kjlm The Korean Journal of Laboratory Medicine Korean J Leg Med 2383-5702 2383-5710 The Korean Society for Legal Medicine 10.7580/kjlm.2020.44.1.1 kjlm-44-1 Review Article Defining and Explaining Serial Murders in the United States ChooTae Myung 1 ChoiYoung-Shik 2 Department of Criminal Justice, School of Letters and Arts, University of North Georgia, Oakwood, GA, USA National Forensic Service, Wonju, Korea Correspondence to Tae Myung Choo Department of Criminal Justice, School of Letters and Arts, University of North Georgia, 3820 Mundy Mill Rd., Oakwood, GA 30566, USA Tel: +1-615-796-3309 Fax: +1-706-867-2670 E-mail: tae.choo@ung.edu 12020 812020 441 16 24102019 08012020 19022020 Copyright © 2020 The Korean Society for Legal Medicine 2020 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract

Serial murder cases in the United States, due to the fact they are rare in numbers and each case has complex nature of the crime, have presented challenges to law enforcement officers and investigators. Academic scholars also have faced obstacles explaining causes of murder within a specific theoretical framework. A steadily rising number of serial murders in recent years prompted this paper to examine the nature of serial murders and their causes in search of answers to questions of ‘who they are’ and ‘why they commit such crimes’ Reviewing research studies on serial murder and/or empirical tests of typology of serial murder provided a mixed results and presented a difficulty of classifying serial murders into mutually exclusive categories.

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