Spree Murder

Other Types of Multiple Murder

Another type of multiple murder, serial murder, was defined by the experts as the murder of three or more [Page 1564]victims, separated by time and place, with an emotional cooling-off period between the various murders. This definition was codified into United States law. A classic example of a serial killer is William George Heirens, a college student who shocked the midwest by his brutal crimes in the mid-1940s. On the night of January 6, 1946, he kidnapped six-year-old Suzanne Degnan from the bedroom of her Chicago home. He claimed she was already dead when he took her from the room, but that would not explain why she had a gag in her mouth. He took her to the basement of a nearby apartment building basement where he dismembered her and put the body parts down into five sewer catch basins.

He then returned to Suzanne's home and left a ransom note demanding $20,000. Heirens had previously murdered two adult women. The first, Josephine Ross, was killed on June 5, 1945 in Chicago, when Heirens was sixteen years old. The second victim, Frances Brown, was killed on December 10, 1945, shortly after Heirens turned seventeen. In her apartment, he wrote on the wall with her lipstick, “For heaven sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself” (Downs 1984: 31). Thus was born the myth that serial killers really wish to be caught. Nothing could be further from the truth.

He was arrested June 26, 1946, as he tried to flee from an apartment building when a janitor and a tenant confronted him after he broke into the tenant's apartment. After Heirens failed a polygraph test, the focus of the Degnan murder investigation turned to him. Heirens's fingerprints and palm prints linked him to crime scenes, and handwriting experts identified the printing on the ransom note as being made by Heirens. Heirens was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Still another kind of multiple murder that is distinguished from spree murder is the mass murder, of which there are two primary types. The “classic” mass murder case involves one person murdering four or more people at one location at one time and not really caring whom he or she kills (Douglas et. al 1992). Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people whose identities did not interest him, is an excellent example of the classic mass murderer.

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