Psychological criminal profiling.

[Shell B]

[Jackalope]

[Rev. Rye]

I'm a big fan of serial killer documentaries

Immediately, I thought of these two:

Fuck yeah, Psychoville!

Also, something I've come to figure out about criminal profiling is that, until they actually catch the killer, it's really no more useful than any other kind of cold reading, like that time there was a sniper in Washington DC, and people thought it was a white supremacist killer and it turned out to be a pair of black guys and nobody seems to be fully aware of why they did it in the first place?

[Shell B]

I think if they include poisoning and Black Widow style murders, women tend toward that sort of thing and I'm not surprised. You also have women who kill their offspring, as fucking horrendous as that is, over the course of many years.

I prefer this definition from Wikipedia for serial killers, "A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people,[1] usually in service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant break (a "cooling off period") between them." because if we're just saying anyone who kills more than one person is a serial killer, the term loses all meaning. While it is accurate semantically, I think we need the distinction because there is something fundamentally different when the murderer is killing and eating or killing and fucking his victims, wouldn't you say?

"The racial diversity of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population."

Only from my research over years, which it would be impossible to source since it's just been years of reading shit, I don't think that's accurate. Even the decent paper I turned up with the stupid new FBI definition showed a higher percentage of white perpetrators than there are white people in general in the United States. We're not all that white these days. I'm not sure I'd attribute it to race, though. Really, I think it has something to do with means, culture, etc. Maybe black people are more prone to shootings because of gang culture and white people are more prone to serial killings because of unrealistic porn. /kidding I have no clue what could be the cause of it, but I do know it has nothing to do with actually being white or black.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Boru

[Mr.Obvious]

[Shell B]

[Mr.Obvious]

[Shell B]

Yeah, it doesn't seem like any of these sources is reliable. Also, given that the definition varies so widely that it would be next to impossible to get a reasonable list together of what we would consider a serial killer versus what the FBI would consider a serial killer today. It's obvious to me that the looser definition that neither of us likes would certainly contain a group proportionate to the population, which will only ever be what we have to go on, since no one keeps a list of just Ted Bundys apparently. Also, if say we realized that there were fewer serial killers in China for example, would that mean it's because there are fewer white males? Impossible to know. In my opinion, it's best to look for people based on other factors.