8th International Investigative Psychology Conference
KEYNOTE TALK: LINKING SERIAL MURDER
By
Dr. C. Gabrielle Salfati
Establishing behavioral consistency in serial homicide offending behavior is essential when linking homicides together and to a common offender. There are two requirements when establishing criminal behavioral consistency: 1) that the criminal behaviors of one offender are similar across all offenses within their series of crimes and, 2) that these behaviors are distinct from those enacted by other serial offenders who commit the same type of crime.
Of pertinent issue is whether one can distinguish behavioral consistency by examining individual serial homicide behaviors, or if a theme based approach is a more effective alternative. On one side of this debate is the idea that an investigator should be able to look at a homicide crime scene, and identify individual crime scene behaviors which are unique to a particular offender. From here, if a second homicide occurs, the investigator can look to see if these same individual behaviors exist in the new homicide and if so, one can infer that there is a strong possibility that the two homicides in question are linked. This is often referred as the signature approach. On the other hand, more recent research in the area of Investigative Psychology has shown that a more thematic approach would lend itself better to analyzing data which is often muddied by situational influences.
Little empirical research to date has however examined the efficacy of either approach in serial homicide. In order to determine the efficacy of either approach to investigations, the notion of signatures and thematic approaches needs to be further evaluated and empirically tested.
The current talk gives an overview of the latest research on linking serial homicide, and discusses both theoretical, methodological and issues related to applied investigations, and aims to detangle and test some of the current beliefs regarding the consistency of offending behaviour in serial homicide.