This article is the second of a trilogy series on my signature theory on the origin of serial killers. In brief, in the first part I discussed how fixations in one or more or Freud’s psychosexual developmental phases plant the seeds of sexual and aggressive fantasies in a serial killer, which are then acted out […]
Attending a murder scene, a detective usually asks the question: Who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit this crime and once that is figured out, it narrows down the suspect list, usually to a single suspect, or no more than a few. The motive could be greed, lust, revenge, or rage and is […]
During the Middle Ages, the gruesome discovery of sporadic mutilated corpses of villagers, and the telltale footprints of a hound on the scene, raised the spectre of a werewolf at large. No-one in the village would ever have suspected that it could have been the cobbler’s son – an as yet unidentified serial killer – […]
If a talented team of scriptwriters had stretched their imagination and came up with the plot for a top-of-the-list crime tv series, they may have conjured up the incredible story of Thabo Bester and his girlfriend Dr Nandipha Magudumana, who pulled off a daring prison break. This con-artist and convicted rapist and murderer got […]
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, […]
Detectives can be commended for investigating and arresting serial killers, but in some cases, communities were being dismally failed by the system and innocent people were brutally killed. These deaths could have been prevented, had the killers not been considered too young! The case of Jeffrey Dahmer poses a good example on how the system […]
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 […]
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)
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 […]