The dark path
Dr Bryanna Fox talks about early warning signs, red flags and how to stop a serial killer.
Descent Of A Serial Killer
Season 1 Sundays (from 3 July) CBS Justice (*170) 20:00
While criminology professor and former FBI agent Dr Bryanna Fox outlines a variety of serial killers’ early warning signs throughout true crime series Descent Of A Serial Killer, she warns that stopping killers before they start isn’t a job for police with bigger guns and more vehicles and fancier computer systems than kiddie series Paw Patrol. It’ll take a human touch and one thing that most serial killers lack: Empathy.
FIVE EXPERT ANSWERS
1 From true crime series in general, it seems serial killers disproportionately target women. Is that accurate?
Yes, it is actually. Part of the reason is specifically that they’re more vulnerable. Men are a more difficult target. And obviously, when there’s a sexual component, a lot of serial killers want to take that out on female victims. But in the second half of our series, we do cover cases where men are targeted.
2 Which of the red flags should be taken most seriously? Just because most serial killers tend to be male doesn’t mean that we can start profiling men. Predicting is a lot harder than looking at common features. There are subtle risk factors, but the one that always stands out is lack of empathy. If you want to intervene, take that seriously. Somebody that doesn’t have empathy, they may not go on to become a serial killer, but they may commit fraud or treat their loved ones poorly. That’s going to be a problem, no matter what.
It’s something more that parents, teachers, counsellors and social service needs to pay more attention to.
3 Do you believe the police could have stopped the killers in the show before they claimed their first victim? The justice system sometimes has “mission creep”, where we’re expecting police to deal with cases where people have certain red flags, but they didn’t commit any crimes. We don’t necessarily need to be preventing serial killing, we can be preventing a host of negative issues, one of which could be violent offences. Even if it’s just that we’re preventing suicide – or preventing a life of despair for some people who have extreme trauma – by preventing the negative implications of trauma, we’re far better suited to have a happier society.
4 Politically, is mental healthcare treated as enough of a priority for that to be possible? There are a lot of people with mental health issues, which is why it’s not predictive of violent crime. And there’s no good reason why we shouldn’t be helping people and treating them. Even if they don’t go on to become serial killers or murderers, they still should be treated better and given access to care. Society should be investing more money to improving these people’s lives. This is a very treatable issue, as opposed to putting money solely towards incarceration, because research shows that incarceration doesn’t stop any crime.
5 If we’re aware of these red flags, why do serial killers slip through?
We spend a lot of time and money on prosecuting low-level offences. Resources should be spent on cases like sexual assault and stalking, and cases that are harder to prove, so they get dropped. But the prevalence of serial killers today is so much lower than it was in the ’70s and ’80s. The main reason for that is DNA. It’s a lot harder to get away with those crimes compared to the way it was then.