Some relationships can be summarized in 2-dimensional graphs; other relationships require a more complex picture. To provide a more comprehensive representation of murders, Michael Maltz proposed using 3-dimensional plots to show the relationship between the ages of victims and offenders. Such a plot is presented in the surface graph to the right.

The contours of its surface reveal some attributes of murder in the U.S. The large central peak shows that most offenders are between ages 18 and 34, as are their victims. The smaller peak off to the left shows that many very young children are killed by persons in their twenties and thirties—mostly incidents of infants being killed by their parents. There is an area between the two peaks in which very few murders occur (victim ages 4 to 12). The diagonal ridge running from the top of the central peak to the lower right-hand corner shows that adult offenders tend to kill victims in their own age group. The ridge running along the line of 20-year-old offenders shows that older juveniles and young adults kill victims in a wide age range.

One difficulty with the 3-dimensional representation is reading the coordinates of various features, due to the distortion caused by representing three dimensions in a 2-dimensional space. Another representation of the same murder data is a 2-dimensional plot that uses color to represent the number of murders in each victim-offender age pair.

Representing complex data visually can help a reader grasp the complex interrelationships often lost in more traditional data presentations.