Why We Love Serial Killers Read Online Free PDF Page A

against society by a desperate and fatalistic individual who has no intention of going away quietly or returning to kill another day.
    In the vernacular of contemporary popular culture, an act of mass murder is frequently referred to as “going postal.” This expression derives from a series of incidents dating back to 1983 in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed their managers, fellow workers, and members of the police and the general public in acts of mass murder. Between 1986 and 1997, more than forty people were gunned down by postal workers in at least twenty separate incidents of workplace violence. For example, in one of the earliest and most deadly of such incidents, fourteen USPS employees were shot and killed andsix others wounded at a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, by Patrick Sherrill, a postman who then committed suicide by shooting himself in the forehead. This incident occurred on August 20, 1986.
    Another classic example of mass murder is the Virginia Tech massacre, a tragic school shooting, which took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. In this mass murder, a very troubled student named Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed thirty-two people and wounded seventeen others in two separate blitz attacks which occurred approximately two hours apart on the Virginia Tech campus. Cho ended his murderous rampage by turning his gun on himself and committing suicide. In addition to the seventeen Cho wounded, another six people were injured while escaping from classroom windows during the attacks. The Virginia Tech massacre is the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in US history.
    The death toll in the Virginia Tech massacre exceeds that of the deranged James Holmes, who killed twelve people and wounded seventy others in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012. James Holmes was motivated to commit mass murder by grandiosity and a pathological belief that society did not appreciate his self-perceived genius. His identification with the Joker character (a homicidal psychopath) in the Batman film The Dark Knight demonstrates his profound paranoia and narcissism. Holmes was hospitalized after attempting suicide several times while in jail in November 2012. After much deliberation, psychiatric evaluation, and the prosecutors’ announcement that they would seek the death penalty, Holmes pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity on June 4, 2013. His trial date is still pending at this time.
    Spree Killers
    While mass murder is manifested in one catastrophic event and serial homicide involves at least three murders separated by an emotional cooling off period, spree killing is comprised of multiple homicides committed at two or more locations with almost no time break in between the events. Stated differently, spree killing involves the murder of multiple people at different locations over a short period of time in which there is no cooling off period between murders. The maximum duration between murders in spree killing is generally considered to be seven days. The perpetrator in a spree killing often, but not always,knows his/her victims and frequently targets either family members or romantic partners. This is very different than serial killers who are much more likely to stalk and target complete strangers. I discuss the serial killer’s pattern of selecting prey in chapter 5.
    One of the most infamous killing sprees in recent history involved the Beltway sniper attacks that took place in October 2002 in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. During a span of twenty-three days that gripped the public in fear, ten people were killed and three other victims were critically injured in separate locations throughout the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and along Interstate 95 in Virginia. What initially appeared to be random killings perpetrated by a lone shooter in a white van actually turned out to be the work of