Radford psychology professor studies serial killers

BY REX BOWMAN
Media General News Service
Published: July 30, 2008

RADFORD — Radford University psychology professor Mike Aamodt has spent years compiling a list of serial killers, and, after subtracting competent hitmen and bloodthirsty pirates, he reckons there have been at least 1,900 since the beginning of the 14th century.

They range from Joseph Kallinger, who claimed he was told by a floating head with tentacles to murder young boys, to Joe Ball, who killed between five and 14 waitresses at his Texas tavern and threw them into an alligator pit.

“There are so many different types,“ Aamodt said recently. “If somebody says, ‘Give me a profile of a serial killer,‘ we have to say, ‘That depends.‘ “
Working with more than 300 students in his forensic psychology courses over 15 years, Aamodt has created the Radford University Serial Killer Database. With 1,873 names, it is one of the largest ever constructed.

Aamodt said he is only now beginning to analyze the information his students have gathered and hopes to one day make the database publicly available. But already, he said, certain stereotypes are crumbling beneath the weight of the data.

For instance, think serial killers are super-intelligent schemers along the lines of the fictional Hannibal Lecter? Think again: The median IQ is 102, or about average. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was an exception, with an IQ once measured at 165. In general, according to Aamodt’s data, the smartest serial killers are the ones who use bombs: Their IQ is 126.

Buy into the conventional wisdom that serial killers are usually white males in their mid- to late-20s? They’re not: Only 18 percent fit that profile. (The FBI released a report this month debunking the stereotype; the report also noted that the racial diversification of U.S. serial killers generally mirrors the national population.)

Aamodt said he began asking students to put together what he calls “timelines” of murderers’ lives and crimes because it was a subject they seemed interested in. “It was pretty much driven by the students — my interests are kind of boring,“ said Aamodt, who added that statistics and common denominators among killers are what intrigue him.

Defining a serial killer generally as someone who has killed three or more people on separate occasions, the students gathered centuries’ worth of details on killers’ intelligence, upbringing, race, gender, age at the time of the first murder, type of victims, murder weapon, proximity of the crime scenes to their homes and sundry other data, such as whether they pleaded insanity at trial.

Heather Custer, one of Aamodt’s former students, said she was only mildly interested in serial killers when she was assigned to dig into the background of a man who preyed on elderly women. “This really got me interested,“ she said of the database. Now, she added, each Christmas she hands her husband a list of grisly nonfiction books to put under the tree. “He kind of laughs at it, but he does think it’s a little weird,“ she said. “I read strictly true-crime stuff when I read for pleasure.“

Custer, who now works with the mentally ill who face criminal charges, used the database to determine that serial killers are much more likely than the general U.S. population to have been abused in their youth.

Gathering the serial killers’ stories into one database has allowed Aamodt to group them into a variety of categories. For example, there are “black widows,“ women who kill a string of husbands, and “Bluebeards,“ men who kill a string of wives or lovers. There are thrill killers and lust killers, and “missionaries” such as Carroll Edward Cole, who believed he had to rid the world of promiscuous women.

There are “angels of death” who kill medical patients and the infirm. There are “visionaries” such as Herbert Mullin, told by voices he had to kill in order to prevent a catastrophic earthquake, and “cost cutters” such as Joseph Briggen, who killed 12 ranch hands when their wages came due. He fed them to his pigs.

“Our plan right now is to keep adding to the database and make sure it’s accurate, because there’s a lot of information we’re still missing,“ Aamodt said. He added that a detailed analysis of the data might not be available for a couple of years.

Rex Bowman reports from the Roanoke bureau of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.