Abstract

Originally termed ‘motiveless stranger killings’, victims of serial murders can result from gang violence, organized crime ‘hits’ and convenience store robberies and are difficult to resolve given the lengths taken to hamper investigative efforts. Selecting vulnerable victims inhibits the timely location of witnesses, analysis of bodies, murder sites, physical evidence, and establishment of reliable chronology. Few findings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 1985 study of twenty-five serial murders have been validated (Hickey, 2014) but the killers have been mythologized, stereotyped as weird, lonely, frustrated losers, or amoral, psychopathic masterminds compelled to satiate urges by escalating violence using torture and singular methods for sexual enjoyment while taking totems and leaving signature ‘calling cards’ because of maltreatment as a child by an overbearing mother. Such assumptions remain uncorrected due to a lack of advancement beyond descriptors like evil or insane, inflation of behavioral profiling and reliance on regurgitated anecdotes which causes definitional issues that complicate studying serial homicide (Gurian, 2015). Erroneous interpretations label serial murderers as one subtype – power/control, visionary, mission-oriented, hedonistic/lust, thrill, comfort or disciple – when only one victim in a series was killed in a manner fitting those archetypes.