The Consulting Detective

Publisher Summary Even though some types of consultants have been useful in understanding some aspects of serial murder investigations, the most valuable is the consulting detective. This chapter gives an account of how consulting detectives were used to help the investigators in the Atlanta child murders and the El Paso desert murders. In the Atlanta child murders, police connected 28 murder cases and 1 missing persons case, most of which had children as victims. These cases were dubbed by the national press as the “Atlanta Child Murders.” The commissioner assembled a group of highly touted ”supercops” as consultants. They were investigators who had previously handled some of the most notorious and high-profile murder cases in the nation, and their image was overhyped by the media, who represented them as the “seven samurai” aiming to solve the cases for the Atlanta police. The second case involved the El Paso Desert Murders, a serial murder investigation with six prostitute victims and one prostitute who had escaped from that same killer.