Serial killers often leave a 'signature'

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Serial killers often leave a 'signature'

Friday, May 19, 2000

By SCOTT SUNDE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

In TV thrillers and novels, the serial killer always leaves some sort of ghastly calling card at the scene of the crime.

It's his "signature," a bit of evidence authorities use to tie together a string of murders.

Experts on serial murder say the fictional version has at least a grain of truth to it.

"They like to (leave signatures). They enjoy it. It's one of their favorable pastimes," said Bob Keppel, an expert on serial killers who once worked for the Washington Attorney General's Office.

"It's my belief that all serial killers leave a sign. It's also my belief that we don't find it all the time because of decomposition or because he doesn't want you to find it."

Keppel, who has written a book on the subject, "Signature Killers," limits his theory to crimes in which there is a sexual element.

But James Fox, an expert on serial murder in Boston, says the signature is "more common in fiction than in fact."

"Part of the modern mythology of serial killers is that they all have signatures: the way they pose a body or dress a body," said Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University. "It doesn't happen so much as people would believe. You can use it loosely to say he always uses the same weapon or sexually mutilates the body in the same way."

Some serial murders even use different methods to kill and prey on different types of victims, he said.

Ted Bundy was a serial killer who enjoyed sadism, but he didn't leave a signature, Fox said. "It was just basically rape and murder."

But Keppel believes Bundy's signature wasn't found.

Part of the problem may be definition. To Keppel, a signature is something "over and beyond what's necessary to commit murder."

Both experts agree that what the serial killer leaves behind may explain what gives him some perverse pleasure.

George Russell, the first serial murderer ever convicted in King County, left bodies in an open display and posed them, Keppel noted.

Russell's first victim was found in 1990 in a restaurant parking lot with her legs crossed and her arms folded. A fir cone was in one hand and a plastic lid was on her forehead.

His second victim was found wearing only high-heel shoes. A shotgun was placed between her legs. The third victim had a sexual device in her mouth.

The signature, Keppel said, "is what their hangup is. It's what their sexual enhancement is."