A criminal justice professor at Southwestern Michigan College is writing a textbook on serial killers.
SMC Criminal Justice Director Don Ricker has taught a class on the topic since the 1990s and tells us he was approached by Kendall-Hunt Publishing in September about taking on the book project. He’s now working on the 200-page, 9-chapter title that could eventually be used in classes all over the country.
Dr. Ricker says he first began studying serial killers as a student, when he had a retired Michigan State Police trooper for a professor. The professor told him all about the John Norman Collins case, which he once investigated.
“[He] was kind of like a Ted Bundy before there was Ted Bundy,” Ricker said. “The all-American boy. His uncle was a state trooper. Some of the evidence was found in the uncle’s home, bloodstains that he painted over. So I said, is there a book? And there was. There was a book called The Michigan Murders. And I read that book and been into it ever since.”
Ricker says studying serial killers can be helpful to criminal justice and psychology students because of certain commonalities between cases.
“So there are a lot of theories on criminology in general, what you find. And again, loads of people experience this, but trauma and rejection is common in most of them.”
Ricker’s textbook will cover a variety of serial killer cases, mostly American. He says we’ve seen some trends with serial killings in recent decades.
“What we’re seeing today is, well, fewer victims per offender. And I think that’s due mostly to technology and advances in science and policing DNA and facial recognition and video. So that’s a good thing. The average number of victims now is between three and four for the male serial murderer.”
Ricker says we’re also seeing more African American serial killers, who have the same motivations as white killers, and he notes there are more firearm-related serial killings these days. Some of them would be classified as mass killings.
Ricker’s textbook is set to be released in January of 2027. He says he’ll start using it in his own class because the one he’s using now has become a bit dated.
