Source: Art by K. Ramsland
In Canada, they’re calling Sabrina Kauldhar a serial killer, but if convicted she might more accurately be called a spree killer. The murders appear to comprise a chain of incidents triggered by an initiating factor that continued to affect the offender throughout the spree. At least three died in at least two locations. Although the FBI no longer uses “spree” as a category of multicide, it’s still useful for the study of motivation in criminology, especially for such a rare case.
Kauldhar, 30, is accused of carrying out three murders this year between October 1 and October 3, in three different towns in Ontario, Canada. She knew one victim and randomly stabbed the other two in separate locations. The first victim was Kauldhar’s roommate in Toronto. A day later, Kauldhar stabbed a man in a park in Niagara Falls. She then took public transit to Hamilton, where she approached a 77-year-old man in a parking lot and stabbed him. Neither man had provoked her. Neither knew her. These were random attacks. A mental health assessment has been ordered to determine Kauldhar’s fitness for the legal proceedings.
My colleague, former FBI profiler Mark Safarik, and I researched spree killer motivations, and from this work, we can anticipate what likely drove Kauldhar. According to news reports, court records show that she’d been convicted in 2018 for several violent offenses, including breaking and entering, assault with a weapon, and assaulting an officer.
Yet her landlord of two years described her as a quiet, responsible person who always paid the rent on time. She’d invited an older woman, Trinh Thi Vu, to reside with her to help with expenses. The landlord had heard complaints from both about cleanliness and noise, but he’d witnessed no aggression or hostility. When a delivery came for Kauldhar on October 1, the landlord entered the apartment and discovered Vu on the floor, bleeding. Police determined she’d been killed.
Kauldhar is a white, female loner who used a knife over three days. We don’t yet know why, but we can reasonably surmise a likely motivation. In 2019, Safarik and I collected a database of 358 cases of spree killing, which involved 418 individuals from 43 countries. We grouped these offenders into five primary categories (anger-revenge, mission, desperation, mental illness, and robbery-thrill) and four secondary categories, which can overlap the primary ones (movement in tight locations, mixed multicides, intended spree, and unique circumstances). Several categories yielded subcategories. Some incidents featured a lone offender, while others involved teams.
Among spree incidents, we find few females operating on their own. They’re more likely to be found on teams, like Caril Ann Fugate with Charles Starkweather, but never as the mastermind or ringleader. There was no female-only team. Some female participants might be considered compliant accomplices, except in thrill-based sprees. Overall, about 5 percent of spree killers are female, with just five (now six) operating on their own. They show up in all but the desperation category.
The weapon of choice for 75 percent of spree killers is a firearm, usually a handgun. Those who used a gun plus other weapons, such as a knife, came next, at 12 percent. “Blades” included knives, machetes, and axes (8.3 percent). Only about 2 percent bludgeoned their victims (usually with hammers) and 1 percent choked or asphyxiated them. The final 2 percent involved miscellaneous methods, like bombs, a mace, or pesticides.
Most sprees in our study (40 percent) ran for one to three days, followed by 18 percent that lasted less than two hours. Kauldhar’s would be typical, then.
Anger-revenge sprees were the most prevalent, followed by robbery-thrill. Significant losses appear to be a primary motivator (relationship, money, employment) at almost 30 percent, followed by motives related to a mission or hate (15 percent) and mental illness (12 percent). Among robbery-thrill sprees, prior crimes were influential. About 1.4 percent sought fame. It seems likely, from the behavior described in the Kauldhar case, that some issue with her roommate precipitated the deadly violence and then she just kept going, either angry or having a mental health crisis (or both).
Thirty percent of spree killers in the anger-revenge category initially killed someone they knew, and then attacked strangers. We called this subcategory targeted and random-opportunistic (versus just targeted or just random-opportunistic). Kauldhar’s behavior seems to fit. A similar example is Jennifer San Marco, who went on an anger-fueled spree in California in 2006. First, she killed a neighbor. Then she went to a former workplace to shoot and kill seven more. Although she was mentally ill (paranoid schizophrenia), she also had a long-standing grudge.
We will wait and see what the Kauldhar proceedings discover, but anger or illness likely played a significant role. As a rare female spree killer (if convicted as such), she should be studied.
