Spree Murder

Earl W. Krueger James

A spree murder is defined in the Crime Classification Manual (Douglas et al. 1992: 20) as “a single event with two or more locations and no emotional cooling-off period between murders.” The time period over which the event occurs can be relatively short or fairly long, as long as a day or more. This definition was arrived at by a team of experts following a ten-year project completed in 1991 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, the purpose of which was to develop standards for differentiating between the various kinds of multiple murders. The result was a more clearly defined set of terms for people working within the criminal justice community; however, the finer distinctions among these terms have not necessarily made their way into the media and the public mind. Another type of multiple murder, serial murder , was defined by ...

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