surrendered quietly to the police. Henry Lee Lucas, on the other hand, began by killing his mother and went on killing for decades before he murdered the only person he said he truly lovedâhis thirteen-year-old common-law wifeâwho, at least according to Lucas, was his 360th victim. (Lucasâs claim is highly contestable.)
Nothing, however, short of capture, will stop a serial killer if he is in his midcycle of murder. Arthur Shawcross first killed two children in upstate New York, was quickly arrested, and served fourteen years in prison before being released in 1987. He immediately began where he left off and killed eleven women in a twenty-one-month period in Rochester, New York, before being rearrested.
In New Jersey in 1958, Richard Biegenwald was arrested after committing his first murder and served seventeen years before being released in 1975. When he was rearrested in 1983, he had killed at least seven additional victims by then.
In Toronto, Canada, seventeen-year-old Peter Woodcock murdered two boys and a girl between September 1956 and January 1957. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined in a psychiatric facility. He was treated for thirty-five years and was eventually groomed for gradual release back into society. On July 13, 1991, the now fifty-two-year-old Woodcock was given his first three-hour pass allowing him to leave the grounds of the psychiatric facility to go for a walk in town and buy a pizza to bring back to the hospital. Before he could make it off the hospital grounds, Woodcock battered, hacked and stabbed to death, then sodomized a fellow inmate in a bushy area on the facilityâs perimeter. Using his pass, he then walked two miles to a nearby police station and confessed to the crime.
Serial killing appears to be incurable: Time or prison does not relieve the need that serial killers feel for murderâonly killing does.
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It is impossible to get an accurate estimate of how many serial killers and victims there are. In 1987, the U.S. Department of Justice estimated that serial killers murdered between 1,000 and 2,500 people that year. 18 Other sources cited a number as high as 6,000 a year. 19 In the Green River region in Washington Gary Ridgway murdered forty-eight women by himself in a twenty-month period in 1982â1984.
Remarkably, nobody even knows precisely how many homicides in total take place annually in the United States, as there are all sorts of reporting discrepancies. It is believed that until the recent decline in murders, approximately 20,000 to 22,000 murders occurred every year in the United States, but some sources estimate that the number is as high as 40,000 due to variations in reporting procedures. 20 (By 2000 the number of murders declined to 15,586 but began to rise in 2001 to 15,980, not including the victims of 9/11âan increase of 2.5 percent. Preliminary statistics for 2002 indicate a further increase of 0.8 percent in the number of murders. This recent rate is distributed strangely across the United States: a decline of 4.8 percent in the Northeast but a rise of 5.2 percent in the West. Cities of more than a million inhabitants show a decline in murders of 4 percent, while towns of 50,000 to 100,000 show a dramatic 6.7 percent rise in homicides in 2002. Suburban counties reported an extraordinary 12.4 percent rise in homicides. 21 )
These statistics do not include the number of people who appear to mysteriously disappear. An often-cited 1984 U.S. Department of Health report estimated that 1.8 million children vanished from home every year. Of those, 95 percent were listed as ârunawaysâ and 90 percent of those returned home within fourteen days. That left 171,000 runaways simply unaccounted for! The other 5 percent of the missing were victims of abduction, of which 72,000 were abducted by parents in custody disputes. The remaining 18,000 children and adolescents simply vanished with no further explanation,
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