Serial Killers and Blood

HELEN: Welcome to Talking About Blood. I’m Helen Osborne, host of this podcast series and a member of the advisory board for The Blood Project. I also produce and host my own podcast series about health communication, and that’s called Health Literacy Out Loud. Today I’m talking with Dr. Elizabeth Gurian, who is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Norwich University in Vermont. Elizabeth teaches about criminal violence. Her research focuses on multicide, serial, and mass murder. Elizabeth holds a PhD in criminology from the University of Cambridge in the UK. She also has degrees in criminal justice and human physiology. Welcome Elizabeth.

ELIZABETH: Hi, Helen.

HELEN: Thank you so much for inviting me. Well, as you know, the Talking About Blood podcast is all about talking about blood, and your specialty is serial and mass murder. Now beyond the very obvious connection, if someone dies, there might be blood, I’m looking forward to our conversation about how these two areas go together. So let’s take it from the beginning. Please explain to all of us, what do you mean by the term criminal violence?

ELIZABETH: So criminal violence is basically looking at homicide, assault, rape and sexual violence, robbery, so they’re kind of the index category one type crimes that the FBI uses. When we look at criminal violence, we’re not only looking at prevalence, but also trying to understand the criminological theory, why people do what they do, and also how we may prevent these crimes from occurring.

HELEN: This is a niche, from in my world, I’m from healthcare. Our listeners are probably either in healthcare or soon want to be working in healthcare. How did you come up with this special interest?

ELIZABETH: So if we go back a little ways, my undergraduate degree was at Boston University. I studied human physiology. I was going to be-

HELEN: Oh, so there’s a connection there.

ELIZABETH: I am trained as a scientist, which I’m very proud of. So I was going to be a medical doctor. The last semester of my senior year, students are required to do an internship. I ended up working at Children’s Hospital in Boston in genetics and psychology research. And then they hired me straight out when I graduated, which was very exciting. During that time, 9-11 happened. I realized I have and will always love medicine, but it wasn’t quite the right fit for me. Northeastern University was down the street from Children’s. My supervisor recognized that I had this kind of budding interest. I was able to continue working at Children’s during the day, but many of the master’s classes were at night. I worked directly with Dr. James Fox, who’s a national expert on serial and mass murder. And I ended up doing my master’s thesis on a case up in Canada: Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. I interviewed the lawyers and journalists involved in that case. And then when it came time to apply to doctoral studies, I applied to a bunch of places in America, several universities in the UK. I’m a bit of an Anglophile. Got into Cambridge, and then obviously you go to Cambridge when you get into Cambridge. From there, my research expanded to look at solo female serial killers and partnered or team. So I’ve always been interested in the dynamics of serial killers who kill together. And then when I completed my doctoral degree, I was scooped up by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna doing a global homicide report, which was incredibly fascinating. I did that for about five months. And then landed at Norwich University here in Vermont, where I’ve been for 14 years. My research has expanded to look at solo male, solo female, and those team or partnered serial killers. And then later, my research expanded further to also include mass murderers in those same categories. So from my mentor, Dr. James Fox, not many researchers study both serial and mass murder. You usually study one or the other.

HELEN: What’s the difference between serial and mass murder?

ELIZABETH: Absolutely. So serial is two or more over a period of time.

HELEN: Two or more murders that this person committed over a period of time, okay.

ELIZABETH: Correct. Usually with, you know, similarities and offending patterns. Must be premeditated.

HELEN: Okay.

ELIZABETH: Versus mass murder, there’s a bit more disagreement about the victim number. Some say two, others say four, but occurs within a relatively short timeframe, usually within a day. So that would encapsulate any school shootings, any public shootings that we see in that spectrum.

HELEN: I’m fascinated. You and I had a preliminary call talking about it, and I was fascinated then. Now we’re recording. I am equally interested. But Bill Aird, the head of The Blood Project, made this connection with you, and he knows there’s an element that has to do about blood, specifically with people who commit these murders or how or when or who they are. I want you to start making that clear. And let me explain who the listeners of this podcast are, please, so you can know the range of people you are going to be talking with. They might be seasoned professionals, often hematologists, usually physicians, who have been doing this work a while. They might be also people newer in their careers, heading into the sciences as you were heading into your sciences, or they might be in an early stage of medical residency or training. Don’t have to all be physicians, just an interest in health. And they also include people like me. Yes, I have a background in health, but I come at this series just for a huge curiosity about all things having to do with blood. So speak to all of us. What’s that connection between serial murders, mass murders, and blood?

ELIZABETH: So, I think we generally, many people because of TV and movies, have some familiarity with serial murder, you know, Silence of the Lambs, any of the kind of criminal mind type shows. You know, if we are familiar with the Manson family, one of the commonly described characteristics of that case was that the offenders wrote in blood on the wall different messages. We know Jeffrey Dahmer, who’s the subject of many different documentaries and films, you know, is involved in cannibalism to some degree. There’s other cases like Vaughn Oren Greenwood, who killed 11 victims slashing their throats, but then also strangely kind of staged the bodies with cups of blood around them.

HELEN: Like little like Dixie cups around the body?

ELIZABETH: Essentially, yeah, just kind of, and then also salt around their heads. So there was, you know, clearly some element of staging going on there. There’s also another serial killer, Hayden Clark, who drank some of the blood of his victims.

HELEN: Yikes.

ELIZABETH: So when I was speaking with Dr. Aird, I have a database from 1900 to present day, international, divided into that solo male, solo female, and partnered. I’m on the verge of making it public. It will be called The Murder Matrix. It’s also in collaboration with Dr. Mike Annett down at Radford University, who also shared some of his data. So in talking with Dr. Aird, blood, you know, I know kind of surface level some of these characteristics about serial killers, but what’s really amazing about this database is I could have a student or a master’s student go in and actually code for these unusual kind of blood characteristics that some serial killers may display, right? So off the top of my head, I just listed four, but there are thousands of cases of serial killers either engaging in vampirism, cannibalism, other types of staging, like I mentioned with the Manson family.

HELEN: Explain what you mean by staging. That’s a term that’s probably more familiar to you than it is to me in this context.

ELIZABETH: Sure, absolutely. So staging is when a serial killer doesn’t simply leave the body how they were killed. They may pose them in some ways, they may commit some kind of other types of rituals like cleaning the body, you know, brushing the hair. As I indicated with Vaughan Orrin Greenwood, he created these kinds of cups of blood with salt around the head of the victim. So creating, you know, in some way something symbolic to them or perhaps a message.

HELEN: So you talked about there were four ways of connection, and I just made quick notes. You talked about vampirism, like sucking the blood.

ELIZABETH: Or drinking, sure.

HELEN: Or drinking. Cannibalism.

ELIZABETH: So eating raw parts of the body.

HELEN: And then the staging.

ELIZABETH: Yes.

HELEN: Is there another one?

ELIZABETH: And then, you know, messaging also, writing in blood.

HELEN: Now what do you see as the connection? What are you learning? So you had this huge matrix that you’re coming out with, this murder matrix. And blood is an aspect of it. What have you learned so far? And I’m just, you know, using the scientific terms, you’re more of a researcher than I am, but causality or just coincidental, it just happens together. How do you understand this?

ELIZABETH: So for me, understanding motive in serial murder is very difficult. I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a clinician, but, you know, motive is something that we try to understand why serial killers do what they do. I think part of what makes the Murder Matrix very exciting for me, to be at the point of sharing it, is it’s built to be an objective data set. So you look at the facts of the case, right? So if I were to go in and code blood manipulation of, you know, writing on the wall, then I could code a yes or no for any serial killer who does that. And then I could theoretically, at the end, tell you through logistic regressions, 15% of serial killers, for example, are likely to engage in blood manipulation in some way. But this is a new question for me in talking with Dr. Aird, that I’m really excited to go into my data set and kind of see what other connections to blood that there might be with serial murder.

HELEN: Do you ever look at the blood of the person who committed the murder?

ELIZABETH: Whether they’re injured in any way?

HELEN: I don’t know. What is behind them? Is there something within the blood, in their relationship to blood? When you kill someone, it’s bloody.

ELIZABETH: I mean, it can be. Women typically use poison or medical drugs, which is a very bloodless way of killing their victims.

HELEN: So what are your thoughts about this? Are you not ready to do it? Are you just looking at the connections there?

ELIZABETH: Well, so because I’ve built this database over a period of 20 years, and there’s, you know, thousands of cases, any time I have a new question, Norwich University, I’m very lucky. We have a very thriving undergraduate research program. I’ve had 14 student apprentices over the past several years who, when I have a question about something, but I don’t have time to enter it into the data set, they do that research for me. So I currently have a student, Samriddhi, who’s from Nepal, who is looking at that relationship between the offenders and the victims and the staging, right? So are they moving the body? Are they mutilating or torturing the victim prior to killing them? And there’s a piece of that, you know, could certainly be the blood piece of, is there some kind of manipulation of the blood in the act of killing a victim?

HELEN: What do you want people in practice to know about this? They’re treating people who have blood conditions, whether they’re cancer or not cancer, they’re, you know, benign hematology, oncology. What do you want them to know about this, what you’re learning? How can that help in their practice and how maybe could they help you in your practice?

ELIZABETH: So I’ve written a book in 2022 called Serial and Mass Murder that explores all of these different facets, the prevalence, criminological theory, possible prevention. But it’s all based on this data set, the Murder Matrix that I’m going to be making available, right? So I imagine me 20 years ago, starting case one, day one, and then it’s taken me this long to create this data set. My hope is that other researchers will take this database and ask the questions that I and others aren’t asking. Because I know, you know, my peers did a lot of really foundational work in understanding serial murder through, you know, basic frequencies and percentages. I’ve tried to kind of escalate our understanding through odds ratios, other higher level statistics. Clearly, as a woman, I’m also asking different types of questions about a woman’s role and how they’re sentenced and convicted differently from men, even if they’re committing serial murder. So my hope is that with this data set, the Murder Matrix, people will ask questions about blood, about blood disorders, you know, about these serial killers and their victims. Are there ways that we should be studying them that we simply haven’t thought to ask yet?

HELEN: Oh, I’m getting it. OK, so you don’t even know what the questions are yet right now.

ELIZABETH: Potentially, because I’m not a clinician, you know, I’m a criminologist who is trained in science, there’s, you know, certainly some questions that I’m not thinking of asking that I’m basically kind of trying to ask the community of, OK, what are we missing? What can we do next with this data?

HELEN: And if you were to come up with that answer, what then?

ELIZABETH: Then you ask more questions. I mean, like I said, with Dr. Aird, I had never, and prior to your podcast, made a connection between blood and serial murder. I mean, as you know, you know, many serial killers do use knives and it is incredibly messy and they stage their victims and they write messages. But my understanding of that is that as a superficial kind of case study basis versus actually going into the data set and coding for that and then being able to say with certainty, if you’re a male serial killer, you’re three times more likely than a female serial killer, for example, to engage in blood manipulation.

HELEN: Fascinating. I think I also find your story so fascinating of how you went from wanting to be a doctor to, you know, all your other research that you’ve done there and you’re continuing to do. What do you want to share with those who are just in the early parts of their careers? And I’m just really wowed about how you brought two huge bodies of work together in this way. So what would you want those who are starting out to know and how can they help you? How can we collaborate more?

ELIZABETH: Sure. I mean, I think for me, when I started out 20 years ago, there was a general assumption that we knew everything there was to know about serial murder. And I was often told, you know, I can’t say that I’m specializing in serial murder. I have to say I’m specializing in criminal violence because serial murder is too niche and there’s nothing left to uncover. What I hope is, you know, anyone listening to this podcast, future students, anyone curious in this is, of course, there are more questions. I am one person who has, you know, pushed the needle a little bit in this field. But there are so many things that we don’t understand. When I teach my course criminal violence, I often tell students, you know, I relate serial murder or murder as being like a completed assault, right? So we know assault rates in America, you know, of all the different types of violent crimes, you know, about 85% of violent crime are going to be assaults. But all it takes is for the knife to be, you know, one millimeter closer to an artery or, you know, to have fallen and hit your head a certain way that, you know, an assault becomes a homicide. I think there’s a lot more questions and that’s partly why I study serial and mass murder together, because they’re often viewed as two distinct types of homicide, which is true. But I think it’s also important to understand where they overlap and where we can learn from other types of violent crime to understand these incredibly rare types of homicide.

HELEN: Interesting. And you talked about a few of the concepts you mentioned earlier, remotive and method. Is that something your database is looking at too?

ELIZABETH: So my database definitely looks at kind of the demographic characteristics of the offender and the victims. Importantly, it does look at the method or sometimes multiple methods. You know, a serial killer may choose to strangle and then stab, for example. So that’s two. But also importantly, I look at what happens after they’re caught. And so I think the assumption is that, you know, as a serial or a mass murder, you’re going to get the book thrown at you if you’re captured. But I think one of the most interesting findings that I’ve come across with my research is that if you’re a woman who’s committing serial or mass murder, you’re roughly 70 to 80 percent less likely to be sentenced to life or death imprisonment if it’s a state that still has capital punishment compared to a man. So part of that also then, you know, separate from motive, is understanding how the criminal justice system views and treats women differently from men. They have access to different types of reasons for getting a lighter sentence, like domestic abuse, child abuse, that may not be as easily applied to men in those cases.

HELEN: I’m thinking of the other population too. I talked about the seasoned professionals, those newer in a science career. I’m thinking of the general public. There are so many podcasts I listen to these days, so many shows, kind of be your own detective out there. I imagine some other listeners are interested in that too and want to perhaps be helpful. Maybe they have an idea, you know, none of us have thought of yet. How could they be part of this? How can they be helpful?

ELIZABETH: So the Murder Matrix is on the verge of launching. It’s themurdermatrix.com. They can also, I believe, you’ll share my contact information. I’m happy to talk with anyone who might be interested in expanding this research.

HELEN: Just tell us right now, so it’ll be on the podcast too. It will also be on your webpage, but what is your contact information?

ELIZABETH: So the easiest is through email. So elizabethgurian, E-G-U-R-I-A-N, at norwich.edu.

HELEN: Okay. So the general public can be part of this too.

ELIZABETH: Absolutely.

HELEN: Really interesting listening to you. You’ve got major issues that you’re dealing with. You’re obviously so knowledgeable and an expert on the topic. You’ve got other experts about blood and you’re looking to make those connections. Looking ahead in a number of years, what would a good outcome be from your perspective?

ELIZABETH: I think we’re sharing some clean, accurate serial murder data with the research community or the general public can have access as well, that we just keep asking questions, that we don’t assume with any discipline that we have met the limits of our understanding. There are always more questions to ask.

HELEN: That is a great way to consider this. We haven’t reached the limit of our understanding and keep asking all those questions. I am so glad that Bill Aird raised those questions, met you, and is trying to uncover this and you’re taking it to the next level, kind of sharing this in ways that are going to stick around for a while, this conversation, to help find the answer to that. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being a guest on Talking About Blood. It was fascinating.

ELIZABETH: Thank you, Helen.

HELEN: To learn more about The Blood Project and explore its many resources for professionals, for trainees, and patients, go to thebloodproject.com. I invite you to also listen to my other podcast series that is about health communication called Health Literacy Out Loud. Please help spread the word about this podcast series and The Blood Project. Thank you for listening. Until next time, I’m Helen Osborne.