The Death of Serial Killers
- Amy
- Oct 28, 2020
- 10 min read
I've been thinking about this a lot, for a long time. Please don't get me wrong, I do not wish for the unjust killings of innocent people. but there's a macabre part of me that kind of wants to know what it's like to live in the days of serial killer madness... What was it like living in fear constantly depending on how you looked or where you lived or but being WHITE. Because we don't really experience the fear anymore. Serial killers (while not exclusively) tend to be white, and they tend to kill within their race, when they aren't butchering black prostitutes and getting away with it because of lack of concern from the public and the police force. Serial killing seems to be the only widespread, external threat white people have lived with in society. We aren't victims of systemic racism, we don't get punished for our white collar crimes well enough, we can do drugs without fear of being murdered in the streets by police.
That's probably why I find it so fascinating. It's like cancer. It's the external threat to my wellbeing born of nothing but luck of the draw, the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm a white, straight woman, one of the three common groups of serial killing victims (along with gay males and black prostitutes). My own death is terrifying, and therefore I can't look away.
And so that's probably why I'm obsessed with true crime, and why I wonder regularly why we dwell on the "classics" so much (that and being able to remove ourselves from the horrors by time). Because there are very few modern serial killers. We've got to fill our boots with Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, Kemper. And so I wonder why there are fewer serial killers, despite our obsession with true crime and white people's inability to control their petty rage. (White serial killers tend not to kill for understandable reasons, with the exception of those with intensely dark childhoods. Mostly it's enacting revenge upon some imagined slight, hatred for themselves, or simply homophobic, racist, sexist, and religious views).
So, why are there very few modern serial killers? (There are modern serial killers, but their presence, victim count and media coverage is no where close to what it was like in the 70s/80s). We're getting to the meat of my post now (sorry white people, for ragging on you for several paragraphs but you know fine well we deserve some criticism). I've come up with a few reasons that I think are responsible for the lack of serial killings in recent years. Obviously, I speak from a very specific place when discussing several of the reasons, so please remember this is not fact nor from direct experience, but from an outsider perspective.
One of the main reasons I think there has been a significant drop in the number of serial killers is the decrease in options and viability of their victim pool. While there is still a huge and unfair number of vulnerable people and communities in the world, these communities have progressed externally in society, but overwhelmingly internally in their own safe spaces. For starters, the LGBTQ+ community has made significant progress since the 70s and 80s, and while it is still not a safe world for them to exist in by any means, acceptance and understanding has increased within the wider population meaning they are more enabled to communicate issues, to an extent. And not only that, safe spaces for LGBTQ+ communities are being created more often. Within these communities, it's encouraged to speak out and against. Notifying others that someone is making the safe space uncomfortable is encouraged. It's a bit more difficult for a serial killer to target young, gay men and have them disappear with no questions when these people are cared for and loved by hopefully, a more understanding family, and certainly by a community of people they have curated. Transient and homeless LGBTQ+ youths still suffer, but are less at risk than in previous years.
And this brings me to the second point on victim pools. While there are still unsafe spaces abound for vulnerable groups, society has taken a step forward and there is significantly more pressure on police forces and the governing bodies to investigate and pursue cases of missing homeless people, LGBTQ+ people and POC and ethnic minorities. The 70s/80s killers were practically encouraged in some cases by police forces. Killers who were murdering prostitutes and the homeless could be considered to be doing the job of the police, clearing up the streets. And that's not just sentiment from the mind of a vigilante killer. Police forces really weren't interested in the dead unless there were literal piles of bodies. Or if one of those bodies was white. In the concept of the less dead, people are valued and their deaths are considered more important due to their societal standings. Basically, one pretty, suburban white girl is worth around a dozen black prostitutes. And it's not that no one was looking for these people when they went missing. Sex workers have families, friends and colleagues. Whole communities of people who were begging police to do their work to find their loved ones. And while these groups are still overwhelmingly vulnerable and under cared for in society, we as a species have gotten a bit, even just a little bit, better at demanding justice for everyone, not just those who are perceived as more worthy.
But note that modern serial killers tend to target these vulnerable groups still. Black women, sex workers and the LGBTQ+ community still provide serial killers with the majority of their victims. White, college age females tend to be safer now. But these vulnerable groups are proof that we have a long way to go in evening out society and providing equal safety and rights to everyone.
And speaking of society, we seem to have taken it upon ourselves to do the care. With the advent of the internet, which should have made victims more easily accessible (and did for a brief period, and still does to an extent), we've pushed ourselves into a state of paranoia, brought on by our understanding of how dangerous the world is. Knowledge is at our fingertips, and that knowledge is a blessing and a curse. We know how cruel people are, we see it in news reports and documented cases. But we also see it in forums, on dark websites, and sometimes on your colleagues' Facebook page. You can know almost everything about a person, and that's not always a good idea. And so, people learn to hide their dark secrets and become better at pretending to be someone else. but we've learned that too. We've taken it upon ourselves to provide the safety that our governing bodies and protective forces seem incapable of keeping up with. You only need to consider the fact that women, prior to a date even with someone they know or have met in person, tend to share details and images of their potential partners and their intended location, as well as tracking locations, with close friends in the event that they are murdered or kidnapped or just feel uncomfortable and need a safety net.
It's not just victims who are changing habits. Potential serial murderers have changed too. While we see a trend in petty violence leading steadily to serious crimes and then to a full blown final mode of constant killing and disgusting violations in our "classic" serial cases, we seem now to have entered an age of instant gratification. Killers are...better, for want of a better word, of holding in their urges and abstaining from petty crime. But, unfortunately, they let this simmer until it boils over. And then, in the preferred method of killing in the modern time, there is one single event. One massacre, one mass shooting, one road rage episode. The victims are numerous, but this isn't a prolonged event where we have a chance of hunting the killer. These people are observed regularly by others, their behaviours scrutinised and openly considered abnormal. But, we ignore the symptoms and forgive behaviours like this. Because these people are typically white. And then, preventing any further criminal activity, these tend to end in suicide.
So, bizarre behaviour, either nature or nurture to blame, isn't necessarily a thing of the past. There are lots of factors which contribute to someone's mental state and some of those factors can trigger an act of violence. Sometimes, personalities are just more susceptible to these kinds of acts. And maybe, some people are just born to do what they end up doing. But as far as external factors contributing to their behaviour, there are some interesting theories as to why the act of serial killing has taken a bit of a nose dive in recent years.
First off, the lead paint theory. A legitimate theory, put forth to explain the drop in crime rates over all but which can be contributed to serial killing decrease also. We've stopped painting our EVERYTHING with lead paint. Our houses no longer have it and we don't have it in our fuel anymore. So was lead poisoning to blame for a rise in negative behaviours in the 60s-80s? It's hard to say, but it is interesting the correlation between the decline in use and the decline in crime, though other factors can contribute to this also.
And please, let me rest with this theory. It's my out there one, my big guy. Pure speculation, nothing much to back it up. But what if serial killers were programmed to kill? What if they were part of a well-known, PROVEN, government experiment made to create unstoppable, entirely unsympathetic killing machines? What if they went awry and so were slowly stopped after being observed to see how they develop?
What if the serial killers we know and hate to love were part of MK-Ultra? Dun. Dun. Duuuuuuun.
Around about the time that folks like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson were caught, they would have been of an age where the effects of MK-Ultra were starting to develop strongly in them? They're of the age where it's feasible to believe they could have been a part of this or another smaller, or better hidden, human experiment project that we're not aware of, yet. Through college, early prison time, paid work for being experimented on. These are all entirely plausible ways in which we could see a serial killer be created. And now, MK-Ultra is over, and the government have moved on to other types of experimentation which we'll no doubt find out the effects of in a further twenty years.
More plausible, however, is that we're also not breeding serial killers the way we were before. We're generally kinder parents, friends and strangers. Kids are safer from bumping themselves on the head. They tend to be free from abusive parents (which statistically is less prevalent now than in the 40s/50s youths of notorious killers). We recognise the Triad, the signs and symptoms of behavioural issues and we treat them with compassion and correct levels of help, where possible.
Societal factors seem to link into this. Our infamous serial killers grew up in turmoil, children during World War 2, young adults during the Vietnam War. Were these traumatic societal influences a factor in the rearing of murderers? It's likely that these would have an effect on a forming psyche and that our advances in understanding and treating mental illness and traumatic external stimuli have decreased our likelihood of raising a killer. And with the advancement in family planning, there has also been a decrease in the number of unwanted children born into difficult familial situations where poverty and abuse play a part in the upbringing. So the potential for situationally raising a killer has decreased.
Also, on the subject of breeding serial killers, we're also not breeding victims. The concept of latch-key or free range kids is kind of dying. We have helicopter parents now. People who grew up with their parents fear of the world and are now more paranoid and protective over their young. It's very rare to find the kind of care-free parenting of the 70s/80s in modern families. Not that it is inherently good or bad either way, but it's rare to find children who are left alone unattended either at home or in public.
Personally, however, I believe that the same amount of people who could become serial killers are born now as they were before. It's just that we're quicker at noticing behaviours and better at treating these people with compassion and appropriate medical/therapeutic care. I feel for a lot of these killers, specifically people like Gein and Dahmer, whose childhoods, upbringing, family units and unchecked mental illness could have factored into their later behaviours.
More depressingly, are we bored of serial killing? Are modern serial killers not sexy enough for the news cycle? Are we so determined to gargle on Ted Bundy's cruel balls that we'll ignore modern crimes in favour for releasing yet another documentary praising his good looks? (Ted Bundy was a basic looking man with a monobrow. He might have been relatively attractive for the 70s to some, but he wasn't a hunk. It's the personality, the manipulative charisma that tricked people. He's not handsome, he's just not as ugly as you think a serial killer should be. Now Kemper and Dahmer, there's your hunks.) There are lots of new serial killers, but we don't go gaga for them like we used to. But maybe that's because society has grown? Ha. More likely, they're not covered as much because they're too basic, not enough gory details and not enough victims before getting caught.
Are we getting better at catching serial killers now? The Behavioural Sciences Unit (BSU), now the Behavioural Analysis Unit 5 (BAU-5) worked to create profiles on killers to make it easier to identify the behaviours and typical signs/history of a potential serial murderer in order to make predicting and capturing easier, a more refined procedure. We've made advances in police investigation and forensic and technical sciences, and continue to do so. No longer can you kill someone in one state and just hitchhike your way across the borders to another to keep on killing, knowing that police forces don't communicate with each other. This most likely would prevent a serial killer from getting beyond the first victim. And in cases where they do, you can note that most modern serial killers have a much lower victim number than the infamous monsters of the 70s and 80s.
We're getting a little bit better in some ways, but not in others. And there's a lot we still need to catch up on. But I think we've seen the end of serial killing, and there's little to no evidence to suggest we'll ever enter another "golden age" of this type of crime. But we have to take what we've learned and put it towards preventing new types of outlet for people who are inclined to act on their darker thoughts. Despite true crime fans harbouring a secret desire for more.
Some interesting sources:
And here are some great reddit threads if you want to read more discussions/discourse on the various different reasons why there may be a decline!
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