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Serial killer
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Serial killer
A serial killer (also called a serial murderer) is an individual who murders three or more people, with the killings taking place over a period of more than one month in three or more separate events. Their psychological gratification is the motivation for the killings, and many serial murders involve sexual contact with the victims at different points during the murder process. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) states that the motives of serial killers can include anger, thrill-seeking, attention seeking, and financial gain, and killings may be executed as such. The victims tend to have things in common, such as demographic profile, appearance, gender, or race. As a group, serial killers suffer from a variety of personality disorders. They are often not adjudicated as insane under the law. Although a serial killer is a distinct classification that differs from that of a mass murderer, spree killer, or contract killer, there are overlaps between them.
The English term and concept of serial killer are commonly attributed to former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Robert Ressler, who used the term serial homicide in 1974 in a lecture at Police Staff College, in Bramshill, Hampshire, England. Author Ann Rule postulates in her 2004 book Kiss Me, Kill Me, that the English-language credit for coining the term goes to Los Angeles Police Department detective Pierce Brooks, who created the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) system in 1985.
The German term and concept were coined by criminologist Ernst Gennat, who described Peter Kürten as a Serienmörder ('serial-murderer') in his article "Die Düsseldorfer Sexualverbrechen" (1930). In his book, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (2004), criminal justice historian Peter Vronsky notes that while Ressler might have coined the English term "serial homicide" within the law in 1974, the terms serial murder and serial murderer appear in John Brophy's book The Meaning of Murder (1966). The Washington, D.C., newspaper Evening Star, in a 1967 review of the book:
There is the mass murderer, or what he [Brophy] calls the "serial" killer, who may be actuated by greed, such as insurance, or retention or growth of power, like the Medicis of Renaissance Italy, or Landru, the "bluebeard" of the World War I period, who murdered numerous wives after taking their money.
Vronsky states that the term serial killing first entered into broader American popular usage when published in The New York Times in early 1981, to describe Atlanta serial killer Wayne Williams. Subsequently, throughout the 1980s, the term was used again in the pages of The New York Times, one of the major national news publications of the United States, on 233 occasions. By the end of the 1990s, the use of the term had increased to 2,514 instances in the paper.
When defining serial killers, researchers generally use "three or more murders" as the baseline, considering it sufficient to provide a pattern without being overly restrictive. Independent of the number of murders, they need to have been committed at different times, and are usually committed in different places. The lack of a cooling-off period (a significant break between the murders) marks the difference between a spree killer and a serial killer. The category has, however, been found to be of no real value to law enforcement, because of definitional problems relating to the concept of a "cooling-off period." Cases of extended bouts of sequential killings over periods of weeks or months with no apparent "cooling off period" or "return to normality" have caused some experts to suggest a hybrid category of "spree-serial killer".
In Controversial Issues in Criminology, Fuller and Hickey write that "[t]he element of time involved between murderous acts is primary in the differentiation of serial, mass, and spree murderers", later elaborating that spree killers "will engage in the killing acts for days or weeks" while the "methods of murder and types of victims vary". Andrew Cunanan is given as an example of spree killing, while Charles Whitman is mentioned in connection with mass murder, and Jeffrey Dahmer with serial killing.
In 2005, the FBI hosted a multi-disciplinary symposium in San Antonio, Texas, which brought together 135 experts on serial murder from a variety of fields and specialties with the goal of identifying the commonalities of knowledge regarding serial murder. The group also settled on a definition of serial murder which FBI investigators widely accept as their standard: "The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) in separate events". Serial homicide researcher Enzo Yaksic found that the FBI was justified in lowering the victim threshold from three to two victims given that serial murderers from these groups share similar pathologies.
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Serial killer
A serial killer (also called a serial murderer) is an individual who murders three or more people, with the killings taking place over a period of more than one month in three or more separate events. Their psychological gratification is the motivation for the killings, and many serial murders involve sexual contact with the victims at different points during the murder process. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) states that the motives of serial killers can include anger, thrill-seeking, attention seeking, and financial gain, and killings may be executed as such. The victims tend to have things in common, such as demographic profile, appearance, gender, or race. As a group, serial killers suffer from a variety of personality disorders. They are often not adjudicated as insane under the law. Although a serial killer is a distinct classification that differs from that of a mass murderer, spree killer, or contract killer, there are overlaps between them.
The English term and concept of serial killer are commonly attributed to former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Robert Ressler, who used the term serial homicide in 1974 in a lecture at Police Staff College, in Bramshill, Hampshire, England. Author Ann Rule postulates in her 2004 book Kiss Me, Kill Me, that the English-language credit for coining the term goes to Los Angeles Police Department detective Pierce Brooks, who created the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) system in 1985.
The German term and concept were coined by criminologist Ernst Gennat, who described Peter Kürten as a Serienmörder ('serial-murderer') in his article "Die Düsseldorfer Sexualverbrechen" (1930). In his book, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (2004), criminal justice historian Peter Vronsky notes that while Ressler might have coined the English term "serial homicide" within the law in 1974, the terms serial murder and serial murderer appear in John Brophy's book The Meaning of Murder (1966). The Washington, D.C., newspaper Evening Star, in a 1967 review of the book:
There is the mass murderer, or what he [Brophy] calls the "serial" killer, who may be actuated by greed, such as insurance, or retention or growth of power, like the Medicis of Renaissance Italy, or Landru, the "bluebeard" of the World War I period, who murdered numerous wives after taking their money.
Vronsky states that the term serial killing first entered into broader American popular usage when published in The New York Times in early 1981, to describe Atlanta serial killer Wayne Williams. Subsequently, throughout the 1980s, the term was used again in the pages of The New York Times, one of the major national news publications of the United States, on 233 occasions. By the end of the 1990s, the use of the term had increased to 2,514 instances in the paper.
When defining serial killers, researchers generally use "three or more murders" as the baseline, considering it sufficient to provide a pattern without being overly restrictive. Independent of the number of murders, they need to have been committed at different times, and are usually committed in different places. The lack of a cooling-off period (a significant break between the murders) marks the difference between a spree killer and a serial killer. The category has, however, been found to be of no real value to law enforcement, because of definitional problems relating to the concept of a "cooling-off period." Cases of extended bouts of sequential killings over periods of weeks or months with no apparent "cooling off period" or "return to normality" have caused some experts to suggest a hybrid category of "spree-serial killer".
In Controversial Issues in Criminology, Fuller and Hickey write that "[t]he element of time involved between murderous acts is primary in the differentiation of serial, mass, and spree murderers", later elaborating that spree killers "will engage in the killing acts for days or weeks" while the "methods of murder and types of victims vary". Andrew Cunanan is given as an example of spree killing, while Charles Whitman is mentioned in connection with mass murder, and Jeffrey Dahmer with serial killing.
In 2005, the FBI hosted a multi-disciplinary symposium in San Antonio, Texas, which brought together 135 experts on serial murder from a variety of fields and specialties with the goal of identifying the commonalities of knowledge regarding serial murder. The group also settled on a definition of serial murder which FBI investigators widely accept as their standard: "The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) in separate events". Serial homicide researcher Enzo Yaksic found that the FBI was justified in lowering the victim threshold from three to two victims given that serial murderers from these groups share similar pathologies.
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