A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more persons, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant period of time between them. While most authorities set a threshold of three murders, others extend it to four or lessen it to two.
Dennis Lynn Rader, also known as BTK, is an American serial killer who murdered at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. Although Rader occasionally killed or attempted to kill men and children, he typically targeted women. His victims were often bound, sometimes with objects from their homes, and either suffocated with a plastic bag or manually strangled with a ligature.
Computer forensics is a branch of digital forensic science pertaining to evidence found in computers and digital storage media. The goal of computer forensics is to examine digital media in a forensically sound manner with the aim of identifying, preserving, recovering, analyzing and presenting facts and opinions about the digital information.
Caril Ann Fugate is the youngest female in United States history to have been tried and convicted of first-degree murder. She was the adolescent girlfriend of spree killer Charles Starkweather, being just 14 years old when his murders took place in 1958. She was convicted as his accomplice and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1976, she was paroled after serving 18 years.
Army of God (AOG) is an American Christian terrorist organization, members of which have perpetrated anti-abortion violence. According to the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security's joint Terrorism Knowledge Base, the Army of God is an active underground terrorist organization in the United States. In addition to numerous property crimes, the group has committed acts of kidnapping, attempted murder, and murder. The AOG was formed in 1982 and, while sharing a common ideology and tactics, the group's members claim that they rarely communicate with each other; this is known more formally as leaderless resistance. The group forbids those who wish to "take action against babykilling abortionists" from discussing their plans with anyone in advance.
Offender profiling, also known as criminal profiling, is an investigative strategy used by law enforcement agencies to identify likely suspects and has been used by investigators to link cases that may have been committed by the same perpetrator. The ancestor of modern profiling, R. Ressler of the FBI, considered profiling as a process of identifying all the psychological characteristics of an individual, forming a general description of the personality, based on the analysis of the crimes committed by him or her.
John Edward Douglas is an American retired special agent and unit chief in the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Robert Roy Hazelwood was a former FBI profiler of sex crimes and is generally regarded as the pioneer of profiling sexual predators. He worked for much of his career for the FBI, retiring in the mid-1990s.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) is the state bureau of investigation of the U.S. state of Kansas. The KBI is a division of the Kansas Attorney General and responsible for providing investigative and criminal laboratory services to criminal justice agencies, as well as investigating and preventing crime in the state of Kansas. Tony Mattivi is the current director of the KBI.
The Wichita Police Department (WPD) is the primary law enforcement agency serving Wichita, Kansas. Wichita Police Department’s jurisdiction overlaps with the Sedgwick County Sheriff's office.
Daniel Owen Conahan Jr. is a convicted American murderer, rapist, and suspected serial killer. Conahan was convicted of one murder, but has been linked to a dozen murders, mostly of transients seeking employment and gay men in the Charlotte County, Florida area in what came to be known as the Hog Trail Murders. Conahan has also been named the prime suspect in the additional murders of eight men, collectively referred to as the Fort Myers Eight, who were discovered in a mass grave site in 2007.
A Good Marriage is a novella by American writer Stephen King, published in the collection Full Dark, No Stars (2010).
Faryion Edward Wardrip is an American rapist and serial killer who assaulted and murdered a total of five women. Four of the women were killed in Wichita Falls, Texas, and the surrounding counties. One woman was murdered in Fort Worth, approximately a two-hour drive southeast of Wichita Falls. Wardrip's killing spree began at the end of 1984 and lasted until the middle of 1986. All of his female victims were white, were between the ages of 20 and 25, weighed less than 120 pounds (54 kg), and were under 5+1⁄2 feet (170 cm) tall.
Guidance Software, Inc. was a public company founded in 1997. Headquartered in Pasadena, California, the company developed and provided software solutions for digital investigations primarily in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia/Pacific Rim. Guidance Software had offices in Brazil, Chicago, Houston, New York City, San Francisco, Singapore, United Kingdom and Washington, D.C., and employed approximately 371 employees. On September 14, 2017, the company was acquired by OpenText.
Candice DeLong is an American former FBI criminal profiler and bestselling author. DeLong was the lead profiler in San Francisco, California, and worked on the Unabomber case. Currently, she hosts the Investigation Discovery programs Deadly Women and Facing Evil with Candice DeLong, the Wondery podcast Killer Psyche, and the Discovery+ program The Deadly Type with Candice DeLong.
High Technology Crime Investigation Association (HTCIA) is an international non-profit professional organization devoted to the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of crimes involving advanced technologies. Author and cybercrime expert, Christopher Brown, described HTCIA as "one of the largest and most respected" associations of its kind.
Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (2004) is a non-fiction true crime history by Peter Vronsky, a criminal justice historian. It surveys the history of serial homicide, its culture, psychopathology, and investigation from the Roman Empire to the early 2000s. The book describes the rise of serial murder from its first early recorded instances in ancient Rome to medieval and Renaissance Europe, and Victorian Britain, and its rise and escalation in the United States and elsewhere in the world, in the postmodern era. The book also surveys a range of theoretical approaches to serial killers interspersed with dozens of detailed case studies of both notorious and lesser known serial murderers, illustrating the theory in practice. Considered by some a definitive history of serial homicide, this was the book serial killer Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was reading when he was arrested in 2005.
A Good Marriage is a 2014 American psychological thriller film based on the novella of the same name by Stephen King, from the 2010 collection Full Dark, No Stars. It stars Joan Allen, Anthony LaPaglia, Kristen Connolly and Stephen Lang. It was released on October 3, 2014.
Mindhunter is an American psychological crime thriller television series created by Joe Penhall, which debuted in 2017, based on the 1995 true-crime book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker. The executive producers include Penhall, Charlize Theron, and David Fincher, the latter of whom has served as the series' most frequent director and de facto showrunner, overseeing many of the scriptwriting and production processes. The series stars Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv, and it follows the founding of the Behavioral Science Unit in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the late 1970s and the beginning of criminal profiling.
Francis Donald Nemechek is an American serial killer who murdered at least five people in Kansas' Trego and Ellis counties between 1974 and 1976. He admitted to committing the murders, along with raping some of his victims, but pled not guilty due to claims of insanity. He was found guilty in 1977 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has been denied parole four times.
