Published January 18, 2012 Researchers have discovered that the
seemingly erratic behavior of the "Rostov Ripper," a prolific
serial killer active in the 1980s, conformed to the same
mathematical pattern obeyed by earthquakes, avalanches, stock
market crashes and many other sporadic events. The finding
suggests an explanation for why serial killers kill. Mikhail
Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, electrical engineers at the
University of California, Los Angeles, modeled the behavior of
Andrei Chikatilo, a gruesome murderer who took the lives of 53
people in Rostov, Russia between 1978 and 1990. Though Chikatilo
sometimes went nearly three years without committing murder, on
other occasions, he went just three days. The researchers found
that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a
mathematical distribution known as a power law. When the number
of days between Chikatilo's murders is plotted against the
number of times he waited that number of days, the relationship
forms a near-straight line on a ty