Serial Killers Not New To History

January 17, 2005 -- "Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" a book by Peter Vronsky recently published by Penguin Berkley Books, traces the history of serial homicide throughout history. Vronsky looks at the myth that serial killers are a modern phenomenon linked to urbanization. While we often think of Jack the Ripper in London in the 1880s as the "first" serial killer, Vronsky cites numerous cases in Germany, France, Spain and Italy of similar serial predators in the 1600s and 1700s. ( See: www.petervronsky.com )

One of the early cases Vronsky looks at is the trial of Jean Grenier in France in 1603, a fourteen-year old boy accused of murdering and cannibalizing several children. Grenier claimed that he was a werewolf, but the court rejected his defense stating that "It has been observed that real wolves tear with their claws, and werewolves tear with their teeth, whereas men know how to despoil girls they wish to eat of their dresses without tearing them." The court ruled that Grenier was not a werewolf but "possessed by demons"-an insanity plea of the time. Instead of being put to death, Grenier was confined for life in a monastery.

Vronsky suggests that tales of werewolves and vampires might really be about serial killers. Even the eighth century English epic "Beowulf" features a description of a character named Grendel hauntingly similar to that of a modern serial killer. Grendel had been killing people by night over a period of twelve years and "grieves not at all for his wicked deeds."

Vronsky reminds us that the term 'serial killer' is only twenty-years old. He points out that the words serial killer do not even appear in Ann Rule's 1980 ground breaking true crime book about Ted Bundy, "The Stranger Beside Me." In 1980, serial killers were still described as "mass murderers", a term reserved today for murderers who commit multiple killings in one frenzied episode.

It has been commonly thought that serial murders were rare until the 1970s and 1980s when an "epidemic" rise of serial killing swept through the USA. Vronsky cites studies, however, showing that serial killer epidemics have hit the USA previously between 1911-1915 and 1935-1941. The difference was that in the 1980s, the Justice Department was lobbying Congress for funding to expand the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit at the same time that missing children's program advocates were also lobbying for funding. It was in the interest of the Justice Department to highlight and even exaggerate the extent of the serial murder "epidemic" and to link it to missing children to secure the funding it was seeking at the time.

As for the actual term 'serial killer', Vronsky definitively explores its use in the past and the claims of former FBI agent and profiler Robert Ressler to having coined it while guest lecturing police officers at Bramshill in England.

One thing Vronsky does point out is that serial killing and sexual homicide in early history were frequently crimes of leisure and excessive wealth and power. He looks at the Roman Coliseum as a form of serial killing for the entertainment of the mobs. He explores the career of aristocrat serial child murderer, Gilles de Rais (who was also Jeanne D'Arc's former bodyguard) and the killings by Countess Elizabeth Bathory in Hungary who was reputed to have bathed in her victims' blood. Vronsky points out that today, some serial killers precisely seek the kind of unlimited power of life and death over their victims that ancient Roman despots had.

As the world became modernized and average people had time to think about things other than how to survive starvation, plague or barbarian invasions, some also had increasing leisure time to start dwelling on sexual and murderous fantasies.

The rise of large cities also made the offender more anonymous, Vronsky explains. He points out that the early migrating serial killers were often captured because small villages quickly identified and focused on a stranger in their community, while those who killed victims in their own tiny communities were quickly linked to them. It was in big cities that serial murders like Jack the Ripper's began to remain unsolved.

The press also had much to do with the perception of serial killers. Jack the Ripper, whose crimes in 1888 still grip our imagination, committed his murders in the media center of its time: London. Newspaper headlines breathlessly covered his killings. But the twenty similar unsolved mutilation murders of women in Atlanta between May 1911 and May 1912, the first seven killings committed like clockwork every Saturday night, remain forgotten because they did not happen in a press center like New York or London. The fact that the victims were light-skinned Afro-American women also played a role in the newspapers' relative lack of interest in the crime, a situation Vronsky suggest persists even today.

It really was not until the term 'serial killer' was picked-up by the media in the early 1980s that the notion of serial homicide as something new and unique was identified in the public's perception. What really was new was the term, not the thing itself.

"Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters" is a definitive 430-page book covering the historical, cultural, psychological and investigative aspects of serial homicide around the globe from the Roman Empire to the Washington Beltway and the Green River murders.

Peter Vronsky is currently completing his doctorate in history at the University of Toronto and is a former international investigative documentary producer.

For more information or to contact the author: www.petervronsky.com

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

Peter Vronsky

New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2004.

432 Pages, Illustrated

ISBN: 0425196402

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