The Imperceptible Phenomenon of Black Sexual Serial Killers By

This research was totally reliant upon secondary sources of information. Multiple sources of information were examined for each case whenever available. However, it was often not possible to know how much information had been recycled from one source to another. The data were collected from various news sources, some acquired through Lexus/Nexis as well as Google Alerts, The Internet and police files which the author had acquired during professional consultations.

The initial challenge for this study was to isolate a specific population of offenders described as serial murderers. The definition used was “The unlawful killing of two or more persons by the same offender(s) in separate events.” (Department of Justice, 2005) (16)

The Data

The author maintains a current listing of serial killers in the United States in conjunction with his research and consultation, which provided a dataset of 488 serial killers in the U.S. as of April, 2012. The next challenge was to isolate a specific population of serial murderers from the overall dataset of 488 who had violated their victims sexually. The author used the following operation definition: “Two or more separate sex-related murders where an individual, acting alone or with another, commits two or more sex-related homicides over a period of time, with time breaks between each murder event.” Serial killings with motivations such as Racial, Thrill, Black Widow, Robbery etc. were extracted from the list and “Spree Killers” were not included providing a dataset of 417 sexual serial killers, which represented approximately 86% of all the serial murderers. The author then identified the 155 Black sexual serial killers from the 417 total sexual serial killer dataset.

The researcher must remain mindful of the question of integrity of the data sources when interpreting the data of the study. The sample used was an unknown proportion of the actual population of serial killers in the United States. The goals of this study are necessarily limited in scope due to the acknowledged paucity of systematic research on serial murder. Notwithstanding, the current research makes an important contribution to our knowledge of existing cases and provides the basis for further qualitative and quantitative study.

The 155 Black sexual serial killers from the 417 total represented 37.2% of all the sexual serial murders in the U.S. as of April, 2012. In 1980 Black sexual serial killers accounted for approximately 21.7% of the murders. Black sexual serial killer doubled between 1991 and 2000 to 50.6% and then peaked at 70.1% between 2001 and 2012. Presently, the overall percentage is 37.2%, which is almost double the percentage from the 1980’s.

The data was divided chronologically beginning with cases which occurred prior to 1980 and then calculated in ten-year increments up to the April, 2012. The following Table provides a breakdown of sexual serial murder prior to 1980 up to April, 2012.

Research Conclusions

There was a total of 417 Sexual Serial Killers who killed 3440 victims. The 155 Black sexual serial killers, who represented 37.2% of the total, murdered 1002 victims. The most frequent modality of death of the victims was strangulation, which occurred in 68.6% of the cases.

This research revealed that Black sexual serial killers targeted more White female victims than White sexual serial killers targeted Black females. The exceptions to that finding were prostitute and homosexual serial killings.

31.6% of the cases involved White victims, 45.3% of the cases involved Black victims and in 23.1% of the cases the victims were Black, White, Hispanic or other. 21.9% of the Black sexual serial killers engaged in home invasions murders involving 200 White female victims and 15 Black female victims and 9 mixed race killings.

BLACK SEX-RELATED SERIAL KILLERS IN THE U.S.
Years by Decade	Total Sexual Serial Murders	Total Black Serial Killers	Percentage of Black Killers
Prior to 1981	134	29	21.7%
1981 To 1990	148	48	32.4%
1991 To 2000	87	44	50.6%
2001 To 2012	48	34	70.1%
TOTALS	417	155	37.2%