killers are Gilles De Rais and Elisabeth Countess Bathory who go back into the 1500's(most of these old century killers were thought to be vampires or werewolves!). Jack the Ripper is widely seen as the first serial killer because the nature of the crimes (with the typical sexual motive) line up more with the more recent common ones, therefore serial killers are widely accepted to be only 125 years old. SOLUTIONS: In the late 1970's the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) of the FBI took a bigger step to battling serial offenses by undertaking profiling and larger behavioral studies. Profiling is understanding the offender, looking at a crime scene and judging by the evidence there what the possible killer is like and what he has done, to achieve this the FBI established the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). VICAP is a program used to evaluate unsolved crimes and is used to evaluate similarities in crimes; most of these have been done by putting certain information into a computer database. NCAVC is a department in the FBI, which pools in such resources as behavior studies, profiling, research etc. and using specially trained agents to operate it and assist in investigations around the US. It must be said now that the FBI's purpose is not to solve a case but to aid police with a profile and/or information to help the police solve it. One man at the forefront of the activity is now retired FBI agent Robert K. Ressler. Ressler played a major part in the BSU in the late 1970's by undertaking the Criminal Personality Research Project (CPRP) which was interviewing known killers such as Speck, Berkowitz, Kemper, Manson and many other killers known and unknown; this helped with the basis of profiling and other behavioral research. Ressler then took on profiling and other behavioral projects such as doing lectures, studies, psychology etc; he also helped establish VICAP an...
