Are there less active serial killers today than in the past?

Factual Questions
1

Hi there,

I have a bit of an interest in true crime, and I have done a lot of reading about some of the famous serial killers of the 20th century. A lot of them used to be given nicknames by the media, and their killing sprees would sometimes spread over years, or decades.

What I’m wondering is, is the phenomenon still as common? I don’t seem to see such things getting reported in the media, and I am wondering if there’s less “serial killing” going on now than in the past.

If so, why? Are forensic investigation techniques just getting too good?

2

A few different items:

  1. I think I’ve heard that police and the media got wise to the fact that serial killers are often in it for the attention. So nowadays they tend to keep it out of the news.

  2. Plus, the upsurge of fictional killers might have made it so that real life killers just aren’t that interesting by comparison.

  3. You’re looking back on famous killers from the entire 20th century. But really that’s a bunch of guys spread out over a hundred years. And even then the only ones who really are sort of interesting are Ed Gein, Charles Manson, and John Wayne Gacy. So while there will probably be just as many killers, you’re going to have to wait a hundred years to get a similar three headline toppers.

  4. The three strikes law has massively increased the number of people incarcerated. All crime is on the decline. So even if a serial killer isn’t caught caught and imprisoned for being a serial killer, if he’s out committing other crimes–which many do–there’s a good chance he’ll get pulled out of the game just based on that.

But no, there’s no reason to think that serial killers are going to be any more or less prevalent than they were in times previous. Forensics might have lowered their number some. Three strikes may have lowered the number some, but it’s going to be hard to quantify that.

3

I think first of all they’re become less newsworthy. If a guy kills three people, it may be reported locally but not nationally.

If the crime isn’t horrific (like Dahmer) it’d also be less likely to be reported nationally. I think drugs play into it more now. Since serial killers tend to pick victims not likely to be missed, when cops find these people they assume it’s drug related. And there probably was drug use involved.

4

I’d imagine the proliferation of Computers has something to do with it. In the Old days if there wasn’t a real motive(and serial killers usually didn’t have a specific one) It was damn near impossible to catch the guys without some lucky break.
But There is just so much information stored about eveything these days. That things narrow down much quicker now for law enforcement.

5

The number is undoubtedly going up. There are three times the number of people in the U.S. as there were 100 years ago and there is no reason to believe that there aren’t also three times as many serial killers.

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters confirms this.

That means only 2462 confirmed victims in the first 175 years or 14 per year.

Lack of record keeping and poorer forensics undoubtedly meant that it was much more difficult for police to ascribe all the victims to any one killer so that number is probably low. If you raise it a bit you get about the same rate per year per 100,000,000 population across time, give or take a big fudge factor.

Nothing has changed over the years. Estimates I’ve read range from 20 - 50 active serial killers roaming the country at any time. Some of their killing sprees no doubt last years, or even decades, and some have been given nicknames. The media reports on them when one is thought to have been caught. Probably the length of their careers contributes to your perceived lack of media attention. Unlike in the movies or TV shows when killers strike several times within an hour and so help themselves get caught, a killing every few years means that they stay out of the media eye - or fade away if nothing happens for a while - and make it harder for law enforcement agencies to track them.

People are crazy. That’s a constant.

6

Psychopathology may occur at a more or less constant rate in a given population, but cultural, political, and technological factors do change to force serial killers to adapt to a new equilibrium, if you will, of risk and opportunity. Computers, databases, closed-circuit TV security cameras, sex education, pop culture (esp. TV shows and movies), and the psychiatric establishment, to name a few, can all have a significant impact.

I’m currently reading Robert Cullen’s The Killer Department, about the serial killer dubbed “Citizen X” (Andrei Chikatilo, arrested for the final time in early 1990 and executed 2 1/2 years later) of the Rostov-on-Don region, Ukraine, who killed some 50+ people in the final years of the USSR. One thing the author stresses is how Soviet/Russian culture and society inadvertently aided and abetted both Chikatilo, and in passing, another necro-sadistic serial killer apprehended shortly before Chikatilo, Anatoly Slivko. In both cases the killer had an unhappy childhood in a dysfunctional family; witnessed at least one act of gory violence in childhood or young adulthood; grew up in a prudish culture and reached adulthood in a state of abysmal ignorance of human sexuality; failed to develop normally emotionally, psychologically, and sexually; struggled sexually after marriage; and failed to secure the much-needed help he needed from the Soviet psychiatric establishment. And in both cases, the killer was able to manipulate his young victims with ease because of the respect and trust children were taught to show to all adults (even strangers); because children were often left to their own devices for transportation and entertainment; because the police were not free or comfortable with publicizing the crime waves they were tracking; because the police knew little about serial killers, sexual psychopathology, and homosexuality (leading to much wasted effort hunting homosexual suspects in their confusion over the nature of homosexuality); because Soviet Communist Party ideology cast the serial-killer phenomenon as a western blight; and because the police lacked the training, experience, computers, and assistance of the psychiatric establishment forthcoming to their counterparts in the west.

In the case of Chikatilo, he was able to control his actions to a large degree in response to changes in risk of apprehension. After he was arrested relatively early in his string of murders, he was blood-tested (the results erroneously cleared him of the murders) but eventually served several months in prison for an earlier charge. This experience chastened him to a degree; the rate of his killing slowed, he ranged farther afield for victims and began taking greater pains to bury their bodies.

I presume that these cases in particular, along with the fall of communism and the opening of the former USSR to much more exposure to the west and its pop culture, have altered Russian (and Ukrainian) society so that it is no longer as naive, trusting, blinkered, and ignorant of sex crimes, sexual psychopathology, and so on – and that for sure their police departments are significantly modernized and better able to cope with the challenges of catching serial killers now than they were twenty years ago.

7

One factor muddying up the statistics is the number of murders not identified as the work of serial killers. If a guy “signs his work” or uses the same MO in a small geographic area, then its pretty easy to see that a serial killer is plying his trade. Otherwise not. Take BTK. His last three kills, coming some years after his first spate, weren’t assigned to him until he took credit for them shortly before his arrest. (In one case, a detective who dared wonder out loud if BTK was involved was told, basically, “Don’t go there!” by his colleagues.) And it is uncertain that his earlier crimes would have been connected if he hadn’t “bragged” about them at the time.

8

Nitpick: “fewer,” not “less.”

9

SERIAL KILLERS FBI says there are between 35 and 50 on the loose right now ,plying their trade. Is that a lot?

10

Came in to say this… I mean, unless he was suggesting that they were killing fewer people per SK.

11

:smiley: Good point.

12

What does Soren Kierkegaard have to do with this???

13

Thanks for the responses.

Of the current “active” serial killers (say, in the United States) are any of them known to the media by some kind of nickname?

14

Absolutely;
This is a pet peeve of mine-----in fact, it is considerably more than a peeve, it makes me foam at the mouth and scream out loud.

15

There was a terrific film made about this case, called Citizen X, with Stephen Rea, Donald Sutherland, Joss Ackland, Max Von Sydow, and Jeffrey DeMunn as Chikatilo.

It depicts the social forces in the Soviet system that The Scrivener mentions, as well as the unbelievable struggle the lead investigator had, over many years, to bring Chikatilo to justice. The acting is uniformly excellent, and I highly recommend it.

I met Jeffrey DeMunn, and actually had dinner with him. But he was in makeup as Abraham Lincoln at the time, I didn’t catch his name clearly, and didn’t connect him with that film. One of my regrets in life is that I missed the chance to tell him what an absolutely tremendous performance he gave.

16

If you take a look at the wiki body count page, there does actually appear, at first glance and without exhaustive statistical analysis, to be a pattern where serial killers, as reported, seem to have been disproportionately active during the 70s & 80s. Moreover, this does not appear to be a US-only trend.

For example, of the Top 15 as listed by Wikipedia, the careers of five (Pedro Alonso López, Daniel Barbosa, Gennady Mikhasevich, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy) occured entirely within the 1970-1989 interval, while the careers of six others (Pedro Rodrigues Filho, Gary Ridgway, Andrei Chikatilo, Anatoly Onoprienko, Ahmad Suradji, Serhiy Tkach) overlapped this period. It seems, from the public evidence, that 73.3% of the worst confirmed serial killers of all time were operating during this time.

This trend is apparently confirmed when one examines Wiki’s list of those with 15-30 confirmed murders. Out of this group of thirty-four, six (Juan Vallejo Corona, William Bonin, Paul John Knowles, Jose Antonio Rodriguez Vega, Robert Hansen, Dennis Nilsen) murdered exclusively during this period, while nine others (Patrick Kearney, Sergei Ryakhovsky, Joel Rifkin, Jeffrey Dahmer, Randy Steven Kraft, Robert Lee Yates, Michel Fourniret, The Monster of Florence, Charles Ray Hatcher) did so partially. Their list says that over 44% of this grouping of “the worst of the rest” were active between 1970-1989. Mind you, their list goes back to 1880.

I think, at least from a Western perspective, that the phenomenon of the serial killer may have peaked in the 70s & 80s, due to a myriad of factors, and that for us, the storm has passed.

However, the occurence of these monsters seems to have happened quite frequently in one place, in particular, over the most recent couple decades: China. A January 2012 post drew my attention to what appears to be a wave of serial killings as societal conditions change - much as happened in the West decades ago.

17

What the hell is going on in Colombia?

18

Inept law enforcement?

19

What about Brazil’s laws? Filho killed over 100 people, was convicted and sentenced for 128yrs, but the maximum a person can serve is 30 years?!

:smack: