When I encountered “my” first serial killer – Richard Cottingham, the “Times Square Torso Ripper” in December 1979, I had never heard of the term “serial killer.” Although the term “serial killing” had been occasionally used during the 1970s in the law enforcement community, in popular media it was called by a host of different labels like “stranger-on-stranger murder,” “recreational killing,” “pattern murder,” “thrill killing,” “multicide,” “psycho murder,” “sequential homicide,” “compulsive murder,” “multiple murder,” “motiveless killing,” “lust murder,” “spree killing” or confusingly “mass murder,” which today we define as a single rampage of multiple murders. Nobody agreed on a single term for it or what defined it nor did anybody assemble all those different multiple killer profiles and their characteristics into named constellations or categories.

To me, Cottingham was some kind of Alfred Hitchcock movie monster, and when in 1980 I bought my first book on the subject to try to understand better what it was I had encountered, Ann Rule’s seminal book on Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, the term “serial killer” did not appear anywhere in the pages of her book.

[image error]It was only on May 3, 1981 that the serial killer and serial murderer constructs first began appearing in the New York Times when referring to Wayne Williams, suspected in the murders of thirty-one children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981.  The New York Times wrote

The incident underscored the belief of many law-enforcement officials and forensic scientists in Atlanta that only some of the killings are the result of a “serial” or “pattern” murderer. . . .

If the New York Times is America’s national “paper of record,” then Wayne Williams is America’s first “serial killer of record.”

There is no one single story as to who coined the term ‘serial killer’ and it is entirely plausible that several people independently proposed the term. According to Ann Rule, California detective Pierce Brooks first coined it. True crime author Michael Newton points out the term is used by author John Brophy in 1966 in his book The Meaning of Murder. Author Howard Schechter and criminal deviance scholar Lee Mellor discovered that Ernst August Ferdinand Gennat, the Chief of the Berlin Police, used the term serienmörder (serial murder) in the 1930s to describe the crimes of Peter Kürten.

The earliest English language use of the term “serial killings” I could find in print was by the Biblical scholar, historian, and concentration camp survivor Robert Eisler, in his annotations to a lecture he gave on sadism and anthropology to the Royal Society of Medicine in London in 1948. The lecture was published posthumously in 1951 as a heavily footnoted book entitled Man Into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. In describing innate infantile sadism, Eisler wrote

The serial killings in the ‘Punch and Judy’ plays for children are so enjoyable because the puppets are of wood and the beaten skulls sound so wooden and insensitive. Nevertheless, this enjoyment is certainly the harmless ‘abreaction’ of the cruel urges of infancy.

Even earlier possibly, the words “Whitechapel serial killer” apparently are used in a newspaper article in the November 9, 1888 edition of the London Daily Post’s coverage of Jack the Ripper.  The words appear in a stock house montage of Victorian-era newspaper clippings, the authenticity of which I was not able to confirm before this book went to press. See the end of the first paragraph in the second column of the newspaper in the image: http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-londonpost-november-9th-1888-clippings-of-the-fifthand-final-52938673.html

While perhaps various people proposed it, I personally believe the most plausible coiner of the term serial killer as we are familiar with it today is FBI agent and behavior sciences profiler Robert K. Ressler. He felt the popular term for serial murder, “stranger killings,” was inappropriate because not all victims of serial killers were strangers. Ressler was lecturing at a police academy in England in 1974 when he heard the description of some crimes as occurring in “a series”—a series of rapes, arsons, burglaries, or murders.

Ressler said that the description reminded him of the movie-industry term for short episodic films shown on Saturday afternoons during the 1930s and 1940s: “serial adventures.” Audiences were lured back to movie theaters week after week by the inconclusive ending of each episode—the so-called “cliff-hanger.” Instead of providing a satisfying conclusion, these endings increased rather than decreased the tension in the audience. Likewise, Ressler felt, serial killers experience a ‘cliffhanging’ tension and desire after every murder to commit a more perfect murder than before, one that is closer to their fantasy. Rather than being satisfied when they murder, serial killers are instead addictively compelled to repeat their killing in an often-unending cycle; a pattern of serial movie-like ‘cliff hanger’ murders. Serial killing, Ressler argued, was a very appropriate description of the compulsive multiple homicides that he believed he was dealing with.