Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas, and.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: So happy to be here, christ and you make it
sound so upbeat.
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: Let's let you jump right into it, since you're so
incredibly enthusiastic.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: So did it change format over time as that data
was entered by you and the students? How did it
all come together?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: So how many subjects are currently in the database, Mike,
what's the universe of people were looking at?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: That's a scary number.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: It's not the same thing at all.
Speaker 4: Though.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: It sounds like you miss your students in that regard.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: How often do you add new information to the database.
Is this a weekly thing, a daily thing, monthly?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: How does Wilmer move on to your database so quickly?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: So are you thinking going to end up with several
different subcategories?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 4: Sure, but to save your audience a lot of listening,
let me put it into categories.
Speaker 3: Perfect. That'd be great.
Speaker 4: 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?
Speaker 2: Can you explain the triad? I'm sorry for those of
our listeners who are not criminologists.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: This is pretty data intensive. How long is each entry
if it's complete, Does it go on for page after page?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: That's a good question. I think it's probably a mixture
of both.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
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Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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 Senior 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?
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: And far from a general category that would fit most
of the crimes committed.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: I think it is.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, Okay, that does make sense though. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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?
Speaker 4: Yeah, they don't exist. The mass killers don't exist in
our database.
Speaker 3: Oh they don't, Okay, don't.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: We would love to be able to help in any
way we can on that.
Speaker 4: How long do you.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: Oh, I enjoyed it. It was great to meet both
of you.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
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