Shadowing Practice: Every Mistake Parents Made That Created Serial Killers - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Edmund Kemper.
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His mother told him no woman would ever love him, so he found a way to make sure they'd never leave.
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Edmund Kemper was just 8 years old when his mother started locking him in the basement every night.
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She said it was to protect his sisters from him.
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She called him a real weirdo, loud enough for him to hear through the walls.
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She told him he reminded her of his father, and that was never a compliment.
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By 10, Kemper had buried the family cat alive, then dug it up, then cut off its head and mounted it on a stick.
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At 14, he ran away to find his father.
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But his father had remarried and didn't want him.
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They shipped him off to live with his grandparents on a remote California ranch.
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His grandmother treated him the same way his mother had, constant criticism and constant control.
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On August 27, 1964, 15-year-old Edmund Kemper shot his grandmother in the head with a rifle.
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When his grandfather came home, he shot him too.
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When police asked why, Kemper said he wanted to see what it felt like to kill grandma
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and he killed grandpa so he wouldn't have to find out.
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Kemper spent five years in a psychiatric hospital.
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Doctors said he was rehabilitated.
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They released him into his mother's care.
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The argument started immediately.
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Screaming matches so loud the neighbors called police.
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His mother told him he was worthless, that college girls would never look at him twice, that he disgusted her.
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Between 1972 and 1973, Kemper picked up six young female hitchhikers.
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He killed them all.
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But these weren't random victims.
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They were college students, the same women his mother worked with at UC Santa Cruz, the same women she said would never want him.
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After killing one victim, Kemper buried her head in his mother's garden, facing her bedroom window.
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She always wanted people to look up to her, he said.
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On April 20, 1973, Kemper finally did what he'd been building toward his whole life.
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He killed his mother with a hammer while she was sleeping.
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He decapitated her and used her head as a dartboard.
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Then he called the police and turned himself in.
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The killings were over.
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He'd destroyed the thing that created him.
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Jeffrey Dahmer.
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When Jeffrey Dahmer was 18, both his parents left.
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His father moved out.
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His mother took his younger brother and left.
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No forwarding address, no phone calls.
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Jeffrey was alone in an empty house.
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He would later say that was the moment everything fell apart.
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Dahmer's childhood looked normal from the outside.
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Suburban Ohio.
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Two-parent household.
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A little brother named David.
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But inside, the family was fracturing.
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His mother suffered from depression and anxiety, swallowing pills by the handful.
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His father buried himself in work, chasing a PhD in chemistry while his marriage collapsed.
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The two fought constantly, screaming matches that echoed through the walls.
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No one noticed their older son slipping away.
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By age 10, Jeffrey had started collecting roadkill.
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He'd strip the flesh from dead animals and keep the bones.
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His father thought it was scientific curiosity.
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He even taught Jeffrey how to bleach and preserve the skeletons.
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He never asked why his son spent hours alone in a backyard hut, surrounded by jars of formaldehyde and tiny skulls.
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By 14, Jeffrey was drinking whiskey before school.
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Teachers noticed, his grades dropped, but no one intervened.
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By the time his parents divorced, Jeffrey had already learned the lesson that would define his life.
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People leave, everyone leaves, and there's nothing you can do to make them stay, unless you make sure they can't.
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Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer killed 17 young men.
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He drugged them, strangled them, and kept their bodies for as long as he could.
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He posed them, photographed them, slept beside them.
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He later told investigators he wasn't trying to hurt anyone.
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He just didn't want to be alone.
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The only way I could keep them with me, he said, was if they couldn't leave.
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Dahmer was beaten to death in prison in 1994.
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He was 34 years old.
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His parents had spent years fighting over who was responsible for what their son became.
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In the end, they both abandoned him, and he never stopped trying to fill that emptiness.
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John Wayne Gacy.
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His father called him stupid, called him a sissy, called him a failure.
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John Wayne Gacy spent his entire childhood trying to earn approval that never came.
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His father was an alcoholic machinist who beat the family regularly.
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At four years old, John was whipped for accidentally moving parts in his father's car engine.
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At nine, a family friend began abusing him.
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John never told anyone, terrified his father would blame him.
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The message was clear.
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Everything wrong was John's fault.
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He tried everything.
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Worked hard in school, joined community organizations, built a successful business, hosted neighborhood parties, even dressed as Pogo the Clown to entertain children at hospitals.
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But nothing worked.
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His father kept calling him worthless.
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Then, in 1966, something changed.
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Gacy had married, had children, was managing restaurants in Iowa.
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His parents came to visit, and for the first time in his life, his father shook his hand and said, Son, I was wrong about you.
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Three years later, his father was dead.
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When Gacy heard the news in prison, where he was serving time for sexually assaulting a teenage employee, he collapsed to the floor.
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His request to attend the funeral was even denied.
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Between 1972 and 1978, John Wayne Gacy murdered at least 33 young men.
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He lured them to his home with promises of construction jobs, handcuffed them with a magic trick, assaulted and tortured them for hours,
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strangled them slowly with a rope tourniquet he called the rope trick.
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Then he buried them in the crawl space beneath his house.
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Twenty-six bodies were stacked in trenches he dug himself.
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When police finally searched his property, the stench of decay had been seeping through heating vents for years.
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Gacy showed no remorse.
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At trial, he joked about his victims.
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He blamed an alter ego named Jack, said the dead were just male prostitutes and liars.
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He was executed in 1994.
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His father never lived to see what his son became.
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But every victim buried under that house was someone's child too, killed by a man still trying to prove he wasn't worthless.
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Albert Fish.
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His mother couldn't afford him, so she gave him away.
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Albert Fish was five years old when his father died of a heart attack.
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His mother, unable to support her children alone, made a decision that would echo through history.
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She placed young Albert in St. John's Orphanage in Washington, D.C.
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She thought she was saving him.
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Instead, she was creating a monster.
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The orphanage was a house of horrors.
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Teachers beat the children constantly, whipped them until they bled, and forced the others to watch.
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It was meant as discipline.
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For Albert, it became something else entirely.
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He discovered he liked it.
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The beatings triggered excitement.
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Watching other boys suffer excited him.
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Pain and pleasure fused together in his developing mind, wiring connections that should never have existed.
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By the time his mother finally retrieved him five years later, the damage was permanent.
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Fish spent the rest of his life chasing that feeling.
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As an adult, he embedded needles into his own groin.
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29 were found lodged in his pelvis when doctors finally x-rayed him.
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He beat himself with a nail-studded paddle.
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He soaked cotton in lighter fluid, inserted it into his body, and set it on fire.
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But his own pain wasn't enough.
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He needed to hear children scream.
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Between 1924 and 1928, Fish murdered at least three children.
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He strangled them, dismembered them, cooked them.
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He even sent a letter to one victim's mother describing how he ate her 10-year-old daughter over nine days.
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Every detail, every recipe.
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Psychiatrists identified 18 different sexual abnormalities in him, more than any case in medical history.
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Fish claimed God commanded him to sacrifice children, like Abraham with Isaac.
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The jury found him insane, but they executed him anyway.
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In 1936, Fish walked to the electric chair and reportedly helped position the electrodes himself.
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His last written statement was so depraved, his own lawyer refused to release it, calling it the most filthy string of obscenities I have ever read.
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The child his mother abandoned to save money had grown into America's most disturbing killer, Henry Lee Lucas.
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His mother dressed him as a girl.
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Then she sold him.
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Henry Lee Lucas was born in 1936 in a one-room dirt floor cabin in Virginia.
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His mother, Viola, sold herself to strangers and made her son witness things no child should ever see.
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If he looked away, she beat him.
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If he cried, she beat him harder.
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But the watching wasn't the worst part.
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Viola dressed young Henry in girls' clothes, with dresses and long hair.
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She paraded him through town like that for years. But why?
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Because in this way, she could sell him to her clients. To men. To women.
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To anyone willing to pay.
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His father was a legless alcoholic who sold pencils on the street.
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He couldn't protect Henry.
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He couldn't even protect himself.
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One night, trying to escape the horror inside that cabin, he crawled outside drunk and froze to death in the snow.
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Henry was beaten constantly.
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When he was seven, his mother smashed a wooden plank across his skull.
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He spent days unconscious.
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When he was 10, his brother slashed his face with a knife.
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The wound got infected.
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His mother ignored it until a teacher accidentally struck the damaged eye.
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It burst and had to be surgically removed.
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Henry learned that he was worthless, something to be used, sold, and discarded.
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In 1960, during a Christmas visit, his mother demanded he move back home to care for her.
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They argued.
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She hit him with a broom, and he stabbed her in the neck.
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She died instantly on the floor.
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Lucas was convicted of her murder and spent years in prison.
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When authorities released him early due to overcrowding, he warned them, I'm not ready to go.
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They released him anyway.
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That same day, Lucas killed a woman within walking distance of the prison gates, his gift to the people who set him free.
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He was eventually convicted of 11 murders.
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He confessed to hundreds more, though many were later proven false.
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The truth of his body count may never be known, but one truth is certain.
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Long before Henry Lee Lucas killed anyone, his mother had already murdered the child he might have been.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Every Mistake Parents Made That Created Serial Killers”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: mother, father, Kemper, Jeffrey, Henry. This video has 167 sentences and 1761 words to shadow. The speech runs for 9:35. The speaker talks fast, about 184 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| bury verb | /ˈbɛɹi/ | To outlive. |
| worthless adjective | /ˈwɜːθ.ləs/ | Having no worth or use; without value. |
| strangle verb | /ˈstɹæŋɡəl/ | To kill someone by squeezing the throat so as to cut off the oxygen supply. |
| scream verb | /skɹiːm/ | To cry out with a shrill voice; to utter a sudden, sharp outcry, or shrill, loud cry, as in fright or extreme pain; to screech, to shriek. |
| orphanage noun | /ˈɔː(ɹ)fənɪd͡ʒ/ | A residential institution for the care and protection of orphans. |
| convict verb | /ˈkɑnvɪkt/ | To find guilty, as a result of legal proceedings, or (informal) in a moral sense. |
| crawl verb | /kɹɔːl/ | To move by dragging one's body along or close to a surface, like a worm or insect, or on one's hands and knees, like a human baby. |
| alcoholic noun | /ˌæl.kəˈhɔ.lɪk/ | A person who is addicted to alcohol. |
| execute verb | /ˈɛksɪˌkjuːt/ | To kill, especially as punishment for a capital crime. |
| whip noun | /ˈwɪp/ | A lash; a pliant, flexible instrument, such as a rod (commonly of cane or rattan) or a plaited or braided rope or thong (commonly of leather) used to create a… |
| abandon verb | /əˈbæn.dən/ | To give up or relinquish control of, to surrender or to give oneself over, or to yield to one's emotions. |
| echo noun | /ˈɛk.oʊ/ | A reflected sound that is heard again by its initial observer. |
| rope noun | /ɹoʊp/ | Thick strings, yarn, monofilaments, metal wires, or strands of other cordage that are twisted together to form a stronger line. |
| cabin noun | /ˈkæbɪn/ | A small dwelling characteristic of the frontier, especially when built from logs with simple tools and not constructed by professional builders, but by those… |
| grandmother noun | /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/ | A mother of someone's parent. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| cut off verb | /ˌkʌt ˈɔf/ [ˌkɐɾ ˈɔf] | To remove by cutting. |
| fall apart verb | To disintegrate, to break into pieces. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| look away verb | To ignore something; to pretend not to have seen or noticed something; to avoid dealing with something. | |
| look up to verb | To show respect or admiration for (someone); to see (someone) as a role model. | |
| move back verb | To reschedule (something) to a later date or time. | |
| move out verb | To leave one's present location; to leave somewhere for another place. | |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was rehabilitated · was beaten · was whipped |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have existed · have ever read |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 18 contractions and reduced forms, such as couldn't, wasn't, he'd. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: worthless /ˈwɜːθ.ləs/, grandmother /ˈɡɹæn(d)ˌmʌðɚ/, filthy /ˈfɪlθi/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: machinist /məˈʃiː.nɪst/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/, smash /smæʃ/, flesh /flɛʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: alcoholic /ˌæl.kəˈhɔ.lɪk/, abnormality /ˌæbˌnɔɹˈmæl.ət.i/, decapitated /dɪˈkæpɪteɪtəd/, formaldehyde /fɔː(ɹ)ˈmældɪhaɪd/, rehabilitate /ɹiː(h)əˈbɪlɪteɪt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like bury, worthless, strangle.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.