Organized serial killers, as profiled by John Douglas, former FBI Profiler, normally share the following common characteristics : Examples are Gein, who killed two, and Gary Heidnik, who also killed two but held four more captives. Sometimes, the term 'serial killer' is somewhat loosely applied to killers responsible for less than three murders. There are, of course, exceptions to these criteria: disorganized killers such as Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer often commit their ghastly deeds at home.

Time: There must be a cooling off period.

Place: The killings must occur at different locations.

Quantity: There must be at least three victims.

In order to qualify as a serial killer, an Unsub must exhibit the following criteria: They are sometimes abused as children, which gives them a sense of powerlessness and inadequacy as adults.

Power/Control - They try to exert and gain power over their victims.

Comfort/Profit - They are primarily motivated by material gain and a comfortable lifestyle, and achieve this through killing.

Thrill - They are primarily motivated to induce pain or a sense of terror in their victims, which gives the killer more stimulation and excitement.

Lust - They are primarily motivated by sex, whether the victims are alive or dead, and their fantasies play a large role in their killings.

So far, there have been three sub-types of the hedonistic killer:

Hedonistic - They seek thrills and derive pleasure from killing, seeing their victims as expendable means to achieve this goal.

Mission-oriented - They typically justify their actions as 'ridding the world' of certain types of people, such as homosexuals, prostitutes, or people of a different race or religion, but are normally not psychotic.

The two most common subgroups are 'God-mandated' or 'Devil-mandated'.

Visionary - They suffer psychotic breaks from reality and sometimes believe they are another person or are compelled to murder by deities such as God or the Devil.

In the past, serial killers were known as Varedwulfs (literally, werewolves), as their crimes were brutal enough in the eyes of locals to perpetuate the belief that they were committed by supernatural creatures Types The term 'serial killer' was coined by FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler who, along with colleague John Douglas, was one of the founders of the BAU.

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