Serial killer database gives insight to criminal minds

By Lindsey Ward

Published: July 30, 2008

On his computer screen is detailed information on the lives of 1,900 serial killers.  Each horizontal line represents another category of their life.

Dr. Aamodt is the brain behind the collection of information.  Fifteen years ago it started as a simple assignment for his students, that has grown into one of the largest serial killer databases ever.

“We started collecting so much information I thought, well, let’s try to put it into a database and then it kind of came a little bit of an obsession after that to build this,” said Dr. Aamodt.
   
It became an obsession for him and his students.  Aamodt says in the past 15 years, students have worked hard to help gather the information, doing online searching, reading books, and making calls.

“They read newspapers articles, they’ll look at prison records if we can get them, they will look at true crime books, anything that they can,” Aamodt said.

He added after all these years, there’s finally enough information to analyze.

“What we’re hoping to be able to do is to see if we can actually look at crime scene information and then try to be able to predict something about the serial killer.”

Perhaps it can help them understand the biggest question, what makes somebody a serial killer.

As the database grows, Dr. Aamodt is looking into putting it on the web.  Right now, only he and his students have access.

Some of you may have heard about this story first from our Richmond newsroom the Richmond Times Dispatch.  Reporter Rex Bowman dug into the database and found that killers who used bombs had much higher IQ’s than those who killed with their bare hands.