Serial sexual homicide is what we usually refer to when we use the term serial killer. There are murderers in the annals of crime who have no obvious sexual motif, yet who kill repeatedly and seemingly compulsively. A few such examples emerged from my study of full-length biographies of murderers, which now number 350. One of these murdererers, Charles Hatcher in Missouri (Ganey, 1989) murdered men, women, and children because of his simply profound misanthropic attitudes. Several of the decadent first-century Roman emperors, most notably Caligula, (Ferrill, 1991) used their absolute power to seduce and to commit sordid sexual acts with whomever they pleased and then proceeded to murder their victims. This is surely a kind of serial sexual homicide, yet it is unlike the serial killers of modern times because the emperors committed their acts as a kind of pastime outside of their main activities. Although we think of Ted Bundy as a serial killer who happened to be a lawyer, we think of Caligula as an emperor who happened to be a serial killer. The first people historically whom we might meaningfully call serial killers (because it had become their main identity) were Jean d’Arc’s lieutenant, the homosexual aristocrat, Gilles de Rais, in the 15th century, (Bataille, 1991) and Hungary’s Countess Erzsebet Bathory in the 16th century (Penrose, 1970). Bathory’s case is unique because she was a woman who experienced sexual release by pressing her body against the sexual parts of the bleeding bodies of young women, suspended from hooks whom her servants fetched from the countryside. I do not know whether this example of female serial sexual homicide (with perhaps 600 victims) is totally unique, although I know of no other instances. As for serial sexual homicide (I use the term serial killers for brevity) as we know it today, the phenomenon is comparatively recent. Cases begin to appear in the latter third of the 19th century, a few years before and a few years after the signal year 1888 marked by London’s Jack the Ripper.