'Spree' shooter straying from typical serial killer motivation
Posted on 10/12/2002 6:52:21 AM PDT by MeekOneGOP
'Spree' shooter straying from typical serial killer motivation
Gunman's main desire is to provoke terror in community, experts say
10/12/2002
Experts who study serial killers say the Maryland sniper, unlike most serial killers, kills from a distance because he is more interested in causing terror in the community than he is in getting to know his individual victims.
The Maryland gunman is a "spree killer," someone who kills several people in a small window of time, some experts say, as opposed to a serial killer, who may space his killings over months or years or a mass murderer, who kills many people all at once.
Charles Patrick Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at State University of New York at Buffalo, said the sniper, who has used a rifle at distances of more than 100 yards, appears to be more like the anonymous attacker who mailed last year's anthrax-laced letters.
The anthrax attacks "were driven by the desire to terrorize the community, and the person who mailed the letters didn't appear to really care about who died as a result of them."
"I don't recall a case like this where the murders have been committed at such a distance," Mr. Ewing said. "It is so impersonal."
Classic serial homicide theory is based on sexual motivation, and the killer often stalks or tortures the victim and kills at close range.
The classic view is spelled out by Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent who pioneered psychological profiling and interviewed infamous killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz and Ted Bundy.
"To a man, they [serial killers] were dysfunctional sexually," Mr. Ressler wrote in his 1992 book, Whoever Fights Monsters. "They were unable to have and maintain mature, consensual sexual experiences with other adults, and they translated that inability into sexual murders."
Several Northern California cases underscore the classic view. The Zodiac killed six during a series of homicides in the late 1960s, then taunted police in letters to newspapers and law enforcement agencies. Though the Zodiac killer was never captured, many officials who worked the case are convinced that he was Arthur Leigh Allen, a convicted child molester who died in 1992 at age 58.
Similarly, Ed Kemper killed eight Northern California women in the early 1970s and enjoyed visiting his mother afterward while his victim's body was hidden in the trunk of his Volkswagen.
Mr. Kemper said he hated his mother, and she was one of his final victims before he turned himself in.
And Charles Chitat Ng, who killed 11 people in the mid-1980s, made videotapes of himself and his accomplice, Leonard Lake, sexually torturing two of their victims in an isolated shack.
Brent Turvey, a professional profiler from Sitka, Alaska, and author of the textbook, Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis, agrees that the Maryland sniper is different from classic serial murderers.
"Those comparisons are completely inappropriate," he said. "The reason why everybody is making those comparisons is because they are all talking to the retired profilers who made those kinds of cases in the 1970s."
Mr. Turvey said he thinks the Maryland sniper is more like Andrew Cunanan, who killed five people, including designer Gianni Versace, during a cross-country rampage in 1997.
"Cunanan was a classic spree killer," Mr. Turvey said. "A serial killer will kill multiple people on multiple dates with a nice cooling-off period in between. A spree killer will kill a bunch of people in a very narrow window of time.
"Most of these Maryland-area crimes occurred in a very short period," Mr. Turvey said. "He did his killing, then went home to watch the coverage on TV."
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.
"I don't recall a case like this where the murders have been committed at such a distance. It is so impersonal."
Charles Patrick Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at State University of New York at Buffalo
Now that was terrorism, no question. Think about how we all changed as a society after those killings....
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