Page:FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 54 (8).pdf/4

 ===Chapter 1 The Men Who Murdered===

Statistics from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports document the alarming number of victims of sexually violent crimes. One of the disturbing patterns inherent in these statistics is that of the serial or repetitive criminal. Law enforcement officials have questioned whether a small percentage of crimi­nals may be responsible for a large number of crimes, that is, a core group of habitual serious and violent offenders. This has been documented in one study on juvenile delinquents,1 and other studies have reported similar results,2 with average estimates of from 6 to 8 percent of delinquents comprising the core of the delinquen­cy problem.

To address this problem, law enforcement is studying techniques to aid in apprehending serial offenders. These techniques require an indepth knowledge of the criminal personality, an area that, until recently, was researched primarily by forensic clinicians who interviewed criminals from a psychological framework or by criminologists who studied crime trends and statistics. Missing from the data base were critical aspects relevant to law enforcement investigation. Researchers have now begun to study the criminal from law enforcement perspectives, with a shift in focus to the investigative process of crime scene inquiry and victimology. Our research is the first study of sexual homicide and crime scene patterns from a law enforcement perspective. It includes an initial appraisal of a profiling process and interviews of incarcerated murderers conducted by FBI Special Agents. The interviews contain specific questions answered from compiled sources plus lengthy, open-ended interviews with the murderers themselves. A subsample of 36 sexual murderers was selected for analysis to develop further information for profiling these murders. Here, we present what we learned about these 36 men. It is important to recognize that we are making general statements about these offenders. Not all statements are true for all offenders, although they may be true for most of the 36 men or for most of the offenders from whom we obtained data. Responses were not available from all offenders for all questions. 2 / FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin