Abstract

Serial murders are not an unprecedented sort of violence, neither are they geo or ethnoconcentrated crimes, as it has been shown by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who, in the nineteenth century, wrote some essays on violent crimes, especially those of sexual connotation. Serial murders have comparative low incidence. It is estimated that they correspond to less than 1% of homicides per year. However, its media appeal is conversely proportional to the estimation above, and dates back to 1888 with the serial killing of prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London. Such crimes where carried out by a stranger who called himself "Jack, the Ripper". In the 1970's and 1980's, a new generation of serial killers, such as Ted Bundy, BTK (Dennis Rader), Green River Killer (Gary Ridgeway) renewed the interest and the fear of the public on these crimes. Awe, in fact, was renewed because of the high recidivism and heinousness of the serial killer in detriment of the public order. But, paraphrasing Habermas (1990), what is the co-natural ius-philosophical discourse to the serial murder phenomenon? The perspective of Hans Kelsen embodies such discourse, whose subtext in a purely formallogical sense, can deduce a solution so heinous as the actual serial killer