Citation

Simkin MV, Roychowdhury VP. J. Theor. Biol. 2014; 355C: 111-116.

Affiliation

Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1594.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jtbi.2014.03.039

PMID

24721476

Abstract

We analyze the time pattern of the activity of a serial killer, who during twelve years had murdered 53 people. The plot of the cumulative number of murders as a function of time is of "Devil's staircase" type. The distribution of the intervals between murders (step length) follows a power law with the exponent of 1.4. We propose a model according to which the serial killer commits murders when neuronal excitation in his brain exceeds certain threshold. We model this neural activity as a branching process, which in turn is approximated by a random walk. As the distribution of the random walk return times is a power law with the exponent 1.5, the distribution of the inter-murder intervals is thus explained. We illustrate analytical results by numerical simulation. Time pattern activity data from two other serial killers further substantiate our analysis.

Language: en