Through the years, social scientists, mental health professionals, law enforcement officials, and criminologists have tried to include different measures for the serial killer’s underlying motivations. Researchers have established a myriad of etiological typologies and theories to define the features of a serial killer. A study was done in 2005 also invalidated the stereotype that serial killers are white by showing that 22 percent were African Americans. Statistics indicate that females represent approximately 12 to 15 percent of serial killers that have been caught. However, when Aileen Carol Wuornos was arrested in 1991, the media broke into a frenzy which highlighted the notion of female serial killers. Significant literature on serial killing has concentrated on mostly White males disregarding the Asian, African American, Hispanic, and female serial murderers. Some researchers have enabled the common stereotype of serial killers being 20 or 30- year-old white males. Lastly, serial murder cases are not driven my any financial gain. Mostly, the killings are not founded on crimes of passion or victim precipitation, and their communication does not explicitly perpetuate the crime. The absence of a previously existing relationship between the victims and the offender characterizes it. They include the person’s act of killing victims in years or months while acting independently in most instances. This can be exemplified by Florida’s case where William Cruise killed six people at different locations and with no resting period between the killings in Palm Bay.įive elements have been proposed to differentiate serial killing from other forms of multiple murders. Spree killing entails slaying a minimum of three targets within the same occasion but is separate scenes. This is classified as mass murder since the incidence happened in a single event, but numerous individuals were killed. For instance, George Hennard opened fire in October 1991 in Killen, Texas, at Luby’s cafeteria, which killed 23 victims before killing himself. Mass killing is whereby one or more offenders kill four or more individuals in a single event, which can go for a few minutes or even hours.
Serial killing is different from multiple homicide cases. In 2005, the US FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit-2 held the Serial Murder Symposium, whereby serial killing was described as the same offender slaying a minimum of two victims unlawfully, in separate events. The FBI provided a serial killing definition in 1998 to include more than murders committed independently, and between them, there is a cooling-off period. It has also been defined as individuals who kill people serially (kill one person after another). Serial killers are individuals who kill more than three individuals. The first person to coin the ‘serial killer’ term was Robert Ressler from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).
In 1957, Reinhardt created the ‘chain killers’ phrase and defined them as individuals who would murder people living behind a ‘chain’ of fatalities. Through the years, the serial killer definition has continued to evolve. A more recent serial killing case in the US is that of William Devin Howell, an accused serial killer who confessed to having killed seven victims in 2003 in Connecticut. It was confirmed that he murdered a minimum of twelve individuals in the 1990s comprising of children, women, and men, although he mentioned that he had killed over twenty-five people (Sharma 5). Holmes being one of the most popular and first in the US. In the United States, various cases of serial killings have been documented from the 1800s, with H. Another notable case of serial killing is Gilles de Rais, a French army’s leader, Joan of Arc’s companion-in-arms, and serial killer, famous for murdering a large group of people in 14th and 15th centuries (about 100 children). It involved someone from Rome known as Locusta, who gained popularity after poisoning Emperor Claudia, his son Britannicus, as well as the other six unspecified victims. The first ever-documented serial killer was reported in the first century CE. Furthermore, songs like The Ripper by Judas Priest, movies like The Perfume, and television shows like The Fall indicate a pervasive enthrallment with serial killers.Īlthough few people are killers, the world has a general fascination with serial killing. While documented acts of serial killing date back to at least the early Roman Empire, societal awareness of serial homicides escalated steadily since the 1960s, with press coverage of notorious cases such as Charles Manson, Albert DeSalvo, and Edward Gein.