Serial killers come from different backgrounds, attain different levels of education, and hold various types of jobs. However, many serial killers do have at least one thing in common: the desire to communicate regarding their crimes. Killers from Jack the Ripper to the Son of Sam often provide clues to their identities, their motives--even their future targets--through crime scene notes, letters to the media, calls to police, messages scrawled on victims, and, increasingly, email and other technology. Here, Gibson takes a look at ten notorious serial killers, their crimes, their victims,...

The Axman of New Orleans specialized in killing grocers of Italian descent in the 1910s, apparently to promote jazz music. Dorothea Puente was a little old landlady who murdered her tenants, but kept cashing their government checks. The Manson Family terrorized California in the 1960s, as did the Hillside Stranglers a decade later. Twelve serial murder cases, occurring in eight decades between the 1890s and 1990s, had one thing in common: significant presence of the mass media. This book examines these specific cases of serial murder, and the way the media became involved in the...

"Serial Killing for Profit: Multiple Murder for Money" addresses a gap in the existing literature by documenting one dozen of the most notorious perpetrators of commercial serial murder murderers who kill to secure inheritances and pensions, to sell possessions or even the body itself, or as murderers-for-hire.

In these pages, readers will encounter some of the nation's most infamous and disturbing criminals, including "America's first serial killer," Herman Mudgett; Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the "Honeymoon Killers;" Los Angeles's "Night Stalker," Richard Ramirez; the "black...