You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by doctor Mike Amott of the Bradford
University, Florida Gulf Coast University Serial Killer Research Database here to talk to us
all about serial killers. Mike, thank you so much for joining us.
So happy to be here, christ and you make it sound so upbeat.
I do. That's just a function of me being excited to be here and
really geeking out over this amazing data analysis that I have at my fingertips as
a result of this serial killer study. So, yeah, I'm a little
amped about serial killers. Maybe I need to tone it down just a bit.
I'll try to dial it back. Let's let you jump right into it,
since you're so incredibly enthusiastic, Mike, go ahead and start by talking
to us about how this database originated. I know you said that it started
as a classroom project. Tell us more as an educator. I love that.
I'm fascinated, So tell us all about the database and how it got
started. Sure, so, there was no intention of creating the database when
it when it first started, but I was teaching a course in forensic psychology
at Radford University, and the students were really interested, even back then,
this is the early nineties, even in serial murder. But what I found
was that there really weren't very many good sources of information. There were a
lot of true crime books, but there really weren't any good academic sources.
There was a profile that the FBI had put out about serial killers. You
had a lot of people speculating, but there really wasn't good data. So
what I did was. I had my students do a serial killer timeline.
So put them into groups of about three or four students, gave them a
true crime book on a serial killer, and told them basically to create a
timeline from when that serial killer was born all the way through until they died
or were convicted, and then to compare with their timeline and what their research
is showing how it compares to what we talked about in terms of aggression in
the classroom. And so we started off with a few of those. I
took them and throw in the firing cabinet, and then I started looking through
my filing cabinet realized I've got a lot of timelines. So I just stuck
them into an Excel sheet and it might not even been Excel back then.
I can't remember what the order was, but I think maybe Excel wasn't even
ready. Then just started putting them in there. And then students wanted to
know if they could do independent studies, to start doing more research, and
it just kept building and building, and then it got out to our local
news media that we had this database, and they were so interested in it.
We thought, let's make it a little more formal and it's just kept
growing. So did it change format over time as that data was entered by
you and the students? How did it all come together? It changed and
that we removed some fields and we added quite a few fields. And then
when the FBI changed the definition from three murders to two, we had to
go back and collect the people that we had thrown out because they had only
the two murders. But we keep adding the fields, and we add a
field, we have to go back and start filling in the thousands that we
hadn't looked for that piece of information for. I'll ask the question that I
think a lot of lay people who are not interested in true criming serial killers
might ask, what is the end goal of having a serial killer database?
That goal has changed a little bit. So when I first started, it
was really more to just give me good statistics to use while I teach my
class. And then it became let's go ahead and try to see if we
can get great statistics for everybody to use on serial murder. And then the
goal became, in addition to that, let's see if we can find some
ways to maybe help law enforcement be able to find or profile serial killers.
And then we got rid of that goal because it didn't look like that was
going to be very successful for a number of reasons. I think the goal
right now is just compiling the most accurate data that's available, So we don't
really have some of these misunderstandings about about serial killers. So how many subjects
are currently in the database, Mike, what's the universe of people were looking
at? So overall we have just short of fifty eight hundred serial killers in
there. Most of them thirty seven hundred are from the US and about twenty
one hundred are international. That's a scary number, it is. And we've
created a kind of a second database where we're looking at instead of just a
serial killers were looking at their victim and so that's limited for the most part
to the US and Canadian victims. But I'll tell you that was a huge
change in our database because what we realized is breaking really basically saying we need
to see each victim name for each serial killer really made the database more accurate
because we had people listed as, for example, having killed six. You
go through and try to find out who those six are, and you realize
there were only two. But somewhere along the way somebody in law enforcement said,
it wouldn't surprise me if they've killed six, and you realize that's not
proof. It's not the same thing at all. Though. One thing before
we move past these numbers. Is it significant to you that there are thirty
seven hundred serial killers in the database for the United States and twenty one hundred
internationally. Is that a matter of data access or does the US have more
serial killers on a per capita basis than every other country on the planet.
My take on this, and not everybody agrees with this take, but my
take on it, it's a matter of access, because if you look at
murder rates by country, the US falls about in the middle, and so
it doesn't make any sense that we would be about in the middle in terms
of murder rates but number one by so much in terms of serial killers.
It doesn't make a lot of sense. But then, if you think about
how people get into the database, they had somebody had to have killed two
or more people on two or more occasions. That had to be discovered,
It had to be reported someplace, had to be reported someplace in English,
because that's pretty much the only language I speak, and I barely speak that,
and so I think the thing is it's just so much easier to get
information about US serial killers than it is others. To give you a good
example of that, years ago, there was a master student out in California,
and I can't remember the name of the university, but she was from
Japan. So she spoke fluent Japanese and she did her thesis on Japanese serial
killers, and her thesis found so many serial killers that nobody had ever reported
before. But the difference was she spoke the language. She could look at
the Japanese newspapers and media sources and find things nobody else could. So,
even though it's a boring answer, it's a matter of it's more a matter
of access than it is something about the US. I think that's really the
explanation for it. And that's why I think when you interpret serial killer data
in general, you just really have to be careful about how you interpret things
because so much of it is access. What is your methodology for this in
terms of data collection, what are the metrics that you're looking at, How
do you get all your data, and who is doing the data entry?
Hopefully this doesn't all fall to you. It does for the most part,
these days. But over the years, it was mostly my students creating the
the data I started to put in the database. But again, as students
wanted to do independent studies, they would start to enter the the data.
I retired from I'm teaching about fifteen years ago. I'm a full time consultant
with a consulting FIRMAUNT at DC, and so I don't have the access to
the students that I used to. When we first started the database, the
Internet really didn't exist, and so pretty much it was a matter of looking
at true crime books, and there's such a difference in terms of accuracy of
those books. There are some really good true crime writers and there are some
horrible ones. One of my students got confused because the book she had they
listed three different birth dates for the killer in the same book. And that's
not really a good that. It doesn't give you much confidence in the inaccuracy
of the book. But then the students would go into the library and look
at microfiche and microfilm, of looking at major newspapers like the New York Times.
But then as the Internet came about, it started changing everything. And
if you think about today, we go through and we still look at true
crime books. We look at different media sources, but for example, ancestry
dot com has been a phenomenal source in terms of getting birth dates and death
dates, and race information and family information whether they served in the military.
Newspapers dot com is again one of those. We get these from these small
towns. We get access to all these different newspapers. So the methods has
changed in a little bit. But what we try to do is make sure
we have at least a couple of sources that are going to say the same
thing. For example, if we have the date of a particular murder,
we want to find out a couple of sources more for the birth dates,
same type of situation. Everything we have in the database is from public information,
so we don't have any secret access, let's say, to the FBI
files. We don't have psychiatrist reports that weren't part of the court proceeding,
and we have done that on purpose because we want to share our database with
other researchers, and if we had access to data that was private, it
would limit our ability to share that. So everything we have now is something
that anybody could get if you want to spend thousands and thousands of hours getting
it. It sounds like you miss your students in that regard. Oh I
do. I miss teaching quite a bit, But I just had they were
offering a early retirement option, the state was and this consulting firm had wanted
me to come on board full time. It was a tough decision, but
I'm glad I made it. But I really missed teaching, being with my
students. How often do you add new information to the database. Is this
a weekly thing, a daily thing, monthly? It's at least a weekly
thing, So at least once a week I'll go in and search to see
if there are new serial killers that have been identified, or if, for
example, from an old case, there's new information that came out, for
example that with the DNA technology now to beginning to identify victims that we had
to be listed as unknown in the past. And so those are the kinds
of things we update. But it's really it's a weekly process. When I
had called you, I think it was last week, to ask if you
wanted to appear in my mind ever murder, and I had mentioned the Wade
Wilmer Senior. You had said, oh, yeah, we already have him
in the database. So Oh my gosh, that's fast work. That's great
because it's really only been since January eighth that they made that announcement that he
is good for the murders of Robin Edwards, David Noveline, and Teresa Howell,
which does make him a serial killer absolutely. How does Wilmer move on
to your database so quickly? In this example, again just going through media
sources, it popped up in the headlines, and so I had his name
go through and verify that, in fact, the three people he was suspected
of killing there's a reasonable suspicion for that. You get a lot of ones
of people that you can't really put in because they suspect but there's not really
enough evidence to suggest that they did it. But right away the name goes
in. I spend some time trying to find whatever information I can find at
him, and then mark him down as a follow up because there'll be other
information that comes out. But he's one of those, for example, that
could go to ancestry dot com get the birth date information, get the death
information. You get all that stuff that wouldn't be in a newspaper article for
example, or a media source, but is available as soon as we knew
about him, which is a few months ago before the announcement, we had
done all that basic research with using ancestry in newspapers, dot com and other
sources, so we had a pretty decent address history, day of birth,
marriage, divorce, when his kids were born. But that's sort of thing,
so we had a sense of that. We're just pleasantly surprised that as
a newly minted serial killer, which by the way, is an expression we're
comfortable using because according to as you said, according to the FBI's criteria,
Alan Wade Wilmer Senior meets their criteria. Interestingly, the FBI, so far
and it's only been a month, they never call him a serial killer.
They seem to avoid terms like that quite often they do, and I think
that the fbis boxed themselves into a corner with their definition, because if you
think about two or more murders on separate occasions, think about somebody who's a
contract killer, they certainly fit the definition of a serial killer. So as
we find them, we'll put them in our database. We don't go searching
for the contract killers, but they would be in there. But those are
certainly different types of people than somebody that is killing homeless folks on the street.
The kind of the term I like to use instead of serial killer is
multiple event killer, and then I think a serial killer is going to be
a subdivision of that, because when that term first came out, it was
coined to describe people who killed in the series. And most of these multiple
event killers, again, they fit the definition of the FBI serial killer,
but they're not killing in the series. They might kill three people over a
thirty year period because they're angry, or they kill people over a period of
time because they're robbing banks, but they're different. They're not that serial killer.
And that's one of the things that I think that we're going to try
to do at some point is see if we can subdivide serial killers into different
types. We already have started that, but we haven't done any analysis on
that, and I think we're going to see some real differences in these kind
of these subtypes. For example, a person who is killing women and sexually
assaulting women is going to be very different from the person who is killing people
at seven to eleven. They're still they're going to be serial killers, but
they're not the same type of serial killer. And I think once that research
really starts again, we're already doing the categorization of those I think we're going
to see some really different results, different patterns. So are you thinking going
to end up with several different subcategories? Yes, however many that is,
I'm not sure whether it's going to be something like ten or twenty. I'm
not sure. But I think one of the reasons that profiling has not been
very successful is because all serial killers aren't the same. What it could be
that if you look at a certain type or subtype, that maybe they share
a lot more in common and that profile can be much more accurate, because
the current profile is certainly not not very accurate. I was taking a look
at the landing page for this study and it states that you utilize over one
hundred and eighty five data points multiple murderer methodology, victimology, and statistical analysis.
Can you talk about those one hundred and eighty five data points that you
look at? Sure, but to save your audience a lot of listening,
let me put it into categories. Perfect. That'd be great. Yes,
So we start off with the actual murders themselves, in terms of when they
began and when they ended. What cities they occurred in, what counties what
countries. We then go to a series of columns that describe childhood, So
when they were born, where they were born, who were they raised by,
Did they have problems in school? What type of education did they have
at the time of the first murder. Then going to the information about the
person themselves in terms of where they abused as a child, Did they have
the try, did they abuse drugs or alcohol? Can you explain the triad?
I'm sorry for those of our listeners who are not criminologists. The McDonald's
try. It basically postulates that people who were aggressive had three common experiences.
They were having bed wedding past the age at which you would expect bed wedding.
They were they were setting fires, and there was animal abuse, and
so that was pretty exciting when when it first came out, But like anything,
people thought that meant everybody that's a killer has those characteristics, and if
you have those characteristics, you're going to be a killer. And what it
turns out is that most of your killers and most murders don't have those characteristics.
They might have one, but they're not going to have all three.
And there are plenty of people who have those that don't become murders. But
if you look at the kind of the probability, those that have all three
characteristics are probably more likely to become violent than those that don't. But it's
not strong enough that you can predict with those. But if they have those
three characteristics, regardless of whether they're going to be violent in the future,
it's problematic in terms that they're going through psychological trauma. So it's not one
of those things that you ignore, but you don't instantly assume that they're going
to become a killer. Very interesting, So murder's childhood, emotional factors.
Any So those are the three main categories. Were there any others that you
take a look at. Sure, And then we go ahead and look at
the murders themselves in terms of how they were committed, whether, for example,
there was something such as necrophilia that occurred, what type of weapon was
used, who were their victims, And then it goes into the outcome of
when they were arrested, how many murders were they charged for, did they
confess, did they plead insanity? So it goes to pretty much every part
of their life, in every part of kind of the murder series. Now,
I would love to say we have every bit of that information for every
killer, but we don't. There are some things, for example, like
race and gender that we have information on for everybody, but then things like
were there abused as children we might have information on let's say twenty percent with
that. And that's a good example, by the way, with the child
abuse of a difficult variable because if you're reading the trial transcripts, if the
person was abused as a child, it's going to show up, most likely
in the sentencing part of the trial. But if they weren't abused, it's
not really going to be mentioned. So when you see that lack of it
being mentioned, you don't know if that's a no or just we don't know,
And so you have to just be and so we limit our entries to
ones that we know, and most of the ones it just isn't mentioned anywhere.
And then you have to be careful too. For example, like with
Arthur Shawcross, who was the Genesee River killer, he told all these stories
about being abused as a child. When they interviewed his parents. Of course,
his parents said didn't happen when they interviewed some relatives they said some of
it happened and some of it didn't. And that's what you deal with a
lot, and so you have to make some judgment calls on who are we
believing here, And we've changed several of those codes or ratings over the years
where we realize what we thought twenty years ago, there's evidence to suggests either
it did or didn't happen. This is pretty data intensive. How long is
each entry if it's complete, Does it go on for page after page?
Oh? No, it's an Excel spreadsheet. So every serial killer will have
one row in the database, and then they'll have hopefully entries in most of
the columns. And you can add more data as it becomes available. So
if you learn new things from an interview or a court transcript or a well
researched book, you may add additional data points as you go along. Oh
absolutely, yep. And then we have and this is where it's probably going
to get start sounding boring, but in the same file as the rest of
the database, we have separate tabs that will automatically calculate all the data Kristen
that you were looking at in the board. It's going to automatically update those
every time we add some new data, so it makes it makes it easier
to summarize, and it is fascinating. What we'll do. We'll put a
link to your most recent annual report into the show notes so that people can
take a look at it, or that the most recent one that people have
access to. I know it's not all publicly available. It was just fascinating
sitting there and combing through that because it is it is just so much interesting
data to take a look at. So how did the partnership with Florida Gulf
Coast University come about? Because this was originally it started at Radford. How
did that partnership come about? It was really interesting. There was a grad
student at Florida Golf Coast University, Kristin eLink Sherman, Laura so a long
name, but she was requested to access to the deity base to work on
her thesis. She was looking at from a remembering rite. It was the
relationship between military service and serial murder. And she got the idea that it
would be great to put this thing online where people could go in and have
access to it. And I thought maybe, and so they brought me down
to Florida Gulf Coast and did a to meet all their students and they were
really charged up about doing this, so let's do it. Dween Daubert was
the faculty advisor at the at the time, and so they took the database,
they went through and they try to confirm every entry in it, and
so we went back and forth about whether they found something wrong, whether I
thought it was actually wrong or not, or whether the their source was wrong.
So that went back and forth, and then they put that online and
people can try to get access it. Now the online version is way behind.
That's not hasn't been updated, and we're working right now with Florida Golf
Coast to try to update something. And we're actually starting a new partnership with
Norwich University in Vermont, and they've got some just really smart faculty and smart
people there that Elizabeth Gurri and Rachel Sickler that are going to take it to
the next level. So right now we're going to be working with them and
in Florida Golf Coast to try to bring this to the kind of the modern
times as opposed to my spreadsheet. Is there such a thing as a typical
user, like what are some of the examples of things that people might do
with the information and the database. So the typical user is either going to
be a college professor or a grad student working on, for example, a
thesis or a dissertation that has a particular question in mind that they're trying to
answer. So we'll provide the database to them and they will use what we
have but also add new information. For example, if they're going to only
be concentrated on one thing, for example, that they can maybe find things
that we didn't because we're concentrated on so many different variables, and then we
can add that to the database as well. We've had a few folks in
law enforcement that have asked for it. We thought it would actually we'd get
many more requests from law enforcement, but we haven't. Is that because people
don't know about it, or because they don't see how they can immediately relate
that to the work that they're doing. That's a good question. I think
it's probably a mixture of both. You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll
be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at mindover
Murder. So when you hear about a new serial killer, like Allen Wade
Wilmer Senior. We talked a little bit about some of the basic data that
you can put into the database for them, so date of birth, so
on and so forth. What other sort of information are you looking for when
you add a new killer to the database. Would it benefit you, for
example, to talk to an investigator that's worked on the case, would as
long as it was data that we can publish. Again, so if we
talked to an investigator said, now this is off the record, but that's
not going to help us because we have to have things that are publicly available.
Where I think it comes in handy or where information is to be helpful
is when we added the victims section. We've added a lot of columns involving
what went on at the actual murder site. For example, was a person
bound, was their torture, was their overkill? And that can be really
difficult information to get. But that some of that information is still very public.
It's just maybe something we haven't come across, and so that's the type
of information that would be helpful. A lot of that's just not available because
they hold it back, or if there's not enough for a trial. For
a trial, if there's not really an appeals. It doesn't show up very
easily. To be able to read that, you'd have to be able to
go get the original documents, and that's more work than eveninem willing to spend.
Is there a difference in what you feel you can put into the public
record depending on whether or not a serial killer is alive or dead. For
example, Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. Died in twenty seventeen. The FBI and
the Hampton, Virginia Police Department have confirmed through DNA that he's responsible for the
murder of at least three people, and they're looking into more. Kristin and
I aren't terribly shy about using his name publicly and saying he's involved in these
murders, whereas if someone's alive, maybe they're incarcerated. But are you as
comfortable sharing data about their crimes? I am? But the reason I am
is because we have a column where we will label the person as, for
example, serial suspected, serial accused, And so various researchers, for example,
have made the decision they're only going to use those that have been convicted
in their study that being accused of being suspected is not going to be enough.
With that kind of hedge, we feel a little bit more comfortable where
we're very careful and don't release to very many researchers is our victim data,
because it might be, for example, that a particular victim was a prostitute,
at least that's what the police labeled that person or the media labeled that
person. And we've had instances where people said, I see in their database
that so and so would kill prostitutes. Well, he killed my daughter and
she wasn't a pute, and go back and look at the individual victims,
and that's exactly right. Let's say eight of the nine were prostitutes that the
one person actually wasn't. But when you're trying to define what's that person's basic
motive or who are they killing, it was prostitutes. So I'm really gun
shy about sharing victim data. For example, that would never go to a
grad student. That would have to be to an academic that we trusted in
that agreed to be very careful. And if you have we have several people
that we are close with in the community who have survived serial killers. If
someone has survived an attacked by a serial killer, do they go into the
victim database or is there like a whole separate set of data to go with
that. That's a great question. Right now, the only victims we have
are ones that were killed first a serial killer. We might list them as,
for example, two murders plus attempts, So it may be that they
had three unsuccessful attempts. And we think that's important because again we find researchers
don't feel comfortable with the FBI two or more. They want to maybe go
three or four, and so they can then decide is two murders and two
attempts enough for them to do that. I want to get into some of
the nitty gritty questions that I came up with as I was doing my deep
dive into the data analysis here. So I'll start with something kind of general,
and then we'll move into more specifics. What were some of the most
interesting or surprising pieces of data that really stood out to you as you went
and started combing over the database. I think the biggest surprise, this is
one I've mentioned previously, is that there's so many types of serial killers.
We got just that one term that wasn't expecting to see that because when we
started the database. That term was you conjure up like a Ted Bundy,
that all of these serial killers we find are going to be Ted Bundy.
They're not. And so that was the biggest surprise and the thing I think
that's complicated again some of the data analysis the most is until we really get
these types figured out, these subtypes, we're not going to make as much
progress as we wanted. Another thing I found that was surprising was how inaccurate
that kind of common profile was. So the common profile is that it's a
serial killer, was it's a white male in their mid to late twenties.
So that profile, if you look to say it's nineteen ninety, it's seven
percent fit that profile. That's not a much of a profile when it's seven
years old and far from a general category that would fit most of the crimes
committed. Yeah, so that's one And one of the reasons I think that's
particularly important is that you get somebody who might be, for example, fifty
five years old and is black, and people would say that can't be one
of our suspects because they don't fit the profile. Nobody fits your profile,
so you have to be careful about about that. Another thing that I found
really interesting was that there's a thought that a stereotype that serial killers are going
to have a certain type of victim, So I'm only going to kill women,
I'm only going to kill somebody with a certain race or age. Turns
out that only thirty seven percent of serial killers kill people that are the same
sex, the same race, the same age. And so again, if
you're law enforcement and you're trying to determine, trying to link different murders,
and he said, couldn't be this person couldn't be linked because they were shot
as opposed to stab or this was a male and most of the victims are
women. It turns out that linkage is just not there. And I think
when you talked to Thomas Hargraved, he probably found this. He probably told
you some of the same things. The linkage is a very difficult thing to
do. I was pushing back on this issue today regarding discussions in our social
media pages on the Colonial Parkway murders. People are looking for patterns which may
or may not be there. But for example, I've got several people and
these are well meaning folks, are supporters of ours and are interested in these
cases. But for instance, I've got several people insisting, Oh, it's
very clear that Wilmer likes dark haired women. Yes, there are some victims
with dark hair, but in the mix there's some blondes and redheads too.
And he has killed both women and men, and he's killed there's one single
woman and at least one straight couple. And he's suspected of killing a lesbian
couple, my sister and her girlfriend. Now that hasn't been proving yet,
but my point is, boy, everybody wants to say this particular killer kills
this particular kind of person in this way, and both Kristin and I are
trying to respectfully push back on that because the profilers that we've met with and
we've learned a lot and they're fascinating people. Oh my gosh. Yeah,
it's been so interesting for us to have opportunities to sit down with these folks,
both on and off the air. They're saying the same thing that you
are, Mike, which is that we can't keep insisting that serial killers kill
the same type of victim in the same type of way, under the same
circumstances. That just doesn't seem to be anything close to the way profilers in
twenty twenty four are seeing things. I agree completely, and that's the problem
though, when you have something that was published at say, thirty forty years
ago, it doesn't go away, It just keeps it hangs on, regardless
of what the kind of the current facts are. It makes something else that
I found very interesting, And I'm wondering if some of this question can be
answered by the idea that maybe there just wasn't enough reporting going on during these
decades. There is a massive jump in the number of serial killers between nineteen
fifty and nineteen eighty. You went from ninety active serial killers in nineteen fifty
to sixty to two hundred and fifty one to six hundred seventy to eight hundred
and twenty three in nineteen eighty. Is that a reporting issue or were there
really just a massive jump in the number of serial killers in this country in
those decades. I think a big part of it a reporting issue. So
the term serial killer was coined depends on who you believe, but was coined
in for the most part in the nineteen seventies. So if you're doing a
search for serial kill like using the term serial killer, you're not going to
pop up with something in the nineteen fifties or sixty so you have to look
for headlines that might be killed two, killed three, and so we meticulously
go through when you use all those kind of combinations to try to find those.
Now, it makes sense that serial killers means would rise in the fifties,
sixties, and seventies because the interstate system, there's more access to the
country, and if they're killing in different states, it's more difficult to perhaps
to be to be identified and caught. But I think so much of it
is a reporting issue that definitely makes sense. I'm writing that down about the
interstate system because that is not something that I had previously thought of. It
was interesting to think about the ways that the country was changing during those time
periods that might lead to those numbers changing. I'm making sure I'm putting that
down. I guess in the same sort of vein why is it that the
numbers of serial killers have trended steadily downwards since nineteen eighty Is that because law
enforcement is getting better at tracking them in solving cases. Is it just that
maybe serial killers are getting a little tired and taking a break and going into
retirement. I think there's several things that are going on there. One is
certainly the law enforcement's gotten better in terms of things like DNA being able to
link murder, so that's certainly part of it. Technology, though, I
think, is another one of those things that has changed. For example,
if you think about serial killers that are black widows, so those are predominantly
women who kill spouses for usually for money, But there are other reasons as
well. If you go back to, for example, nineteen twenty or nineteen
thirty, somebody could kill a spouse, move to another state, kill a
spouse, still get the insurance money. Where today all these computers are,
the databases are linked, it would be very difficult to try to get insurance
on a third spouse that was mysteriously killed. So I think the technology is
there. When you think about hospitals serial killers who kill their patients, the
software is out there now that you have expected death rates for every type of
illness, and when those death rates exceed a certain level, it's flagged.
So those are some of the reasons. But I think there's really two main
reasons that are responsible for this decline. One is change in parole. If
you look at the seventies and eighties, for example, where the serial killer
rates were highest, there was a lot of pressure to parole people, the
prisons were overcrowded, there was kind of a movement toward prison reform. So
we're releasing people then that would maybe become serial killers. An interesting fact is
that in our database, eighteen percent of the serial killers in our database had
killed, gone to prison and been released. And so if you are more
strict on parole, I think that's one of the reasons people which we are
these days. I think that is one of the explanations. And the other
one is there are just fewer high risk behaviors that people engage in today.
So when I think about when I was growing up, I rode my bike
everywhere, I hitchhiked, I picked up hitchhikers, I walked to elementary school.
Today, there are no parents that are going to let you do that.
There are very few people who would hitchhikers hitch hikers. And so we
did an analysis of comparing in the seventies and eighties the percentage of murders that
were serial killers, serial murders that were of high risk behaviors such as hitch
hiking, and helping people who with stranded motorists with the ones from the last
two decades, and there's such a drop. It's a huge drop. And
when you think about cell phones, thirty years ago, if your car broke
down, you'd either have to get in a car with somebody or have them
go to the gas station to use a payphone. Now you're not going to
let anybody in your car. You're not going to get in their car.
You're going to use your cell phone call for help. And so I think
a lot of those high risk behaviors have changed. A few days ago,
my partner Pamela and I were driving along the country road and there was a
pickup truck parked next to the road on this kind of straight, quiet stretch.
The hazard drawn on and we didn't see anybody in the vehicle. But
then a couple one hundred yards down the road, and this is wintertime,
snowy and cold, there's a woman walking along on the road. We stopped.
I tried to let Haamla be visible, so she leaned forward. But
we just stopped briefly to ask if the woman was all right, and she
smiled and said she was, and it looked like she was actually out for
a walk. And I'm not even sure that was her truck. Necessarily,
she told us she was fine and she was just out for a walk on
a beautiful winter day. We just wanted to make certain that she wasn't out
there in the boonies without a cell phone or whatever. So she smiled,
and she seemed accepting of the fact that we'd made this offer of assistance.
In listening to you just now, Mike, I'm thinking maybe that's increasingly rare.
I think it is. Yeah. Absolutely. Do you have enough information
yet to draw any conclusions on how the pandemic affected the number and type of
serial killers? I realized we're really barely out of the pandemic. Has there
been any information that you can lean about how that affected serial killers? And
there are activities not at this point. One reason would be is that there
have not really been a lot of serial murders over the last few years,
which is a good thing, but it's a bad thing for data, so
it would be difficult to do that. There's a lag period really between oftentimes
the serial killings and then when they're arrested and whether it gets announced. So
I would say it'll be at least a decade before we could start to address
that. Question. Oh wow, Okay, that does make sense though.
Absolutely. Do you feel like the advances in forensic technology and manly the things
we've talked about over the last few minutes have discouraged people who might have exhibited
these behaviors in the past. That's a great question, and I've had those
conversations with colleagues, and my initial response to you is, I don't know,
because it can go both ways, right. It can be now that
I know what these advances and forensics are, I'm going to avoid leaving fingerprints.
I'm going to avoid leaving DnaB and so it could be to encourage some
that think that they can avoid it, or for some of them, it
may be They're going to catch me, so I'm not going to do it.
And that would depend, I think on the again, like the subtype
of serial killer, because there are going to be some killers that they haven't
need to kill, and they're going to probably kill no matter what. But
I think some of these ones that maybe kill for financial gain that may have
slown that pace down a little bit. Just occurred to me when you were
talking earlier about subdividing different types of killers. Are you eventually going to have
a different database for mass shooters and spree shooters. Is that going to become
a whole separate database or are they just going to exist on the serial killer
database? Yeah, they don't exist. The mass killers don't exist in our
database. Oh they don't, Okay, don't. And I know that there
are several researchers that have developed databases on mass killers, and so I think
that's well taken care of by some other folks. The one that was more
difficult for spree killers because again with the FBI basically said that they don't really
distinguish between cereal and spree in terms of the motives and those types of things,
and so we will include those but labeled them as within our database as
spree and again, researchers can make their own decision about whether they want to
include them or not. One of the things we've tried to do is be
overly inclusive and then let researchers who use the database make their decisions about who
stays and who goes, and whether they have to have a certain type of
motive or not. Do you know if any serial killers who are currently incarcerated
have ever been permitted to access the database? I know that there are people
that are currently incarcerated that do have internet access that actually have made use of
their time. But I didn't know if they ever had looked themselves or other
people up in the database. To have access, they would have had to
make a formal request, and if we saw, for example, that it
was coming from a prison, it would be declined. But it doesn't mean
that again that they don't can't get somebody else to request it for them.
I've noticed that I've had several requests from students where I've said, yeah,
we'll give you this part of the database. Here's the condition, so you
need to agree to those and please copy your advisor on the email and the
way I can look up the advisor make sure they exist. I've had several
times where the student didn't get back. I thought, yes, because it's
not for a class project. That must mean you have people trying to access
the database just for I'm interested in serial killers, but not in an academic
way. What we do and the one where I struggle with now is I
get requests from students who are in data science programs, so they need a
database to be able to do a class project for data science, and they
think serial killers are interesting, but they're not really trying to study serial killers,
and so in those situations, I'll usually ask them what fields do you
want and give them maybe a smaller number of fields. We don't give them
the whole thing, and then I don't give them the names of the serial
killers. That way they can run their data and not worry about privacy aspects.
Mike, what can we do to help you with data on Alan Wade
Wilmer Senior so that we can round out his entry in your database? We
want to give you as much help as possible, because obviously we have invested
interest in his activities. So tell us how we can help you. We
would love to be able to that's and I appreciate that. Probably the easiest
thing would be if I sent you both the victim and the serial killer data
that we already have. Have you take a look to see if there are
fields that you can fill in that I have blank, and that would be
great perfect. We would love to be able to help in any way we
can on that. How long do you see yourself continuing to do work on
the databasis? Is just going to be an all the time thing? Or
is this your baby and you're invested in it. It's my baby, and
I'm invested in it, so I will all continue to do it. But
I think that's why the kind of the relationships or the partnerships with Florida Gulf
Coast and Norwich are important because they can take it to a different level.
So I'm going to still work on it because it's fun. It's like being
a little detective. And it's terrible when you get excited because you found a
birth date, but it makes my day, and so I'll continue to do
that even after I retire. But I think that again, with those two
universities, they're going to take it to that next level. Doctor Mike ah
Mottz, formerly of Redford University, the inventor, shall i say, of
the Radford University of Florida Gulf Coast University Serial Killer Research Database. Mike,
thank you so much for joining us today and lending us your considerable expertise.
We appreciate it. Oh, I enjoyed it. It was great to meet
both of you. Thank you so much. That is going to do it
for this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero
and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
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