I’ve been reading lots of articles about serial killers and more often than not, it is widely assumed that serial killers have very high intelligence; which they used to avoid capture and leaving no traces behind. But that conception is wrong. Serial killers IQ varies from low to high and it is not something that can be easily contained in a single category.
You can see bellow, depending on the method of killing, how the IQ varies from one group to another.
Because there is no information about the intelligence level of every single serial killer caught, the numbers bellow are based only on 217 serial killers. While it is true that we would have had a much clearer image about serial killers’ IQ if more of them would have had a known IQ, we can definitely still have an image about their IQ based on the data available.
We have these numbers from Dr Aamodt, Radford University/FGCU Serial Killer Database. He spent years dedicating time to analyze serial killers and provide statistics that can give a close picture to the reality of these kind of murders.
| Killing Method | No of serial killers with an IQ known | Average IQ |
|---|---|---|
| Bomb | 3 | 140.3 |
| Strangle/Bludgeon | 8 | 108.8 |
| Strangle/Shoot | 6 | 105.8 |
| POison | 1 | 100 |
| Strangle | 41 | 96.7 |
| Stab/Shoot | 26 | 95 |
| Stab/Shoot | 25 | 92.3 |
| Shoot | 61 | 90.7 |
| Strangle/Stab | 14 | 90.2 |
| Blodgeon/Shoot | 11 | 87.1 |
| Blodgeon?stab | 11 | 85.5 |
| Bludgeon | 10 | 79.1 |
For more statistics about serial killers, go to this page.
Source: Dr Aamodt, Radord University
