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FOREWARNING, this article is a thorough span of everything serial Killer related from why its interesting to the common folk, the most famous killers of all time, to the common trends of killing today! I recommend that if you're only interested in one, use the CTRL+F and search for the title of your choosing to avoid having to scroll through all the unnecessary information of your choosing.
...Well, I won't let you die waiting!
What Is The Most Fascinating?
If you were to carefully calibrate your fear of being murdered according to statistics, you should be 12 times as afraid of your family members as of serial killers. Less than one percent of murders in any given year are committed by serial killers, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s report on serial murder; in 2012, 12.5 percent of murders were committed by victims’ family members.
Sadly, tales of domestic violence zoom in and out of the news so frequently that they rarely capture the public’s attention, and when they do, they don’t hold it for long. Meanwhile, Gacy’s story, along with those of other serial killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and David Berkowitz, are remembered even decades later: They’re so well-known that we continue to hear casual references to them in pop culture. For example, in Katy Perry’s recent song “Dark Horse,” Juicy J raps, “She’ll eat your heart out/like Jeffrey Dahmer.” Dahmer, who was known for cannibalizing his victims, committed his crimes between 1978 and 1991, and was killed in prison in 1994, nearly 20 years before “Dark Horse” was released.
Juicy J can drop that tasteless reference and know it will be understood because serial killers are “still very much a part of our culture,” Penman says. The question is, why? What draws people to their dark, disturbing stories? Why do some killers become celebrities while others are forgotten?
In his new book, Why We Love Serial Killers (out October 28), criminologist Dr. Scott Bonn attempts to solve some of these mysteries. “My question is: What can we learn from these individuals?” he says. “What can we learn about ourselves? People are drawn to understanding the dark side, and the dark side is part of the human condition.”
This desire to see into the mind of a serial killer can be a powerful attraction. At the Crime Museum, I met a 59-year-old tourist named Joanne Marvel who described her lifelong fascination with crime. A recording of a police siren blared around us as she told me how her grandfather used to read crime magazines, and how her father claimed to have met Al Capone once in Chicago during the heyday of organized crime. “For me it’s about how their childhood affected what they did later,” Marvel said. “I think a lot of people think that way—they want to know why [the killer] got that way rather than what he did. It’s more about why he did it.”
As retired NYPD homicide detective Dave Carbone told Bonn when asked about the public’s interest in serial killers, “The why is the wow.” Or in the words of Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist and author of numerous books including The Human Predator,
“It’s not really about the victims. It’s more about the puzzle—the interesting labyrinth of human emotions and human motives.”
What made serial killers this way? Why did they kill, and why did they do it so gruesomely? How are they different from us? (Please let them be different from us.) These are complicated, compelling questions. But here, at the outer boundaries of the human condition, are realities that resist our understanding.
In the public imagination, serial killers tend to fit a certain stereotype: “They’re all men, all white, all evil geniuses or mentally ill; they want to get caught,” Bonn said, listing the most prevalent myths. Even the serial killer exhibit at the Crime Museum claims, “Over 90 percent [of serial killers] are white males.”
It’s not hard to see why that misconception exists, though: Many of the serial killers who become cultural legends are white men. Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, and Berkowitz were all white, as were Gary Ridgeway (the “Green River Killer”), and Dennis Rader (“Bind Torture Kill”). The Zodiac killer, while never caught, was described as a white male. Richard Ramirez, or the “Night Stalker,” is one well-known non-white killer—he was the son of a Mexican policeman—but as Ramsland points out, he became infamous largely because he “had the whole Satan thing going.” (He drew pentagrams on his hand and occasionally shouted “Hail Satan” during his trial. Fairly attention-grabbing behavior.)In reality, Bonn says, “they are actually far more nuanced, far more varied than the general public realizes.” The racial breakdown of serial killers is about the same as that of the U.S. population at large, according to the FBI. Based on the Radford University serial killer database, which includes data on nearly 4,000 killers, just 46 percent of serial killers since 1910 have been white men.
“It’s almost as if we have a canonical group, and anyone who comes after that is just seen in that context,” suggests David Schmid, a professor of English at the University of Buffalo who has studied serial killer celebrity and the popularity of true crime in the United States.
Bonn has a few theories about why white male killers get more attention. Female serial killers tend to kill by less-gory methods—poisoning rather than shooting—which makes their stories less sensational. Aileen Wuornos, the killer portrayed by Charlize Theron in the film Monster, murdered with a gun, and Bonn believes that is a key reason for her fame.
Only about 9 percent of serial killers since 1910 have been women, according to the Radford database. But 40 percent have been African American, and few of those have achieved celebrity status. Bonn notes that most serial killers tend to kill within their own race, and that white victims, especially white female victims, usually get wider media attention. This means their killers, who are likely white as well, consequently get more coverage.
Another unfortunate possibility is that killers who target minority victims are just less likely to get caught, due to disparities in police resources. “Serial murder investigations are complicated, time-consuming, and very expensive,” Bonn writes. “Although it may not seem fair, affluent white neighborhoods are given priority over poor, black, or Latino neighborhoods by state officials in the assignment of valuable policing resources. This negatively impacts the ability of law enforcement personnel to pursue serial murder cases in poor racial minority communities.”
For all of these reasons, and possibly more, the quintessential serial killer is usually imagined as a middle-class white man who turns out to have a dark secret, à la Gacy, who was said to host regular parties at his suburban Chicago home, or Rader, who was active in his church. Schmid talks about the gap between killers’ twisted inner lives and their unassuming outward appearances. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was a round-faced, droopy-eyed man who seemed like any other Jewish kid from Brooklyn. Ted Bundy, a clean-cut Republican Party operative, is frequently described as “handsome.” The gap between the extraordinary and the ordinary is part of what fascinates people, Schmid says, and in our culture, “ordinary” is often shorthand for “white, male, middle-class.”
Just as there are misunderstandings about who serial killers are, there are false assumptions about how they got this way. Another prominent myth involves three specific warning signs: bedwetting, cruelty to animals, and setting fires. The Macdonald Triad, as it’s sometimes called, originated from a small 1963 study in which psychiatrist John M. Macdonald analyzed 100 of his violent patients at one psychiatric hospital. Ramsland calls it a “small, poorly-designed study”: Later research refuted the idea that the presence of these childhood traits necessarily predicts violent behavior.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to identify a serial killer in the making. The FBI reminds readers in its report that there are a lot of factors that go into influencing human behavior. Just as it would be impossible to describe all of the reasons a person decides to get married—or makes a far more mundane choice, like having pizza for lunch—it’s impossible to explain all the reasons why a person chooses to kill.
Yet the stereotypes live on, making it easier for the public to file serial killers away neatly in their mind-cabinets, clearly labeled for easy reference. “I think it comes down to how a seemingly ordinary person can develop into an extreme offender,” Ramsland says. “We’re hoping the answer is that they’re not seemingly ordinary to start with, that they’re set apart in some way that we’ll be able to identify and eventually treat. We want them to be deviant monsters.”
The serial killer is a quintessentially American figure. According to the Radford database, there have been more than 2,600 serial killers in the U.S. since 1900. England, the country with the next highest total, has had 142. Schmid, who is originally from the U.K., says that while there are serial killers in other countries, because the rates of violence in general, and serial killer violence specifically, are so much higher in the U.S., “a difference of degree becomes a difference in kind,” and people are led to “see serial killers as prototypically American.”
The U.S.’s high rates of violent crime may also be the reason certain killers become more famous than others. When the news is filled with gun violence every day, another murder by firearm doesn’t necessarily stand out. But when killers stab, torture, rape, and even eat their victims, that’s attention-grabbing, even to a desensitized nation. “I’m so immune to gun violence at this point,” says Penman, the exhibits and events manager at the Museum of Crime and Punishment. “But get out a knife and start stabbing people, and I’m traumatized. It’s different. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”
“We have largely lost our ability to be appalled,” Schmid says. “It takes a very, very extreme crime for us now to recover that.”
The serial killers who become famous are extreme, either in their methods (like Rader, who named himself Bind Torture Kill after his modus operandi) or their madness (the Zodiac, who sent baffling letters written in code to the press). These shocking details are what get people’s attention; the need for answers is what keeps it.
These stories also capture the public’s imagination because they have elements of the most gripping fiction: high stakes, danger, mystery, heroes, and a villain who ultimately gets his comeuppance (or, in a case like the Zodiac Killer, eludes the law and remains an enigma). “It’s sometimes difficult to draw a hard and fast boundary between [reality and fiction],” Schmid says. “True crime shows often use fictional techniques to dramatize what they’re showing, and fictional shows draw upon real stories to give themselves authenticity.”
This is why Bonn believes the public experiences no meaningful difference between real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and fictional serial killers like Hannibal Lector from The Silence of the Lambs. “They are equally scary and entertaining,” he writes. And fiction and reality do bleed into each other: Buffalo Bill, who collects victims’ skin in Silence of the Lambs, was based in part on real-life killer Ed Gein, who kept a collection of women’s body parts. Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibalistic serial killer who was apprehended in 1991, was compared endlessly to Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector, particularly since the film version of Silence of the Lambs came out that same year.
Even the news media plays into this tendency to paint serial killers as storybook villains. For his book, Bonn did a little media analysis. He looked at articles mentioning serial killers in The New York Times and Time magazine between 1995 and 2013, and searched within them for the words “devil,” “monster,” and “evil.” In both publications, 35 percent of articles contained one or more of those descriptors.
“Even in, arguably, the most credible publications out there, they’re buying into this monster narrative,” Bonn says. “The narrative of good and evil is something that we are taught, and we fit things into that.” Bonn invokes the sociological concept of anomie, a state in which a society’s norms and rules are broken and confused (in this case, the norm of “not killing people”). When a serial killer is at large, people flail about looking for moral guidance, Bonn says. “We demand answers. What we get back from the media and law enforcement is: ‘Evil has come to our town, but don’t worry about it, we’re going to conquer evil.’ That narrative in some ways is reassuring, but it’s reassuring in a way that’s not real. It’s an oversimplification, but it’s done so that we feel better.”
It’s a reductive story, but a useful one. The good-versus-evil/monster-hunt narrative is a way to manage the incomprehensible. Evil doesn’t need to be understood, just eliminated. So the desire for answers is satisfied; the burden of parsing a killer’s complicated motivation falls away. All the messy details are composited into a single figure: the serial killer. This boogeyman-like entity has become less of a threat than a stock character, useful for selling publications and spicing up fictional stories.The public fascination with serial killers can seem callous at times—especially when the stories are real, but even when they’re imagined. However, research suggests that people who enjoy graphic, frightening stories can have a variety of motivations. A 1995 study on why adolescents watch horror films found that “gore watchers,” who professed to enjoy the blood and guts, tended to have low levels of empathy and a strong need for adventure-seeking. “Thrill watchers,” who watched the movies to get the adrenaline rush of being scared, had high levels of adventure-seeking, but also high levels of empathy. Gore watchers tended to identify with the killer and not the victim, while thrill watchers tended not to identify with either killers or victims—they were captivated mainly by the excitement and the mystery. “If the real serial killer comes knocking on your door, then it has real implications,” Bonn says. “But until then, it’s just entertainment.”
David Schmid has another theory about why people find serial killers entertaining, one that’s not necessarily flattering to American audiences. Procedural shows like CSI or True Detective may attract viewers simply because of the drama and the plotting, he says, but in other recent shows like Dexter and Bates Motel, the criminals are the protagonists—the characters people are supposed to identify with when they watch. People both fear and admire criminals, he says, because they live outside the bounds of laws and social conventions.
“For all kinds of reasons, people are not very honest about why they consume these types of products,” Schmid says. “But I really do believe that part of it [is] this fascination with people who don’t obey the rules and put themselves first, always. It’s not that we want to go around murdering people, but we wonder what life would be like if we could just do whatever we wanted.”
It’s been many years since any new serial killers were added to the canonical group. That’s not to say there haven’t been any: Richard Beasley*, who killed victims he met via Craigslist, and Anthony Sowell, or The Cleveland Strangler, both got some media attention. But none of these recent criminals have attained true celebrity status. There is no modern John Wayne Gacy.
Today, Schmid argues, the fear of being randomly attacked is provoked less acutely by serial killers than by terrorists. Under the right conditions, he says, the public could certainly be whipped into a frenzy by a serial killer again. But for the most part, “post 9/11, terror has come to have a more specific, more political meaning. That’s why [terrorist attacks] get a lot of coverage at the moment, because they allow people to ask if this is the defining crime of the time.”
As the most infamous serial killers slip farther and farther into the past, people are able to look at them through a more detached, historical lens, as “examples of Americana,” Schmid says. According to Eric Hickey’s book Serial Killers and Their Victims, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were 40 or so films about serial killers, real or imagined. From 2000 to 2008, there were more than 270, though he notes that more than half of those were straight-to-video releases.
These stories get told and retold, calcifying as they go, shedding the pesky details that don’t quite fit into the mold we’ve come to expect, until we’re left with the familiar, archetypal story: that of the white male serial killer whose everyman exterior hides a twisted, violent alter ego. Killers who don’t fit are forgotten or ignored—as are, all-too-often, their victims.
When the lethality of a femme fatale is presented in book or film, she is most often portrayed as the manipulated victim of a dominant male. This popular but stereotypical media image is consistent with traditional gender myths in society which claim that boys are aggressive by nature while girls are passive. In fact, both aggressiveness and passivity can be learned through socialization and they are not gender specific.
The reality concerning the gender of serial killers is quite different than the mythology of it. Although there have been many more male serial killers than females throughout history, the presence of female serial killers is well documented in the crime data. In fact, approximately 17 percent of all serial homicides in the U.S. are committed by women. Interestingly, only 10 percent of total murders in the U.S. are committed by women. Therefore, relative to men, women represent a larger percentage of serial murders than all other homicide cases in the U.S. This is an important and revealing fact that defies the popular understanding of serial murder.
Although they are not household names like their infamous white counterparts, examples of prolific racial minority serial killers are Coral Eugene Watts, a black man from Michigan, known as the “Sunday Morning Slasher,” who murdered at least seventeen women in Michigan and Texas; Anthony Edward Sowell, a black man known as the “Cleveland Strangler” who kidnapped, raped and murdered eleven women in Ohio; and Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, a Mexican national known as the “Railroad Killer,” who killed as many as fifteen men and women in Kentucky, Texas, and Illinois.
Many serial killers are able to successfully hide out in plain sight for extended periods of time. Those who successfully blend in are typically also employed, have families and homes and outwardly appear to be non-threatening, normal members of society. Because serial killers can appear to be so innocuous, they are often overlooked by law enforcement officials, as well as their own families and peers.
In some rare cases, an unidentified serial killer will even socialize and become friendly with the unsuspecting police detectives who are tracking him. The incredible tale of Ed Kemper (the “Co-ed Killer”) provides an example of this phenomenon.
Serial killers who hide out in plain sight are able to do so precisely because they look just like everyone else. It is their ability to blend in that makes them very dangerous, frightening and yet very compelling to the general public.
Unlike Bundy, most serial killers have very well defined geographic areas of operation. They typically have a comfort zone—that is, an area that they are intimately familiar with and where they like to stalk and kill their prey. Jack the Ripper provides the classic example of this geographic preference because he stalked and killed exclusively in the small White chapel district of London in the fall of 1888.
The comfort zone of a serial killer is often defined by an anchor point such as a place of residence or employment. Crime statistics reveal that serial killers are most likely to commit their first murder very close to their place of residence due to the comfort and familiarity it offers them. John Wayne Gacy “The Killer Clown” buried most of his thirty-three young, male victims in the crawl space beneath his house after sexually assaulting and murdering them.
Serial killers sometimes return to commit murder in an area they know well from the past such as the community in which they were raised. Over time, serial murderers may extend their activities outside of their comfort zone but only after building their confidence by executing several successful murders while avoiding detection by law enforcement authorities.
As noted by the FBI in its 2005 report on serial murder, the crime data reveal that very few serial predators actually travel interstate to kill.3 The few serial killers who do travel interstate to kill typically fall into one of three categories:
Sadly, tales of domestic violence zoom in and out of the news so frequently that they rarely capture the public’s attention, and when they do, they don’t hold it for long. Meanwhile, Gacy’s story, along with those of other serial killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and David Berkowitz, are remembered even decades later: They’re so well-known that we continue to hear casual references to them in pop culture. For example, in Katy Perry’s recent song “Dark Horse,” Juicy J raps, “She’ll eat your heart out/like Jeffrey Dahmer.” Dahmer, who was known for cannibalizing his victims, committed his crimes between 1978 and 1991, and was killed in prison in 1994, nearly 20 years before “Dark Horse” was released.
Juicy J can drop that tasteless reference and know it will be understood because serial killers are “still very much a part of our culture,” Penman says. The question is, why? What draws people to their dark, disturbing stories? Why do some killers become celebrities while others are forgotten?
In his new book, Why We Love Serial Killers (out October 28), criminologist Dr. Scott Bonn attempts to solve some of these mysteries. “My question is: What can we learn from these individuals?” he says. “What can we learn about ourselves? People are drawn to understanding the dark side, and the dark side is part of the human condition.”
This desire to see into the mind of a serial killer can be a powerful attraction. At the Crime Museum, I met a 59-year-old tourist named Joanne Marvel who described her lifelong fascination with crime. A recording of a police siren blared around us as she told me how her grandfather used to read crime magazines, and how her father claimed to have met Al Capone once in Chicago during the heyday of organized crime. “For me it’s about how their childhood affected what they did later,” Marvel said. “I think a lot of people think that way—they want to know why [the killer] got that way rather than what he did. It’s more about why he did it.”
As retired NYPD homicide detective Dave Carbone told Bonn when asked about the public’s interest in serial killers, “The why is the wow.” Or in the words of Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist and author of numerous books including The Human Predator,
“It’s not really about the victims. It’s more about the puzzle—the interesting labyrinth of human emotions and human motives.”
What made serial killers this way? Why did they kill, and why did they do it so gruesomely? How are they different from us? (Please let them be different from us.) These are complicated, compelling questions. But here, at the outer boundaries of the human condition, are realities that resist our understanding.
In the public imagination, serial killers tend to fit a certain stereotype: “They’re all men, all white, all evil geniuses or mentally ill; they want to get caught,” Bonn said, listing the most prevalent myths. Even the serial killer exhibit at the Crime Museum claims, “Over 90 percent [of serial killers] are white males.”
It’s not hard to see why that misconception exists, though: Many of the serial killers who become cultural legends are white men. Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, and Berkowitz were all white, as were Gary Ridgeway (the “Green River Killer”), and Dennis Rader (“Bind Torture Kill”). The Zodiac killer, while never caught, was described as a white male. Richard Ramirez, or the “Night Stalker,” is one well-known non-white killer—he was the son of a Mexican policeman—but as Ramsland points out, he became infamous largely because he “had the whole Satan thing going.” (He drew pentagrams on his hand and occasionally shouted “Hail Satan” during his trial. Fairly attention-grabbing behavior.)In reality, Bonn says, “they are actually far more nuanced, far more varied than the general public realizes.” The racial breakdown of serial killers is about the same as that of the U.S. population at large, according to the FBI. Based on the Radford University serial killer database, which includes data on nearly 4,000 killers, just 46 percent of serial killers since 1910 have been white men.
“It’s almost as if we have a canonical group, and anyone who comes after that is just seen in that context,” suggests David Schmid, a professor of English at the University of Buffalo who has studied serial killer celebrity and the popularity of true crime in the United States.
Bonn has a few theories about why white male killers get more attention. Female serial killers tend to kill by less-gory methods—poisoning rather than shooting—which makes their stories less sensational. Aileen Wuornos, the killer portrayed by Charlize Theron in the film Monster, murdered with a gun, and Bonn believes that is a key reason for her fame.
Only about 9 percent of serial killers since 1910 have been women, according to the Radford database. But 40 percent have been African American, and few of those have achieved celebrity status. Bonn notes that most serial killers tend to kill within their own race, and that white victims, especially white female victims, usually get wider media attention. This means their killers, who are likely white as well, consequently get more coverage.
Another unfortunate possibility is that killers who target minority victims are just less likely to get caught, due to disparities in police resources. “Serial murder investigations are complicated, time-consuming, and very expensive,” Bonn writes. “Although it may not seem fair, affluent white neighborhoods are given priority over poor, black, or Latino neighborhoods by state officials in the assignment of valuable policing resources. This negatively impacts the ability of law enforcement personnel to pursue serial murder cases in poor racial minority communities.”
For all of these reasons, and possibly more, the quintessential serial killer is usually imagined as a middle-class white man who turns out to have a dark secret, à la Gacy, who was said to host regular parties at his suburban Chicago home, or Rader, who was active in his church. Schmid talks about the gap between killers’ twisted inner lives and their unassuming outward appearances. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was a round-faced, droopy-eyed man who seemed like any other Jewish kid from Brooklyn. Ted Bundy, a clean-cut Republican Party operative, is frequently described as “handsome.” The gap between the extraordinary and the ordinary is part of what fascinates people, Schmid says, and in our culture, “ordinary” is often shorthand for “white, male, middle-class.”
Just as there are misunderstandings about who serial killers are, there are false assumptions about how they got this way. Another prominent myth involves three specific warning signs: bedwetting, cruelty to animals, and setting fires. The Macdonald Triad, as it’s sometimes called, originated from a small 1963 study in which psychiatrist John M. Macdonald analyzed 100 of his violent patients at one psychiatric hospital. Ramsland calls it a “small, poorly-designed study”: Later research refuted the idea that the presence of these childhood traits necessarily predicts violent behavior.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to identify a serial killer in the making. The FBI reminds readers in its report that there are a lot of factors that go into influencing human behavior. Just as it would be impossible to describe all of the reasons a person decides to get married—or makes a far more mundane choice, like having pizza for lunch—it’s impossible to explain all the reasons why a person chooses to kill.
Yet the stereotypes live on, making it easier for the public to file serial killers away neatly in their mind-cabinets, clearly labeled for easy reference. “I think it comes down to how a seemingly ordinary person can develop into an extreme offender,” Ramsland says. “We’re hoping the answer is that they’re not seemingly ordinary to start with, that they’re set apart in some way that we’ll be able to identify and eventually treat. We want them to be deviant monsters.”
The serial killer is a quintessentially American figure. According to the Radford database, there have been more than 2,600 serial killers in the U.S. since 1900. England, the country with the next highest total, has had 142. Schmid, who is originally from the U.K., says that while there are serial killers in other countries, because the rates of violence in general, and serial killer violence specifically, are so much higher in the U.S., “a difference of degree becomes a difference in kind,” and people are led to “see serial killers as prototypically American.”
The U.S.’s high rates of violent crime may also be the reason certain killers become more famous than others. When the news is filled with gun violence every day, another murder by firearm doesn’t necessarily stand out. But when killers stab, torture, rape, and even eat their victims, that’s attention-grabbing, even to a desensitized nation. “I’m so immune to gun violence at this point,” says Penman, the exhibits and events manager at the Museum of Crime and Punishment. “But get out a knife and start stabbing people, and I’m traumatized. It’s different. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”
“We have largely lost our ability to be appalled,” Schmid says. “It takes a very, very extreme crime for us now to recover that.”
The serial killers who become famous are extreme, either in their methods (like Rader, who named himself Bind Torture Kill after his modus operandi) or their madness (the Zodiac, who sent baffling letters written in code to the press). These shocking details are what get people’s attention; the need for answers is what keeps it.
These stories also capture the public’s imagination because they have elements of the most gripping fiction: high stakes, danger, mystery, heroes, and a villain who ultimately gets his comeuppance (or, in a case like the Zodiac Killer, eludes the law and remains an enigma). “It’s sometimes difficult to draw a hard and fast boundary between [reality and fiction],” Schmid says. “True crime shows often use fictional techniques to dramatize what they’re showing, and fictional shows draw upon real stories to give themselves authenticity.”
This is why Bonn believes the public experiences no meaningful difference between real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and fictional serial killers like Hannibal Lector from The Silence of the Lambs. “They are equally scary and entertaining,” he writes. And fiction and reality do bleed into each other: Buffalo Bill, who collects victims’ skin in Silence of the Lambs, was based in part on real-life killer Ed Gein, who kept a collection of women’s body parts. Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibalistic serial killer who was apprehended in 1991, was compared endlessly to Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector, particularly since the film version of Silence of the Lambs came out that same year.
Even the news media plays into this tendency to paint serial killers as storybook villains. For his book, Bonn did a little media analysis. He looked at articles mentioning serial killers in The New York Times and Time magazine between 1995 and 2013, and searched within them for the words “devil,” “monster,” and “evil.” In both publications, 35 percent of articles contained one or more of those descriptors.
“Even in, arguably, the most credible publications out there, they’re buying into this monster narrative,” Bonn says. “The narrative of good and evil is something that we are taught, and we fit things into that.” Bonn invokes the sociological concept of anomie, a state in which a society’s norms and rules are broken and confused (in this case, the norm of “not killing people”). When a serial killer is at large, people flail about looking for moral guidance, Bonn says. “We demand answers. What we get back from the media and law enforcement is: ‘Evil has come to our town, but don’t worry about it, we’re going to conquer evil.’ That narrative in some ways is reassuring, but it’s reassuring in a way that’s not real. It’s an oversimplification, but it’s done so that we feel better.”
It’s a reductive story, but a useful one. The good-versus-evil/monster-hunt narrative is a way to manage the incomprehensible. Evil doesn’t need to be understood, just eliminated. So the desire for answers is satisfied; the burden of parsing a killer’s complicated motivation falls away. All the messy details are composited into a single figure: the serial killer. This boogeyman-like entity has become less of a threat than a stock character, useful for selling publications and spicing up fictional stories.The public fascination with serial killers can seem callous at times—especially when the stories are real, but even when they’re imagined. However, research suggests that people who enjoy graphic, frightening stories can have a variety of motivations. A 1995 study on why adolescents watch horror films found that “gore watchers,” who professed to enjoy the blood and guts, tended to have low levels of empathy and a strong need for adventure-seeking. “Thrill watchers,” who watched the movies to get the adrenaline rush of being scared, had high levels of adventure-seeking, but also high levels of empathy. Gore watchers tended to identify with the killer and not the victim, while thrill watchers tended not to identify with either killers or victims—they were captivated mainly by the excitement and the mystery. “If the real serial killer comes knocking on your door, then it has real implications,” Bonn says. “But until then, it’s just entertainment.”
David Schmid has another theory about why people find serial killers entertaining, one that’s not necessarily flattering to American audiences. Procedural shows like CSI or True Detective may attract viewers simply because of the drama and the plotting, he says, but in other recent shows like Dexter and Bates Motel, the criminals are the protagonists—the characters people are supposed to identify with when they watch. People both fear and admire criminals, he says, because they live outside the bounds of laws and social conventions.
“For all kinds of reasons, people are not very honest about why they consume these types of products,” Schmid says. “But I really do believe that part of it [is] this fascination with people who don’t obey the rules and put themselves first, always. It’s not that we want to go around murdering people, but we wonder what life would be like if we could just do whatever we wanted.”
It’s been many years since any new serial killers were added to the canonical group. That’s not to say there haven’t been any: Richard Beasley*, who killed victims he met via Craigslist, and Anthony Sowell, or The Cleveland Strangler, both got some media attention. But none of these recent criminals have attained true celebrity status. There is no modern John Wayne Gacy.
Today, Schmid argues, the fear of being randomly attacked is provoked less acutely by serial killers than by terrorists. Under the right conditions, he says, the public could certainly be whipped into a frenzy by a serial killer again. But for the most part, “post 9/11, terror has come to have a more specific, more political meaning. That’s why [terrorist attacks] get a lot of coverage at the moment, because they allow people to ask if this is the defining crime of the time.”
As the most infamous serial killers slip farther and farther into the past, people are able to look at them through a more detached, historical lens, as “examples of Americana,” Schmid says. According to Eric Hickey’s book Serial Killers and Their Victims, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were 40 or so films about serial killers, real or imagined. From 2000 to 2008, there were more than 270, though he notes that more than half of those were straight-to-video releases.
These stories get told and retold, calcifying as they go, shedding the pesky details that don’t quite fit into the mold we’ve come to expect, until we’re left with the familiar, archetypal story: that of the white male serial killer whose everyman exterior hides a twisted, violent alter ego. Killers who don’t fit are forgotten or ignored—as are, all-too-often, their victims.
5 Myths About Serial Killers
Myth #1: All Serial Killers Are Men
Reality: This is simply not true but it is understandable why the public would hold this erroneous belief. As late as 1998, a highly regarded former FBI profiler said “there are no female serial killers.” The news and entertainment media also perpetuate the stereotypes that all serial offenders are male and that women do not engage in horrible acts of violence.When the lethality of a femme fatale is presented in book or film, she is most often portrayed as the manipulated victim of a dominant male. This popular but stereotypical media image is consistent with traditional gender myths in society which claim that boys are aggressive by nature while girls are passive. In fact, both aggressiveness and passivity can be learned through socialization and they are not gender specific.
The reality concerning the gender of serial killers is quite different than the mythology of it. Although there have been many more male serial killers than females throughout history, the presence of female serial killers is well documented in the crime data. In fact, approximately 17 percent of all serial homicides in the U.S. are committed by women. Interestingly, only 10 percent of total murders in the U.S. are committed by women. Therefore, relative to men, women represent a larger percentage of serial murders than all other homicide cases in the U.S. This is an important and revealing fact that defies the popular understanding of serial murder.
Myth #2: All Serial Killers Are Caucasian.
Reality: Contrary to popular mythology, not all serial killers are white. Serial killers span all racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. The racial diversity of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population. There are well documented cases of African-American, Latino and Asian-American serial killers. African-Americans comprise the largest racial minority group among serial killers, representing approximately 20 percent of the total. Significantly, however, only white, and normally male, serial killers such as Ted Bundy become popular culture icons.Although they are not household names like their infamous white counterparts, examples of prolific racial minority serial killers are Coral Eugene Watts, a black man from Michigan, known as the “Sunday Morning Slasher,” who murdered at least seventeen women in Michigan and Texas; Anthony Edward Sowell, a black man known as the “Cleveland Strangler” who kidnapped, raped and murdered eleven women in Ohio; and Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, a Mexican national known as the “Railroad Killer,” who killed as many as fifteen men and women in Kentucky, Texas, and Illinois.
Myth #3: All Serial Killers Are Isolated and Dysfunctional Loners.
Reality: The majority of serial killers are not reclusive social misfits who live alone, despite pervasive depictions of them as such in the news and entertainment media, including the socially challenged “Tooth Fairy” serial killer in the film Red Dragon. Real-life serial killers are not the isolated monsters of fiction and, frequently, they do not appear to be strange or stand out from the public in any meaningful way.Many serial killers are able to successfully hide out in plain sight for extended periods of time. Those who successfully blend in are typically also employed, have families and homes and outwardly appear to be non-threatening, normal members of society. Because serial killers can appear to be so innocuous, they are often overlooked by law enforcement officials, as well as their own families and peers.
In some rare cases, an unidentified serial killer will even socialize and become friendly with the unsuspecting police detectives who are tracking him. The incredible tale of Ed Kemper (the “Co-ed Killer”) provides an example of this phenomenon.
Serial killers who hide out in plain sight are able to do so precisely because they look just like everyone else. It is their ability to blend in that makes them very dangerous, frightening and yet very compelling to the general public.
Myth #4: All Serial Murderers Travel Widely and Kill Interstate.
Reality: The roaming, homicidal maniac such as Freddy Krueger in the cult film A Nightmare on Elm Street is another entertainment media stereotype that is rarely found in real life. Among the most infamous serial killers, Ted Bundy is the rare exception who traveled and killed interstate. Bundy twice escaped from police custody and committed at least thirty homicides in the states of Washington, Utah, Florida, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho and California. Articulate, educated, well-groomed and charming, Bundy was truly atypical among serial killers in his cross-country killing rampage.Unlike Bundy, most serial killers have very well defined geographic areas of operation. They typically have a comfort zone—that is, an area that they are intimately familiar with and where they like to stalk and kill their prey. Jack the Ripper provides the classic example of this geographic preference because he stalked and killed exclusively in the small White chapel district of London in the fall of 1888.
The comfort zone of a serial killer is often defined by an anchor point such as a place of residence or employment. Crime statistics reveal that serial killers are most likely to commit their first murder very close to their place of residence due to the comfort and familiarity it offers them. John Wayne Gacy “The Killer Clown” buried most of his thirty-three young, male victims in the crawl space beneath his house after sexually assaulting and murdering them.
Serial killers sometimes return to commit murder in an area they know well from the past such as the community in which they were raised. Over time, serial murderers may extend their activities outside of their comfort zone but only after building their confidence by executing several successful murders while avoiding detection by law enforcement authorities.
As noted by the FBI in its 2005 report on serial murder, the crime data reveal that very few serial predators actually travel interstate to kill.3 The few serial killers who do travel interstate to kill typically fall into one of three categories:
1) Itinerant individuals who periodically move from place to place
2) Chronically homeless individuals who live transiently
3) Individuals whose job function lends itself to interstate or transnational travel such as truck drivers or those in the military service.
The major difference between these individuals who kill serially and other serial murderers is the nature of their traveling lifestyle which provides them with many zones of comfort in which to operate. Most serial killers do not have such opportunities to travel and keep their killings close to home.
In fact, very few serial killers suffer from any mental illness to such a debilitating extent that they are considered to be insane by the criminal justice system. To be classified as legally insane, an individual must be unable to comprehend that an action is against the law at the exact moment the action is undertaken. In other words, a serial killer must be unaware that murder is legally wrong while committing the act of murder in order to be legally insane. This legal categorization of insanity is so stringent and narrow that very few serial killers are actually included in it.
Psychopathic serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy and Dennis Rader are entirely aware of the illegality of murder while they are in the process of killing their victims. Their understanding of right and wrong does nothing to impede their crimes, however, because psychopaths such as Gacy and Rader have an overwhelming desire and compulsion to kill that causes them to ignore the criminal law with impunity.
When they are apprehended, serial killers rarely are determined to be mentally incompetent to stand trial and their lawyers rarely utilize an insanity defense on their behalf. Once again, this is due to the extremely narrow legal definition of insanity which simply does not apply to most psychopathic killers. Even David Berkowitz, the infamous Son of Sam, who told his captors tales of satanic rituals and demonic possession, was found to be competent to stand trial for his murders following his arrest in 1977.
Considerable mythology also surrounds the intelligence of serial killers. There is a popular culture stereotype that serial killers are cunning, criminal geniuses. This stereotype is heavily promoted by the entertainment media in television, books and films. In particular, Hollywood has established a number of brilliant homicidal maniacs like John Doe in the acclaimed 1995 film Se7en. John Doe personifies the stereotype of the evil genius serial killer who outsmarts law enforcement authorities, avoids justice and succeeds in his diabolical plan.
The image of the evil genius serial killer is mostly a Hollywood invention. Real serial killers generally do not possess unique or exceptional intellectual skills. The reality is that most serial killers who have had their IQ tested score between borderline and above average intelligence. This is very consistent with the general population. Contrary to mythology, it is not high intelligence that makes serial killers successful. Instead, it is obsession, meticulous planning and a cold-blooded, often psychopathic personality that enable serial killers to operate over long periods of time without detection.
The major difference between these individuals who kill serially and other serial murderers is the nature of their traveling lifestyle which provides them with many zones of comfort in which to operate. Most serial killers do not have such opportunities to travel and keep their killings close to home.
Myth #5: All Serial Killers Are Either Mentally Ill Or Evil Geniuses.
Reality: The images presented in the news and entertainment media suggest that serial killers either have a debilitating mental illness such as psychosis or they are brilliant but demented geniuses like Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Neither of these two stereotypes is quite accurate. Instead, serial killers are much more likely to exhibit antisocial personality disorders such as sociopathy or psychopathy, which are not considered to be mental illnesses by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). An examination of psychopathy and sociopathy, and a discussion of the powerful connection between antisocial personality disorders and serial homicide is presented in chapter 4.In fact, very few serial killers suffer from any mental illness to such a debilitating extent that they are considered to be insane by the criminal justice system. To be classified as legally insane, an individual must be unable to comprehend that an action is against the law at the exact moment the action is undertaken. In other words, a serial killer must be unaware that murder is legally wrong while committing the act of murder in order to be legally insane. This legal categorization of insanity is so stringent and narrow that very few serial killers are actually included in it.
Psychopathic serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy and Dennis Rader are entirely aware of the illegality of murder while they are in the process of killing their victims. Their understanding of right and wrong does nothing to impede their crimes, however, because psychopaths such as Gacy and Rader have an overwhelming desire and compulsion to kill that causes them to ignore the criminal law with impunity.
When they are apprehended, serial killers rarely are determined to be mentally incompetent to stand trial and their lawyers rarely utilize an insanity defense on their behalf. Once again, this is due to the extremely narrow legal definition of insanity which simply does not apply to most psychopathic killers. Even David Berkowitz, the infamous Son of Sam, who told his captors tales of satanic rituals and demonic possession, was found to be competent to stand trial for his murders following his arrest in 1977.
Considerable mythology also surrounds the intelligence of serial killers. There is a popular culture stereotype that serial killers are cunning, criminal geniuses. This stereotype is heavily promoted by the entertainment media in television, books and films. In particular, Hollywood has established a number of brilliant homicidal maniacs like John Doe in the acclaimed 1995 film Se7en. John Doe personifies the stereotype of the evil genius serial killer who outsmarts law enforcement authorities, avoids justice and succeeds in his diabolical plan.
The image of the evil genius serial killer is mostly a Hollywood invention. Real serial killers generally do not possess unique or exceptional intellectual skills. The reality is that most serial killers who have had their IQ tested score between borderline and above average intelligence. This is very consistent with the general population. Contrary to mythology, it is not high intelligence that makes serial killers successful. Instead, it is obsession, meticulous planning and a cold-blooded, often psychopathic personality that enable serial killers to operate over long periods of time without detection.
Who's Notorious
The world has known many serial killers, some of which have been previously mentioned. The list of such people who have committed inhumane crimes is endless. But then there are some who have actually stolen the spotlight for the hideous crimes committed against humanity. Here are 20 most evil and notorious serial killers the world has ever seen:1. The Zodiac Killer
2. Donald Henry Gaskins: The Hitchhikers' Killer
Gaskins has claimed to have killed between 80 to 90 people by torturing and mutilating them. He started killing in 1969, picking up hitchhikers on the coastal highways of the American South. A criminal associate witnessed him killing two young men and confessed to the police. He was sentenced to death which was later turned to life imprisonment without any parole. Gaskins added another murder to his name and became the only man to have ever killed an inmate on death row.
3. Tsutomu Miyazaki: The Human Dracula
He got more names due to his hideous acts. Some of them were The Otaku Murderer, The Little Girl Murderer or Dracula Miyazaki. The reason for this being that he abducted little girls, killed them and indulged in sexual activities with their corpses. On one occasion, he not only drank the victim's blood but ate her hand as well. He also preserved body parts as trophies and sent postcards to the families describing the murder. His father committed suicide and Miyazaki was hanged in 2008, aged 45.
4. Ted Bundy: The Crazy Necrophile
Ted Bundy was an American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, and necrophile. He operated in various states in the USA and confessed to killing 30 women. He revisited crime scenes and indulged in sexual acts with the corpses. Bundy decapitated at least 12 victims and kept their heads as trophies in his apartment. Aged 42, Bundy died on the electric chair in 1989. His own defence attorney said, "Ted, was the very definition of heartless evil."
5. Jack the Ripper aka Whitechapel Murder
The real killers or killer were never identified. The name came into being because the victims had organs missing and judging by procedure the killer seemed to have surgical experience. Jack the Ripper who was later believed to be a single person killed female prostitutes in the slums of London between 1888-91.
6. Luis Garavito: The Beast
Also dubbed by the media as the Le Bestia (The Beast), the Colombian is probably one of the world's worst serial killers. He confessed to the torture, rape and murder of 147 young boys. But the number is believed to be over 300. He was found guilty on 139 counts, which should amount to 1,853 years in prison. But Columbian law limits it to 30, which is what he was sentenced to in 1999. He may be released earlier for cooperation and good behavior.
7. Ahmad Suradji: The Sorcerer
The cattle-breeder from Indonesia admitted to killing 42 girls and women between 1986 to 1997. As a part of his ritual, he used to bury them waist deep. Bodies were found in a sugarcane field with their heads facing his house, which he believed would give him more power. Suradji was sentenced to death by a firing squad in 2008.
8. Alexander Pichushkin: The Chessboard Killer
He was also known as the 'Chessboard Killer' and the 'Bitsa Park Maniac'. His targets were homeless men whom he lured to his house with vodka. He is believed to have killed 49 people, most of them with repeated hammer blows to their heads and inserted a vodka bottle into the gaping skull wound. He initially said he wanted to complete the number of squares on a chessboard and kill 64 people. Also, it is believed that he was in competition with another Russian serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted in 1992 for 53 killings. It was the very same year Alexander started killing.
9. Andrei Chikatilo: The Butcher
Andrei, the Butcher of Rostov, said, "When I used my knife, it brought psychological relief. I know I have to be destroyed. I was a mistake of nature." He was responsible for sexually assaulting, killing and mutilating 53 women and children between 1978 and 1990 in Russia. After being captured in 1992, he was ordered to be killed by a firing squad in 1994.
10. Charles Edmund Cullen: The Angel Of Death
Cullen worked as a nurse in many hospitals but kept switching jobs as he was fired for suspicious behaviour from many of them. He confessed to murdering 40 elderly patients in New Jersey from 1984 to 2003. He did this by poisoning his patients to death with unprescribed medication. He stated that he wanted to relieve the patients from their suffering much like an angel would. Experts say he had more than 300 victims. Cullen has been imprisoned for life.
11. Patrick Wayne Kearney: The Trash Bag Killer
Also called the Trash Bag Killer, he operated between 1975 -1977. Kearney had a high IQ but once captured, he confessed to 32 murders of homosexual men. Kearney would dump their bodies along California highways and wrapped them in trash bags thus earning the name. He was convicted of 21 murders, but was sentenced to life because of his confession.
12. Dennis Raider: BTK Murderer
Between 1974 and 1991, Dennis Raider murdered 10 people in Wichita, Kansas. He even sent letters to police taunting them under his alias name BTK which stood for ‘Bind, Torture, Kill’. His technique was to stalk his victims before breaking into their homes, binding their limbs and finally strangling them. He disappeared in 1988, but remerged in around 2005 when he sent a floppy disc to the press which helped in tracing him. Rader confessed to his crimes and is serving 10 consecutive life sentences with the earliest release date possible on February 26, 2180.
13. John George Haigh: Acid Bath Murderer
John George Haigh was also known as the 'Acid Bath Murderer' and operated during the 1940s. He was convicted for the murders of 6 people, although he claimed to have killed 9. He was a professional conman, who lured wealthy people by charm and deceit, into to a warehouse where he shot them. Later he would dissolve their bodies in sulphuric acid then forge papers to sell their possessions and collect their life savings. He was sentenced to death and hanged in 1949.
14. Paul Knowles: The Casanova Killer
Also known as the Casanova Killer, Knowles used his charm into making victims believe him and later killed them. He killed a total of 18 people, although the count might be more. His victims included men, women and children. The man from Florida was eventually killed by an FBI agent in 1974 when he was trying to escape.
15. William Bonin: The Freeway Killer
Bonin was also known as the 'Freeway Killer'. Between 1979 and 1980, he raped, tortured and murdered at least 21 young men. Bonin would dump their bodies along freeways in South California. After being convicted for 14 of his killings, he was executed by lethal injection in 1996. His sadistic side was still seen during his prison sentence where he corresponded with many of his victims' families about how their children reacted to his torture.
16. Aileen Wuornos: The Monster
Her story allowed Charlize Theron to win an Academy Award. While working as a prostitute, Aileen killed seven men in Florida for their money and confessed to shooting them, claiming all of them had either raped or attempted to rape her. She died in 1992 by lethal injection.
17. Jeffrey Dahmer: The Milwaukee Cannibal
Jeffrey Dahmer was responsible for dismembering 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Dahmer also indulged in necrophilia and cooking body parts of his victim, then eating them. He was eventually caught after a prospective victim managed to overpower him. Dahmer was sentenced to 15 terms of life imprisonment in 1992. But he was beaten to death by a fellow prisoner at the Columbia Correctional Institution two years later.
18. John Wayne Gacy: The Burial King
Gacy operated between 1972 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois. He sexually assaulted and murdered 33 teenage boys and young men. Gacy would lure his victims to his home with the promise of work or money before murdering them by strangulation using a tourniquet. He buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space under his house and later disposed the bodies off in the Des Plaines River. Convicted of 33 murders, Gacy was sentenced to death and spent 14 years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection on May 10, 1994.
19. Tommy Lynn Sells: The Brutal Texan
Tommy Lynn Sells is perhaps the most dangerous Texan in history. He claimed to have killed at least 70 people. He brutally murdered people between 1985 and 1999 including stabbing a 13-year-old girl 16 times. Sells broke into the bedroom of a 10-year-old girl, stabbing her and left her to die. But despite her injures, she managed to survive and gave a detailed description of Sells to the police. He was sentenced to death & remains on death row in a high security prison in Texas.
20. Pedro Rodriguez Filho: The Brazilian Maniac
Arrested in 1973, Pedro was later convicted in 2003 for the murder of at least 71 people and was then sentenced to 128 years imprisonment. He was only 14 when he committed his first killing. He wreaked havoc on local drug dealers, in revenge for his girlfriend's killing while he was imprisoned. In prison, he even executed his own father, who was also serving time for murder. Filho went onto kill at least 47 inmates while imprisoned. His continued killings have led to his sentence to be increased to 400 years imprisonment.
Can You Guess the Killing Trends?
There are plenty of structural explanations for the rise of reported serial murders through the 1980s. Data collection and record-keeping improved, making it easier to find cases of serial murder. Law enforcement developed more sophisticated methods of investigation, enabling police to identify linkages between cases—especially across states—that they would have otherwise ignored. The media's growing obsession with serial killers in the 1970s and '80s may have created a minor snowball effect, offering a short path to celebrity.
But those factors don't explain away the decline in serial murders since 1990. If anything, they make it more significant. Then why the down trend? It's hard to say. Better law enforcement could have played a role, as police catch would-be serial killers after their first crime. So could the increased incarceration rate, says Fox: "Maybe they're still behind bars." Whatever the reason, the decline in serial murders tracks with a dramatic drop in overall violent crime since the '80s. (One caveat: The numbers for the 2000s may skew low, since some serial killers haven't been caught yet.)
As the raw numbers have declined, the media have paid less attention, too. Sure, you've still got the occasional Beltway sniper or Grim Sleeper who terrorizes a community. But nothing in the last decade has captured the popular imagination like the sex-addled psychopaths of the '70s and '80s, such as Ted Bundy (feigned injuries to win sympathy before killing women; about 30 victims), John Wayne Gacy (stored bodies in his ceiling crawlspace; 33 victims), or Jeffrey Dahmer (kept body parts in his closet and freezer; 17 victims). These crimes caused media frenzies in part because of the way they tapped into the obsessions and fears of the time: Bundy, a golden boy who worked on Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign in Seattle, seemed to represent the evil lurking beneath America's cheery exterior. Gacy, who dressed up as a clown and preyed on teenage boys, was every parent's nightmare. "Son of Sam" David Berkowitz milked—and, in so doing, mocked—the media's obsession with serial killers by sending a letter to New York Daily News reporter Jimmy Breslin.
The media returned the favor, inflating the perception that serial killers were everywhere and repeating the erroneous statistic that there were 5,000 serial murder victims every year. These horror stories were not exactly discouraged by the FBI, one of whose agents coined the term "serial killer" in 1981. (The phrase "serial murderer" first appeared in 1961, in a review of Fritz Lang's M, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) The perception of a serial murder epidemic also led to the creation of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in 1981.
Infamous crimes almost always needle the anxieties of their periods. The murder of a 14-year-old boy by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in 1924 captured the growing obsession with modern psychiatry, as the pair considered themselves examples of Nietzsche's Übermensch, unbound by moral codes. A series of child abductions in the 1920s and '30s, from the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders to the killing of Charles Lindbergh's son, became a symbol of societal decay during the Depression. Charles Manson, who presided over the Tate murders in 1969, embodied a sexual revolution gone mad. The Columbine massacre preyed on parental fears of the effects of violent movies and video games.
Conversely, sensational crimes that don't play into a larger societal narrative fade away. In 1927, Andrew Kehoe detonated three bombs at a school in Bath Township, Mich., killing 38 children and seven adults, including Kehoe—one of the largest cases of domestic terrorism before the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The disaster made headlines, but was soon eclipsed by Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight. "It was a crime that was ahead of its time," says Schechter.
Indeed, if something like the Bath School massacre happened today, it would probably resonate more deeply than it did in the 1920s. What child abductors were to the '20s and serial killers were to the '70s and '80s, terrorists are to the early 21st century. After 9/11, fear of social unraveling has been replaced by anxiety over airplanes, bombs, and instant mass annihilation. Stephen Griffiths isn't the new Jeffrey Dahmer. The Times Square bomber is.
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