10/24/15
Ari N. Schulman’s “What Mass Killers Want—And How to Stop Them”
Serial killers are people who have a history of multiple killing of other individual usually unknown to them beforehand. An occurrence which seemed to gain some prominence in the second half of the twentieth century record of the practice can be found at least as far back as London’s Jack the Ripper (1888) or Hanover’s Fritz Haarmann (1924). Mass murder (sometimes interchangeable with "mass destruction") is the act of murdering several or more people, typically simultaneously or over a relatively short period of time. The FBI defines mass murder as murdering three or more persons during an event with no "cooling-off period" between the murders (wikipedia.org).
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Often, serial killers exhibit three behaviors in childhood bed-wetting, arson and cruelty to animals. They are also likely to have come from broken homes and been abused or neglected. A serial killer keeps killing until one of four things happens he/she is caught, he/she dies, he/she kills himself or he/she burns out. In February, 1989, the Associated Press released a story about a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in the same area of Los Angeles that harbored the Southside Slayer. He was believed to have killed at least 12 women, all with a small handgun. The news story referred to the victims as "strawberries"-young women who sold sex for drugs. Farther north, the Green River Task Force in Seattle, Washington, continues to investigate a series of murders of at least 45 young women over the past eight years. When the corpses of boys and young men began appearing along the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1980s, police became convinced a serial killer was at work in the area. The preceding cases are typical of homicides one might envision when characterizing victims of serial killers. The media quickly and eagerly focus attention on serial