MURDERS BY NUMBER

Everything you need to know about serial murder in thirteen numbers

0 – The number of serial killers generally thought to have existed before the nineteenth century: in other words, before anyone thought up modern urban capitalism. Not that there is unanimous agreement on the issue. Some point to a handful of possible exceptions, such as Gilles de Rais, who was murdering children by the dozens as early as the fifteenth century, and even Vlad Dracula, busy impaling his enemies about the same time. Certainly, both shared enough interests with modern serial killers that there would be little chance of awkward pauses in the conversation. There were also ‘leopard men’ in Africa and one or two other bizarre characters - isolated but startling - from various, scattered parts of the world. What we might call the modern era, though, dates from much more recent times: think of Chicago’s HH Holmes; London’s Jack the Ripper; Milan’s Eusebius Pieydagnelle. The Finnish Juhani Aataminpoika was unsually energetic, managing twelve victims in just two months as early as 1849. The rest of Europe was distracted by the German uprisings, the Siege of Rome, and the invention of the safety pin. Crimes like Aataminpoika’s were so rare that most people saw no need to invent a special name. Criminologists have been known to blame the atomisation of twentieth-century society and the sometimes-violent search for meaning that is its consequence.

2 – The bar to qualification as a ‘serial killer’ is, comparatively speaking, quite low. A candidate needs more than two victims. Crucially, there must be a ‘cooling-off’ period in between, such that we can identify an actual series of crimes, rather than a single crime with multiple victims. The latter would be called ‘mass’ rather than ‘serial’ murder, although such distinctions would be little comfort to anyone caught up in it. You are perfectly at liberty to consider the whole affair somewhat artificial. Some have argued that just two murders ought to be sufficient qualification, since there is little, psychologically speaking, to distinguish double murderers from serial murderers. Perhaps the reason is just another technicality: ‘Two’ is not literally a ‘series’.

3 – The ‘Macdonald triad’ consists of bed-wetting after the age of five, animal-torture, and arson. A young child who displays two out of three behaviours may be at danger of violence and possibly homicide later in life. For sure, no one would argue that any of them is a good sign. Even so, the idea remains somewhat controversial. The FBI’s psychological profilers claim that unusual numbers of serial killers fit the pattern; some psychologists suspect otherwise.[i]

4 – The modal number of homicide profile types suggested by researchers in the area. The FBI’s original distinction (and the one that still dominates pop culture) was between just two categories of serial criminal, which they called organised and disorganised. Later, the FBI added a third category. Although they called it ‘mixed’, they could equally well have called it ‘we don’t know’. Other typologies – whether developed on the basis of investigative experience or on sophisticated statistical modelling - have proven more successful (see 260%, below). Different research teams have suggested anywhere between two and six categories. As far as homicide is concerned, the most common categories are expressive, instrumental, visionary, hedonistic, power/control, travelling, and local. Briefly, this is what they mean: Expressive – homicide committed to relieve the killer’s emotional distress (Dennis Nilson and Monte Rissel come to mind); instrumental – to achieve a goal, such as money or a getaway; visionary – in response to hallucinations of some sort; hedonistic – for the purpose of thrills or pleasure; power/control – to relieve a sense of impotence by inflicting one’s dominance over others (Nasen Saadi, perhaps); travelling – covering perhaps thousands of miles (Israel Keyes, the horribly-named ‘Kill Kit Killer’ is the prime example); local – those who do not like to commute (Jeffrey Dahmer, perhaps).[ii] It's obvious that the categories overlap considerably.

8-12 years of age – A crucial period of development, perhaps especially for boys. In the lives of many serial killers, this is the age at which a father figure is lost. There may be a number of different reasons: death; abandonment; imprisonment. The child becomes ‘solidified in his loneliness’.[iii] Some start to avoid peers, schoolmates, and situations at which they’d encounter them. Other factors also start to have their terrible impact (see 70%, below).

22 – The number of points on the ‘Gradations of Evil’ scale developed by the psychiatrist, Michael Stone. He wanted an objective way of describing just how evil any given murder might be. It might help judges decide on appropriate sentences. A ‘Power-Hungry And Cornered’ murderer (point 12 on the scale), for instance, may attract a sentence similar to that of others in the same category. Point 22 is the highest on the scale, or, if you prefer, ‘most evil’. Point 1 refers to ‘justifiable homicide’; point 22 to ‘psychopathic torture murders’, in which the causing of pain and harm is the main motive. The scale informed the Most Evil television series, which ran from 2006 to 2015. Stone’s project may have proven more popular with the general public than with fellow psychiatrists, many of whom were put off by the word ‘evil’, with its supernatural connotations.

25 – The number of serial killers interviewed in the famous research programme run by the FBI in the 1970s. As the story goes, two of the most celebrated profilers – Robert Ressler and John Douglas – agreed to learn as much as they could about murderers by interviewing them in the exact places where they knew they could find them: prison. They wanted to create a database of commonalities, making future murderers easier to profile and apprehend. Today, that seems like such an obvious thing to do, it’s difficult to appreciate exactly how little support the rogue agents received. Although serial killers were the nominal focus, many of the subjects were in fact mass murderers or assassins.[iv] A sample of 25 is very small indeed. Offender profiling boasts a rather sciency reputation (nourished by Hollywood and popular novels) but some argue that it may best be conceived as a proto-science: that is, one that remains in the very earliest stages of development.[v] Profilers have made a number of notorious but perhaps unavoidable errors by assuming that what was true of their sample must be true of serial killers generally. The stereotype of serial killers as white and male, for instance, may be an artefact of the sample, which consisted entirely of white males. Profilers stumbled when faced by such notorious killers as Aileen Wournos (female) and the Beltway Snipers, Muhammand and Malvo (both Black).

36 – The total number of interviewees in the FBI’s programme. Of those, 24 were classified as organised offenders; 12 as disorganised. This was no big sample to work from. If you have studied a little statistics (don’t worry, it’s not required for readers of this Substack!) you may be startled by the lack of power such a sample represents. There is very little predictive value here. Of course, we are talking about a very specific group of people and every proto-scientist has to start somewhere.

70% - The proportion of murderers in the FBI’s original sample who had family history of alcohol or drug abuse. It’s a startling number, especially when you consider that it may be an underestimate: people have a vested interest in covering up family scandals. We begin to appreciate the amazingly-difficult backgrounds from which serial killers seem to emerge.[vi] In fact, the FBI found numerous commonalities: Half the killers had immediate family members who had suffered or were suffering from some sort of psychiatric disorder; half had parents with criminal records; most - as we saw – had father figures who vanished during a crucial developmental period; every single one suffered emotional abuse during childhood. ‘And all of them,’ writes Robert Ressler, ‘developed into what psychiatrists label as sexually dysfunctional adults, unable to sustain a mature, consensual relationship with another adult’.[vii] This is why the psychiatrist, Joel Norris, used to refer to ‘serial killer syndrome’, by analogy with a medical condition. One common reaction on reading the biography of a serial killer is to feel tremendously sorry for them until the chronology reaches late adolescence, when the crimes begin: ‘The threshold has been crossed, and there’s no return possible. He’s frightened and he’s thrilled…’[viii] Sympathy vanishes. The reader wonders why they ever felt it.

193 – The largest number of proven victims for any serial killer. The hideous honour belongs to Luis Garavito, who was active in Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela throughout the 1990s. He died in 2023 just before – believe it or not – becoming eligible for parole.

233 – The number of times the phrase ‘serial killer’ was used in the New York Times (the US paper of record) in the 1980s – the decade in which the phrase entered popular usage. It was coined by Robert Ressler in the mid-1970s. Or so, at least, the story usually goes. The term Serienmörder had in fact appeared in German as early as the 1930s, when it was used by the criminologist Ernst Gennat (you can read about the case he was investigating HERE). Come the 1990s, the New York Times had to use the phrase no fewer than 2,514 times. That represents more than a tenfold increase in a decade.

260% - In what may have been the first proper scientific experiment intended to assess the usefulness of offender profiles in live police investigations, psychologists found an improvement just this high. As many as 260% more crimes were solved by police departments using ‘new statistical profiles’ as part of their investigations, compared with those that used more traditional methods.[ix] Note that phrase, ‘new statistical profiles’. They sound pretty sciency, as opposed the the kind of profiling popularised in serial-killer novels, films, and television shows, which usually involves writhing around in picturesque mental torture on one’s living-room carpet before being hit by a revelatory thunderbolt. It’s one of the first rules of science: Always trust the numbers. There will be more about this in an upcoming newsletter, once I learn more.

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600 – The approximate number of murders that Henry Lee Lucas claimed to have committed (he claimed to have started pretty early – at the age of 15[x]). Lucas became known as the ‘Confession Killer’, the title of a Netflix series about him. He may be the most notorious criminal in the whole literature of false confessions. The benefits to him were fairly obvious – he got to leave his stifling Texas-summer jail cell to go chat to Rangers who paid him just the kind of attention that so many serial criminals seem to crave. He even ended up with a television in his cell, painting materials, and milkshakes. The benefit to law enforcement officials is less obvious, but perhaps more worrisome. One can imagine the temptation: faced with public pressure to solve a local murder, many leapt at the chance to blame one of the country’s most notorious killers. Literally hundreds of cops managed to close literally hundreds of cases. In a statement that surprised no one whatever, Lucas claimed a moral imperative for his hurtful time-wasting – he was ‘testing his interrogators’[xi] and trying to open the public’s eyes to the corrupt nature of law enforcement. Someone should really have asked how far you can expect to trust a serial killer whose most famous public pronouncement was ‘I am not a serial killer’. Dozens of cases remain unsolved or improperly attributed to Lucas’.[xii] Sime of the victims he claimed turned out to be alive, well, and, doubtless, surprised to learn they’d been murdered many years previously.

Here are links to other Crime & Psychology newsletters about serial killers and offender profiling. Please check them out!

Robert Abel and the murders on the I-45

The Zodiac Killer in Dirty Harry

Luis Garavito image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.

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[i] Leary Terence, Southard Larry, Hill Joe & Ashman John: ‘The Macdonald Triad Revisited: An Empirical Assessment of Relationships between Triadic Elements and Parental Abuse in Serial Killers’, North American Journal of Psychology, 2017, Vol 19, Issue 3, p627

[ii] Fox Bryanna & Farrington David P: ‘What have we learned from offender profiling? A sytstematic review & meta-analysis of 40 years of research’, Psychological Bulletin, Vol 144(12), 2018, pp1247-1274

[iii] Ressler, Robert & Schachtman, Tom: Whoever Fights Monsters – A brilliant FBI detective’s career-long war against serial killers, BCA, London, 1992, p94

[iv] Check out this article in Psychology Today: The FBI's Sessions with Serial Killers | Psychology Today United Kingdom

[v] Canter, David: Mapping Murder – The secrets of geographical profiling, Virgin, London, 2003

[vi] Canter, David, op cit, pp1-6

[vii] Ressler, Robert & Schachtman, Tom, op cit, p88

[viii] Ressler, Robert & Schachtman, Tom, op cit, p108

[ix] Fox, Bryanna: ‘Is Criminal Profiling Dead? Should It Be?’, Psychology Today, April 4, 2019

[x] Norris, Joel: Serial Killers – The growing menace, Arrow, London, 1990, p156

[xi] Norris, Joel, op cit, p164

[xii] Taki Oldham, quoted in Horton, Adrian: ‘He was America's most deadly serial killer – but it was all a lie’, The Guardian, 5^th December, 2019