Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (57 page)

COINING AND DEFINING THE TERM
SERIAL KILLER

While the thing itself has been around a lot longer, the expressions
serial killer
and
serial murder
came into popular use only in the mid-1980s. Prior to that, the terms
mass murderer, lust murderer, chain murders, stranger killing,
and
recreational
or
thrill killing
were used. Recently the term
sequential predation
has been gaining currency in academic literature. Nobody has precisely defined what the term
serial killer
means. The definitions of serial killers and serial murder vary from expert to expert and include the following:

• Someone who murders at least three persons in more than a thirty-day period.
  ²⁰¹
  
• At least two fantasy-driven compulsive murders committed at different times and at different locations where there is no relationship between the perpetrator and victim and no material gain, with victims having characteristics in common.
  ²⁰²
  
• Two or more separate murders when an individual, acting alone or with another, commits multiple homicides over a period of time, with time breaks between each murder event.
  ²⁰³
  
• Premeditated murder of three or more victims committed over time, in separate incidents, in a civilian context, with the murder activity being chosen by the offender.
  ²⁰⁴
  
• Someone who over time commits at least ten homicides. The homicides are violent and brutal, but they are also ritualistic—they take on their own meaning for the serial murderer.
  ²⁰⁵
  
• Someone who murders two or more victims, with an emotional cooling-off period between the homicides.
  ²⁰⁶
  

The term
serial killer
might have been coined by Robert Ressler, who says that he felt the term
stranger killings
was inappropriate because not all victims of serial killers were strangers. Ressler says he was lecturing in England in 1974 at Bramshill, the British police academy, where he heard the description of some crimes as being in series—a series of rapes, arsons, burglaries, or murders. Ressler says that the description reminded him of the movie industry term for short episodic films shown on Saturday afternoons during the 1930s and 1940s:
serial adventures.
Each week, juvenile matinee audiences were lured back to movie theaters, week after week, by an inconclusive ending in each episode—a so-called “cliffhanger.” Ressler recalled that no episode had a satisfactory conclusion, and every time one ended, it increased rather than decreased the tension in the audience. Likewise, Ressler felt, serial killers increase their tension and desire after every murder to commit a more perfect murder—one that is closer to their fantasy. Rather than being satisfied when they murder, serial killers are instead agitated toward repeating their killing in an often-unending cycle. That, Ressler maintains, was a very appropriate description of the multiple homicides that he was dealing with and is the history behind the term
serial killer.
²⁰⁷
(Some dispute Ressler, claiming that others used the term earlier. Michael Newton says author John Brophy used the term in 1966 in his book
The Meaning of Murder
.
²⁰⁸
Ann Rule credits Pierce Brooks with coining the term
serial killer.
²⁰⁹
But in the text of Rule’s 1980 seminal book on Ted Bundy,
The Stranger Beside Me,
which introduced the current concept of a serial killer, the term itself never appears. Bundy is still described as a “mass murderer.” It does seem, however, that Ressler at least introduced it into popular usage in the law enforcement community, even if others might have used the term previously.)

The FBI System of Profiling: Crime Scene Analysis

Today a local police department in the United States or Canada can fill out a VICAP form and submit it to the NCAVC for analysis of a series of unsolved murders, people missing under suspicious circumstances, or unidentified bodies. The VICAP data is then entered into the Profiler computer system. It is an artificially intelligent system, meaning that the computer program has been taught to reason like a human being. Of course, all artificial intelligence systems are limited by the number of rules by which the computer reasons. These rules, which were identified through years of interviews with serial killers and studies of homicide case data, are expressed as lines of instructions using “if-then” operators—for example, “
if
the victim is tied with duct tape,
then
the offender might be an organized personality;
if
the offender is an organized personality,
then
souvenirs of the murder might have been taken.” These lines of reasoning refer to each other and can be assembled in millions of different combinations by the computer, as would a trained human mind when reasoning out a problem. In 1990, Profiler was operating under 270 rules; however, every time the NCAVC research arm learns something new about the behavior of serial offenders, the information is programmed into Profiler in the form of a new line.

Profiler is not a substitute for human analysts—it is a tool. Its output is always analyzed and reviewed by a human profiler. Profiler is used to statistically pinpoint human conclusions. Sometimes Profiler and the human analyst disagree, and the data are reviewed—perhaps a mistaken piece of data was entered into the computer, or perhaps the human analyst forgot something in his or her assessment. Human error in the analysis can be identified, because unlike humans, a computer never forgets.

The FBI system of criminal profiling, called criminal investigative analysis (CIA), is essentially a six-step process. Step One,
profiling inputs,
involves gathering as much of the following data as possible: a complete investigative report, crime scene photographs, information on the neighborhood or area, the medical examiner’s report, a map of the victim’s movements before death, and background on the victim.

In Step Two,
constructing decision process models,
the basic nature of the homicide is established: whether the killing was a serial or single murder; whether the homicide was the primary objective of the offender or the result of another crime; whether the victim was a high-risk victim (prostitute or hitchhiker, for example) or low-risk, such as a middle-class married female. Other factors in building the model include whether the victim was killed at the scene or elsewhere and the nature of the location where the homicide might have taken place.

Step Three, the
crime assessment
, is the stage at which the FBI profiler decides whether the crime scene has the characteristics of an organized or disorganized offender, or a mix of both. This organized/disorganized dichotomy is both controversial in current debates on the effectiveness of criminal profiling (discussed later) and unique to the FBI system of profiling. It is primarily based on the already mentioned study of thirty-six sexual murderers conducted in the early 1980s. Factors such as whether the victim’s body was positioned, whether sexual acts were performed before or after death, insertion of foreign objects into the body, vampirism, mutilation, keeping of the corpse, age of the victim, and use of weapons or restraints all statistically characterize either an organized or disorganized killer. This categorization of offenders is the heart of the FBI approach.

According to this system, organized offenders have a tendency to:

• plan their crimes carefully, giving thought to escape routes and body disposal
  
• carefully select and stalk their victims
  
• prefer strangers as victims
  
• engage in controlled conversation with the victim
  
• capture their victims, kill them, and dispose of their bodies at separate locations
  
• use restraints, often bringing them to the crime scene
  
• come prepared with weapons
  
• commit sexual offenses with a living victim
  
• attempt to extensively control the victim through manipulation or threats, and desire a show of fear from their victim
  
• use a vehicle
  
• commit their crimes far away from their residence
  
• study police investigative techniques
  
• become more proficient in the commission of their crime with time
  

As individuals, organized killers are likely to be of above-average intelligence, attractive, married or living with a spouse, employed, educated, skilled, orderly, cunning, and controlled. They have some degree of social grace and often talk and seduce their victim into being captured. They are more likely to appear physically attractive to their victim, and their victims are often younger. They are difficult to apprehend because they go to inordinate lengths to cover their tracks and are often forensically aware. Their family background is more stable, their father was more likely to have been gainfully employed, and they are of higher birth order, often the eldest of siblings. When they commit their crimes they are likely to be angry or depressed and under the influence of alcohol, and their offense is often triggered by some kind of personal stress such as divorce, loss of a job, or financial crisis. They are likely to follow the media reports of the crime and are prone to change jobs or leave town after the crime.

Disorganized offenders, on the other hand, are more likely to:

• commit their crime spontaneously without planning
  
• engage in minimal conversation with the victim
  
• use a weapon found at the scene or leave one there
  
• position the body
  
• perform sexual acts with the corpse
  
• leave the body at the scene or keep the corpse with them
  
• try to depersonalize the body through extensive mutilation
  
• not use a vehicle
  

The disorganized offender is likely to be of lower birth order, come from a unstable family, and have been treated with hostility by his family. Parents often have a record of sexual disorders; the offender himself is sexually inhibited and sexually ignorant and may have sexual aversions. They are more likely to be compulsive masturbators. They often live alone and are frightened or confused during the commission of their crime. They commit the crime closer to their workplace or home than organized offenders and they are likely to kill victims they know and who are older than them. They often “blitz” their victims—use massive sudden force—to overcome and capture them. They are unlikely to stalk their victims for any length of time or to talk or seduce their victims into capture. Disorganized offenders are very likely to be heterosexual, be uneducated, and leave forensic evidence behind. They are unlikely to transport their victims from where they first encountered them to another location. Stress is not a major factor in triggering their crime, but significant behavioral changes may be evident in their daily conduct.
²¹⁰

A crime scene can also be mixed when there are multiple offenders of different personality types or when the offender is immature or undergoing psychological transformation midway in his killing career.

In Step Four of the FBI system, the
criminal profile,
the profiler offers a report describing the personality and possible physical and social characteristics of the unknown offender, listing objects that might be in the possession of the suspect, and sometimes proposing strategies for identifying, apprehending, and questioning him. The report can vary in length from a mere few paragraphs to pages, depending on how much information the profiler had to analyze.

Step Five, the
investigation,
depends on whether the report is accepted by the local police department and introduced into the investigative strategy. Using the profile data, police can narrow the list of likely suspects or adopt strategies likely to lead to an arrest. If additional crimes occur or more evidence or information is discovered, the profile can be updated and expanded during this stage.

Finally, Step Six is
apprehension.
The success or failure of a profile is compared to the identity of the actual offender in custody. The results are added to the variable database and the interpretive algorithms used by profilers are tuned, with the objective of further enhancing profiling accuracy in the future.

Criminal Signatures, MO, and Staging and Posing

French criminologist Edmund Locard, in the early twentieth century, determined what is today called Locard’s Principle of Exchange: “Anyone who enters the crime scene both takes something of the scene with them and leaves something of themselves behind.” Locard was, of course, referring to physical evidence—fingerprints, hair, fibers, blood, soil, and so forth—but his rule also applies to methodological and psychological imprints left by the offender at the crime scene.

A criminal may leave one or both traces of the following behavioral processes:
MO
(
modus operandi,
or method of operation) and
signature,
the personal imprint of the offender. While every crime has an MO, not all crimes will have a signature, or at least, one immediately visible. Recognizing and differentiating signature from MO is one of the profiler’s essential tasks.

The MO is what the offender
needs
to do to commit his crime—break a window, cruise the highways looking for hitchhikers, pose as a fashion photographer. It is a learned and changing behavior—the repeat offender constantly alters and refines his MO to suit circumstances and to reflect things he learns. He may learn, instead of breaking a window, to seek out an unlocked door first; instead of using rope to tie a victim, the offender may discover that it is easier to use handcuffs. At its core, the MO is dynamic and changing, because it reflects outside circumstances that affect the offender’s behavior.