ABSTRACT
When the throat of Victorian prostitute Polly Nichols was slashed in Buck’s Row on Bank Holiday, August 31, 1888, serial murder became part of our cultural lexicon (Rumbelow, 1988). Jack the Ripper was certainly not the first nor last of his type, but the unsolved mystery of the Whitechapel murders still symbolizes our inability to understand these dangerous predators. Serial murder is a frightening and perplexing phenomenon that has proven to be a difficult puzzle for both criminal investigators and criminological researchers. Despite being a rare event, this crime has a broad-based impact on the larger community (Jenkins, 1992a; Silverman & Kennedy, 1993). Fear, shock, repugnance, scientific curiosity, and morbid fascination are all common reactions to such cases (see Dietz, 1995). There are also growing concerns about the increase in the prevalence of these dangerous predators. It has even been suggested that serial killers are the quintessential criminal of a violent, postmodern society (Carputi, 1990; Richter, 1989; see Ellis, 1991; Kerr, 1992).
