Long winded answer here, I'm afraid. I don't mean to overstate the argument that "police" didn't believe in serial murderers. A man named Philip Jenkins, in a work entitled Serial Murder in the United States, 1900-1940: A Historical Perspective, argues that there were actually MANY serial murder cases in that era which were cleared up and were cleared up by the co-operation of multiple police agencies. And he has a point; that is true.



But the other side of the argument has a point, too, which is this; that police agencies until at least 1980, confronted with a random murder, did approach it with undue skepticism toward the possibility of a murder without motive, and did create injustice in many, many cases by hastily rejecting the possibility it was a random crime driven by the madness of the killer, insisting instead that the crime had to have been committed by the victim's husband, father, brother, cousin or bowling partner. The execution of Timothy Evans in England in 1950 for a crime committed by the serial murderer John Cristie, is an example of that.



And this way of thinking about crimes is not limited to police, and did not end in 1980. The persecution of John and Patsy Ramsey, which you mentioned before, is one example of that. But I am also writing a book now, The Man from the Train, about a serial murderer who lived a hundred years ago. In things written about his crimes NOW, a hundred years later, I very often see journalists casually rejecting links between his crimes that, in truth, could not possibly be any more obvious.



As to the second part of your question, challenges today for the criminal justice system. .. ..the two greatest problems in the judicial system today (other than the massive mishandling of the drug issue) are 1) the great difficulty that the system has in admitting that it has made a mistake, and 2) the awkward handling of privacy issues.



Not trying to ramble, but explaining what I mean about the second issue.. .. .let us suppose (God forbid) that your wife was murdered. That is too raw a supposition; let us suppose that you have a good friend whose wife is murdered. Your good friend would certainly become the first suspect in the case, and I don't have a problem with that. The police would almost certainly get a warrant allowing them to search his computers, and I don't have a problem with that. If, in searching his computers, they find record of his doing searches for "How to kill your wife" or "How to make poisons at home", that's entirely legitimate.



But what very often happens is that when they search his computers, they don't find anything GENUINELY incriminating, but they find some evidence that your good friend and his wife had a terrible fight two years ago because he was flirting with a girl at a party, and they find evidence that the family was short of money. It's not really evidence; it's called "marriage"--but the prosecutors will claim that it is motive and spin it into evidence.



That should not be allowed, and at the moment there are no safeguards against it whatsoever. Police and prosecutors should not be allowed to take ordinary private matters and turn them into evidence, unless they are actual evidence. We need a doctrine of privacy which says, in essence, that even though the police may search your computers to look for evidence that you have purchased a gun or hired a hit man, that does not give them an unrestricted license to make use in court of anything and everything that they find.