About this Book

One source of information about solving serial murders has remained virtually untapped. It is the case law on serial murder convictions. Although the procedures used by police in homicide investigations have not been studied empirically, they are a common source of appellate issues raised by those convicted of murder and suspected of serial murder. Frequently, they illustrate that the successful completion of a serial homicide investigation is dependent on a combination of several so-called solvability factors. These are: (1) The quality of police interviews with eyewitnesses. (2) The circumstances which led to the initial stop of the murderer. (3) The circumstances which established the probable cause to search and seize physical evidence from the person and/or the property of the murderer; specifically, the solvability factors in each case. (4) The quality of the investigations at the crime scene(s) (5) The quality of the scientific analysis of the physical evidence seized from the murderer and/or his property and its comparison to physical evidence recovered from the victims and the homicide scenes. Based on the cases of five notorious serial murderers, each of whom was convicted of at least one murder and suspected in at least twenty other murders, this text focuses on the major investigative and legal implications exhibited by these cases. The identified implications are applicable to serial murder cases in general.