![]() It’s possible that his fascination with serial killers arose simply because they were a part of the zeitgeist. They applied methods of criminal profiling to research serial killers- and Ressler was the first to coin the term. While with the FBI, he and Special Agent Roy Hazelwood helped pioneer modern criminal profiling. In 1970, a man named Robert Ressler joined the FBI with the intent on researching and understanding extremely violent cases where motive seemed difficult to pin down. But the term “serial killer” is considered to be relatively recent. In fact, one of the oldest and most notorious serial killers, Jack the Ripper, was active in the 1880s. We know that serial killers are not a new phenomenon. Wikipedia, for example, reports that the murders need to take place over more than a month and must include a significant amount of time between them. ![]() To further muddy the waters, some definitions include timeframes. Thus, there’s no officially agreed-upon definition, but either two or three seems to be the most common minimum number. The FBI held a Serial Murder Symposium in 2005 which defined serial murder as only needing two or more victims killed by the same offender(s). In 1998, the US Congress passed a federal law protecting children where it defined “serial killings” as a “series of three or more killings, not less than one of which was committed within the United States, having common characteristics such as to suggest the reasonable possibility that the crimes were committed by the same actor or actors.” This definition has become the general standard, though other definitions have given a different minimum number of victims. What makes a serial killer? While that’s a provocative question, I mean it here in the most literal sense: What, exactly, is the definition of a serial killer and at what point does a murderer gain the specter of a serial killer?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |