It would be interesting to have a look at the methodology used to arrive at these figures. At a glance it seems suspicious that you could arrive at 31.8% for enjoyment and only 0.5% for attention. Since people often "enjoy the attention" it would seem odd to have such a huge gap between two intuitively related (at least a little bit related) concepts.

To illustrate say I conducted a questionnaire survey asking people to describe the feeling of eating a particular peanut flavored chocolate bar. If I had 40% of respondents describe the peanut chocolate bar as "crunchy", but only 0.5% described the chocolate bar as "chunky" I would be forced to go back over the method.

The inclusion of "convenience" seems out of place in the list. Can someone actually be said to be motivated by convenience?

Most serial killers derive enjoyment from their activities, but how many communicate with newspapers and blackmail with threats of terrorist attacks if they fail to print their letters? That’s attention-seeking.

As for "convenience" I’m not so sure, but I’m put in mind of Dr Harold Shipman who killed his own patients on a massive scale.

The Hillside Stranglers loved Mr. Moto movies. When they got his daughter they remembered how much enjoyment they get from watching her father on film and they spared her life. I too enjoying Mr. Moto movies, they are very good.

O’so?

Well there is that Charlie Chan at Treasure Island connection.

My wife can’t stand me watching those films, too racist for her tastes. Boy oh boy are they campy though.

Well according to those figures out of the roughly 3000 records in the database only 15 killers were attention seekers. Something fishy there. I’ve come across at least a small handful of killers who wrote letters and I don’t even research serial killers regularly.

BTK, Zodiac, ONS, Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Charles Manson, Unabomber. That’s 7 examples of clear attention seekers off the top of my head.

I suppose the fact that the attention seekers are the ones who often become the most famous would tend to skew the results… a little, but not that much. I’m calling it, these statistics are total bunkum.

The more I read it over and over the more nonsense I see. We have such gems as serial killing "to avoid arrest", serial killing due to "convenience". If you think that’s paradoxical nonsense, that’s because it is paradoxical nonsense.

I bet someone from VOX has prepared this graph from the original study, and they’ve just jammed the original findings into one end of a spaghetti maker and squeezed out this pile of garbage. I think I’ll see if I can find it.

Found it.

http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%2 … istics.pdf

It looks like it’s not VOX’s fault, I get a bad impression from this report. I’d love someone who knows a thing or two about statistics to give an opinion. It has a way of interpreting statistics that make patterns evaporate. I don’t like that any more than I like analysis that makes numbers magically jump up.