John Douglas is the legendary FBI criminal profiler and former Chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit where he researched, investigated, and conducted interviews of some of America’s most violent criminals. Over the past half-century, he either directly worked on or had overall supervision in over 5,000 violent crime cases. He is one of the foremost experts of the criminal mind, its methods, and motivations. Douglas is a veteran of the United States Air Force and holds a doctorate degree in Education, and lives with his wife, Pamela, in the Washington, DC, area.

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Who are the men committing the rising number of serial homicides in the U.S. -- and why do they kill? The increase in these violent crimes over the past decade has created an urgent need for more and better information about these men: their crime scene patterns, violent acts, and above all, their motivations for committing these shocking and repetitive murders. This authoritative book represents the data, findings, and implications of a long-term F.B.I.-sponsored study of serial sex killers. Specially trained F.B.I. agents examined thirty-six convicted, incarcerated sexual murderers to build a valuable new bank of information which reveals the world of the serial sexual killer in both quantitative and qualitative detail. Data was obtained from official psychiatric and criminal records, court transcripts, and prison reports, as well as from extensive interviews with the offenders themselves. Featured in this book is detailed information on the F.B.I.'s recently developed Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) and a sample of an actual VICAP Crime Analysis Report Form.

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Chapter 1

The Study of Murder

Interpersonal violence spans a wide range of human behaviors of which murder represents one of the terminal disruptions in the equilibrium of a society. Sexual homicide, a crime of increasing concern in our society, is the killing of a person in the context of power, sexuality, and brutality. Such crimes often receive widespread publicity, and they create a great deal of fear because of their apparent random and motiveless nature. Particularly in cases of serial sexual homicide, law enforcement officials feel public pressure to apprehend the perpetrator as quickly as possible.

Apprehension of the sexual murderer is one of law enforcement's most difficult challenges. Because sexual killings often appear motiveless and random, they offer few clues about why the murder occurred or, consequently, about the identity of the murderer. Even the sexual nature of these murders is not always immediately obvious, for conventional evidence of a sexual crime may be absent from a crime scene.

The Scope of the Problem

The number of sexual homicides occurring in a given year is difficult to assess, partially because of the manner in which crimes are investigated. In obvious cases of sexual assault and murder, the crime most often is reported as a homicide, not as a rape assault (Brownmiller 1975; MacDonald 1971). In other cases, conclusive evidence of sexual assault may be inadequate or lacking (Groth and Burgess 1977). Investigators may not recognize the underlying sexual dynamics of what appear to be either ordinary or motiveless murders (Cormier and Simons 1969; Revitch 1965). In addition, investigators often fail to share their findings, limiting the collective pool of knowledge on the subject (Ressler et al. 1980).

The difficulty in determining the scope of the problem of sexual homicide is reflected in official reports on murder. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) publication, Crime in the United States, presents statistics for crimes committed in the United States within a given year. For example, a survey of the statistics in the UCR for all murders committed in the period 1976 through 1986 shows that the number of murders in the United States has fluctuated from 16,605 in 1976 to a peak of 21,860 in 1980, dropping to 20,613 in 1986 (Crime in the United States 1986). The UCR also gives information about age, race, and sex of victims and offenders, about types of weapons used, and about situations in which killings took place. However, there is no differentiation in these official reports between homicides that included initially undetected sexual assault and those that did not.

The dearth of incidence statistics for sexual homicide promotes other approaches to evaluating this crime's magnitude. One of these approaches is to examine statistics for murders with unknown motives as indicators of the sexual homicide. Murder with unknown motive is one of five homicide categories for which the UCR annually provides data. These categories are as follows:

Felony murder (occurs during the commission of a felony).
Suspected felony murder (elements of felony are present).
Argument-motivated murder (noncriminally motivated).
Other motives or circumstances (any known motivation that is not included in previous categories).
Unknown motives (motive fits into none of the above categories).

Because sexual homicide so often appears random, motiveless, and with its sexual aspects obscured, some experts argue that many sexual homicides may be reported in the unknown motive category.

Figures for most categories of motives, except the unknown category, have remained relatively stable over the past decade. For example, felony-connected murders represented 17.7 percent of all murders in 1976, 17.2 percent in 1981, 18.0 percent in 1984, and 19.4 percent in 1986. The percentages for those murders placed in the "other" category are as follows: 1976, 18.6 percent; 1981, 17.1 percent; 1984, 17.6 percent, and 1986, 18.6 percent.

However, the number of murders committed for unknown motives has risen dramatically. These murders represented 8.5 percent of all murders in 1976, 17.8 percent in 1981, 22.1 percent in 1984, and 22.5 percent in 1986. This trend is of particular interest in the study of sexual homicide. Opinion has varied on the importance of this problem. Sociologists Wolfgang and Ferracuti proposed that the vast majority of murders are committed for a specific reason and that "probably less than 5 percent of all known killings are premeditated, planned, and intentional" (1982, 189). On the other hand, in a 1969 article psychiatrists Cormier and Simons cite studies observing that dangerous sexual offenses are both rare phenomena and nonescalating in aggression; in contrast, their data suggest that sexual murderers may be more common than we wish to acknowledge and that they do in fact have progressively violent records. The rapid increase in the unknown motive category, while most categories have held relatively steady, is an indication that the Wolfgang and Ferracuti proposition, first noted in 1967, may no longer be valid. Reporting methods for the unknown motive category have remained constant since 1976 and thus do not account for the dramatic increase in motiveless murder.

Although the incidence of sexual homicide may be difficult to ascertain, its effects are less unclear. Many sexual homicides are difficult to solve precisely because of the lack of clues. Law enforcement investigators note that solution rates may be misleading and should be scrutinized closely, since some crimes reported as unsolved are, in fact, solved after the figures have been reported. It is the belief of both investigators and clinicians that the majority of serial murders are sexual in nature (Lunde 1976; Ressler et al. 1985; Revitch 1965).

Veteran investigators say that sexual homicide is not a new phenomenon, although its apparent increase is. Public awareness of the problem has also increased, largely because of news media attention to these often bizarre, sensational crimes. People fear these crimes precisely because of the s…