Serial Killers

The phenomenon called serial homicide—the slaughter, for pleasure, of successive victims with a certain interval of time between each atrocity—is undoubtedly as old as humanity itself. Indeed, it may well predate our species. Recent research into the violent behavior of chimpanzees—which often kill and mutilate their kind for no other reason than sheer blood lust—suggests that a bent for such savagery is part of our primate heritage.

That human beings have always indulged in the sort of barbarities now associated with serial murder—cannibalism, rape, torture, dismemberment, and so on—is made clear in everything from Greek myths to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. How, then, is it that people have come to believe that serial killers are unique to our age?

Part of the reason is that the term itself is so new. Its first documented use, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in the May 3, 1981, issue of the New York Times Magazine, in an article by M. A. Faber on [Page 1362]the then-unsolved Atlanta child-murders. During the following decade, stories about serial killers pervaded the press, creating the impression that a new, unprecedented species of criminal had suddenly appeared on the scene.

In fact, only the name had changed. In past eras, people described such predators by other labels: lycanthropes, human monsters, murder-fiends, lust-killers, homicidal maniacs. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the term mass murderer was the most common designation.

Nowadays, one draws a distinction between mass murder, spree killing, and serial homicide. The mass murderer is often defined as a “human time bomb”—a person, male or female, who erupts in a sudden burst of annihilating fury that wipes out a whole group of people in a single, confined area (for example, a school or workplace). At bottom, mass murder is a suicidal act, typically ending with the perpetrator's own death. A classic example is the Texas Tower sniper, Charles Whitman, who barricaded himself on an observation deck overlooking the University of Texas campus in 1966 and proceeded to kill fourteen random victims before being shot to death by police.

Spree killing is much the same as mass murder—a murderous rampage committed by people who are so full of rage and despair that they have decided to end their own lives, although not before taking bloody vengeance on the world. The primary difference between spree and mass murderers is that the former move from place to place as they kill. Spree killing, in short, can be defined as mobile mass murder. Andrew Cunanan, who murdered four men in August 1997 as he made his way across the country toward his ultimate target, the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, epitomizes this type of criminal.

Serial murder is a fundamentally different phenomenon. The most useful definition comes from the National Institutes of Justice: “A series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time ranging from hours to years. Quite often the motive is psychological, and the offender's behavior and the physical evidence observed at the crime scenes will reflect sadistic, sexual overtones” (Schechter 2004: 9).

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