Clifford Robert Olson Jr. (Serial) and Marc Lépine (Mass).

These two notorious murderers have both committed unforgivable crimes yet they did them in two different ways. Serial murderers tend to have a pattern of victims, or methods to kill them whereas mass murderers are not as organised and set out to just kill. For example, Marc Lepine was a mass murderer and he didnt have a pattern of killing, he decided one day he was going to show up at Montreal's École Polytechnique and shoot women who he accused of being "feminists." However, Clifford Olson planned each murder carefully and repeated it over the years killing eleven children. This is more of a pattern than a disorganised plot to attack a school, his pattern continued those eleven times until he was caught.

The differences between serial and mass murders are quite obvious yet still somewhat confusing. For example, in the case of revenge, a serial murderer if they were abused by thier mother as a child, they would kill any woman who reminded them of their mother. Whereas a mass murderer, in the case of revenge, if they were fired from their job they would show up to that workplace and shoot workers and perhaps the boss. Or what about for profit? In serial, a woman could poison a line of husbands in order to collect their life insurance money. However for mass murderers, if they were conducting a robbery, they would kill all employees so their was no witnesses.

The reason for Marc Lepins murders was not because he was "crazy" or "psycho", yes he did have some unresolved issues clearly but what he did was his way of believing he was "ridding the world" of feminists. The reason for this deep hatred of feminists was because he claimed they had taken all the jobs and made many men unemployed. How he obtained this hatred might be due to the fact that perhaps as a child his father lost a job to a woman, or maybe even he did. Most mass murders are done to take vengeance on people/ society etc.


Clifford olson however has other reasons for his murders because he wasn't setting out to better society, but to rid himself of his sexual and sadistic desires. True serial murderers have cooling off periods between murders and use this time to collect themselves and continue. Either hedonistic reasoning or power and control is what dominates over Clifford Olson and is what made him committ his crimes. For example, a hedonistic killer seeks thrills and derives pleasure from killing, seeing people as expendable means to this goal. And power and control is when their main objective for killing is to gain and exert power over their victim. Such killers are sometimes abused as children, leaving them with feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy as adults. Which is why Clifford went for children instead of woman or young men because he could control children easier which gave him a feeling of power.

To stop people like this in Canada there needs to be more strict rules, punishments, and anything else that can halt killings. Noticing warning signs would also be highly helpful because you could prevent it easily. If the guards/judges etc. noticed that Clifford was not doing well in jail, had sexually assaulted, and had many crimes on his criminal record that he should not be allowed out, then all those deaths could have been prevented. However with mass murders, sometimes they cannot be prevented because the killer has already set out to do something (Columbine or Virginia Tech) and getting in their way could result in more peiople being killed. Although standing aside and letting it happen when you've seen the warning signs is just as bad if not worse from trying to stop it. Hence why there are criminal mind agents out there that can talk to these people to control their desire to kill and even help.