Murder Call

Although not all serial killers are sex murderers, a significantly great proportion are. The very act of cutting, dismembering, binding, torturing, and/or killing is often more important to the sex murderer than the actual sex act. This somewhat differentiates a sexual murderer from a “rapist-killer” who as an afterthought murders his victim to prevent her from reporting him to the police. The psychological dynamic is entirely different, and the sexual killer is more predisposed to repeat his crimes in a serial pattern. Until the mid-eighteenth century, sex crime of any kind was virtually unknown, or at least largely unreported. One reason for this is the proposition that sex crime is a “leisure activity” requiring available time to develop and dwell on sexual fantasies and the freedom to act upon them. Prior to the industrial age the majority of people were just too busy to be fantasizing about sex. Most were desperately trying to feed themselves and survive various life-t

How many serial homicides take place? Almost every month somewhere in the world a new case of serial homicide is reported by the police, and except for Antarctica, no continent has been spared.   From Alaska to New Zealand, from South Africa to China, cases of serial murder appear to be on the increase—slowly in the Third World, and alarmingly rapidly in the industrialized nations. Anybody could be a potential victim of a serial killer— absolutely anybody: man, woman, child, old, rich, poor, obscure, or famous—nothing makes one immune from being a potential victim.   Before going further here, however, we should make one thing clear: “Strangers” means that the investigation determined definitively that the victim did not know the killer. This includes not only random victims of serial killers, but also, for example, store clerks shot dead by strangers in the course of a robbery. “Persons unknown” on the other hand, means precisely that—investigators simply did not know whether