June 8, 1949 - David Meirhofer
His case holds a particular place in criminal justice history: Meirhofer was the first serial killer actively investigated using FBI offender profiling, a technique then still being refined and now standard in major crime investigations. The crimes themselves — four murders in rural Montana over seven years, three of them children — unfolded in a community where such violence was wholly unexpected, which helped conceal his actions for so long. He died by suicide shortly after confessing, leaving the legal process unfinished.
From Wikipedia
David Gail Meirhofer (June 8, 1949 – September 29, 1974) was an American serial killer who confessed to four murders in rural Montana between 1967 and 1974 — three of which were children. Meirhofer killed himself shortly after confessing, and was never tried in court.
In the early 1970s, when Meirhofer's crimes were ongoing, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been refining a method of psychologically profiling criminal offenders, and Meirhofer would be the first serial killer to be actively investigated using this technique. Offender profiling is now a contemporary method used to discover clues pertaining to the characteristics of an unknown offender from evidence at the scene of the crime, and to psychologically profile the perpetrator concerned.
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