The Significance of Old Ideas in Serial Murder Research

• In Event: Rare Homicide Types

Abstract

Mars and Nelkin, series editors of Leyton’s Ed.(2000, pg. xvi) SERIAL MURDER, found problems that preclude consensus in that field: (1) Senior researchers ignore each other’s works as if they did not exist. (2) There is no consensus about major issues, e.g. child abuse. (3) Police and academics shoplift old ideas “more or less at will . . . . Rampant in the field is the unscholarly and discourteous practice of ‘borrowing’ ideas and redeploying them as one’s own without pausing to acknowledge their source.” ASC’s new ethics code should stimulate criminologists to question anyone’s claim to originality unless evidence of early research is provided. A field that neither knows nor asks the research basis for major ideas is doomed to endlessly debate their meaning without ever understanding their utility. Therefore, anyone claiming authorship of old ideas or anyone wanting to know their basis, is warmly invited to attend. There, the following ideas can be discussed: multiple jurisdictions, overkill, early detection of victim linkage, calling cards, souvenirs, new methods of crime analyses; time spans between homicides (escalation), and a national data bank for systematic coordination and collation of information collected from a system of regional data banks.

Authors

• Barrie J. Ritter, Ritter Homicide Research

• Jack C. Ritter, House of Words