Matt Murphy, who prosecuted some of California’s most notorious killers, says many were spoiled and entitled rather than abused — and argues that understanding their desire for power and control is more important than searching for childhood trauma.
FALLBROOK — What turns an ordinary child into a serial killer? Is it childhood abuse, neglect or trauma? Or could some of the world’s most notorious murderers have grown up in relatively comfortable homes, spoiled by parents and accustomed to getting their way?
According to Matt Murphy, a former senior deputy district attorney in Orange County who spent much of his career prosecuting homicide and sexual assault cases, the popular belief that serial killers are products of childhood abuse is often misleading.
In a recent interview, Murphy challenged several widely accepted assumptions about serial killers, psychopathy, sexual violence and the criminal justice system.
Murphy, author of The Book of Murder, said his experience prosecuting 14 serial killers led him to a surprising observation: Many of the offenders he encountered were more likely to have been spoiled and entitled as children than severely abused.
“If there’s a common thread, a lot of them were spoiled as kids much more often than abused,” Murphy said.
His observations challenge the familiar narrative portrayed in countless crime documentaries, books and television programs — that childhood mistreatment creates violent predators.
Murphy argues that this explanation is not only frequently inaccurate but also unfair to the millions of childhood abuse survivors who grow into responsible, compassionate adults.
Murphy calls the widely held belief that abused children become abusers the “vampire bite myth.”
The analogy suggests that, just as a vampire’s bite supposedly turns its victim into another vampire, childhood abuse somehow transforms its victims into future predators.
Murphy rejects that assumption.
“A lot of people are abused as kids, but the vast majority of people who are subject to abuse don’t go on to become serial killers or child molesters or anything else,” he said.
He cited notorious killers including Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Rodney Alcala as examples of offenders whose crimes, in his assessment, could not simply be explained by childhood abuse.
Murphy acknowledged that some serial killers did experience abuse, but emphasized that correlation does not establish causation.
He believes the public is uncomfortable accepting that some individuals may develop profoundly violent and sadistic tendencies without an identifiable traumatic event in childhood.
“We want to believe that there’s a cause and effect there,” Murphy explained.
He suggested that biological predispositions and personality characteristics may play a greater role in some offenders than commonly recognized.
However, Murphy’s conclusions are based primarily on his prosecutorial experience and should not be interpreted as scientific proof that serial killers generally come from spoiled households. Research into violent offending identifies multiple possible influences, including biological, psychological, developmental and environmental factors. There is no established single childhood profile that predicts serial murder.
One of Murphy’s most provocative observations concerns the role of entitlement.
Rather than describing serial killers as people who were deprived of affection, he recalled offenders who appeared accustomed to having their desires accommodated and who later demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to impose their will on others.
Murphy discussed Andrew Urdiales, a serial killer he prosecuted, who claimed childhood abuse as a mitigating factor in his defense.
According to Murphy, investigators were able to disprove specific allegations Urdiales made about his upbringing.
Murphy contrasted the killer’s claims with the experience of an 8-year-old boy whose mother was murdered by Urdiales.
The boy lost his mother, entered foster care and endured considerable hardship. Yet he eventually attended college and established a successful career as a real estate appraiser.
For Murphy, the contrast illustrated the danger of assuming that childhood suffering determines adult character.
He also recalled Skylar Deleon, convicted in the murders of Tom and Jackie Hawks, a couple who were tied to an anchor and thrown into the Pacific Ocean as part of a plot to steal their yacht.
During the penalty phase of Deleon’s trial, his mother testified about difficult experiences in his childhood, including an incident when he nearly drowned in a swimming pool.
Murphy questioned whether that experience could meaningfully mitigate the deliberate drowning of two innocent people.
He said Deleon, too, appeared to have been spoiled more than abused.
The prosecutor’s underlying argument is that difficult childhood experiences should not automatically be treated as explanations or excuses for extraordinary cruelty.
Murphy also challenged another common misconception: that psychopaths and people experiencing psychosis are essentially the same.
They are not.
Psychosis generally involves a disruption in a person’s perception of reality, potentially including hallucinations or delusions.
Psychopathy, by contrast, describes a constellation of personality traits that may include callousness, manipulativeness, shallow emotional responses and disregard for others.
Psychopathy is not itself a separate diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Murphy stressed that most people with psychopathic traits do not become serial killers.
Some, he observed, may function successfully in business or other professions.
What distinguishes certain sexually motivated serial killers, in Murphy’s view, is the combination of psychopathic traits with a powerful desire to dominate, terrorize and inflict suffering on others.
He argues that focusing exclusively on their lack of empathy misses something essential.
Many offenders, he said, understand perfectly well how their victims feel. They recognize fear, pain and vulnerability.
The problem is not necessarily an inability to recognize another person’s suffering.
It is that they may deliberately exploit that suffering for their own gratification.
Murphy believes the public should focus less on what these offenders lack emotionally and more on what they actively do to others.
Another misconception Murphy addressed is the tendency to portray serial murder as violence motivated solely by anger, revenge or a desire to kill.
In his experience, sexual sadism was a central component of many of the most notorious cases.
He described offenders who derive gratification from exerting absolute power over another human being, including inflicting fear, humiliation and physical pain.
Murphy argued that the familiar term “serial killer” is too broad to adequately describe this particular type of offender.
The FBI generally defines serial murder as the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender in separate events.
Under that definition, a contract killer who murders for money and a sexually sadistic predator could both qualify as serial killers, even though their motivations are substantially different.
Murphy cited the murders committed by Deleon as an example. Although the crimes involved multiple victims and separate incidents, the primary motivation was financial gain.
That differs significantly, he argued, from offenders whose crimes are driven by sexual gratification and the desire to dominate victims.
He suggested that the older criminological concept of “sadistic lust murder” better captures the behavior of certain predators.
The distinction matters because understanding an offender’s motivation can help investigators recognize patterns, connect crimes and identify suspects.
Not all serial murders involve sexual motives, however, and sexual sadism should not be assumed without supporting evidence.
Murphy offered another unusual observation from his courtroom experience: Some notorious offenders insist on representing themselves during criminal proceedings.
He cited Bundy and Alcala as examples.
Although self-representation is not universal among serial killers, Murphy believes it can be especially attractive to defendants obsessed with control.
A defendant acting as his own attorney gains certain courtroom powers, including the ability to question witnesses and participate directly in presenting a defense.
For individuals accustomed to manipulating and controlling others, that authority can be appealing.
But Murphy said these defendants often make poor attorneys.
Their difficulty understanding how jurors perceive their behavior can undermine their cases.
He recalled Alcala’s decision to play Arlo Guthrie’s protest song “Alice’s Restaurant” during the penalty phase of his trial, attempting to make an argument against the death penalty.
According to Murphy, the strategy backfired when the judge referenced the song while addressing Alcala at sentencing.
Beyond serial murder, Murphy offered insights into the ethical obligations of prosecutors.
He said he never received a not-guilty verdict from a jury in a homicide case he prosecuted, although some convictions were subsequently reversed on appeal.
Murphy explained that he approached charging decisions using two separate considerations.
First, he believed a prosecutor should be personally convinced of a suspect’s guilt.
Second, the prosecutor must determine whether sufficient admissible evidence exists to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.
He emphasized that prosecutors frequently decline cases the public never hears about because the evidence is insufficient.
Murphy also discussed the difference between murder and voluntary manslaughter, explaining that the circumstances surrounding a killing can affect the appropriate criminal charge.
A killing committed during legally sufficient provocation, for example, may be treated differently from a deliberate murder. The legal distinction depends on the specific facts and applicable law.
He recalled cases involving elderly spouses who killed partners suffering from advanced dementia, describing circumstances in which prosecutors considered compassion and the absence of a history of domestic violence when determining how to handle the cases.
Throughout the interview, Murphy repeatedly returned to the devastating impact murder has on surviving families.
He described the loss of a loved one as something that can permanently alter the lives of children, spouses, parents and future generations.
“The ripple effect of grief that happens from somebody getting murdered is multi-generational,” he said.
Murphy’s experiences also led him to reject the idea that understanding an offender’s background necessarily excuses the crime.
He believes criminal behavior can be studied and explained without diminishing personal responsibility.
That distinction is particularly important when discussing childhood abuse.
Survivors of trauma, he argued, should not be stigmatized as potential future predators simply because they suffered mistreatment.
At the same time, individuals who commit horrific crimes should not automatically be presumed to have been victims themselves.
Murphy’s central message is that the public should be cautious about simple explanations for extraordinarily complex behavior.
His argument that many serial killers were spoiled rather than abused is a provocative interpretation of the cases he prosecuted, not a settled conclusion of criminological research.
But his broader point is clear: Childhood suffering does not predetermine a life of violence, and an apparently comfortable childhood does not guarantee that someone will grow into a compassionate adult.
For Murphy, the more revealing question may not be what happened to a murderer as a child, but why that individual later chose to inflict suffering on others.
Editorial Note: This article is based on an October 2026 interview with former Orange County homicide prosecutor Matt Murphy discussing his book, The Book of Murder, and his experiences prosecuting violent offenders. His observations about childhood entitlement, abuse, and serial murder are attributed to himand his professional experience.
