Mass and serial murders

SIGNIFICANCE: Murder is a source of national fascination and fear in America and has made an indelible mark on folklore, the criminal justice system, and popular culture. During the 1970s and '80s, a number of gruesome murders by serial killers caught national attention. Since the late 1990s and into the beginning of the twenty-first century, mass murders, mass shootings in particular, have seen a dramatic increase.

No single definition fully covers both mass murder and serial murder. Both crimes are types of multiple murders in that they involve the killing of multiple victims by the same offenders. What has been called “mass murder” or a "mass killing" involves the killing of three or more people within a single occurrence. “Serial murder” also involves the killing of at least three to five people by a single perpetrator but is differentiated from mass murder in that it is carried out over a longer period of time—at least one week but usually months or even years.

The terms serial and mass murder are usually applied only to certain types of multiple homicides—generally those perpetrated by private individuals. War crimes, political murders, and most gang-related killings might technically be considered mass or serial murders, but they usually are not classified as such. Although both kinds of crimes result in the deaths of multiple people, most serial killers are quite different from most mass murderers in profile, history, and motive.

History of the Crimes

Multiple murders of all kinds have occurred for untold centuries. It is impossible to get accurate numbers on such crimes in the remote past because of the meager law-enforcement resources that were long available to societies. Many mass and serial murderers doubtless went unpunished because of scanty investigative capabilities, or because of the offenders’ personal, political, or financial influence on government. Nevertheless, some multiple murderers of the past are known to history. They include Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth century Frenchman who killed dozens of children; Elizabeth Bathory, a sixteenth century Hungarian countess; and the infamous Vlad III Dracula, or the “Impaler,” the fifteenth century Transylvanian ruler who inspired the title character of Bram Stoker’s novel about a vampire, Dracula (1897).

However, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that serial killings began to be reported with any frequency at all. Perhaps improved investigative techniques or more crowded urban conditions made it less likely that these killings would go undetected. Perhaps the often-squalid living conditions in large cities and the increasing mobility of the population inspired more motives or opportunities for serial killings. In any case, the newly developed popular press made the public more aware of multiple murders. The late nineteenth century was a period in which members of the public in Western countries began to read sensationalized accounts of murderers such as London’s Jack the Ripper, Chicago’s H. H. Holmes, and France’s Henri Landru.

Throughout the twentieth century, occasional serial or mass murders would capture the public’s attention. For example, Howard Unruh killed thirteen people in Camden, New Jersey, during a single afternoon in 1949. Charles Whitman shot and killed fifteen people from the tower on the University of Texas campus in 1966. During that same year, Richard Speck murdered eight student nurses. However, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that mass and serial murder truly captured the public imagination.

Popularizing Multiple Murders

By the late 1970s, multiple murderers, especially serial killers, suddenly seemed to be proliferating, and names such as Edmund Kemper, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams, Kenneth Bianchi, and James Huberty were constantly in the news. A charismatic serial killer named Ted Bundy attracted unprecedented media and public attention and helped to promote interest in serial killers generally. Meanwhile, law-enforcement authorities focused increasing attention on serial killers. New methods were developed for law-enforcement agencies to share information with one another—which was important because serial killers typically move about from place to place.

During the mid-1980s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began developing a criminal profiling system to assist in apprehending serious violent offenders. After the US Congress held hearings, in which the frequency of serial killing was much exaggerated, it approved special funding for this program.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, attention to multiple murder was far from waning. New incidents received extensive media attention, such as a mass shooting of students and staff at Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999; the necrophilic and cannibalistic Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed more than fifteen people during the 1980s; the manifesto-writing “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski; and murders committed by Aileen Wuornos, a woman who was widely—and falsely—proclaimed America’s first female serial killer.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw an increase in high-profile mass shootings with a significant number of victims. In April 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people on a shooting spree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) before killing himself. In 2012 another significant shooting took place at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises. James E. Holmes opened fire on moviegoers, killing twelve and injuring seventy. The one of the deadliest shootings in US history occured on December 14, 2012, when Adam Lanza killed his mother at home and then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed twenty children and six adults before killing himself. On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed fourteen people and wounded twenty-two when they opened fire at a holiday party at Farook's employer in San Bernardino, California. The couple was later shot and killed by police. On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed forty-nine people and injured fifty-three at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Mateen was killed in an exchange of gunfire with police. The Orlando shooting was the deadliest in US history until little more than a year later, when Stephen Paddock opened fire with an automatic weapon on a country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, killing sixty people and injuring more than four hundred. On February 18, 2018, Nikolas Cruz shot and killed seventeen people at the Marjorie Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida. Cruz was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Salvador Ramos killed nineteen students and two teachers on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, before he was killed by law enforcement.

Frequency of Multiple Murders

Despite the attention that they receive, multiple murders are relatively rare. Based on FBI estimates, there are twenty-five to fifty serial killers active in the United States at any given time. The United States has had the highest concentration of recorded serial killers in the world, according to the Radford University/FGCU Serial Killer Database.

Overall, violent crime rates (including murder) began decreasing nationwide beginning in the mid-1990s and continued going down through the middle of the following decades. In 2014, the FBI reported that violent crime had reached the lowest rate since 1978 and that murder in particular had reached a new low since the 1970s. The violent crime rate ticked up slightly in 2015 and 2016 but remained well below historical levels. In 2016 murder accounted for 5.3 percent of violent crimes, the highest proportion since 2008. In the twenty-first century, statistics show that serial murders are less prevalent, but mass murders, particularly mass shootings, have experienced a sharp increase. The website Mass Shooting Tracker, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot (injured or killed). Using research from the Gun Violence Archive, CNN reported 689 mass shootings in 2021 (the highest year on record as of 2024), 644 in 2022, and 655 in 2023.

Although multiple-murder crimes are rare, they do exact a serious toll on society. Not only do their victims lose their lives, but the victims’ families are often left to grieve over the senselessness of the relations’ deaths. Furthermore, the public at large suffers from increased anxiety as people tend to overestimate the chances of being killed by serial or mass murderers themselves. Serial killings also often carry exceptionally high monetary costs, as it is particularly difficult and expensive to investigate and prosecute these crimes. For example, it was estimated that it cost the state of California more than fourteen million dollars in 1999 to convict Charles Ng of murdering eleven people.

Why the Killers Kill

From the growing body of research on the underlying motives behind multiple murders, it appears that serial killers and mass murderers are driven by very different motivations. A number of theories have been developed to explain typologies of serial killers, as well as what inspires their behavior. Although a small number of these killers are motivated by financial gain (such as by collecting on insurance payments), most of them are driven by the desire physically or sexually to dominate and terrorize others. Some kill simply to silence their victims, while others enjoy the killing itself. Many killers enjoy media and law-enforcement attention, and when apprehended, not only confess to their crimes but sometimes even exaggerate how many murders they have committed.

Although most serial killers can be classified as having antisocial personality disorder, most are not psychotic. Many, but not all, have suffered from horrific abuse as children. Some theorists believe that these people truly are “natural born killers” who literally have genes that predispose them to murderous behavior. Other theorists focus on other biological or biochemical factors, such as brain damage. Still others focus on psychological and social causes. Despite all the studies of serial killers, the puzzle of what creates them remains unsolved.

From a behavioral and psychological standpoint, most mass murderers differ greatly from serial killers. Mass murderers typically suffer from serious mental problems, including depression and psychosis. Many have experienced recent personal misfortunes, such as divorces or losses of their jobs. Compared to the behavior of serial killers, the behavior of mass murderers is less calculated. Many seem to “snap” and may view their violence as a last attempt to gain control over those who they believe are responsible for their woes. Unlike serial killers, mass murderers usually make little or no attempt to escape apprehension, and they frequently either kill themselves or are killed by police. They are generally not interested in winning media attention or notoriety.

Mass Murders

From the perspectives of law-enforcement officials and prosecutors, mass murders are very different from serial killings. With mass murders, there is rarely any question of who the perpetrators are, so identifying suspects does not become an issue. Moreover, apprehending mass murderers is also usually not a major issue. If they do not kill themselves or get killed by police, they are generally arrested at or near the scenes of their crimes.

In cases involving mass murder, police rarely need to use investigative techniques to identify, track down, or apprehend offenders. Moreover, because mass murders usually occur in one confined location, law-enforcement officers rarely have to coordinate their investigative work with agencies in other jurisdictions. Instead, law-enforcement action in these cases generally focuses on protecting potential victims, arresting—or killing or incapacitating—the offenders, and collecting evidence after the crimes end.

Because approximately one-half of mass murderers kill themselves or are killed by others, prosecutions for these crimes are uncommon. When these crimes are prosecuted, it is usually not difficult to prove that the offenders have committed the acts in question, as mass murderers generally make little attempt to hide their crimes or identities. The more difficult prosecutorial task often lies in proving the defendants’ legal responsibility for their murders. Mass murderers frequently suffer from mental illness and may plead not guilty by reason of insanity. However, insanity defenses are not necessarily successful. For example, after a woman named Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Texas in 2001, she claimed to have been suffering from postpartum depression—a believable claim, considering the horrific nature of her crime. Nevertheless, the jury rejected her insanity defense, and she was convicted. However, the jury may have been influenced by testimony about her mental state when it sentenced her to life in prison rather than execution. (In early 2005, a Texas appeals court reversed Yates’s capital murder conviction because testimony from an expert witness had been flawed. However, she remained in prison, where she was receiving psychiatric care.)

Like Andrea Yates, most convicted mass murderers receive severe sentences, usually either life in prison—often without possibility of parole—or death. Because of legal complications involving capital punishment, the notorious mass murderers Charles Manson and Richard Speck had their death sentences changed to life in prison while they were facing execution during the early 1970s.

Serial Killers

In comparison to investigating mass murders, investigating serial killings is difficult. Many serial killers are mobile, so investigating their crimes requires that law-enforcement agents in several jurisdictions share information. Moreover, it may not even be clear that serial murders are linked. In addition, many victims of serial killers are not found until long after they are killed, by which time evidence relating to their murders may have become lost or degraded. To make investigation even more difficult, serial killers typically have no prior connections with their victims and nearly always take careful, even elaborate, steps to avoid detection.

By the end of the twentieth century, a number of advances were helping law-enforcement identify and apprehend serial killers. These included computerized databases that are shared across jurisdictions and, when a serial killing is recognized, the creation of special task forces. Because serial killers often cross state lines, the FBI may become involved. Since the 1980s, police have made use of a variety of kinds of profiling, including offender and crime scene profiling. Advances in forensic science have also proved invaluable, such as new DNA analysis techniques.

Prosecution of serial killers is usually time-consuming and can be expensive. It is more difficult to tie accused serial killers to their crimes than to link mass murderers to theirs. Prosecution of serial killers also usually requires cooperation among law-enforcement jurisdictions and agencies. When killings occur in more than one state, the defendant may need to be tried multiple times. Once serial killers are caught, some of them readily confess, and may cooperate with authorities, which makes prosecution easier. However, they may also make exaggerated or false claims about their own misdeeds. Some may also enjoy manipulating the criminal justice system, deliberately drawing out trial processes as long as possible. Although some serial killers do attempt to use the insanity defense, as in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, they are rarely successful.

When serial killers are convicted, they are nearly always sentenced to death or, if they are in a state that does not have capital punishment, life imprisonment. As in most capital cases, appeals typically go on for years, which adds to the already high costs associated with serial killings.

Spree Killers

A third type of multiple murderer, distinct from both mass and serial killers, is the spree killer. Spree killers murder several people in several locations over a period of a few days or weeks. One of the earliest and best-known spree killers was Charles Starkweather, who, together with his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, killed eleven people in Nebraska in 1958.

Unlike serial killers, spree killers make little effort to hide their crimes and allow no cooling-off periods between their crimes. The people they kill are often victims of circumstance, not people they seek out for any specific reasons. Spree killers often commit their murders simply as a means toward other ends, such as stealing their victims’ cars.

Spree killings often appear to be sparked by single events, such as botched robberies or prison escapes that kill associates and leave the survivors feeling desperate. Some spree killers are driven by a need to carry out a particular mission. For example, Andrew Cunanan went on a cross-country killing spree in 1997, seeking revenge on people he thought responsible for his having contracted AIDS. Similarly, a White supremacist named Benjamin Nathan Smith went on a spree shooting members of minority groups over a period of three days in 1999. Most spree killers—like Cunanan and Smith—end up dying by their own hands or those of the police.

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