So what's the difference: Serial killer, spree killer, mass murderer?

Well I guess they told me.

I was complaining all week during the Patrick Tracy Burris case, the guy who allegedly killed five people around Gaffney, S.C.over a week's time beginning in late June, and then was shot and killed by police in nearby Gastonia, North Carolina during a burglary attempt.

Ballistics on the gun of the man killed by police in Gastonia matched bullets that killed the five people in South Carolina.

I thought he was being misidentified as a serial killer when he was really a spree killer.

Turns out there’s no such thing as a spree killer, at least according to a 2005 FBI symposium on serial killers.

The symposium folks noted that there has been at least one attempt to legally define serial killers. In 1998, a federal law was passed by the United States Congress, titled: Protection of Children from Sexual Predator Act of 1998 (Title 18, United States Code, Chapter 51, and Section 1111). This law included a definition of serial killings:

"The term ‘serial killings’ means a series of three or more killings, not less than one of which was committed within the United States, having common characteristics such as to suggest the reasonable possibility that the crimes were committed by the same actor or actors.”

“Previous definitions of serial murder,” the report stated, “specified a certain number of murders, varying from two to ten victims. This quantitative requirement distinguished a serial murder from other categories of murder (i.e. single, double, or triple murder).”

I’m not sure why whoever wrote the law chose to use “actor or actors” instead of “killer or killers,” or even why at least one of the killings has to occur in the United States. Does this mean there are no serial killers in other countries? Or do they have to come up with their own definitions?

In any event, the symposium’s final definition of a serial killer was “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.

Anyway, Ted Bundy was a serial killer, as were the BTK killer in the St. Louis area, and Ed Kemper in California, who killed six hitchhiking coeds, his mother and her friend in the Santa Cruz area in the early 1970s.

I covered his trial and later interviewed him in prison after he’d petitioned the state to allow him to receive a lobotomy to quell his homicidal urges. The turned him down. But that’s a story for another time.

Mass murder was described during the symposium as a number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders.

“These events typically involved a single location, where the killer murdered a number of victims in an ongoing incident (e.g. the 1984 San Ysidro McDonalds incident in San Diego, California; the 1991 Luby’s Restaurant massacre in Killeen, Texas; and the 2007 Virginia Tech murders in Blacksburg, Virginia).”

And, finally, we have the spree killer category which the FBI symposium basically rejected as a separate category.
The symposium concluded that spree murders are “two or more murders committed by an offender or offenders, without a cooling-off period.” It was the “cooling off period” they had trouble reconciling.

“Because it (the cooling-off period) creates arbitrary guidelines, the confusion surrounding this concept led the majority of attendees to advocate disregarding the use of spree murder as a separate category. The designation does not provide any real benefit for use by law enforcement.”

Different discussion groups at the symposium agreed on a number of similar factors to be included in a definition. These included:

• One or more offenders
• Two or more murdered victims
• Incidents should be occurring in separate events, at different times
• The time period between murders separates serial murder from mass murder

But I still think  the South Carolina culprit was a spree killer. Let me know what you think. richardbattin@gmail.com