After a week-long robbery and murder spree that claimed five victims and left the rural South Carolina county of Gaffney on edge, he is dead. His name was Patrick Tracy Burris, and he was a 41 year-old recent parolee with a lengthy criminal record for burglary and assault, fresh from an eight-year stint at a North Carolina prison.Though with five victims he qualifies as a multiple murderer, of course, he was not a serial killer, as he was falsely described, nor could you even call him a typical spree killer, as I wrongly believed him to be. He was simply a guy who thought he had to return to a life of crime to get by, and didn't want to go back to prison as a consequence of leaving witnesses behind to identify him. Of course, there may have been some rage involved, but it is noteworthy that, so far as has yet been revealed, he did not sexually assault any of the female victims (nor the males).
This was a small county in South Carolina, Gaffney, and interestingly enough, it had an earlier experience with a serial killer, a man named Lee Roy Martin, who was known as the Gaffney Strangler. His last victim was a fourteen year-old girl, and he died in prison, murdered by a fellow inmate. Like Burris, who was shot dead by police following his week-long murder spree, he claimed five victims.
So what can you say? Burris served his time, was released, and evidently should not have been, or should have had access to some kind of counseling, which I seriously doubt was the case. If we're going to put people with a violent criminal history back out into society, then we need to do a better job of making sure they can adjust. It's not just a matter of feel-good, politically correct social engineering, its just a matter of what's best for society in general. Either rehabilitate them, or keep them locked away. In worse case scenarios, involving such cases as mass or multiple murderers, serial rapist/killers and child rapists/killers, execute them.
But don't just put these people back out on the streets, fail to rehabilitate them, or make the attempt, and refuse to follow up on them, and then act surprised when it leads to tragedy.
