The Beltway snipers were not serial killers, but spree killers. People who go on killing sprees for the feeling of power it gives them.
The most common type of serial killer is the sexual sadist who wants the hands on experience of killing. They rarely use guns . They are described as “addicted to killing,” and rarely stop on their own.
Well it seems to me the Russian guy mentioned upthread was smart- kill all kinds of people, all kinds of ways, doing it differently each time, certainly that would throw off investigators. I don’t know why more don’t do something out of the ordinary, like a white guy killer leaving a note implying he’s black and hates white people and is therefore killing them. It could be argued they are usually too crazy to do this, but if they are sane enough to kill and not get caught, surely they realize that different, odd things done each time will make them harder to catch?
It’s interesting to read about Jack the Ripper and the assumptions of who must have done it: that because he stopped, therefore he was killed or imprisoned, since that fits the profile for serial killers.
What historical guesswork fails to account for is all the other murdered prostitues of the era, that could have been the work of the same killer, if the killer had simply changed MOs. We assume serial killers don’t change MOs because the ones we’ve caught never did. Duh — that’s how we caught them.
I would say ‘guess’ instead of ‘determine’. As for admitting they can be wrong… well, they could hardly do otherwise, could they?
I don’t have an answer to the OP, but reading through the thread I think a lot of people are confusing the terms used in “serial killer profile” and “criminal profiling”. The serial killer profile is a group of traits that are generally shared by serial killers, but is hardly expected to apply to every one. Criminal profiling is determining traits of a specific killer based primarily on analysis of his/her crimes. It can be highly accurate, but by no means perfect.