DR. MICKI PISTORIUS

Psychologist, Author & Profiler

Category: Articles

Anti-Stalking Laws – Lightweight Deterrents?
Jun 6 2024
Articles

Anti-Stalking Laws – Lightweight Deterrents?

The series Baby Reindeer spotlights the predicament of thousands of victims of stalkers, who find themselves helpless against an unsolicited onslaught of a stalker. Stalking is a global phenomenon.  It was only in the late 1990’s in California that formal stalking laws were first promulgated, but it took years to catch on in other countries, […]

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Why do Serial Killers return to the Scene of a Crime?
May 8 2024
Articles

Why do Serial Killers return to the Scene of a Crime?

The aphorism that a criminal always ‘returns to a crime scene’ features in literature in Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment  of 1866, Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet 1887 and in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links 1923.  Do serial killers return to their crime scenes? Yes, in my experience they do, for various different […]

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History repeats itself with South African serial killers The rustic peaceful ambience of Wynberg in Cape Town was brutalised in the 1940’s by Salie Lingevelt, a serial killer who randomly bludgeoned women to death in their homes (Public Domain)
May 8 2024
Articles

History repeats itself with South African serial killers

Revisiting historical South African serial killer cases, it seems as if someone discovered the script of an old case and re-enacted it out 50 – 60 years later.  Episode 6 of the television series Catch me a Killer, depicts the Cape Town Prostitute whom I profiled in 1996 and it is uncanny how many similarities […]

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Serial killers and Parole Open Breakwater Prison Door in Cape Town. (Lennon Fletcher/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
Mar 27 2024
Articles

Serial killers and Parole

To any Police Department, the cost of launching a serial killer investigation is excessive and often not budgeted for. It comprises extra manpower, overtime, setting up an operational room, vehicles, helicopters and gasoline, processing multiple crime scenes, deployment of alternative resources such as profilers, artists for reconstructing faces of unidentified victims, expensive DNA tests and […]

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A person killing more than two people is not necessarily a serial killer The body of Jack the Ripper’s las known victim, Mary Jane Kelly. Although she was eviscerated, the modus operandi shows planning, and concealment so Jack would have been an organized serial killer in my opinion. (Public Domain)
Feb 3 2024
Articles

A person killing more than two people is not necessarily a serial killer

Many people automatically assume when someone kills more than two people, he / she is a serial killer.  This is usually not the case, but the press love to sensationalize headlines with ‘serial killer’ as clickbait. It is the deep subconscious psychological motivation that drives and defines a serial killer – not the number of […]

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