Most serial killers had their own vehicle and house, and were able to keep those despite most killers not being able to hold down a job once they started the murders.
Try doing that today. You can’t methodically kill people if you’re freezing to death on the streets.
These greedy corporations are just saving us from serial killers by making it impossible to become one without financial ruin.
Plot twist. The serial killers still have all that time, but they realized the could kill way more people by becoming billionaires and exploiting them to death.
As previously mentioned, the typical age range for serial killers to start killing is in their late 20s to early 30s.
So figure that the people killing were maybe maybe late 20s to early 30s in late 1950s to 1970, when the numbers were exploding.
That means people born in ~1920 to ~1940; the serial killers probably were mostly born in the interwar period, between World War I and World War II; born in the Roaring Twenties and then the Great Depression.
Going based on the generations there, that would have mostly been the Silent Generation.
The period of rapid increase was only about twenty years long, so it’s really only about the length of one generation (though that doesn’t mean that it need nicely align with the “generational cohorts” thing).
The Boomers were already falling off.
By the time Generation X rolled around, the spike would already have been done.
Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, long after all this happened.
And one other point – remember that the graph is of absolute, not per-capita numbers. According to it, in 2010, we have numbers in absolute terms comparable to about 1955. But that’s in absolute terms.
In 1955, the US population was about 106 million. Today, it is 334 million. That is, in per-capita terms, 2010 is somewhat-lower than any period shown on the chart. It’s not just low, it’s lower than it’s ever been.
Now, all that being said, I’m not sure how they measure the number of concurrently-active serial killers. I would imagine that things like the advent of DNA evidence, buildup of fingerprint databases, and other changes in criminology probably have changed things; one might have assumed that a serial killer was responsible for a copycat/similar crime, or perhaps vice versa in different conditions.
A 19-year-old – the youngest cohort listed – would be 33, maybe the end of the peak period to start serial killing – 14 years after 1944. That’s in 1958, and that’d have been the tail end of American WW2 veterans being in the prime serial killer initiation age. The boom had started then, but the highest rate of increase came later…and that’s looking at the very tail end of the WW2 vets.
The serial killers would mostly have been children or young teens during World War II, not actually served in it.
I think that the reduction in lead is far too late, if you figure that it’s cumulative exposure over someone’s lifetime, not short-term (which I have not looked up, but would expect to be the case).
In this cohort study of 553 New Zealanders observed for 38 years, lead exposure in childhood was weakly associated with official criminal conviction and self-reported offending from ages 15 to 38 years. Lead exposure was not associated with the consequential offending outcomes of a greater variety of offenses, conviction, recidivism, or violence.
Yeah, so it’s a childhood thing. You’d be talking about on the order of maybe a 20 year delay until a reduction in exposure translates into peak potential serial killer period.
Also, for stuff like lead paint, it’s gonna be around for decades, gets kicked up over time, so it takes an even longer time for regulations to go have an effect, and that effect is very spread out, whereas this is a pretty sharp increase and decrease.
In 1971, Congress banned the use of lead-based paint in residential projects (including residential structures and environments) constructed by, or with the assistance of, the federal government.[3] The Consumer Product Safety Commission followed with implementing regulations, effective in 1978.[4] Additional regulations regarding lead abatement, testing and related issues have been issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
I’d – without digging up numbers – guess that halting leaded gasoline probably had the most-immediate impact on lead in the air, since burning leaded gasoline is gonna put it straight into the air.
In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency issued regulations to reduce the lead content of leaded gasoline over a series of annual phases, scheduled to begin in 1973 but delayed by court appeals until 1976.
If something were gonna happen in the 1970s to reduce the rate of serial killing, to be a relevant input, it’d have to be something that had a major immediate effect rather than a long-term developmental effect.
And leaded gasoline and leaded diesel and leaded aviation fuel and lead pipes in household plumbing. Probably lead in the cigarettes everyone smoked literally everywhere.
It might be interesting to see if countries other than the US – and I have no idea if whatever metrics used by the author here can be applied in those countries, might not have the same data available – saw similar changes in serial killer activity, since that’d help let one know if the relevant factors producing the spike were something that the US in particular experienced or not.
The other theory I’ve heard that makes some sense is lead exposure. From 1925 to about 1976, lead was commonly added to gasoline. Lead is known to cause psychological problems including irritablity and general mood disorders.
Pretty much everyone born during that period was exposed to aerosolized lead.
Nah. It’s an industrialized, mass-produced economy now. Before the 90s, killing people was a bespoke trade. Mass murder was a one-on-one kind of transaction, each murder personally crafted for the victim by a specialist. The really industrial scale deaths at the time were the stuff of nation-states.
The transition of mass murders to the private sector as heralded by Atlanta, Waco, Columbine and Oklahoma City coincided¹ with the Clinton admin and the advent of NAFTA, which promoted mass industrialization of heretofore domestic industries².
Ever since, it’s been death dealt on an ever expanding scale on an j cident-by-incident basis. A sort of Moore’s Law of death and disillusionment.
I hate myself for even penning this diatribe, but the situation is so bleak it feels like no depth of dark humor will reallybshock anyone anymore.
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Correlation does not imply causation
This is such a badly formed argument even for satire, I’m embarrassed
Back in the day you could afford both med school and running an elaborate murder hotel with some gruesome custom made contraptions. Now you can’t even afford a simple murder house. What has come of this country.
I’m curious, you got anything light reading you can recommend to ease into the topic, please pm me. I’d appreciate, if it wasn’t another post which basically recites the content of another post, and so on - far too much out there these days)
Weapons availability and the mental health crisis. In countries without easy access to guns, mass killings are conducted with knives or cars (runovers). And in countries with socialized healthcare that includes mental health, mass killings don’t happen, at all, or very rarely if ever. Socioeconomic inequality is usually the third element, like in the fire triad, mix the three and you get mass shootings.
Availability of weapons mixed with infrastructure development that atomizes communities to the point that the only places some people can find any social activity is nihilistic message boards full of psychopaths that actively encourage terroristic attacks on society but in the oblique way that dodges accountability for it when someone actually goes and does it.
It’s simply too easy to grab a gun by anyone. Military grade equipment is available to pretty much anyone with a credit card. Then you combine that with a CONSTANT beating drum from people like Alex Jones talking about how much they want crush, destroy, kill their enemies and how corrupt everything is. Then also talking about how people need to rise up and do “something”. While also in the same breath telling people to go off their meds and how any sort of treatment for mental disorders is actually poison. Then pair that with the fact that there’s pretty much no public infrastructure around public health (thanks Reagan). That means if you are having some sort of mental break down, depression, whatever, if you can’t afford the $100s/$1000s of dollars to get regular psychiatric treatment you are basically just going to be untreated. There is also pretty much no safe place to recoup for someone in distress but not at risk of suicide. But even if there were, even if you could afford it, fascists and preachers know that mentally healthy people are harder to grift so they spend all their time demonizing the very help you’d need.
However, not everyone that does this is mentally unwell. Some are just hateful fascists that believe killing gets their hate filled messages into the world. It’s why it is irresponsible for any media outlet to publish the name or manifestos of these assholes. Having notorious killers encourages more notorious killers.
As to that first point, you know we had AR-15s in the 70s, right? (No one gave a shit. They weren’t “cool” until the Assault Weapons Ban. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well…)
You know guns were far easier to get back then? LOL, I got an old Mossberg 500 (think classic 12-gauge pump) that was branded Revelation. They sold those at Western Auto stores.
It was no thing to see a dude with a loaded gun rack in his pickup. Point being, access is not the thing that changed.
Current gun laws are pretty restricted compared to things that used to be allowed. The big one is mail order guns, you could just send a money order and get pretty much any semi-auto gun you wanted delivered to your house with no background check at all.
Full auto gums required a tax stamp since the 30s, and weren’t banned until 86.
As to that first point, you know we had AR-15s in the 70s, right?
The other 2 factors are important along with the internet. There may have been less legal barriers to getting an AR-15, that does not mean accomplishing such a task was easy to do. It’s not like there were AR-15 ads on TV or in newspapers (well, there may have been, but that would have been highly regional). It’s not like every city had an “AR-15” guy in the yellow pages. Legal access hasn’t changed, but general access has (particularly to assault rifles).
Regardless, my advocacy is first just starting with laws I think most everyone can agree with, red flag laws. Take away or don’t allow the purchase of guns by a domestic abusers or someone with a history of violence. Heck, you could even put a time limit on that stuff like “within the last 7 years”.
A ton of these cases are fairly young men (<20). So it would be enough to say “hey, if you are under 25 and your school teachers say ‘Do not let this kid in particular have a gun’” then you don’t get a gun until you turn 25. Or even an outright ban on ownership for people less than 25 (though that’d be much less popular).
too many scared assholes who love their guns more than anything else.. highly sensitive momma's boys in love with their guns, always ready to lose their shit..
One could argue that it is preferable to serial killers.
Serial killers meticulously plan and often torture their victims extensively and many of their victims families never get closure because nothing gets tied back to the killer.
Mass gunman attacks, for example, kill orders of magnitude faster with much less pain for many of their victims, the perpetrator isn’t active for a long period of time, and the families get closure.
Of two severely fucked up scenarios that happen, it seems that one is worse.
Not really, ETA, IRA, Al Qaeda the Palestinians hijacking planes, Pablo Escobar blowing up planes, Unabomber, Oklahoma City. These are all things of the past.
I do research and writing for a crime docuseries, and the amount of times sex workers go missing and cops/news don’t care until there’s multiple bodies or a more well known disappearance occurs, is DISGUSTING.
The Poughkeepsie Killer was killing sex workers in broad daylight and was keeping their corpses in his hoarder house attic. The families of Wendy Meyers and Gina Barone went to the press and were told that the cases “weren’t the kind the public cared about”.
Police had the suspect but didn’t pursue the case until 5 women went missing. Why do their lives matter less just because they do a different kind of physical labor for work? Each was someone’s daughter.
Cops don’t do anything about it around here because they see it as some kind of Dexter situation, it “reduces their workload,” and whatnot.
Way back in my homeless/drug addict days I was chilling with this bigger time cartel dealer guy. Everyone knew that he was definitely a serial killer but his target was always heroin addict girls and I am neither of those. We’re driving around and cops just swarm us. After some questions, they ended up giving him back his gun (he’s a felon) and telling him that their agreement was that he is not to ever leave the more ghetto area of town. They then openly gang stalked us until we went back to that area.
I’m fairly certain that police commonly know exactly who the serial killers are in their area and I think they often times have agreements with them.
Canadian cops from Vancouver ignored Robert Pickton’s serial killing for over 20 years 'cause he targeted prostitutes from the DTES (downtown east side). He fed their bodies to his pigs and finally confessed to 49, convicted of 6 murders.
Toronto cops ignored outcries from the LGBTQI+ community for almost 7 years because Bruce McArthur’s victims were almost all immigrants. The landscaper was finally convicted of 8 murders, hiding the body pieces in large planters on his client’s properties.
lot of comments in here talking about how they’re just doing their kills some other way: cops, mass shootings, not getting caught (this one is the most braindead). But everyone is ignoring how we’ve largely eliminated regular lead exposure that used to be the norm. that shit makes you go fucking insane.
Leaded gasoline production and learning about the butterfly room in the lead producing part of the factory was fucking terrifying. That shit was so dangerous to workers.
[…] House of Butterflies—a building for tetraethyl lead synthesis—so named because its workers were known for brushing hallucinated insects from their bodies.
Absolutely chilling. The rest of the article is good too. A great example of how championing for positive change, though difficult and frustrating, can have huge huge positive effects. So glad to have heroes like Needleman in the world.
I don’t like the way policing has turned many first world countries into semi-police states … being a person of colour (like me) automatically makes you questionable with the law no matter what you’re doing. I know from experience.
But after saying all that, mass murderers and killers are probably lesser now because of better policing, mass surveillance, intercommunications, mass data collection, profiling, forensic science and monitoring. It’s a lot harder now than in was in the 60s, 70s or 80s for a random stranger to wander from place to place committing murders and not getting caught. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible … it’s just that in our day in age of technology, it’s a lot harder.
In the book Freakonomics they made the argument that the sudden decline in crime in the late 90’s appeared to be tied to Roe v. Wade. I wonder if this is similar.
It’s the same quality of scholarship as a Malcolm Gladwell book - namely, none. On the one hand it’s a shame these kinds of books are bestsellers, but I guess it’s good that people are reading books at all. Most of the people I know stopped reading in their mid-20s except for poorly written “news” articles online that can be completed in a couple minutes or less.
A large percentage of serial killers suffered from childhood abuse and trauma. Kids in the foster system are often abused and traumatized. I can see it.
Later researchers found a coding error and pointed out that Mr Levitt had used the total number of arrests, which depends on the size of a population, and not the arrest rate, which does not. Others pointed out that the fall in homicide started among women. No-fault divorce, rather than legalised abortion, may have played a bigger role.
I’m not sure that you can safely label serial killers as incels per se. BTK was married, IIRC. Ted Bundy def. dated. John Gacy was a pedophile (more accurately a hebephile, but close enough).
Many of them were misogynistic for sure, although that’s not necessarily a motive when you have serial killers that are gay or pedophiles (Gacy, Wayne Williams–believed to have been the Atlanta Child Murderer–and Dahmer). Incels seem to be much more likely to be spree or mass murderers; the idea of an incel where all women collectively share the blame seems to be a fairly new idea. And a lot of mass murderers aren’t related to sex a all, like the people that have been trying to start racial holy wars by murdering non-white people.
I think the lead poisoning theory is a bit overblown, personally. There’s something to it, but “all the serial killers were just brain damaged” is I think trying to put a very neat little bow around a complex package.
I think a lot of it is simply that it’s harder to get away with murder now. I mean not to make it sound too easy but in 1982 there were a lot of ways to kill someone that basically could not be tracked back to you as long as you weren’t literally seen doing it. People aren’t stupid, they know this, and they change their patterns around it.
Additionally, I’m sure that (potentially as a result of this) we have more spree/mass killings now, and a decent deal of spree killings have a component of sexual frustration to them as many serial killers had.
I've heard this theory as well and it makes a lot of sense. Forensics has improved to the point where evidence is always left behind. If someone is caught after their 2nd murder they don't spend the next decade escalating, amassing bodies in their crawlspaces.
I figure it’s mostly the electronics angle. Your phone, if you have it with you it’s really obvious if you travel to the area crimes happen. Heck, even not using your phone or other connected electronics can indicate something. Your car seen on surveillance cameras which are everywhere, from private home’s doorbells to commercial cameras to municipal roadway cameras. Your internet search history of maybe the victim or the location. Automatic toll payments. You’d have to live an almost completely disconnected life and take serious measures to avoid detection, and even then it’s not a sure thing.
Yep. The Moscow Murders seem to be a good example of this. College student seemingly took a lot of precaution to stab 4 people to death in their rental home, left almost nothing behind, turned his cell phone off during the crime - but he’s still dinged because earlier records show him basically scoping out the house in days prior based off his cell phone location.
I should say it’s not yet stated in a court of law whether this student actually did the killings, and courts do get those decisions wrong - but even still it’s a good example of how technology can track you essentially all the time
Agreed. There was a would-be serial killer that popped up in Stockton a year or two ago. Dude would just pop up and shoot someone from out of the shadows. He made it to victim number four before a camera caught him and the cops caught up to him. In 1980, this dude would have been a national fucking terror, but he barely made the local news in 2023.
Most crime has declined dramatically since the 90s. And yet right wing media is scaring the shit out of people, saying there are murderers, rapists, and terrorists behind every bush.
The world is actually becoming more empathetic and safer, but some people want us to be scared because fear keeps them in power. Don’t believe them.
Interestingly the start of the decline is 1988 which also happens to be the year the seminal Stewart Raffill film Mac and Me was released. Coincidence? I wonder.
I know I’ll sound like a bootlicker, but this is why I’m in favor of more street cameras for the city. It’s obnoxious how often there’s a picture of the car involved in something but no one catches them because there’s no way to just follow the car to where it went.
because it’s also a massive privacy invasion as well. If someone with access to the system decides they don’t like me, they can stalk me, if someone hacks it, whatever is in there about me is now available to them. If the government wakes up one day and decides that it doesnt like people who have differing political opinions, suddenly they have a profile of who i am and what i do almost perfectly.
It’s very much patriot act levels of national security, but for the individual. “we’ll spy on you, but it’s only so terrorism doesn’t happen, we promise” and then uh, snowden shows up in the story.
Same thing with something as simple as tracking vehicles, it’s a lose lose most of the time, and a win lose the rest of the time.
Nowadays peopke bring their phone to a murder like a chump.
Some of the analytical software that can be applied to mobile phone cell ping and metadata alone is incredible. Not only is it able to show snapshots of a given period to identify patterns, but it can also be walked back in time to identify patterns which are increasing in their intensity. This can indicate changing behaviours in individuals and groups.
You might think the solution is to turn off your mobile, wrap it in foil, leave it at home, smash it ect but that’s not the answer. A suddenly lost mobile agent is a red flag, as is an abnormally stationary one, or an abnormally repetitive one.
Imagine you’re an analyst, and you’re aware of a potential terror cell consisting of 5-8 members. You’ve identified from cell metadata that each member has met at least one other member at least once in person. Imagine then that 6 of these individuals either go off-line, or their phone remains stationary for an unusual amount of time, eg normally they would be at work. You could reasonably conclude that they are having a secret rendezvous in meatspace. Then, based on the time taken for each mobile to reconnect, and its position when it does, you might be able to heat map a list of possible locations that they could have met at, based on estimated travel time for each. Then you might find evidence of tgeir meetup from osint sources like CCTV or sat imagery.
If you dont want mobile phone metadata used to uncover your crimes, you should constantly behave unpredictably. Maybe carry a foil bag and keep your phone in it sometimes at work to simulate black spots. Maybe choose a mobile provider with the worst possible coverage. Sometimes leave your phone at home. You know those random spam messages you get on Signal or whatsapp? Converse with them occasionally, these act like red herrings in your interaction matrix. Anything that contributes as chaff, white noise, false signals, whatever you want to call them, anything will help if it makes you unpredictable.
And that’s just phones. CCTV, satellite imagery, other peoples phones and devices, freeway ALPR cameras, audio devices, all these things contribute to mapping your move.ents, constantly, over time.
Take solace that probably nobody is actually watching you, at least, no human is. Just an algorithm. When the algo detects youve deviated from your pattern, then it might flag you for human review, so try not to have an easily identifiable pattern, and chaff that bitch up as often as you can.
It was roughly 60% in 2018, which was lower than it was decades before that. It was 90% in the 1960s for instance. Murder clearance rates have been declining for decades. 2023 was under 50% and is a record low for murder clearance.
Basically more and more murders are going unsolved, and this is a trend stretching decades. National murder clearance rates have never been 20% since that data has been tracked.
Some cities are near that currently though, like Oakland. Interpreting police incompetence around murder cases as somehow indicating less serial killing is pretty absurd.
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