Serial Killers and the Phenomenon of Serial Murder

David Wilson

Description

A superbly targeted resource for those learning about serial killings. Serial Killers and the Phenomenon of Serial Murder examines and analyses some of the best known (as well as lesser) cases from English criminal history, ancient and modern.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 28 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781906534257
• Langue: English

Extrait

Serial Killers and the Phenomenon of Serial Murder
A Student Textbook
David Wilson, Elizabeth Yardley and Adam Lynes
With a Foreword by Steve Hall
Copyright and Publication Details
Serial Killers and the Phenomenon of Serial Murder
A Student Textbook
David Wilson, Elizabeth Yardley and Adam Lynes
ISBN 978-1-909976-21-4 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-906534-25-7 (Epub e-book)
ISBN 978-1-906534-34-9 (Adobe e-book)
Copyright © 2015 This work is the copyright of David Wilson, Elizabeth Yardley and Adam Lynes. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the authors in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide.
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained on request from the British Library.
Cover design © 2015 Waterside Press. Design by www.gibgob.com
UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH. Tel: [phone] ; [e-mail]; www.gardners.com
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Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire.
e-book Serial Killers and the Phenomenon of Serial Murder is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Myilibrary, Dawsonera, ebrary, EBL and Ebscohost.
Published 2015 by
Waterside Press
Sherfield Gables
Sherfield on Loddon
Hook, Hampshire
United Kingdom RG27 0JG
Telephone [phone]
E-mail [e-mail]
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Contents
About the Authors vii
Acknowledgements viii
The Author of the Foreword ix
Foreword xi
Introduction 17
Themes and Issues 18
Key Term — Coactivation 19
Key Term — Family Annihilator 21
Key Term — Munchausen Syndrome 23
Key Term — Case Linkage 24
Why Study Serial Killers? 24
Using this Textbook 26
Revision 27 What is Serial Murder? 29
Murder and Homicide Defined 30
Key Term — Mens Rea 31
Key Term — Social Construction 33
Some Various and Early Definitions of Serial Murder 34
Dissenting Voices 37
The Use of Serial Murder 39
More Recent Definitions — Cooling-off? 41
Other Definitional Issues to Consider 42
Serial Killers Defined! 43
Revision 45 Theoretical Perspectives on Serial Murder 47
Key Term — Positivism 50
Medical-Psychological — Genetic Inheritance and Personality 50
Key Term — PCL-R 55
The FBI and their “Blunt Little Tool” 56
Key Term — Crime Scene Analysis: Organized/Disorganized 59
The Structural Tradition 61
Widening the analysis — Serial Murder in Britain 63
Revision 65 How it all Began: Jack the Ripper 67
Mary Ann Nichols — The First of the “Canonical Five” 70
Four More Murders 73
Jack the Ripper — A profile 80
Eyewitness Testimony 82
The Structural Tradition and Jack the Ripper 85
Revision 86
Key Term — Rendezvous Discipline 69 An Overview of British Serial Murder 87
Key Term — Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivation 88
Some General Observations 92
A History Lesson — The British Miracle? 94
“There are people who say corpses don’t talk, but indeed they do” 97
Key Term — Forensic Science 97
Police Forces 100
Not Just Waiting for War 102
People Matter 104
Revision 109 Serial Murder and Occupational Choice 111
Unemployed Serial Killers 112
Key Terms — Instrumental and Expressive Crimes 113
Employed Serial Killers 116
Occupations of British Serial Killers 116
Healthcare 117
Business 119
Public and Personal Service 122
Driving and Transitory Dependent Work 123
Key Term — Linkage Blindness 126
Revision 128 Case Study: Peter Sutcliffe 131
Key Term — Case Study 132
Case Overview 133
Occupational History 135
Offending History 136
Peter Sutcliffe — A Case Study of Serial Murder 137
Key Term — Crime Template 137
Key Terms — Awareness and Activity Space 141
Revision 147
Key Term — Rational Choice Theory 147 The Female Serial Killer 149
Introduction — Crime, Violence, Sex and Gender 149
To Kill … 153
… and Kill Again 155
Progressing the Study of Female Serial Killers — The ‘Institutional’ Approach 161
Revision 164
Box 1: British Female Serial Killers in the 20 th -century 150
Box 2: Feminine and Masculine Traits and Characteristics 152
Key Term — Gendered 152
Key Term — Social Divisions 153 Mary Ann Cotton 165
Introduction 165
The Life and Crimes of Mary Ann 166
What ‘Type’ of Serial Killer was Mary Ann? 167
Mary Ann Cotton Through the Lens of the 19th-century Media 168
“But surely there was something wrong with her?” Medical Explanations for Mary Ann Cotton 171
Key Term — Medicalisation 171
Institutional Understandings of Mary Ann Cotton 176
Wife 180
Mother 181
Worker 182
Christian 184
Fraudster / Thief 185
Murderer 186
Mary Ann Cotton the Emancipatory Murderer? 187
Revision 188 Serial Killers and the Media 191
Key Term — Mediatisation 194
Crime and the News 195
Key Term — Doubly Deviant 197
Trevor Joseph Hardy 198
Becoming Unseen 203
Prime Time? 204
Revision 206
Conclusion 209
Index 211
About the Authors
Professor David Wilson is one of the UK’s leading criminologists, a National Teaching Fellow and presenter of a number of crime-related TV programmes. Based at Birmingham City University where he is Founding Director of the Centre for Applied Criminology, his books for Waterside Press include Serial Killers: Hunting Britons and Their Victims 1960-2006 (2007) and Mary Ann Cotton: Britain’s First Female Serial Killer (2013).
Dr Elizabeth Yardley is a Reader in Criminology and Director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University. Her research focuses upon homicide and violent crime with a particular emphasis upon female serial killers and the role of digital communication media in homicide. Her publications include the Female Serial Killers in Social Context (2015 forthcoming, Policy Press) and the ‘Making Sense of Facebook Murder? Social Networking Sites and Contemporary Homicide’ ( Howard Journal , 2015), the first piece of research to explore the role of social networking sites in homicide.
Adam Lynes is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University and Deputy Head of the Homicide and Violent Crime (HaVoC) research cluster within the Centre for Applied Criminology. His research predominantly focuses on the significance of occupational choice for serial murderers and his publications include ‘Driving, Pseudo-Reality and the BTK: A Case Study’ (2015 forthcoming, Journal of Forensic Psychology and Offender Profiling , with David Wilson) and, drawing upon his degree in English Literature, ‘Zola and the Serial Killer: Robert Black and La Bête Humaine’ (Lynes et al , 2012, International Journal of Criminology and Sociology ). He has also studied and written about other forms of violent crime, including the act of family annihilation, in ‘A Taxonomy of Male British Family Annihilators, 1980–2012’ (2014, Yardley et al , Howard Journal ).
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Steve Hall for his warm words of encouragement; the librarians of a number of university libraries, especially of Birmingham City University and Cambridge University Library; everyone at Waterside Press; and our undergraduate and postgraduate students who have shaped our thinking about serial killers and the phenomenon of serial murder.
David Wilson would particularly like to thank Barbara McCalla and the peerless Bryan Gibson.
Elizabeth Yardley would particularly like to thank the PhD students in the Centre for Applied Criminology, whose interest in and enthusiasm for our work always drives our research forward.
Adam Lynes would especially like to thank his family for all their love, support, and encouragement. In particular for his parents who taught him the value of critical understanding and supported him in all his academic pursuits, and his grandmother, Brenda, whose love and support helped make his dreams and aspirations a reality.
The Author of the Foreword
Steve Hall is Professor of Criminology at Teesside University and the co-founder of the Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology. He is an internationally leading criminological researcher and theorist. His book Theorizing Crime and Deviance (Sage 2012) was lauded as ‘a remarkable intellectual achievement’ that ‘rocks the foundations of the discipline’.
Foreword
When I taught big core criminological theory modules to undergraduates I was often confronted with the fascination many students have for serial killing. They want to know why a small number of people do such horrific things to each other. The easiest way out of that particular challenge is to dismiss the whole issue as voyeuristic, sensationalist and too rare to be of significance, the stuff of vacuous ‘true crime’ magazines and therefore unworthy of the attention of a sophisticated discipline such as criminology. The criminological establishment issued stern warnings: to sensationalise extreme behaviour is to demonise individuals, or to misrepresent humanity by unduly emphasising its extremes and offering unwelcome support to the old conservative position that something wicked lies at the core of the human condition. In a post-war criminological paradigm that grew out of a critical stance towards labelling and authoritarian governance, some criminologists were convinced that to focus on serial killing was distasteful, politically dangerous and a distraction from the task of addressing the real issues, which of course should be the defence of individual criminals as victimised actors and the critique of the crimes of the powerful and their corporate