Where did the term ‘serial killer’ come from?
The term serial killer might have been coined by Robert Ressler, who says that he felt the term stranger killings was inappropriate because not all victims of serial killings were strangers. Ressler says he was lecturing in England in 1974 at Bramshill, the British police academy, where he heard the description of some crimes as being in series - a series of rapes, arsons, burglaries, or murders. Ressler days that the description reminded him of the movie industry term for short episodic films shown on Saturday afternoons during the 1930s and 1940s: serial adventures. Each week, juvenile matinee audiences were lured back to movie theaters, week after week, by an inconclusive ending in each episode - a so-called “cliffhanger.” Ressler recalled that no episode had a satisfactory conclusion, and every time one ended, it increased rather than decreased the tension in the audience. Likewise, Ressler felt, serial killers increase their tension and desire after every murder to commit a more perfect murder - one that is closer to their fantasy. Rather than being satisfied when they murder, serial killers are instead agitated toward repeating their killing in an often-unending cycle. That, Ressler maintains, was a very appropriate description of the multiple homicides that he was dealing with and it’s history behind the term serial killer. (Some dispute Ressler, claiming that others used the term earlier. Michael Newton says author John Brophy used the term in 1966 in his book The Meaning of Murder. Ann Rule credits Pierce Brooks with coining the term serial killer. But in the text of Rule’s 1980 seminal book of Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, which introduced the current concept of a serial killer, the term itself never appears. Bundy is still described as a “mass murderer.” It does not seem, however, that Ressler at least introduced it into popular usage in the law of enforcement community, even if others might have used the term previously.)




