Sexual homicides involve sexual activity before, during or after the homicide . In spite of the sensationalized media attention they receive, sexual homicides are rare. On occasion, sexual homicides are a hybrid offense between sexual assault and murder . The perpetrator did not have the intention of killing his victim (Stefanska et al. 2017).
Police Sex-Related Criminal Homicides is the first of the ten types of PSM we discuss. There are two categories in this type—serial murderers and rape plus murder . Serial sexual murderers intend to kill their victims. Serial sexual murders are driven by personality disorders. Sexual serial murderers are psychopaths or sociopaths , who show no remorse, lack empathy, and see others as objects for their sexual pleasure. Torture is there “turn on” (Ressler and Shachtman 1992). An unknown number of these disturbed individual’s are law enforcement officers.
FBI profiler John Douglas found that serial killers are drawn to police work because of the power, and the authorization to hurt “bad people for the common good” (Douglas and Olshaker 1995). Kenneth Bianchi , one of the serial killers known as the Hillside Stranglers was turned down for several police positions after successful vetting processes before working as a security guard, a not uncommon work substitute for rejected police applicants. However, deranged individuals have become law enforcement agencies. Other sexually motivated serial killers began their reign of terror as law enforcement officers and continued after leaving police work. They no longer carry a badge but they use their law enforcement experience and training to facilitate their deprivations.
Should these disturbed individuals ever been given a badge? Where there known, or knowable reasons for rejecting the sexual aggressors. What were the known or knowable characteristics of the police sexual predators? We can discuss what we know now that they have been unmasked.
Our discussion begins with the worst-case scenario of law enforcement serial killing history in American history—Gerald Schaefer . That may change. DNA analysis has recently revealed that the notorious Golden State Serial Killer and Rapists of the 1970s and 1980s—50 rapes and at least 12 murders —were a police officer. Further information may eclipse Gerald Schaefer’s reign of terror and murder (McNamara 2018). There is also an unfolding story of a US Custom and Border Patrol Agent supervisor who has been charged with the serial killing of four women and attempted murder on a fifth (Horton, September 17, 2018). These two cases remind us that unidentified police serial sexual murderers may be present in today’s police agencies.
Does the Devil Exist? Yes He Does—Gerard J. Schaefer Jr.
At the top of any list of sexually motivated serial killer cops is Gerard John Schaefer Jr . The grim reaper could be seen in his eyes a former lover remarked (Mason 2008). A psychiatrist opined, “Schaefer is an anti-social personality, which is manifested by sexual deviation and erotic sadism.” He killed his victims in pairs and sometimes threes because “Doing doubles is far more difficult than doing singles, but on the other hand it also puts one in a position to have twice as much fun” (Mason 2008).
Schaefer’s reign of terror was an act of whore cleansing—a noble cause often used as a rationalization for serial murder . Schaefer claimed that he killed his victims to stop them from being whores or to release them from the life of being a whore. Any girl out on the street, especially hitchhikers, was a whore in his twisted logic—psychologically disturbed inclination. He went into a puritanical rage at the sight of a woman exposing her naked self, even if it were not for his viewing. That they were whores justified their sadistic deaths to this sexual psychopath who grew up Catholic, attended parochial school and attempted at one time to become a priest. His interest in the priesthood was dashed when he was told he was not religious enough. He quickly renounced Catholicism. That he became a law enforcement officer is regrettable. There were good reasons to reject him.
Schaefer’s early life was not as idyllic as one would expect for a “devout Catholic boy.” He frequently fought with his verbally abusive alcoholic father, especially when the senior Schaefer called his mother a whore. At twelve, the budding psychosexual murderer wore women’s underwear and discovered autoerotic asphyxiation while slipping into the woods and hanging himself from a tree while masturbating.
During this same time period, the father was going on business trips. Gerard suspected his father-committed adultery with whores on these trips. These suspicions increased his hatred for whores who violated Catholic values and the sanctity of the Sacrament of Marriage and caused problems in his family.
Classmates described Gerard, a loner in high school, as weird. However, the tall, smiling blonde teenager did attract a girlfriend. They went together for almost two years before breaking up, because of his bizarre sex games. The young Schaefer was only able to have sex if he pretended to play-rape her and tear off her clothes while talking dirty to her. After the split, the odd teenager returned to the woods for self-gratification with women’s panties and a hangman’s noose.
According to his next girlfriend, lover, and biographer, Sondra London , the teenager added voyeurism to his perverted sexual behaviors (Schaefer 1989). London recounts the young Schafer watching a neighbor girl undress at night. He railed on in a fit of rage saying that the girl, Leigh Hainline , was flaunting her naked charms at him through the window. He vowed to put a stop to her behavior. He made good on the threat years later. In 1969, Leigh Hainline disappeared and was never seen again.
A background check would have discovered the red flags and disqualified his police application, but it was never done (Green 2018). One red flag was hard to miss, but it was. Gerard pretended to be a transvestite to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. He writes that the Society of Friends came to campus and described ways to avoid the draft, a common practice during this unpopular war (Schaefer 1989). The Society of Friends suggested 1-Y deferment for personality disorders. After being drafted, Schaefer reported to the Army induction center wearing panties, garter belt, and nylons and asked “is it gonna be OK to be in the Army if I’m queer?” As expected, he was granted a 1-Y deferment.
In August 1970, the confused young man got married and received a B.S. degree in geography from Florida Atlantic University. Within a month after his graduation and marriage, the small town Wilton Manor Police Department hired him without a background check or psychological tests. He completed basic academy training, fulfilled his six-month probationary period and hit the streets as a sworn, and trained certified police officer. There is speculation that the disappearance of a young blonde female driver during his rookie year was his first victim. FBI profilers Ressler and Shachtman (1992) report that he was disciplined for stopping cars driven by young women and then running their licenses for computer checks to learn more about them—a common technique to identify sexual targets. Two years into the job, the rookie officer received a commendation for a drug arrest, but his commendable arrest was soon marred by a confrontation with the chief of police. The chief was set to fire him, but Schaefer begged him out of it.
The disgruntled Schaefer applied for a position with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office , without notifying his chief. Schaefer failed Broward County mandatory psychological exam and was disqualified—proper vetting. This information was not shared with any other law enforcement agency. At the time, Florida did not have a certification and decertification system. Two months later, he interviewed with the Martin County Sheriff’s Department , using a forged letter of recommendation from the Wilton Manor Chief of Police. He was fired immediately when the Wilton Manor chief learned he interviewed with the Martin County SO, but he was hired by the sheriff’s office.
The Martin County 27-year-old sheriff was a first-time sheriff and only in office for about two months. He was desperate for personnel. Gerald John Schaefer was now a Gypsy Cop, moving from department to department under suspicious circumstances. The sheriff’s first hiring mistake was colossal and would put him, his department and Martin County, Florida on the front page of newspapers around the world.
Twenty-eight days into his new position, Schaefer’s law enforcement career came to an inglorious end on July 21, 1972, when he picked up two teenage girls. Nancy Ellen Trotter , age 19 and Pamela Sue Wells , age 18, had hitchhiked from Michigan to Florida for some fun in the sun. Inclination and opportunity come together under a perceived low-risk setting. Deputy Schaefer , in uniform and driving a police vehicle, picked them up and lectured them on the dangers of hitchhiking. He gave them a ride to the halfway house where they stayed and arranged to meet the next day for a guided tour of the area. Later they testified they trusted him; after all, he was a cop.
Instead of a tour Schaefer abducted them, took them to remote woods on deserted Hutchinson Island —safe space. He bound and gagged them, put a noose around their necks and tied them to trees while threatening to kill them or sell them into prostitution. For some reason, he left the girls handcuffed, gagged, with nooses around their necks tied to a tree, leaving them at risk of hanging if they slipped. He told the horrified girls he would be back shortly. Ressler and Shachtman (1992: 142) opine that he left the scene to answer roll call because he returned to the scene two hours later in uniform, but they were gone. One of the girls managed to escape her noose and run to a nearby road where a passing motorist stopped and picked up the urine-soaked survivor and drove to a police station. When Schaefer returned, he found the girls missing.
Schaefer called Sheriff Crowder and confessed he had done something foolish. He said he played a joke on two girls who were hitchhiking, and he pretended to kidnap and threaten them to scare them out of this risky behavior. Sheriff Crowder ordered him to the station where he was stripped of his badge, fired, and arrested for false imprisonment and aggravated assault.
Schaefer was in jail from July 1972 until September 1972 and then released on his own recognizance. The killing spree began. While out on bond, young girls started disappearing. The investigation revealed Schaefer abducted and slaughtered Susan Place , 17, and Georgia Jessup , 16 during that time period. Place’s mother last saw the girls leaving with a man named Gerry Shepherd. Suspicious of Shepherd she wrote down the car’s license plate number. Later, their mutilated remains were found on Hutchinson Island . Almost a year later, the police finally got around to trace the number, by that time other young girls were butchered and Schaefer was charged with other murders . Following the disappearance of Jessup and Place, two young girls Mary Briscolina age 14, and Elsie Farmer , age 14, disappeared. They were last seen hitchhiking in the Fort Lauderdale area. A piece of Elsie’s jewelry would be found in Schaefer’s trophy stash and he would “sort of confess” to killing these young girls.
It is beyond this court’s imagination to conceive how you were such a foolish and astronomic jackass as you were in this case. (Mason 2008)
The day before Schaefer was to report to jail to begin serving his six-month sentence Collette Goodenough , age 19 and Barbara Wilcox age 18 disappeared while hitchhiking from Sioux City, Iowa to Florida. The available evidence confirms the belief that Schaefer was operating under a delusional false sense of low risk. Some of their personal items were found in Schaefer’s trophy stash, but their remains were not found until four years later, well after Schaefer had been convicted of the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup . In April 1973, the decomposing, butchered remains of Place and Jessup were found in shallow graves on Hutchinson Island . The location of their remains was in the same general area where Trotter and Wells were held. The similarities of the abduction to the earlier false imprisonment and aggravated assault cases and the evidence that victims Place and Jessup had been tied to a tree led to a search warrant for Schafer’s apartment and his mother’s house.
Nothing incriminating was found in Schaefer’s apartment but the search of his mother’s house produced a mother’s lode of evidence, leading to his prosecution for the murders of Place and Jessup, and implicated him in a number of unsolved disappearances. The police found detailed writings from the killer’s perspective describing the torture, rape, and murder of women referred to as whores and sluts. Also found was his stash of victim’s trophies—personal belongings such as jewelry, driver’s licenses, passports, diaries, and teeth from at least eight young women and girls who had gone missing in recent years. It was learned that Schaefer had given Susan Place’s purse to his wife. Jewelry and two gold-capped teeth belonging to Leigh Hainline were found in his stash of victims’ trophies. Her body was found in 1978, but Schaefer died without being charged with her murder .
After a circus of motions to declare him insane failed, Schaefer’s trial for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup began in a packed courtroom on September 17, 1973. A six-member jury with one alternate decided the case. The death penalty was not an option because the murders occurred during a period when the US Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. The amount of evidence against him was shocking, scary, brutal, and immense. Prosecutors brought in actual tree limbs that held the victims, with the noose markings on them. Large roots from the scene were dug up and brought to court to show how the victims had to balance themselves to keep from being hung before being filleted by the defendant. Several jurors appeared shaken and pale. Susan Place’s mother took the stand and identified Schaefer as the man who was last seen with her daughter. The medical examiner came to the stand and described the decomposition and mutilation of the young girls. He showed the detailed cuts on the bones and told them where their body parts had been separated with a large knife.
Nancy Trotter and Pamela Wells testified about their encounter with Deputy Schaefer and their narrow escape. Their testimony ended with a video presentation enactment of what they had endured, including them reenacting being bound and gagged hanging by nooses from trees. The jury was given a copy of one of Schaefer’s writings found during the searches. The manuscript titled “How to Go Un-Apprehended in the Perpetration of an Execution-Style Murder” went into gory detail after gory detail explaining how to choose and murder women, even up to selecting victims in pairs. A weak defense followed and the jury began its deliberation on September 27, 1973. The jury returned a verdict of guilty after several hours of deliberation. On October 4, 1973, the former deputy sheriff was sentenced to life in prison. Twenty appeals were turned down by a variety of courts.
While in prison Schaefer , who had taken several creative writing courses in college, developed what he called a new writing genre called “killer fiction ” described as “where the writer takes violence as an artistic medium and instead of glorifying it, makes the reader see it as the cruel and horrid act as it is in reality. I don’t represent violence as good or bad, merely as it is” (Mason 2008). Among his gory stories was a collection of five brief homicidal scenarios titled “Whores—What to DO About Them.” The sadistic and bloodcurdling tales describes five whores who were shot, stabbed, hung, and eviscerated with a razor-sharp skinning knife by a serial killer. Schaeffer bragged that he killed at least 80 women; he wrote, “I killed women in all ways from shooting, strangling, stabbing, beheading, to odd ways such as drowning, smothering, and crucifixion. One I whipped to death with a strap, another I beat to jelly with a baseball bat while she was hanging by her wrists.” All described in his killer fiction writings.
Schaefer was linked to murders of an unknown number of other girls and women. He was never charged for these other murders . On December 3, 1990, an inmate burst into Schaefer’s cell and slit his throat and stabbed him in both eyes, claiming he was a “rat” and troublemaker.
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Gerald Schaefer was a seriously disturbed individual who was a law enforcement officer because of poor vetting and the lack of attention to his bizarre behavior patterns—inclination. This Gypsy Cop selected his known victims, except Leigh Hainline , from pairs of young teenage girls hitchhiking—opportunity. He began his targeting, selection, and murder while an active law enforcement officer and continued his sexually motivated murders after he was fired—delusional sense of low risk.
What makes Schaefer’s so disturbing is that the murders could and should have been prevented. We know more about Schaefer because of the volume of nonfiction and true crime books written about him and his disturbed behavior. Unfortunately, that is not true for former police officer David Middleton .
David Middleton began his disturbed sexually motivated killings while a police officer and continued killing after being fired. There is evidence that his murder streak, like Schaefer’s , could have ended long before it was.
David Middleton the Cable Guy Killer Aka the Prince of Darkness
“That dude’s evil man—I can feel it.” Interviewing Reno, Nevada Homicide Detective. (Kaye 2008: 109)
The following narrative is from two sources (Kaye 2008 and Middleton v. State of Nevada 114 Nev. Adv. Op. 120—No. 31499, November 25, 1998).
Former police officer David Middleton was first identified as a sexual predator while a working police officer, and then continued his sexual depravations after leaving police work. He was convicted of two murders and sentenced to death. However, he is suspected of several other murders .
Victim Number 1—Katherine Powell
Katherine Powell , the first known Nevada victim was forty-five years old, a third-grade school teacher, divorced and lived alone in Reno, Nevada. She did not report to her teaching position on Monday, February 6, 1995 and was reported missing by school workers who went to her home and could not get an answer to repeated knocks. The police responded and entered the residence but found nothing suspicious. Five days later on Saturday, February 11, Reno Police received a report that a homeless “dumpster diver” found a body in a dumpster. The police found a yellow plastic bag covering a sleeping bag that contained a naked bound female body—Katherine Powell . She had been sexually assaulted, tortured, and brutally murdered.
A neighborhood canvass revealed that David Middleton , a black “cable guy” technician, in a TCI Cable red truck was seen in front of Powell’s home on Saturday February 4, 1995. On Sunday February 5, a male disguising his voice to appear female called a Reno store and ordered a $1900 piece of stereo equipment using Powell’s credit card. A woman, who turned out to be Middleton’s longtime live-in girlfriend, picked up the stereo equipment. She drove a red truck with TCI Cable on the side and Colorado plates to the store.
During the investigation, detectives discovered the yellow plastic bags covering the sleeping bag were sold at two local hardware stores. One store sold a box of the 33-gallon bags three days before Powell’s body was discovered. The description of the purchaser fit David Middleton .
Middleton was interviewed and admitted he made a service call to the Powell house on January 28, 1995 and did own a red truck. He denied knowing anything about the stereo or Powell’s credit card. He said he knew nothing about the yellow garbage bags. One of the detectives noticed what looked like keys for a lock that would fit on a storage unit on his key ring, so he asked Middleton if he had a rented storage unit. Middleton said no and walked out of the interview.
On March 5, 1995, an anonymous caller-never identified—informed the detectives that Middleton and his live-in girlfriend had a storage unit and gave its location. The next day the police executed a search warrant on the storage unit and found a “treasure load” of incriminating evidence, including a box of yellow 33-gallon plastic bags with one missing, and the stereo equipment purchased with Powell’s credit card. Powell’s house and car keys and her camera, computer, and other personal items were also found.
Inside the storage unit, a refrigerator lay on its back on the floor. Fibers found in the refrigerator matched those found on Powell’s body. The refrigerator was modified and served as the “torture chamber” for Powell. According to court transcripts, Powell was stored in the refrigerator and Middleton would come by and torture her while engaging in vaginal and anal sex. When finished, he would place her back in the refrigerator and come back again until she died. The investigation revealed Powell lived for two days until the air coming in from two holes drilled in the bottom was exhausted and she suffocated. A foam ball with teeth marks on it was found in the storage unit. This was stuffed in the victim’s mouths to muffle their screams while he engaged in his depraved sex acts. A stun gun and rope similar to that used to tie Powell’s body was also found.
As the search continued, more ominous pieces of evidence were discovered, including orange-handled tension clips containing hair and fiber, black canvas belts with Velcro, black wire ties, handcuffs, condoms, and partial rolls of duct tape. The detectives discovered a second makeshift “torture and storage” container—a large speaker box with a space behind the speaker about 14 inches deep, 30 inches wide, and 36 inches high. The speaker box could hold a small woman or child, raising the distinct possibility of one or more victims. Hair and fibers found in the speaker box confirmed their suspicion. A nearly empty industrialized jug of Clorox bleach found inside the storage unit and the obvious smell of Clorox used to clean up the unit led to the suspicion that someone with police experience who knew that bleach will obliterate DNA was involved.
The detectives discovered that David Middleton was a convicted sex offender and former police officer. His original charges on November 19, 1989 were kidnapping and sexual assault, and he was convicted of the charges of false imprisonment and aggravated battery in June of 1990—light treatment because of police status? He was sentenced to two concurrent five-year prison terms and released in 1993 after serving a little more than two years. His records revealed Middleton was a Boston PD police cadet for two years before resigning. He then became a police officer with the Miami, Florida PD for eight years before resigning. His resignation date revealed he was a cop when he was arrested for the original charges of kidnapping and sexual assault. The Reno detectives speculated that the bad outcome of the first known kidnapping and rape led him to kill future victims.
The investigators found other possible sexual murder victims. Ex Miami cop David Middleton was listed as a suspect in the disappearance of a Montrose, Colorado 18-year-old girl before moving to Reno. The Reno detectives went to Colorado and discovered incriminating evidence but there was no body or indication of murder . They returned to Reno with the firm belief that Middleton was indeed a serial killer. The Reno detectives flew to Florida to see what they could learn about his eight-year tenure as a Miami-Dade police officer.
What they found solidified their suspicion that David Middleton was a seriously disturbed sexually motivated serial killer and police sexual predator. The Miami prosecutor said he was “a bad cop who was twisted enough to use his badge and uniform to hunt down women and sexually abuse them” (Kaye 2008: 159). She said that when he was arrested he had tapes of him having sadomasochistic sex with women, believed to be prostitutes. The women in the tapes were in handcuffs and obviously in pain. The former prosecutor regretted that a bureaucratic mistake prevented her from introducing the tape as evidence that would surely lead to a rape conviction and a long prison sentence. She also admitted that she wanted to file federal charges but her supervisor stopped her. Officers who worked with Middleton at Miami-Dade described him as obsessed with sex and bragging about having tapes of him having sex with women. His peer group knew of his bizarre sexual habits, but none reported him. All seven of the cops interviewed stated that Middleton had sexually deviant tendencies long before he moved to Reno.
Victim Number 2—Thelma Davila
Two months after Powell’s body was found, the body of a second and prior victim who left the hair and fibers in the speaker box in the storage unit was found. On April 9, 1995, a man walking his dog found a skull and human remains and notified the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office. Earlier in 1994, the remnants of a sleeping bag had been found with bone fragments strewn nearby.
A dental bridge in the skull was identified as belonging to Thelma Davila , a forty-two-year-old woman who lived with her sister in a one-bedroom apartment in Sparks. She was reported missing on August 10, 1994. A blanket, a black lacy top and other personal items belonging to Davila were found in Middleton’s storage unit. Hairs found on duct tape in the storage unit were consistent to Davila’s. Knots found in the ropes on Powell and Davila’s bodies and remains were the same.
She and Middleton met at a Latin dance club in downtown Reno and had been seen in each other’s company numerous times by friends. Middleton had installed the TV cable in the sisters’ apartment—opportunistic victim selection same as first known victim.
David Middleton went on trial in 1997 and was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder , and two counts of first-degree kidnapping. He was sentenced to death. The ex-cop serial murderer is on Nevada’s death row and is a “person of interest” in several unsolved murders of women in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada.
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Police sexual serial murderers occur in police forces worldwide-occupational deviance consistent with the PSM Causal Equation nexus of inclination, opportunity and real or perceived risk. A disturbed gay British law enforcement with same-sex victims who began his murders as a working police officer, as did David Middleton —and continued his murders after leaving police work. A second police serial murderer was a Russian police officer discovered a DNA match committed long after his crimes.
Dennis Nilsen—British Police Serial Killer—Aka Britain’s Jeffrey Dahmer
Dennis Nilsen was hired as a police officer, even though he was seriously psychologically disturbed—not properly vetted. His behavior became more disturbed and noticeable while he was in police work and then evolved into repetitive sexual homicides after he resigned from the London Metropolitan Police . There is evidence to suggest that his contacts with potential victims as a police officer, and his prior police training and acquired knowledge facilitated his reign of terror.
The former English “Bobby,” killed 12–15 young men from December 1979 to February 1983. The key to his predatory behavior was in his past. Becoming a killing machine is not an overnight event; it is a long slow process with a lot of clues along the way, according to FBI profilers (Ressler and Shachtman 1992). A withdrawn and lonely child, Nilsen struggled with the knowledge he was homosexual. After an 11-year tour of duty with the British Army, where he engaged in sexual fantasies and masturbation, the conflicted young man joined the London Metropolitan Police Force and was posted to a seedy and diverse section of London . While a police officer he acted on his homosexual tendencies and frequented gay pubs engaging in casual sexual liaisons—there is evidence to suggest that his bizarre behavior was known to his police colleagues (Ressler and Shachtman 1992). He resigned from the police force after a year’s service and became a security guard and then a British civil servant.
According to Ressler and Shachtman (1992), Nilsen’s increasing male sexual encounters disturbed him and increased his loneliness, leading to more bizarre behavior and sexual fantasies that turned to sadism and necrophilia—psychologically disturbed inclination. His first known murder victim, a young man he met in a gay pub, was invited to his house for drinks. In a deranged desire to keep the man from leaving, Nilsen strangled his victim to unconsciousness then drowned him in a bucket of water. He washed his victim’s body, placed it in his bed, spending the night sleeping with the corpse. He placed the corpse under the floorboards for seven months before burning the decaying remains in his back garden. Thus began, one of the most macabre tales of sexual perversion in English history.
Nilsen selected victims from a vulnerable target pool of gay, homeless, orphans, drunks, and males prostitutes. Homeless, unemployed, and male prostitute victims are not likely to be reported missing, cops know that. Nilsen knew that—opportunity and low risk. The disturbed serial killer strangled and drowned his next 11 or 14 victims, slept with their corpses, dismembered their bodies, boiled their heads before flushing their remains down the toilet or burning them (Ressler and Shachtman 1992).
Body parts and putrefying human flesh were discovered in the attempt to free the clogged drains, bringing the authorities into the investigation. Nilsen readily confessed when confronted; he was proud of what he had done. Thousands of bone fragments were found in his backyard-burning pit. Several plastic bags, containing human remains, dismembered heads and larger body parts were found in his apartment. At trial, he was charged with six murders ; pleaded not guilty even after giving a lengthy confession. The shocked and sickened jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict, with some jurors opting for diminished responsibility due to mental illness. However, the judge agreed to accept a majority verdict and Nilsen was convicted on all six counts. Currently serving a life sentence in a British maximum-security prison, he is on the list of prisoners never to be released.
Mikhail Popkov—“The Werewolf”—Most Prolific Police Serial Killer in Russian History 1994–2000
During the years 1994–2010, Mikhail Popkov a Russian police officer known as the “Werewolf” killed and mutilated 82 women. The nickname “Werewolf ” came after one of his victims was beheaded, and her heart cut out. Popkov assumed the women were prostitutes, a few were, but the majority were not—one was a medical student and another his daughter’s teacher. As stated earlier, killing prostitutes or whores is a commonly stated motivation for serial sexual killers operating on a perceived moral crusade—disturbed inclination. He slaughtered his victims with axes, knives, and screwdrivers. His police identity facilitated his killing spree. He committed his heinous act in uniform and while driving a police car “to fool his victims,” he confessed—opportunistic victim selection. The following narrative comes from two sources (Barbash, January 12, 2017; Wikipedia 2019).
Popkov confessed to murdering 82 women between 1992 and 2010. The murders followed the same planned method of operation (MO), making full use of his police identity. When the desire became strong—inclination, Popkov went on the hunt. He knew where to find vulnerable victims during his routine patrol activities—opportunity. Popkov parked his police car outside nightclubs, restaurants, and other public places where drinking was common and waited for unaccompanied women to emerge. He would call them over to his car and offer help in getting home or suggest that they have some fun with him. Those that agreed fit his “loose women” definition. They had to die.
His justification for murder blames the victims, “The victims were those who, unaccompanied by men, at night, without a certain purpose were on the streets behaving carelessly, who were not afraid to enter into conversation with me, for the sake of entertainment, ready to drink alcohol and have sexual intercourse with me.” He had a “desire to teach and punish” these loose women. After the trap was sprung, Popkov drove to the woods, raped his victims and killed them with hand-held weapons, some of which he took from the police evidence locker.
His murders continued after he retired, even though he was rendered impotent by a venereal disease caught from one of his victims in 2000. The number of victims brought on extreme efforts to identify the possible police serial killer. In 2012, 3500 current and former Russian police officers in the region where the murders took place were forced to provide DNA samples. The DNA analysis linked Popkov to 22 murders . Popkov lamented the use of DNA analysis in his downfall stating, “I could not anticipate the examination of DNA . I was born in another century. Now there are such modern technologies, but not earlier…” The Werewolf confessed to 22 murders and sentenced to life in prison. In January 2017, according to the Russian Investigative Committee [Federal Investigation Agency, FBI equivalent], Popkov confessed to 60 more sexual murders and began taking the police to graves of women reported as missing. The stimulus for his new confessions was to prevent his transfer to a tough penal colony to serve out his life sentence. The Russian police believe his final total is 82.
Conclusion
The brief Illustrative Examples—I.E.—demonstrate that sexual homicides , in fact all sexual crimes, are pattern forms of deviant behavior with characteristics common to the offender, victims, and the selection of victims. It is possible to identify possible repetitive police sex offenders prior to employment with proper vetting. It is also possible to take proper action when problem officers are identified to deter their future acts in any law enforcement setting. Real evidence is always present at a sexual encounter. Modern technology—DNA analysis and technical assist, such as body and dash cameras—have made sex crimes easier to solve. The use of DNA in the Russian example and the recent identification of the Golden State Killer and Rapist make this point clear.