MASS MURDERPioneering the Study of Mass Murder
It is because of Fox’s daily efforts to scour and synthesize police and media reports that we know 2,944 people have died in 567 mass killings in the U.S. since 2006. And that was before a man shot and killed at least 18 people at a restaurant and a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine.
James Alan Fox, a longtime Northeastern professor, is the record-keeper of American mass murder.
It is because of his daily efforts to scour and synthesize police and media reports that we know 2,944 people have died in 567 mass killings since 2006. That was before a man recently shot and killed at least 18 people at a restaurant and a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine.
Fox presides over the Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killings Database, the longest-running and most extensive data source on the subject.
For all it does to deepen understanding of American gun violence, the award-winning database serves as merely the chalk outline of a four-decade career that has partnered Fox with a U.S. president, an array of law enforcement investigators and TV shows of all kinds.
Fox’s predilection for the worst crimes can be traced back to an exploratory question raised in the late 1970s by his close friend and Northeastern colleague Jack Levin.
“Jack said, ‘Has anyone ever done a study of mass murder?’” recalls Fox in the living room of his Boston duplex, where the walls are adorned with handwritten cards from President Bill Clinton and other memorabilia. “Psychiatrists had written books about their cases. Journalists had written true crime books. But no one had ever done a study of the characteristics.”
They set out to be the first.
“I sent a student to the library to look through journal articles and books — to find something written about this dreaded phenomenon — and she found nothing,” says Levin, professor emeritus and co-director of Northeastern’s Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict. “I was shocked that no one had ever studied serial murder — there was a much larger number of serial murders than we see nowadays.”
While embarking on their initial five-year study of mass murders, Fox and Levin helped create an industry — both academically and in the media — in the decade of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and “The Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz, among many others.
Their first article was based on data from 42 grisly cases. “We referred to mass killers as ‘extraordinarily ordinary’ because they’re very able to look safe and you’d never suspect they’re dangerous,” says Fox, who would go on to make clever turns of phrase his trademark.
