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Authors: Peter Vronsky
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Newsweek, Life, Omni, Psychology Today, Playboy, and Penthouse, painted a picture of the United States plagued by an âepidemicâ of senseless random homicides committed by roaming anonymous monsters who often victimized our children.
All those fearful and perhaps exaggerated cries came to some fruition. In 1982 Congress passed the Missing Childrenâs Act and in 1984 the Missing Childrenâs Assistance Act. President Ronald Reagan personally announced the establishment of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), to be housed at the FBI Quantico Behavioral Sciences Unit. The data collected by the BSU sexual killer study is applied today in a program known as VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program). When police suspect that a serial offender is loose in their jurisdiction, they can fill out a standard VICAP questionnaire consisting of 188 questions about their homicide case and submit it to the Investigative Support Unit requesting a profile of the unknown offender. (See Chapter 9 for a more detailed account of profiling and its problems.) The fill-in-the-blanks questions on the form range from the description of the location of where the victimâs body was found down to the details of the nature of the assault and mutilation of the victim, the condition of the suspectâs car, and his method of approaching the victim if it is known.
The result of a VICAP crime report is twofold. First, a computeranalysis of the responses can identify patterns that may link the offender to other crimes he may have previously committed anywhere in North America. Each serial killer is known to have his own personal âsignatureâ of which he is often not aware, and a properly completed VICAP questionnaire can identify this signature, while the computer can match it to other incidents.
Second, the data supplied by the VICAP report allows analysts to profile the killer, something that the FBI has developed into a reasonably effective but not entirely perfect technique. An analysis of the data in the report can often identify a high probability of the killerâs race, age, social status, employment, intelligence, and sexual preference; how he dresses, and even the type of car he drives. Successful profiling can greatly narrow the field of suspects.
This means that there is an identifiable method to the madness committed by serial killers. Since the BSU study was completed, much has become known as to how and why serial murderers come to develop and act on their killing addiction.
Previous Serial Killer âEpidemicsâ
Let us return once more to the question of the rising wave of serial murders over the last thirty years. Is it real, or is it exaggerated media hype intended to address political agendas and sell papers? Philip Jenkins, a professor at Penn State, is probably the most recognized debunker of serial homicide statistics. Jenkins, for example, cites working lists of all known serial killers compiled by the Justice Department for use at the Behavioral Sciences Unit. He noted that in 1992, the FBI list of serial killers in the United States from 1900 to 1970 contained 447 names and an additional 365 names from 1970 to 1992, linked to 2,636 known victims and suspected in an additional 1,839. But after combing through the lists, Jenkins found enormous faults of duplicationâfor example, each of the convicted killers in the Manson Family was assigned the same list of victims, making the number of victims of spree killing in 1969 three times greater than it really was. 39 Jenkins found case after case of similar such multiplication of victims in the use of âsuspected victimâ categories and discredited confessions such as Henry Lee Lucasâs confession of 360 murders.So the good news is that there are fewer serial killers and victims in recent times than the FBI claims.
The bad news, according to Jenkins, is that the apparent rise in serial murder in the last
All those fearful and perhaps exaggerated cries came to some fruition. In 1982 Congress passed the Missing Childrenâs Act and in 1984 the Missing Childrenâs Assistance Act. President Ronald Reagan personally announced the establishment of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), to be housed at the FBI Quantico Behavioral Sciences Unit. The data collected by the BSU sexual killer study is applied today in a program known as VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program). When police suspect that a serial offender is loose in their jurisdiction, they can fill out a standard VICAP questionnaire consisting of 188 questions about their homicide case and submit it to the Investigative Support Unit requesting a profile of the unknown offender. (See Chapter 9 for a more detailed account of profiling and its problems.) The fill-in-the-blanks questions on the form range from the description of the location of where the victimâs body was found down to the details of the nature of the assault and mutilation of the victim, the condition of the suspectâs car, and his method of approaching the victim if it is known.
The result of a VICAP crime report is twofold. First, a computeranalysis of the responses can identify patterns that may link the offender to other crimes he may have previously committed anywhere in North America. Each serial killer is known to have his own personal âsignatureâ of which he is often not aware, and a properly completed VICAP questionnaire can identify this signature, while the computer can match it to other incidents.
Second, the data supplied by the VICAP report allows analysts to profile the killer, something that the FBI has developed into a reasonably effective but not entirely perfect technique. An analysis of the data in the report can often identify a high probability of the killerâs race, age, social status, employment, intelligence, and sexual preference; how he dresses, and even the type of car he drives. Successful profiling can greatly narrow the field of suspects.
This means that there is an identifiable method to the madness committed by serial killers. Since the BSU study was completed, much has become known as to how and why serial murderers come to develop and act on their killing addiction.
Previous Serial Killer âEpidemicsâ
Let us return once more to the question of the rising wave of serial murders over the last thirty years. Is it real, or is it exaggerated media hype intended to address political agendas and sell papers? Philip Jenkins, a professor at Penn State, is probably the most recognized debunker of serial homicide statistics. Jenkins, for example, cites working lists of all known serial killers compiled by the Justice Department for use at the Behavioral Sciences Unit. He noted that in 1992, the FBI list of serial killers in the United States from 1900 to 1970 contained 447 names and an additional 365 names from 1970 to 1992, linked to 2,636 known victims and suspected in an additional 1,839. But after combing through the lists, Jenkins found enormous faults of duplicationâfor example, each of the convicted killers in the Manson Family was assigned the same list of victims, making the number of victims of spree killing in 1969 three times greater than it really was. 39 Jenkins found case after case of similar such multiplication of victims in the use of âsuspected victimâ categories and discredited confessions such as Henry Lee Lucasâs confession of 360 murders.So the good news is that there are fewer serial killers and victims in recent times than the FBI claims.
The bad news, according to Jenkins, is that the apparent rise in serial murder in the last
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