Abstract

Objective: This commentary addresses misconceptions present in Too Few Victims: Finding the Optimal Minimum Victim Threshold for Defining Serial Murder and seeks to limit the damaging effect that the authors' recommendation of reverting the victim threshold will have on researchers, practitioners and law enforcement.

Key points: To classify serial homicide offenders by a metric such as deadliness unnecessarily segments a population of offenders that share similar pathologies. Upper level statistics that neglect to account for the narrative factors responsible for the offender's homicidality cannot elucidate the true differences between the groups of serial murderers identified by the authors.

Implications: In analyzing an offender's number of kills and motive the authors ignore the relationship between victim and attacker and the time period between murders. The authors discount thousands of serial homicide offenders due to the absence of information on formative events and disregard intent and markers associated with serial homicide, all to manufacture an inflection point and command the future direction of serial homicide offender research and apprehension efforts. This will curtail the foray of new researchers into an area rife with potential discoveries while also restricting efforts by law enforcement organizations to form task forces to intervene earlier in an offender's career.