University of Houston criminologist Steven Egger is one of the world's foremost experts on serial killers, having compiled data on more than 1,300 of them. The author of The Need to Kill and, more recently, The Killers Among Us: Examination of Serial Murder and its Investigations, Egger has been a homicide investigator, a police consultant and the project director for the state of New York's computerized tracking system for serial murderers.
Neil Boyd is a professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., the author of six books, including The Beast Within: Why men are violent and a Vancouver reformer who has written extensively about heroin treatment initiatives and homicide investigations.
The start of the trial in Vancouver for Robert Pickton — a man accused of killing 26 mostly sex-trade workers — and the recent arrests in Britain of two men suspected of killing five Ipswich-area streetwalkers has once again focused attention on the murders of prostitutes.
Why do they seem to be singled out as targets? One study has suggested prostitutes are 40 times more likely than other women to be murdered. And what sort of person commits these crimes?
For answers, CBC.ca interviewed two of North America's leading experts in this field, Steven Egger, a criminologist at the University of Houston, and Neil Boyd of Simon Fraser University. Here are their thoughts.
Why are prostitutes such a target?
S.E. For a variety of reasons. The main one is that they are vulnerable and they are vulnerable because they are available. This provides relative anonymity for the killer because when you pick up a prostitute in an area where they ply their trade, everyone expects to see cars picking them up. No one pays much attention to the so-called Johns.
The other aspect is: Who is going to report a missing prostitute? If it's another prostitute, she may not have credibility with the police.
They are the most at-risk people for serial killers that I know of, at least in the U.S. and Canada.
Are all prostitutes at risk?
N.B. One of the first points that has to be made is that it is only certain kinds of prostitutes who have become a target. We have massage parlours and escort agencies in virtually every city and the women who work there engage in prostitution but they are protected by credit cards and the like.
Their customers know that if they commit violence, they could easily be tracked down. So the violence that does occur is against the most vulnerable women who are working as street-level prostitutes.
Is there anything else about their line of work, the symbolism of it for example, that makes them targets?
N.B. I think it can be seen as both a crime of opportunity as well as a symbolic crime. There are obviously opportunities for men who want to act with sexual violence against women. But I think these acts are also something of a symbolic statement about the perpetrator's attitudes toward women.
It is really in some sense an expression of male power, male rage taken out against the most vulnerable members of society because these are people who through a variety of reasons don't have the protections that most prostitutes do have.
S.E. It may simply be availability or it may be symbolic significance, or it may be a specific symbolic significance where the killer picks out blonds or redheads or something like that.
The greatest similarity I found among all serial killers, not just the killers of prostitutes, is the vulnerability of the victim. In almost all cases, we're talking about a victim who is available, who is from a powerless group of society and who tends not to have a lot of prestige.
Is there a common profile for those who commit these kinds of murders?
N.B. Generally speaking, they are mostly like other men in the penitentiary population. They are in their 20s, they come from working class or poor backgrounds. There is nothing that really separates them from the more general category of criminal offenders except for what they have done.
The crime identifies them but their characteristics are quite similar to the general penitentiary population.
That's also true of sex offenders. We tend to think of sex offenders as a unique class. But it's actually much more common for people who commit sex offences, except for pedophiles, to commit a wide range of offences than to specialize in a particular type of crime.
One thing you have to remember though is that 87 per cent of all sex offenders will not have been arrested for a sex offence prior to that first arrest. In other words, we face a pretty daunting challenge to comb through records of past offenders in order to find someone who is responsible for a given crime. Our better opportunities really lie with DNA.
S.E. One similarity that seems to be present among all serial killers is that they have had some traumatic event in their early childhood. It can be a physical event where there has been some head trauma or a psychological event where there has been some physical or sexual abuse or neglect.
The problem with looking at a profile of the serial killer is that they are produced in different ways. They have different backgrounds. As I tell my graduate students, by the end of the class they are going to know less about serial killers than about their own wives or husbands or friends, but what they are going to know is fact because there is a lot of mythology out there.
When you look at the most prominent, they all seem to be white males. Is this a cultural phenomenon?
S.E. That tends to be a bit of a myth also. A couple of colleagues and I have been doing some research on the myth of the white serial killer and we found that, at least between 1980 and 2005, between 15 and 20 per cent of serial killers were black.
Yes, that's still a minority percentage but it's much larger than most people think.
N.B. Almost invariably we are looking at white males. Obviously it has something to do with culture. Partly it is because we hear about it in the context of the modern developed world and that is primarily a white world.
So maybe it is just a population skew.
Is the rise of the serial killer a Western phenomenon?
S.E. No, it's an international phenomenon. It is more prevalent in the West, in the U.S., for a variety of reasons. One of the primary reasons is that we are a very mobile society and what this means is that we tend to make strangers of one another.
We've lost our sense of community and we don't really feel empathy or concern for people down the street so it makes it easier for a serial killer to operate.
N.B. We look in the historical record and we can find many examples of men killing prostitutes. The difference today is that there are a lot more offenders and victims just as a function of population growth and the fact that we have the technology to tell us about these events on a global scale.
Do you see a fundamental difference between these types of killers and school shooters for example?
S.E. Yes. When you're talking about a school shooter, you're talking about somebody who would be considered a mass murderer as opposed to a serial killer. You're also talking about somebody who would have had something in their immediate background that has caused them to blow up. We're generally talking about young people here.
In many cases, also, they are psychotic, they hear voices, they are delusional, whereas the serial killer tends to be a psychopath, which is different. Psychopaths are people who have no empathy for their victims. They treat their victims as objects, not as human beings.
And that plays directly into the choice of prostitutes as victims: They don't see the prostitute as being a person, as being somebody's daughter, somebody's wife, just as an object for the killer to use and throw away.
N.B. Serial killers often lead "normal lives." They are married, they don't appear to have these agendas of rage against the world. The targets are quite different, too. Here the targets are very pointed, very focused
What is it about serial killers that we can say they live "normal lives?"
N.B. I think it is like what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in The Tipping Point that we tend to think of human beings as having singular characteristics — they are honest, they are good — when in fact people are quite complex. A person might appear to be one thing to one person, then quite different in another context.
Some of the Scandinavian countries say they don't have this problem because they have legalized prostitution and areas where prostitutes can ply their trade. Is this a possible solution to this problem?
N.B. These are the kinds of things we have to explore. We have to explore ways in which the police can work together to protect these women. As I noted earlier, there is quite a stark difference between the people who work in escort agencies and massage parlours, who are really quite well-protected, and these other types of women prostitutes who are not.
S.E. The legalization and red zones may reduce these crimes to some extent because it provides less anonymity for the killer. But I don't believe there are no serial killers in the Scandinavian countries. All civilizations have experienced this to some extent or another.
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