According to the FBI, serial murder is the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.
At official site of the FBI there is plenty useful information on this topic and authors also debunked many myths about serial killers.
Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year.
FBI also stated: ”Serial murder is neither a new phenomenon, nor is it uniquely American. In 19th century Europe, Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing conducted some of the first documented research on violent, sexual offenders and the crimes they committed. Best known for his 1886 textbook Psychopathia Sexualis, Dr. Kraft-Ebing described numerous case studies of sexual homicide, serial murder, and other areas of sexual proclivity.”
People’s interest in this topic and numerous articles, books, publicity given to them began with ‘’Jack the Ripper’’, in the late 1880s.
Once I read somewhere that news publishers used those murders to sell newspapers and that ‘’Jack the Ripper’’ was more creation of journalists than real enigma. Actually, that it was not isolated case, just they needed something to increase sales.
Still, in the 1970s, the US, Dennis Rader, so-called ‘’BTK’’, murdered people brutally, wrote letters to newspapers and demanded to be called ‘’BTK’’. Previous it was ‘’Zodiac killer’’ who also wrote letters to newspapers and he has never been caught.
In the book ‘’The New Evil’’, Michael H. Stone, MD and Gary Brucato, PhD offered several classifications of serial killers and it goes something along the lines of the following:
In broad terms, serial killers generally fall into four categories:
- Those who commit serial sexual homicide, the most commonly encountered variety.
- ‘’Angels of Death’’, who are physicians, nurses or other medical professionals who intentionally murder or harm individuals under their care; mother who smother to death one infant after another, usually at intervals of at least a year between killings.
- Misanthropic males who murder men, women and children at intervals, due to a generalized hatred of humankind and with no sexual motivation.
Criminologists Drs. Ronald Holmes, Stephen Holmes and James De Burger have collected serial killers’ motives and have proposed the four categories:
- Visionary type suffers from psychotic illness and they are rare. They feel they must murder, because it was demanded from them.
- Mission oriented type are driven by urge to ‘’clean’’ the world of certain people based on their race, ethnicity, their way of life etc. In their mind, those murders are justified. Sometimes they are psychotic, but sometimes they are not.
- Power/control type craves for dominance over victims. Inadequacy and powerlessness are underlying drives, stemmed from childhood abuse. If there are sexual elements, it has nothing to do with lust, but the need for dominance over victims.
- Hedonistic type seeks excitement and draw pleasure from murder. Here we have subcategories:
Lust killers have sexual fantasies and they act out on these fantasies by gaining control, dominance and power over victims. They take sexual pleasure in inflicting pain and mutilating live or dead victims.
Thrill killers are excited by hunting victims. They enjoy pain they are causing. Those are relatively brief, nonsexual homicides.
Comfort killers are those who murder for material gain and their victims are usually family members or acquaintances. Sometimes they murder strangers.
There is also a classification which categorized serial killers as organized, disorganized and mixed. Organized serial killers plan how to commit murders. They are meticulous. Their way of life is tidy. Disorganized killers are opportunistic. Their murders are randomly and they are generally chaotic. It makes them unpredictable and hard to catch. They are usually loners and have poor intellect and social skills. Mixed type have characteristics of both. Sometimes it points to more offenders. Also, due to use of drugs, alcohol and other factors, organized serial killer can begin in an organized way of committing crimes, but ends up as disorganized serial killer.
Serial killers are psychopaths, but small number of them are psychotic or manic. According to Dr. Michael H. Stone, about half of them are schizoid or loners with schizoid traits and although some of them yearn for an attachment, they are psychologically unable to relate to people.
These classifications are used by law enforcement, forensic scientists, forensic psychiatrists, forensic psychologists and other researchers to identify and understand their motivations, underlying drives and catch them.