Why aren’t there more black, Hispanic or Asian serial killers? All the major ones, Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, Berkowitz, Jesperson, Fish, Gein, and Manson, are white; even among a much larger list of serial killers on Crimelibrary.com (a great site,) there only seem to be three or four non-white psychos.
I don’t understand this. It can’t be explained along class lines because serial killers come from both upper and lower class backgrounds.
What do you think?
First of all, the biggest chunk of the population is white. That part is purely math. A more subjective factor is the trend that, among police officers, white people don’t look as suspicious as non-whites. Sure, I know, lots of cops are truly color-blind. However, the phrase, “driving while black” didn’t materialize out of thin air. I’m not speaking from bitter experience; I’m white. In fact, I can think of a couple of police encounters where I might have ended up in jail if I hadn’t been a paleface.
Another factor is that serial killers are the result of unusual psychogical causes. American society affects white people differently from non-white people, so it’s consistent that white people and non-white people are affected by different psychological causes.
I see two possibilities:
It may simply be that psychopathy is genetically more common in people of European descent, much the same way sickle-cell anemia tends to be more common in African-descended people.
At least according to several sources I can find, sexual deviance is predominantly a white male phenomenon. The great majority of serial killers are sex-driven.
So why are things like pedophilia, necrophilia, etc. mostly white phenomena? I haven’t the foggiest idea.
I think the first part of the first response is probably closest to the mark. We had a thread on this subject a few years ago wherein a South African poster offered that most serial killers where he came from are black. Not too hard to fathom.
RickJay, pedophilia is hardly a white phenomenon. Just look at Michael Jackson. Oh, wait.
Anyway, here’s my completely speculative and unscientific WAG: It has to do with culture. The “white American” population are all about repressing negative emotions (esp. anger) and saying “Have a nice day!” to that rude customer, etc. The buried emotions fester and ultimately express themselves in a myriad of ways, from alcoholism to spousal abuse to serial killing.
Black Americans, on the other hand, are more apt to express their emotions whenever they feel them. So they’re more likely to commit crimes of passion, but less likely to repress those emotions that lead to killing random strangers.
Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong…
According to a study referenced by Eric W. Hinkey in Serial Murderers and their Victims, between 1975 - 1988, black serial murderers made up 21% of reported offenders. Matters such as class and location are also not determining factors.
I would hazard a guess that since black men are more likely to be incarcerated for whatever reasons, it’s possible that potential future serial murderers may be prevented from killing simply because they tend to be behind bars.
AskNott brings up another possibility, that black men are more likely to be singled out by police for whatever reason, which may, in a sense, effectively curtail repetitive killings. Is a black man more likely to be singled out and discovered to have killed one person sooner than a white man, before said white man can kill a huge number of victims? This is just a guess.
Isn’t that fairly close to the percentage of blacks in the U.S.? Maybe it is just that you don’t see black serial killers on American Justice, as much (if ever).
The percentage of blacks in American society is ~12.5%.
<hijack>
Related to this, I was once told that most serial killers were ex-military.
I was wondering if someone here can give me the straight dope on this:
A few speculations:
A successful serial killer has to be able to charm people into letting him put them in dangerous situations. Women gladly got into Ted Bundy’s car because he seemed like a nice, clean-cut preppie. Kids went to John Gacy’s house because he seemed like a harmless, jolly clown. Victims were (mistakenly) at ease around such men. Well, if Bundy or Gacy had been black, I suspect people would have been much more leery of being alone with them in the first place.
Crimes involving well-to-do, white, (especially female) victims always get a LOT more media attention than those involving poor women or ethnic minorities. I mean, when Chandra Levy disappeared, the national media obsessed over the story. If she’d been a black woman in East St. Louis, you think her story would’ve gotten so much play?
Point is, if there were a psycho strangling black women in Watts, people outside L.A. might never hear of the crime spree at all, while a psycho strangling white women in Beverly Hills would be the #1 story in every media outlet in America. Now, suppose that both killers were caught. Would anyone know (or long remember) the name of the black man killing women in Watts? Nope. But people would remember the name of the Beverly Hills Strangler forever.
In other words, there may NOT be a disproportionate number of white serial killers. But the white ones get a lot more media attention and notoriety.
There are exceptions, notably the DC sniper.
No. Even a cursory examination shows that the majority were not ex-military.
More to the point, the majority of all serial killers engage in acts of cruelty or violence during childhood; i.e.–torturing pets, killing small animals, or displaying an excessive intrest in death or suffering. It obviously starts early, & may even begin pre-natally.
I heard a black comedian (Sinbad?) comment on this very phenomenon. He noted that the majority of incidental violent (i.e. burglary gone bad) and stupid crimes were perpetrated by blacks due perhaps to shortsightedness or undue focus on the larger goal: getting a 40; whereas the truly psychotic crimes were done by whites. Two friends watching a football game & one ends up getting shot in a heated debate over a “bad call” = black man. Granny duct-taped into a mummy & raped repeatedly and forced to watch her parrot plucked alive and then she’s finally killed in a gas explosion in the home = white guy.
Given the disproportionately colorful complexion of our prison system I’m inclined to favor the argument that colored psychos get caught before they can become sereal killers because the white cops are always on the lookout for the boogeyman. Could be parenting too. If a white kid gets into domestic vivisection when he’s a kid, his parents might not find out, or if they do they might not do much about it. I don’t know any black kids who wouldn’t get the wrath of momma and beat within an inch of their lives in the same situation–maybe they’ve found a way to curb that kind of behavior.
Related issue: I wonder how many women serial killers there really are that escape justice simply because mancops don’t think to look for a she-perp.
While I think the percentage of population theory has some merit, smart money’s on astorian’s excellent answer. It goes deeper than simple population metrics.
Snicks
This pretty much tells all:
So it’s quite simple. The majority of serial killers are white, because the majority of the population is white.
Since teh 2000 US Census says 12/1% of the population self-identifies as “black” (and 1.6% as “two or more races”), this statistic really turns a lot of the idle speculation in this thread on its ear. Blacks may actually over-represented. [An argument could be made that we should use the percentage of the prison inmates who are black, rather than the percentage of the general population, but (mistakenly or not) I believe that a) serial killers are relatively rare, and b) almost all US serial killers are in prison. If these assumptions are true, then the general US population is the more informative denominator
I would hate to see this turned around to draw unwarranted prejudicial remarks about blacks. It’s possible that this reflects public/media bias (is there a difference anymore?) in media coverage and classification. I’ve met a few urban black males who claimed to have killed several people (e.g. gang violence), but they would not are not counted as “serial killers” in the press. They might, however, be counted as serial killers for the purpose of treatment in prison. There may also be a bias or culture among various segments of the prison population that lencourages blacks to claim multiple kills to enhance their (protective) reputation or get into psychiatric therapy to gain potential “psychiatrist parole recommendations” for their “tremndous change from their behavior on the street”
That’s all speculation, of course. I just wanted to point out that there can be many, perhaps surprising, confounding factors in prison stats. Qadgop, of course, is one of our most informed regulars on this subject. [Yeah, that’s there to grab him if he vanity searches. Sorry. With a 2-character name, I can’t do vanity searches, and besides, for me, they’d be “reveal your insignificance on this board” searches]
It’s important not to read too much
Why is it, too, that it seems like most serial killers have “Wayne”, “Ray” or “Lee” as their middle name?
I would have to agree with KP’s evaluation, namely that “serial killer” should be defined before the statistics on their distribution handed out. One definition on the Internet was “a person who kills at least three people, one at a time, over a relatively short interval.”
That definition covers a lot of ground. It would certainly cover a young man involved in violent gang- or drug-related skirmishes, although I don’t think that’s what we think of when we think “serial killer.” I personally associate it with compulsive premeditated murders with a common element or method, committed against similar victims individually, against many over a period of time.
The difficult part about this question is that our public perception relies so heavily on what the media considers newsworthy, and this is not just (as astorian suggests) because of the color of the victims. If, for good or bad, the common perception is that dark-skinned people are criminals, then another dark-skinned criminal is barely worth a lead story. (“Yawn, another black man turns out to be a criminal. Put it on page six.”) But a light-skinned criminal, once caught, may get better press coverage. (“Hey, a white father of two in suburban USA turns out to be a multiple murderer. That’s different!”) As an example, just look at the hay made of the female guard charged with torturing prisoners, and the relatively little attention paid her male cohorts.
Such a thing could reverse the common perceptions. If the afore-cited statistic is correct, this could well have happened.
I think the DC snipers would be considered “spree killers”–people who shot a bunch of people over a short period of time. Like Charles Starkweather, they just wanted to get away with killing people. Mass murderers are similar, but they kill a whole bunch of people at once; i.e Columbine.
Serial killings have a physcial/sexual aspect to them. The killer rarely uses a gun, because they get off on the actual physical sensation of killing another person. Sexual abuse before and after the murder occur. Dhmer, Gacy & Bundy were serial killers.
Before the killers are caught, the media has no idea who is doing it, much less the killer’s race. The DC sniper was originality said to be “a white guy in a van,” and the Atlanta child muders were suspected to be a Klu Klux Klan killer.