Elliott Leyton

Elliott Leyton was a Canadian social anthropologist and author who became one of the world's most widely consulted experts on serial and multiple murder. In his 1986 book Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Multiple Murderer, Leyton applied anthropological method to the study of serial killers, examining their social and cultural context rather than treating them purely as individual psychological aberrations, and argued that patterns in who serial killers are and whom they target reflect broader tensions and inequalities within the societies that produce them. His comparative, historically grounded approach distinguished his work from the more purely clinical or investigative accounts of serial murder that dominated the field, and Hunting Humans became one of the most frequently cited academic studies of the phenomenon.