A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, usually in the service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the murders taking place over a month and including a significant break (a "reflection period") between them.. Different authorities apply different criteria when designating serial killers. While most set a threshold of three murders, others extend it to four or reduce it to two. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for example, defines serial murder as "a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by an assailant acting alone."
Although psychological gratification is the common motive for serial murders, and most serial murders involve sexual contact with the victim, the FBI states that motives for serial killers can include anger, thrill-seeking, financial gain and seeking attention. The murders can be attempted or completed in a similar way, and the victims can have something in common: age group, appearance, gender or race, for example.
Serial murder is not the same as mass murder (killing numerous people in a given incident); Nor is it a killing spree (in which the murders are committed in two or more places, in a short time). However, cases of prolonged episodes of sequential killings during periods of weeks or months without apparent "reflection period" or "return to normality" have done some experts suggest a hybrid category of "serial murderer"
The English term and the concept of "serial killer" are commonly attributed to former FBI special agent Robert Ressler in 1974, and author Ann Rule posits in her book Kiss Me, Kill Me (2004), that the English credit for Coining the long-time serial killer goes to LAPD detective Pierce Brooks, who created the ViCAP system in 1985.
However, there is ample evidence that the term was used in Europe and the United States previously. The German term and concept was coined by the influential Ernst Gennat, who described Peter Kürten as Serienmörder (literally "serial killer") in his article "Die Düsseldorfer Sexualverbrechen" (1930). And, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the specific term "serial killer" first came up in a German film article written by Siegfried Kracauer on the German-language film M (1931), which portrays a pedophile Serienmörder.
In his book Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (2004), criminal justice historian Peter Vronsky argues that although Ressler could have coined the term "serial homicide" within the law, at the Bramshill Police Academy in Great Britain, And "serial murderer" appear in John Brophy's book The Meaning of Murder (1966). In his most recent study, Vronsky states that the term "serial murder" first entered popular American usage when it was published in The New York Times in the spring of 1981., to describe Atlanta serial killer Wayne Williams. Later, throughout the eighties, the term was used in the pages of the New York Times 233 times, but in the late 1990s, in the second decade of publication, the use of the term climbed to 2,514 times in the national newspaper De registry “.
