Are human monsters being killed off?
DNA testing is the key to help close many unsolved homicides
WHEN prison officials jabbed a needle containing a cocktail of death into the chubby arm of serial killer John Wayne Gacy that should have been the end of it.
But even with his ticket punched “MORGUE”, the Killer Clown – executed on May 10, 1994 – has persevered in the public’s consciousness.
Gacy isn’t alone, a slew of documentaries of his fellow twisted brethren dominate Netflix and other streaming services.
Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, and the Boston Strangler among others have been given the treatment.
There is no shortage.
At one point in the early 1980s, southern California had so many serial killers hunting its sun-kissed landscape that there were two Freeway Killers.
If the late 1960s to the 1980s were the golden age of the serial killer, boffins now say this terrifying breed of monster is in decline. Northeastern University in Boston criminology professor James Fox said: “Part of it has to do with the same reason the murder rate has gone down.
“You have a surging number of people behind bars, so some of the would-be serial killers were likely behind bars as opposed to in the bars looking for victims.”
Fox is one of the co-authors, with Jack Levin and Emma Fridel, of a new book entitled Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder.
Serial murder hit its peak in the 1970s and 1980s when desperate loners scoured the United States looking for victims on the country’s highways and byways.
According to the book, the number of serial killers hit its apogee in the late 1970s when there around 300 known serial killers at work in the U. S.
By the 1980s, the number had dropped to 250 active killers who accounted for between 120 and 180 murders per year.
But by the time the 2010s arrived, there were reportedly just 50 known active killers. The results were based on data from the Radford University/florida Gulf Coast University Serial Killer Database.
There are a slew of reasons for the 40-year decline. Among them are changing demographics.
From the late 1960s onward, there were thousands of young men and women on the move, hitchiking and traveling across the country. That made for a target rich environment.
But more important have been quantum leaps in forensic and other technologies and policing itself. These advances have made it extremely difficult for serial killers like Gary Ridgeway – the Green River Killer – to commit their heinous acts.
One expert on condition of anonymity said: “There are still plenty of serial killers.
“They’re just much easier to catch and their death counts are significantly lower because they’re identified and arrested when their number of victims is still low.”
When the U. S. justice system began cracking down on crime – particularly violence – in the late 1980s, it made it difficult for killers to escape scrutiny.
Crime dropped because so many villains were now caged.
From 1980 to 1992, the incarceration rate in prisons – federal and state – doubled to 332 per 100,000 population, the U. S. Bureau of Statistics reports.
The leaps and bounds in technology, particularly DNA testing, has enabled cops to close
homicides that have in some cases been on ice for decades.
Fox continued: “The first case I was involved with in 1990, I was on a task force investigating the murders of five college students.
“We had DNA, but it was pretty crude. We couldn’t get DNA from hair – now you can. You needed a lot of genetic material to be able to identify the DNA pattern – now you don’t.”
Former cop Joseph Deangelo saw his quiet retirement shattered when cold case detectives used forensic genealogy to capture the elusive maniac known as the Golden State Killer.
Deangelo terrorised California from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. He copped to 13 counts of first-degree murder and other crimes to escape the death penalty.
Using forensic genealogy, cops linked DNA collected at the crime scenes and worked their way through a family tree to finally nab the Golden State Killer. Suspected Idaho quadruple killer Bryan Kohlberger was also captured using this method.
A flood of surveillance cameras and cellphones with GPS tracking capabilities have made getting away with murder tougher for multiple killers.
And the public has also changed, Fox noted. Gone are the free and easy days of flower powunsolved er. There is less widespread drug use, nearly zero hitchhiking and less rebellion today than in 1971. Public fears of being butchered by a serial killer have increased even though the number of killers has supposedly dropped.
Fox, who believes fewer would hop into a stranger’s car, added: “[People are] much more aware and cautious than we used to be.”
Since the golden age of serial murder where many of the victims were children, parents have become significantly more vigilant. Young women and girls are less vulnerable.
According to Fox, Levin and Fridel, of the 5,582 victims killed by serial killers since 1970, more than half are female.
About 30.2 per cent of those female victims are between the ages of 20 and 29 and 23 per cent are between the ages of 5 and 19.
Northeastern professor of applied psychology Laurie Kramer said parents view the world as a “more dangerous and risky” place, even in school, places once assumed to be a safe space.
Kramer said: “There is that sense that parents need to be much more participatory and intentional about selecting those opportunities in which their kids are going to be beyond school and church or other sorts of things that are pretty normative for them.
“There’s just a general anxiety, and I think that plays out with being protective.”
But Kramer believed a dramatic change in education could also be a reason for the drop in serial murderers.
Children are now taught empathy, he believes and kids with problems are identified quickly and get the help they need.
A more recent case, however. is that of Anthony Robinson, 35.
The alleged ‘Shopping Cart’ killer, was arrested in 2022 and charged with the murder of at least two women who were found dead in Virginia.