What we do not know includes: How often are the bodies of murder victims never found or never identified as victims? What happens to members of marginalized groups who disappear but are never reported missing, because no one cares enough about them or knows enough about them to file a report? How often do we fail to detect murders of people who were expected to die, such as hospital patients and nursing home residents?
"The exaggeration and hype of the 1980s have been replaced by more reasonable estimates, but we may yet be undercounting the number of serial murder victims in the United States by discounting what we do not know." "The true number of serial murder victims in the United States is a function of what we know - apprehended killers and strongly suspected serial murder cases - as well as what we do not know - serial murder cases that for one reason or another are off the radar of police, coroners, medical examiners and others officials," she writes in the Homicide Studies article. But the much more conservative calculations of victim numbers that followed were also inaccurate, she said, because they were based on incomplete data. In research published in 1990, she debunked wildly inflated claims about the number of serial killer victims that had been circulated by special interest and advocacy groups and in the news media.
The article marks a return to a subject of early professional interest for Quinet, who is also a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment at IUPUI, teaches a course each spring titled, "Murder in America," and is a member of the Indiana Violent Crime and Homicide Investigator's Association. "And this is not new - these are victims that we've always been not counting." "We're talking about a factor of two clear up to a factor of 10," she said. Quinet's analysis, based on conservative extrapolations from existing data, would add at least 182 and possibly as many 1,832 victims. Recent academic estimates of the average number of serial killer victims each year range from 67 to 180. Quinet writes that a lack of reliable data about the "missing missing" - including marginalized groups such as prostitutes, transients, gay street hustlers, foster children and "thrown-away" teens - is likely to contribute to undercounting of the victims of serial killers.