Identifying a new crime category is a bit like discovering a previously unrecognized disease. Until you can discern a clear pattern and put a name to it, each incidence seems like nothing more than a collection of bizarre coincidences, a problem we cannot begin to address.

From the first bewildering reports that a young pregnant woman named Laci Peterson had vanished from her California home on Christmas Eve 2002, I sensed that something greater and even more disturbing was at play than an individual family tragedy. As the facts began to unfold, it quickly became clear that Laci was not the victim of a stranger abduction, as her husband Scott alleged. Yet until her body and that of her unborn son washed up on the shores of San Francisco Bay four months later—90 miles from her home and precisely where Scott said he had gone on an impromptu solo fishing trip that day, in a boat no one knew he had purchased, after researching tides in that part of the bay and fashioning a series of homemade cement anchors—it was hard to believe that she was killed by the man her friends and family uniformly considered to be the “perfect husband.” There was apparently no previous history of violence between the couple and no evidence whatsoever that a crime had occurred inside their home.

Murder is a messy business, and few crimes are as self-revealing as domestic homicide. The typically spontaneous nature of these murders, fueled by anger or jealousy or other highly charged emotions, creates an unmistakable trail of evidence for investigators to follow. Despite his controversial acquittal, a mountain of physical evidence tied O.J. Simpson to the killing of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, including a blood trail that literally led from her condo into his car and back to his home. A classic signature of domestic homicide is what profilers call “overkill”—the use of an extreme level of violence or multiple means of violence far beyond what is needed to take the victim’s life. The near decapitation of Nicole Simpson was such a telling indicator of the motivation for her murder that the defense made the ludicrous argument that Nicole was the mistaken target of an ultra-violent South American drug gang hit squad, whose grotesquely deep throat slashings are termed “Colombian neckties.”

The stark contrast between the bloody and unplanned crime scenes typically found in domestic homicide and what I was discovering as a journalist covering the Peterson case set me on a six-year quest that culminated in my recently published book “Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives.” As I began looking into other reports of women who, like Laci, had reportedly vanished without a trace I found hundreds of cases that fit a distinct pattern, yet one that had never been identified because we have tended to look at each case in a vacuum.

These were not women who had run off on their own, gotten lost, or disappeared in some amnesic haze. These were invariably women who had been murdered by a current or former husband or boyfriend, the murder covered up and disguised as a mysterious vanishing. Some of these men, like Mark Hacking and Michael White, took the Peterson paradigm a step further, setting up phony scenes to support an abduction scenario. Others claimed their wives simply disappeared or walked out on them—without taking their children, their cars, their possessions, or even their wallets with them.

John David Smith, who killed his first wife and kept her remains in a makeshift coffin in his grandparents’ garage for 15 years, contends that he came home one day to find his second wife gone and a note stating little more than “Don’t forget to feed the fish.” She has not been seen since and he has never been charged with her murder, although he was convicted of murdering his first wife. Donald Moringiello claimed he and his wife became separated in traffic as she followed him in her own car on the way to visit his children. However, he still had not reported her missing a month later when her body floated to the surface of the bay behind their home, cinderblocks tied to her neck and ankles. It took two trials to convict him. Hans Reiser suggested that his estranged wife might have been kidnapped by the Russian Mafia or the KGB, or as his attorney claimed at his just concluded trial, that she was hiding out in her native Russia to “screw him to the wall.” When Gerald Miller’s second wife vanished into thin air, just as the first had, he offered nothing but this brazen bit of sarcasm: “Maybe she was abducted by aliens.” He wasn’t even investigated in the disappearance of his first wife until the second followed her into the ether five years later.

While some recent killers cited Scott Peterson as their inspiration, he was hardly the first to come up with such an idea. I traced the pattern back a century to the real-life murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel, “An American Tragedy.”

These killings were distinct in nearly every way from more typical domestic homicides. They were not committed in a sudden rage or “heat of passion” but were literally planned executions, conceived after considerable thought and preparation and carried out with military precision. They were cold-blooded rather than hot-blooded crimes, controlled and calculated acts that often involved a high degree of staging. Many of these killers researched in advance ways to kill or to dispose of their victim’s body. They often employed methods such as strangulation or suffocation, what police refer to as a “soft kill,” in order to leave behind as little forensic evidence as possible. While many men who commit domestic homicide never even leave the crime scene or attempt to deny culpability, these men go to great lengths to distance themselves from their actions. Everything is done with the idea of getting away with murder—and an alarming number of these killers are able to do just that.

As I continued my research, I observed a second pattern that seemed like a variation on the same theme. In these cases, the victim herself was not “disappeared” but the true cause of her death, and who was responsible for it, was erased. Her body was left for police to find, but the death scene was staged or re-staged to appear to be the result of an accident, a suicide, or a crime perpetrated by someone other than her intimate partner. Many of the most notorious wife-killings of the last several decades fit into this latter pattern. Jeffrey MacDonald, a highly regarded surgeon and Green Beret was convicted of stabbing and bludgeoning his pregnant wife and two young daughters to death, a crime that to this day he insists was committed by a gang of “drug-crazed hippies” he claims broke into his home. Authorities believe he based his cover story on an Esquire magazine article about the Manson Family killings found in his home at the time of the murders.

Charles Stuart infamously claimed he and his pregnant wife were ambushed on the way home from a hospital birthing class by a black mugger, who forced his way into their car at a stoplight and shot them both, a case that caused a racial firestorm when black men matching the generic description he gave police were randomly stopped on the street and pulled in for questioning. Stuart even went so far as to pick an innocent man out of a lineup. But after his brother told police that Stuart cooked up the mugging story, and police obtained an warrant for his arrest, Stuart jumped to his death from a bridge—leaving behind a note that simply read “sorry for all the trouble.”

Novelist and one-time mayoral candidate Michael Peterson staged his wife’s death to look like a tragic fall down the stairs in their home. An autopsy indicated that she actually died from a vicious bludgeoning to the head. He was convicted of her murder, but was never tried for an almost identical death 15 years earlier of another woman he was very close to, who was also found dead at the bottom of a staircase and was last seen alive in the company of Michael Peterson.

Dentist Barton Corbin pulled off perhaps the most audacious ruse of all, making not one but two different intimate partners appear to have taken their own lives. While still in dental school he shot his estranged girlfriend then staged the scene to make it appear to be a suicide. Fourteen years later he did the same thing to his wife. He might have gotten away with it again but authorities were eventually able to tie him to the gun used to kill his wife. Facing the death penalty if convicted of both murders, he grudgingly admitted to murdering both women in exchange for avoiding execution.

What completely clinched for me the belief that these various types of hidden homicides were just opposite sides of the same coin was the Drew Peterson case. While he has not yet been charged with any crime, this Illinois cop is the chief suspect in the disappearance of his fourth wife, and the drowning death of his third wife (whose death was considered an accident until her body was exhumed and re-autopsied in the wake of the disappearance of the 4th Mrs. Peterson).

In my book I present an original criminal and psychological profile of what I have come to call “eraser killers.” I have given them this name because “erasing” their victim best describes both the motive and modus operandi of these crimes. The eraser killer does not kill for money or to be with another woman. Those might be ancillary benefits his crime affords him, but they are not what truly drives him. Instead, he kills to eliminate the woman, and sometimes children, in his life because he views them as in the way, as an impediment to what he believes he deserves. He is not about to support a wife he no longer cares to be with, or raise a child he does not want. In the mind of the eraser killer, murder is a quicker, easier, less painful, and more emotionally satisfying solution.

Divorce would leave him with too much baggage, too many restraints. His goal is to expunge this intolerable burden from the record of his life, and once he kills he seems compelled to rid himself of every earthly trace of her existence, often giving away his victim’s most intimate possessions even as he claims to be searching for her and praying for her return. He is so incredibly selfish, so consummately narcissistic, that he feels entitled to this most brutal form of annulment, the ultimate do-over. Because he is psychopathically callous, devoid of empathy or any genuine human connection to those he once professed to love, getting rid of an inconvenient wife and child is of no more emotional consequence than throwing out an old sweater. And because he is also highly Machiavellian, he believes that he can pull off the perfect murder and move blithely on to a newer, better life, one more in line with the grandiose nature of his fantasies. He does not fear punishment because he is thoroughly convinced that he will never be held accountable. He thinks that he is smarter than everyone around him because he has spent his whole life lying to others, living behind a mask of secrets, sometimes living a completely double life.

Yet in the existing scientific literature, there is virtually nothing on domestic homicides involving the kind of elaborate staging and deception employed by these killers. There has been literally more research on lesbian serial killers (of which I think there has been exactly one in history) than on a crime so prevalent I find new cases that appear to fit this profile every week.

The most shocking thing I uncovered about eraser killers is that many who get away with murder go on to kill another intimate partner later in life, often not even bothering to change their “foolproof” plan one iota. Many “missing” women are never found and no one is ever held to account for what happened to them. A few victims—the lucky ones, in a manner of speaking—are eventually discovered, often by pure chance or an act of nature. Their families get a chance to bury their loved ones, or what is left of them, and sometimes their killers are brought to justice. A small number of presumed killers are tried and convicted in the absence of a body, while others are acquitted with or without a body because there is not enough evidence to convince a judge or jury beyond a reasonable doubt that a murder occurred, much less that the woman’s intimate partner was responsible. Many missing persons cases never even advance to the level of a homicide inquiry. And many homicides go undetected, due to sloppy police work or just-clever-enough killers who are able to pass off their handiworks as a fall or bathtub drowning or an undetected poisoning or, God forbid, the actions of an innocent person.

Eraser killers exploit fundamental safeguards enshrined in our legal system to protect honest citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures and from being coerced into giving incriminating testimony against themselves, as if these honored protections were simply escape hatches meant to provide safe haven for someone able to pull off an expert murder. Without an actual name for these crimes and for this killer, we cannot see through his schemes and solve what are all too often unsolved mysteries.