Even though data supports the fact that the heyday of serial murder has long concluded, there remains an immense yet explicable interest in the offenders and the crimes they commit. Television programs such as You, Barry, Killing Eve, Mindhunter, Dexter, The ABC Murders, Hannibal, Criminal Minds and Luther and movies like The House That Jack Built and You Were Never Really Here are unrelenting in the portrayal of the serial murderer as a persistent facet of society that must be dealt with, usually by those with intimate knowledge of their mesmeric personalities. The killers in these shows and movies are shown to be thoroughly damaged people that place the blame for who they are externally, typically due to a past traumatic experience which compels them to pay it forward by killing other people. Showrunners and directors have theorized that serial killers can and will work on becoming the best version of themselves but only with the help of those one or two people that truly understands them. Without our support, they hypothesize, serial murderers have no choice but to go on harming others until someone gives them their due. In that way, the serial murder entertainment complex has made all of us complicit in humanizing serial killers. This essay will attempt to demonstrate that researchers, practitioners, and law enforcement officers willfully sustain the serial murder entertainment complex.

In Murder in Plain English, we accompany Arntfield and Danesi— pioneers of literary criminology—on an exciting odyssey to establish an über-tale that explains the motives and meanings of murder by binding fictional, forensic, and psychiatric domains. The authors deconstruct symbolic and imaginary interactions between public and private statements, writings, and expressive artifacts of serial and mass murderers; they arrive forthwith at vivid character archetypes and compelling narrative typologies. Arntfield and Danesi shepherd us by way of a revelatory humanistic approach through an exploration of homicide as a means to understand ourselves.

I was invited by your professor to talk about my unique set of experiences in the field of atypical homicide research. There has never been a systematic analysis of the people that study this topic and I hope to provide a small window into our sometimes myopic world with this presentation. A colleague once told me that many of the folks in this field share qualities with the offenders they study. Over time, I would come to see firsthand how true that sentiment can be.

I am proud to share the history of the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative with you today as I accept the MACJE Award for Innovation in Criminal Justice. This award demonstrates that those functioning quietly in the background can make an impact and is an important acknowledgment of the influence one can have on the direction of a field. The collaborative was a game changer in the criminal justice community, the result of combining various novel ideas in a unique way. To realize a vision for the future through better solutions applied more effectively using processes and technologies utilized in other industries is the essence of innovation. I am gracious of your recognition of my work in the field of serial homicide research and humbled by your attention to this story about finding a way along divergent paths.

Yes, that’s me in the first picture, looking like I had everything figured out back in 2005. What I came to realize was that everything I knew about serial murderers was based on stereotypes and myths. After long term exposure to Silence of the Lambs and the Profiler TV show, I had fallen victim to the serial murder entertainment machine. My attitude began to change after more than a decade spent studying serial homicide in Boston. What I thought I knew about serial murder would be consistently challenged after watching the offenders pictured here earn this classification in ways not historically associated with serial murderers.

Every once in a while I come across someone in my career who seems to appear on my doorstep wanting to help and collaborate. Enzo Yaksic did just that and offered to collect serial murder cases for me to use in updating my tables for 2004 - 2011 found in chapters 7 - 10. A special thanks to Dr. Mike Aamodt of Radford University, Virginia, and Dr. John White of Richard Stockton College Center for Public Safety and Security, New Jersey, for their help in identifying the race of specific serial killers who appear in the sixth edition updates constructed by Enzo. He also prepared the original profile for the Samuel Dixon case that was facilitated by the use of the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative. Enzo, thank you so much for your assistance. Your passion for the field of forensics is exactly what is needed to further the work. Working with you has been most enjoyable, and I am sure that we will collaborate for many years to come. Also, a special thanks to James A. Reavis, Psy.D, Director of Forensic Services at the Relationship Training Institute in San Diego, California, for his assistance in developing the profile of Samuel Dixon. Your collaboration is much appreciated.

In the wake of recent tragedies, instances of gun violence command national attention. Leonard Morgenbesser categorized the use of handguns as conflict resolution tools to be a threat to public health, a stance that preceded our collective response of outrage. Leonard considered injuries and homicides wrought by these recurring incidents to be at epidemic levels and characterized the reliance on such weapons as a disease whose devastation fractures communities.

After separately compiling serial killer databases for James Alan Fox and Eric Hickey, I built a community where serial homicide experts could share information in a digital workspace: the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative (SHEISC). I act as the data coordinator for the SHEISC initiative, the goal of which is to synchronize and standardize all serial homicide data collection efforts so the stereotypes, myths and lore that surround the study of serial murderers can be addressed. The following folks contributed their entire datasets to the project - Ronald Hinch, Brigadier Gérard Labuschagne, Janet McClellan, Bryan Nelson, Kenna Quinet and John White. It was my job to collect and then merge these data files together with the Fox/Hickey data and make sense of the sometimes disparate layouts.

To date, the majority of criminologists protest the inclusion of gang killings and professional murders in serial homicide offender databases because these offenses typically occur alongside functional or instrumental violence. If killing is a means of conflict resolution, endorsed by others, motivated strictly by financial gain, the byproduct of provocation or is committed out of convenience, revenge or survival, the offender is often deliberately excluded from serial homicide offender research samples. Because these offenders have understandable, conventional and logical motivations they are erroneously viewed as being different than killers yearning to repetitively relish in causing death.

Background: I’m Enzo Yaksic and yes that’s me in the first picture, looking like I had everything figured out back in 2005. What I came to realize was that everything I knew was based on tropes. I had fallen victim to the serial murder entertainment machine. My attitude began to change after more than a decade spent studying serial homicide in Boston. What I thought I knew about serial murder would be consistently challenged after watching the offenders pictured here earn this classification in ways not historically associated with serial murderers. With this webinar, we hope to help you begin to understand a bit about the modern serial murderer and the state of research in the field.

I have crafted this open letter to you – members of the atypical homicide research community – as a notification that I have resigned as a longstanding contributor to and promoter of the Radford/FGCU Database Project after being accused by its organizer of misappropriation.

The Atypical Homicide Research Group was initially formed as the brainchild of a fellow scholar and man that became my mentor and friend. Leonard Morgenbesser, the anti-gun-violence advocate and researcher at the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision of Albany, sought to assemble a small group of academic researchers, mental health practitioners and law enforcement officers, to better understand the sexually violent offender. Leonard was distraught about the lack of a safe space for researchers to converse about topics that affect them on a professional or personal level. He wondered why he could not simply email a query to a group of experts willing to provide feedback. When I met Leonard at a conference in Binghamton, New York in 2011, the groundwork for such a collaborative had been in the process of forming since 2005 when Robert Ressler encouraged me to survey some of the top criminologists in the world during my internship at the FBI Academy. Before their passing, both Leonard and Robert had fostered in me the unwavering feeling that drawing upon expertise outside of my own limited viewpoint was an acceptable avenue to venture down.

This offender may be intentionally targeting the Seminole Heights area, particularly the class of individual that frequents the area. Due to the diversity of the neighborhood, the disparity between the offender’s perceived lower status may be driving his motivations to victimize those from other statuses. An effective strategy when addressing this offender publicly during press conferences would be to appeal to this perceived deficit without an air of condescension such as terminology characterizing him in a derogative manner. The victimization of others while they are completing everyday tasks, while not the offender’s primary motivation, rounds out a profile of an individual with a disdain for constructs such as wealth and stature oftentimes flouted by today’s society. Future news briefings should highlight that law enforcement does not support such biases.

WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO BECOME A CRIMINAL PROFILER? AND WHY?

Well I am actually not a criminal profiler in the strictest sense but sometimes news outlets will add that term on their own after I have given statements to them which I will not see until the story is in print. Unbeknownst to most people, there is no employment opportunity or role that one could apply for under that name. Agents are promoted from within the FBI’s ranks and are only considered after amassing substantial investigative experience. Criminal Investigative Analysis, of which offender profiling is one component, encompasses a range of services such as threat assessments and interview strategies to indirect personality assessments and search warrant affidavit assistance and is carried out by Supervisory Special Agents of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Stafford, Virginia.

Before delving into Scott Bonn’s Why We Love Serial Killers, readers should question the necessity of yet another addition to the bloated inventory of serial homicide literature. Written as a foray into an overcrowded field, one not clamoring for another voice, Killers is the culmination of an endeavor to advance Bonn’s contentious standing as a “serial killer expert”. Bonn produces a convoluted and systematically flawed work, displaying a cursory understanding of serial homicide offenders and a tenuous grasp over what motivates them. Be forewarned, midway through Killers, Bonn abandons his pledge to “set the record straight about serial killers” after failing to deliver on his commitment to “present the truth”.

Five decades before Louisiana became the setting for Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective, the bayou served as a backdrop to serial killer suspect Felix Vail’s continual narrative of domination, degradation and control. Much the same as Pizzolatto’s killer, Vail operated in plain sight and was unknowingly aided by a peripheral political connection; the late District Attorney Frank Salter Jr declined to prosecute family friend Vail for the death of Mrs. Mary Horton Vail in 1962. Vail strove to maintain his accustomed standard of living, one untethered to obligations. His veiled dangerousness arose from the unabashed and ruthlessly-pursued philosophy that life should be unaffected by the turmoil caused by lesser people. This viewpoint contributed to Vail’s aspiration to escape the commitment of becoming a second-time father, allegedly resulting in the murder of his wife, Mary Horton Vail.

In Geberth and Turco's article titled Antisocial Personality Disorder, Sexual Sadism, Malignant Narcissism, and Serial Murder (1997), the authors state that "The National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) identified 331 serial murderers in the United States between 1977 and April 1992." In filing this request, we ask that only the first and last names of all offenders cataloged within research databases located at the Critical Incident Response Group’s (CIRG) National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime Behavioral Analysis Unit 2 (Crimes Against Adults), the Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center (CASMIRC) and the FBI Academy’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) be identified. In an effort to avoid impeding an ongoing investigation or interfering with a pending investigation or internal inquiry, the focus of our request is solely closed, fully adjudicated cases. Information on any unsolved homicides, offenders suspected of unsolved homicides or classified law enforcement techniques or methods is beyond the scope of this inquiry.

Soon after the capture of "The Grim Sleeper", one of California’s most elusive serial killers, an all too common portrait of the perpetrator emerged. Unbeknownst to most, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., the friendly mechanic who volunteered around his neighborhood, does indeed fit the mold cast by scores of killers before him. A local man, Franklin held menial jobs, had a criminal record, chose marginalized victims, lived in the vicinity of the crimes, and was snared by DNA. The façade he delicately concocted to conceal these facts was shattered to reveal his true nature, shocking his neighborhood. These are all hallmarks of the average, modern day serial killer.

With the discovery of the murders in Ohio allegedly committed by Michael Madison comes speculation that a new type of criminal has emerged – the African American serial killer. Even though at least one out of every two serial killers is African American (Yaksic, 2006; Hickey, 2013), one of the most recurrent stereotypes in the field of serial homicide research is that the majority of serial killers are Caucasian. It is now known that several African American serial killers – Kermit Gosnell, Lonnie Franklin, Lorenzo Gilyard, Carl Watts, Chester Turner and Vincent Groves – rank among the most prolific in their respective states. Even by conservative estimates, African Americans have historically been overrepresented among serial murderers based on their share of the population (Kuhns and Coston, 2005). Despite these facts, African American serial killers have enjoyed some measure of freedom to commit their crimes in the absence of consistent intervention from law enforcement, rigorous study by academic researchers or intrusion by the news media.

There is no criminal act as sensationalized and misunderstood as serial murder; the subject of myth, stereotypes and exploitation since the concept came to prominence four decades ago. In days of yore, stories of werewolves and vampires were conceived to explain away the deeds for which serial killers were culpable. Even now, they are labeled as monsters, thought capable of acts inconceivable by normal men. In the late 1970’s, interest in the burgeoning phenomenon led some to falsely claim that the ‘crazed, serial sex killer’ was a new class of criminal; killing without motive and responsible for the countries’ thousands of unsolved murders. Serial killers have enjoyed some measure of anonymity due to the misinformation generated at our expense.an idea.