ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of serial murder can be found in many historical periods, and perhaps the most famous case of all—that of Jack the Ripper—occurred in London as long ago as 1888. At the end of the nineteenth century, Krafft-Ebing published a pioneering account of a group of serial sex-killers from several European nations (1978:53–80), and other such syntheses appeared in the 1920s (Douthwaite 1929). During the present century, there have been many celebrated cases of what were then known as mass murderers, such as Ed Gein and Albert Fish in the United States, and the Moors Murderers or the Yorkshire Ripper in Great Britain (Williams 1967; Harrison 1986). However, perceptions of this type of crime changed rapidly in the early 1980s, when American authorities drew attention to what appeared to be a rapid proliferation both of multiple-murder cases, and of the number of victims involved in each.
