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Authors: Peter Vronsky
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its problems.) The fill-in-the-blanks questions on the form range from the description of the location of where the victim’s body was found down to the details of the nature of the assault and mutilation of the victim, the condition of the suspect’s car, and his method of approaching the victim if it is known.
The result of a VICAP crime report is twofold. First, a computer analysis 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 “signature” 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 killer’s 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 “Epidemics”
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 duplication—for 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 “suspected victim” categories and discredited confessions such as Henry Lee Lucas’s 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 three decades, while not as big as once thought, is nevertheless real—and worse, it is not our first. It merely follows several previous waves of serial killer epidemics over the last hundred years, each bigger than the last. Jenkins identified two previous periods during which there were surging waves of serial homicides: 1911–1915 and 1935–1941. He found that the FBI list, while duplicating some of the more modern serial homicide cases, entirely overlooked the existence of earlier ones. 40
The FBI study, for example, lists a total of thirteen serial homicide cases in a twenty-five-year period between 1900 and 1924. But by merely looking through back issues of the New York Times , Jenkins identified a wave of seventeen cases just in the short period of five years between 1911 and 1915! Clearly the FBI was underestimating the prevalence of serial murder in America in earlier years.
Henry Lee Moore, for example, between 1911 and 1912, was a traveling serial killer who murdered more than twenty-three people—entire families. But little is known about him—he is a mere footnote. In September
The result of a VICAP crime report is twofold. First, a computer analysis 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 “signature” 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 killer’s 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 “Epidemics”
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 duplication—for 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 “suspected victim” categories and discredited confessions such as Henry Lee Lucas’s 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 three decades, while not as big as once thought, is nevertheless real—and worse, it is not our first. It merely follows several previous waves of serial killer epidemics over the last hundred years, each bigger than the last. Jenkins identified two previous periods during which there were surging waves of serial homicides: 1911–1915 and 1935–1941. He found that the FBI list, while duplicating some of the more modern serial homicide cases, entirely overlooked the existence of earlier ones. 40
The FBI study, for example, lists a total of thirteen serial homicide cases in a twenty-five-year period between 1900 and 1924. But by merely looking through back issues of the New York Times , Jenkins identified a wave of seventeen cases just in the short period of five years between 1911 and 1915! Clearly the FBI was underestimating the prevalence of serial murder in America in earlier years.
Henry Lee Moore, for example, between 1911 and 1912, was a traveling serial killer who murdered more than twenty-three people—entire families. But little is known about him—he is a mere footnote. In September
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