SERIAL KILLER DEFINITION SERIAL

SERIAL KILLER DEFINITION SERIAL

I do not know who the actual journalist was but it is the earliest use of the term I could find.Īnd yes serie-moordenaar or seriemoordenaar translate into Serial Killer.Over the years, researchers and law enforcement professionals have tried to achieve uniformity in the use of the term “serial murder,” but such efforts have rather proved futile. The murderer is being described as a “serie-moordenaar” in the article. The film is about an Australian sheep ranger who falls in love with a Russian princess who’s admirers keep being murdered. In 1927 an unknown Dutch journalist wrote a review about the film ‘ The Coming of Amos‘ (1925) in the Algemeen Handelsblad newspaper.

In the 20s-30s it was Gennat who brought Serial killers to the public’s attention, in the 70s-80s it was Ressler.īut… even Gennat mentioning it in his book was not the first time the term serial killer was used… In a way this is a lot like what was happening in the US in the 1970s and 1980s when Ressler and the FBI started to look into this phenomenon again.

In a way he also popularised it, he was a famous detective, often mentioned in newspapers and magazines, and Inspector Karl Lohmann, the detective in one of the best movies ever made (M, 1931) was based on him.ĭue to several serial killers getting a lot of media attention in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, it was a hot topic. So Ernst Gennat used the term Serial Killer for the first time with the same meaning it has today back in 1930. In the 1930 publication “Die Düsseldorfer Sexualverbrechen” about Peter Kürten he used the term “Serienmörder” which directly translates as “serial murderer” but is generally translated into ‘Serial Killer’. He worked on cases involving infamous serial killers Peter Kürten and Fritz Haarmann but also revolutionised police detective work, developed what we now call ‘profiling’ and set up the very first homicide squad. When we talk of serial killers or murderers we know what it means, regardless in which language it is being said/written.Īnd once we start looking outside the English language we soon find much earlier examples of the term being used with the actual meaning we still know today.Ī very strong contender is Ernst August Ferdinand Gennat (1 January 1880 – August 20, 1939) who was a famous German detective in Berlin. However, a phrase or term being coined crosses language borders. Which predates the 1950 book but does seem to describe a type of slapstick violence that doesn’t quite match the definition of serial killing it has today, so it also doesn’t quite fit. Hughes, Historian Robert Eisler used the term ‘ Serial killings‘ in a lecture given at the Royal Society of Medicine in London in 1948, speaking of ‘the serial killings’ in the Punch and Judy plays. So although it is the first example of the phrase being used in the English language it also doesn’t quite fit.īefore the book by Mr. The term ‘ serial murder‘ in English was first used in the 1950 book ‘The complete detective being the life and strange and exciting cases of Raymond Schindler, master detective’ by Richard Hughes.Ĭhapter two is titled “The serial murderer” about Arthur Warren Waite who poisoned two people in 1916.īut this double murderer doesn’t really fit the modern definition of a serial killer. Hughes in her 1947 book ‘ A lonely place‘.įrom reviews I get the idea that she truly describes a (fictional) serial murderer and there is a lot of talk about murders that are a series, but after searching through the book I could not find that actual term anywhere. It has been said that the term ‘Series killer’ was first used by writer Dorothy B. Ressler himself stated he was the first person to use the phrase and this has been repeated many times, most recently in the (excellent) Netflix drama ‘Mindhunter’ and ‘Conversations with a serial killer, the Ted Bundy tapes’.īut he was not the first person to use it, even with the specific definition stated above. Serial killers have been around since the dawn of time, they are not a new thing, but when was the term coined?

The term Serial Killer is defined as a murderer killing several people over a longer time (with other words, not all at once), for no apparent reason or for psychological and/or sadistic sexual motives. Ressler in the late 1970s.Īccording to my dictionary coining a term or phrase means “to invent a new word or expression, or to use one in a particular way for the first time”. For decades it has been generally accepted that the term ‘Serial killer’ was first coined by FBI agent Robert K.

Serial killer definition