Murderers and their Mothers

At 14 Daniel Bartlam savagely killed his mother with a claw hammer and then sought to cover his tracks by setting fire to her body.His parent’s divorce led to menacing behavior, and the mom was desperate to keep it a secret, to her own dreadful fate.

Fred and Rosemary West raped, tortured, murdered and dismembered twelve women. Why did the Wests embark on their path of depravity? Were they born to kill, or did their mothers make them into monsters thanks to childhoods full of incest and abuse?

Jed Allen, presumably had a stable life, but in May 2015 he killed his mother, step-father and six year old sister. MacIntyre and Dr. Yardley explore Jed's dysfunctional childhood with his mother to discover the trigger that led him to commit murder.

Dr Harold Shipman was UK's most prolific serial killer with at least 215 known victims. Was Shipman simply addicted to murder, or did his upbringing and the circumstances of his mother's death turn him into a mass murderer?

Joachim Knychala, aka ‘Frankenstein', butchered and desecrated his victim’s bodies with an axe. MacIntyre and Dr. Yardley explore Knychala's twisted relationship with his mother to see whether they were the cause of his murderous misogyny.

Dennis Nilsen murdered 15 young men from the 70s - 80s. Nilsen held on to the corpses of his victims for weeks on end, talking to them on his return home from work and sleeping beside them. What led this bizarre killing?

Robert Black preyed on young girls while a delivery driver. Black's own childhood was fraught with violence and abandonment. MacIntyre and Dr Yardley piece together his past to see if these traumas were what transformed him into a depraved monster.

Leszek Pekalski murdered dozens of people, who were mostly bludgeoned to death and raped. His mother's heavy drinking while pregnant & later abuse played a sever role in his make-up.

Richard Kuklisnki, aka the Iceman, killed up to 250 as a hitman, all of which he kept separate from his average middle-class existence. How much of his traumatic upbringing was invented by Kuklinski as a way of rationalizing his crimes?

Adam Lanza killed his mother before driving to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shooting dead 20 children and six teachers in one of the bloodiest mass shootings in American history. Is she to blame for keeping guns with a mentally disturbed son?