Serial Murder History

A serial killer can be defined as a person who murders 3 or more people with a significant cooling off period (a break) in between each one (FBI). Credit for coining the phrase “serial killer” is commonly given to former FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler, one of the founding members of the Bureau’s elite Behavioral Science Unit, now called the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to compromise less than one percent of all murders in any given year. Though uncommon, serial killers do not limit public fascination; much like a car accident on the side of the road.

On the one hand, serial killing seems like a uniquely and exclusively present-day phenomenon, a result of the various ills afflicting late-twentieth-century

During the Middle Ages, immoral Aristocrats like Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory, known as the Blood Countess, fed their irreligious lusts on the blood of hundreds of victims, while psychopathic peasants like Gilles Ganier and Peter Stubbe butchered their victims with such barbarous brutality that they were believed to be werewolves. Other homicidal monsters of the premodern era include the Scottish cannibal Sawney Beane and Vlad the Impaler, the real-life Dracula (Serial Killers Through

The situation became even grimmer during the 1960s, a period that produced such infamous figures as Albert “Boston Strangler” DeSalvo, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, and the still-unknown Zodiac. By the time the 1970s rolled around, the prevalence of serial killer related crimes had so great that, for the first time, law enforcement officials felt the need to define these burgeoning episodes as a specialized category of crime. The 1970s was the decade of Berkowitz and Bundy, Kemper and Gacy, and Bianchi and Buono, also known as the “Hillside Stranglers”.

By the 1980s some criminologists were bandying words like plague and epidemic to characterize the problem. Though these terms smack of hysteria, it is nevertheless true that serial homicide has become so common in the United States that most of its perpetrators stir up only local interest. Only the ghastliest of these killers, the ones who seem more like mythic monsters than criminals – Jeffrey Dahmer, for example – capture the attention of the entire nation and end up as household names (Serial Killers Through