Devil’s advocate: What if they’re just better at hiding it now?
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Wait, wait… Just heard about suitcases full with human body pars were found in a undeveloprd lot in the Florence suburbs! Maybe these news aren’t getting the first page.
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He adds that pornography may quench the sexual impulses that often precede sexualized killings. “It’s possible that the sewer that is much of the internet is providing a non-violent outlet for these guys,” he says.
Fascinating and totally plausible on its face, although still pretty uncomfortable to think about. Because somehow I think it’s not cutesy centerfold pics and erotic vampire stories that are holding back the murder tide. So… yaaaaaaay porn? kinda?
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Yeah, I was surprised not to see that mentioned. But then it’s so mind-bogglingly enormous in terms of the impact it had, it’s easy to forget. (Or maybe that’s just my childhood lead exposure talking.)
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Except that in the past serial killers often were able to be serial killers precisely because they were targeting people who were less likely to be missed and/or thoroughly investigated. (Long ago, one the books I worked on as a production editor was an extensive encyclopedia of serial killers!)
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I believe we will never truly understand the huge impact that this had. I have wondered if the boomers falling for Trumpism is lead-related even?
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I’m not an expert on serial killers, but a lot of the famous cases at least seem to be about the notoriety. Maybe this is just one of those things that when you stop paying attention to it, it goes away. So not necessarily that would-be serial killers are becoming mass shooters, but the rise of mass shootings and terrorism along with the disappearance of local news makes it harder for “just” a serial killer to get noticed?
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Proud boys came out of the closet?
Yeah, positive like a negative biopsy. The bad news for them is good news for civilization.
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I do remember, growing up in that era, that there seemed to be an awful lot of these people in the 1980s. Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy, were just two of the most notorious.
Gacy was geographically close enough to me (Chicago area) that his arrest freaked out my teenage cohorts and I at the time.
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Millennials killed serial killing!
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IIRC they blacklisted the name and face of the Christchurch killer in New Zealand. It was reported, but subsequent updates/reports didn’t use his name.
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Well if dna being traced being traced back through a distant relative who gets their DNA logged doesnt make potential serial killers
paranoid I don’t know what will.
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Flint, Michigan could serve as a natural experiment. We just have to watch the statistics over the next forty years and see 1) if the rates there go up, and 2) if any who get caught throughout the country grew up in Flint.
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I have to believe that better forensics, DNA evidence, and video all over the place, have made it really difficult to be a serial killer these days. Even serial killers from decades ago are now being caught with old DNA evidence.
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and the increase in cameras everywhere. People still go missing all the time, though.
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Anything is possible, but: it’s widely observed that killers tend to resemble their victims in terms of status, race, location, etc. Most crime is intra-racial, intra-socio-economic-status, and local. And murder is the one crime that tends to get noticed. Even if a body isn’t found, bills stop getting paid, whatever public benefits a person has stop being used, bank accounts stop getting accessed, healthcare system interactions stop… about the only population in the US that could disappear would be the very most isolated illegal aliens who haven’t even gotten drivers licenses, gone to any school, interacted with the immigration system, or applied for asylum or anything like that. There must be some murders in that community that never get officially recorded, but those numbers must be quite small.
I really believe that serial killing is going down simply because they get caught faster these days, mostly due to DNA and other forensics.
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It was an interesting phrase. Look at it this way: Did Trump have a negative impact on white supremacist recruitment? Or positive?
Oh, I took to mean what you say. But I also wondered, hmm, do you really mean serial killers found safer outlet joining racist groups. Which would be a fascinating hypothesis.
Regardless, it was a thought provoking post.
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There are still serial killers out there on the highways, using big rigs as cozy personal spaces for their murders. The inability to connect the disappearance of a prostitute in one truck stop to the dismembered remains found months or years later makes it hard to figure out the patterns that distinguish serial killers. Many of those prostitutes have few family ties, they have sketchy living arrangements, they are assumed to have just moved to a different locale.
