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Choo and Choi: Defining and Explaining Serial Murders in the United States
Review Article

Korean J Leg Med 2020;44(1):1-6.

Published online: 8 January 2020

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7580/kjlm.2020.44.1.1

Defining and Explaining Serial Murders in the United States

Tae Myung Choo1, Young-Shik Choi2

1Department of Criminal Justice, School of Letters and Arts, University of North Georgia, Oakwood, GA, USA

2National 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

      Revised 24 October 20198 January 2020       Accepted 19 February 2020

Copyright © 2020 The Korean Society for Legal Medicine

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.

Keywords: Serial murder, Theory of murder, Crime analysis

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