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The Today, the concept of a serial killer, even the very term itself is so ingrained in our cultures

and in our mindsets that it's almost impossible to imagine a point in time where we weren't constantly talking

about notorious murderers and podcasts and learning about them in documentaries. But the term

serial killer has actually only been around since the 1970s. And before then, it wasn't really

even a thing that investigators thought about that often. Hard to believe, but it's true. Before then, it wasn't really even a thing that investigators thought about that often.

Hard to believe, but it's true. Before then, anyone who went on a killing spree went widely unnoticed

or at the very most was believed to be a particularly deranged criminal and sort of a one-off situation.

The closest we'd come to thinking about the concept of potential serial killers

was when the British were calling a string of murders, crimes in series.

Now, as we all know, that barely scratches the surface of what the term serial killer means today.

Because today, we have the general knowledge of who serial killers tend to be,

what kind of childhood they usually tend to have, and what kind of lives they usually live as

adult. But where did all the facts and all the statistics for this particular crime profile

come from? Who is the man that coined the term serial killer?

Well, his name was Robert Ressler.

Robert grew up on North Memorial Avenue in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1940s and 1950s,

and from a young age, he found himself drawn toward the sensationalized stories and news

articles about killers, rapists, and other violent criminals.

Far from terrorized or even repulsed by the men who seemed to make these things go bump

in the night, Robert wanted to know what made them tick.

This urge to understand the very people who seemed to be wanting to tear civilized society apart at the seams only grew stronger

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