triggered it. You can infer that Ted Bundy had a pretty confusing and not-so-great childhood. Starting from having to find out who his real mom was and watching his abusive grandfather. Who knows what happened in that household? In my opinion, Bundy learned his behavior from his grandfather, he probably beat his wife, and Bundy took those actions into his life, but went as far as murdering them. Ted Bundy’s horrible childhood played out in his adulthood. Therefore his nurture was his downfall.
In conclusion, as can be seen in the examples of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, it is not possible to unequivocally state that it is nature that guides the actions, in this case, so terrible, of people. Both nature and nurture are equivalent because both can lead a person to commit crimes. Accordingly, the nature versus nurture debate will still remain open, unfortunately. On the other hand, it should be remembered that the crime that a person commits is their own choice, and the responsibility for it lies solely with them, not their genes or nurture.
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