Serial Murder

Beginning in the 1880s and for the next 100 years, the phenomenon of multiple murders attributed to one individual was referred to as “lust murder,” and, although the term “serial murder” was first coined in the latter half of the 20th century, the media confused serial murder with mass murder, referring to the latter term until the end of the 1980s. As more instances of sequential homicide were officially recorded throughout the first half of the 20th century, informed explanations of serial murder were developed during the 1960s and 1970s by government analysts interested in the nature of such “multicide.” By the 1980s, scholarly literature also had been developed. Much of this research was conducted in Australia, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States and is complemented by the FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), which provides an incidence-based compilation of homicide victims and offender sociodemographic data.

Accordingly, six kinds of murders are identified, namely: single, double, triple, mass, spree, and serial. The multiple-homicide concept includes two of these six classifications, serial murder and mass murder, thereby providing an important operational distinction. Articulated by James Alan Fox and Jack Levin, the multiple-homicide concept is defined as the murder of at least four victims. By establishing this minimum body count, multiple killing is distinguished from homicide generally. This conceptualization further differentiates the forms of multiple homicide, namely, those cases in which victims are slain at once (the mass murderer), over a short period of time (the spree killer), or over an extended period of time, which distinguishes the serial murderer concept.

Defining Serial Murder

The FBI's Crime Classification Manual provides a concise, albeit controversial, definition of serial murder as, “Three of more separate events in [Page 859]three or more separate locations with an emotional cooling-off period between homicides.” Thus, several definitions of serial murder have been advanced. Among these are those events we now refer to as serial murders but were once identified as “stranger murders.” This phenomenon was also referred to as chain murder, mass murder, and, later, multicide. Introduced into the literature in 1972, the term multicide characterized an act by an individual with a psychopathological personality who committed a number of murders over an extended period of time.

Even the origination of the term serial murder is itself in dispute. Once thought to be used for the first time in 1982 by an FBI agent, there is evidence that the term was actually created in 1966 by the British author John Brophy in a book titled The Meaning of Murder. The term serial murder is again found in the literature based on the work of forensic psychiatrist Donald Lunde, whose book, Murder and Madness, was published in 1976.

Although serial murder varies widely by geography, countries such as Australia, Germany, and Great Britain rarely record serial killing events. It is estimated that 80#x0025; of all known serial murderers identified during the 20th century resided within the North American continent, especially in the United States. Despite the claim, serial murder is not a new crime wave that began in the 1960s. Placing the available data within an appropriate social and historical context offers the insight that within the United States, the multiple killings were at least as prevalent during the1920s and 1930s as they have been since 1965.

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