Blood Loss
Television crime dramas regularly feature plots in which a series of murders are
committed by the same person. But how common are such characters in real
life? In this 2011 article for Slate, Beam reports a surprising trend: Serial killings
occur much less often than they did a generation ago. He suggests that shifting
cultural anxieties, not just police work, can explain the decline.
When it came to serial killing, Stephen Griffiths did everything by the
book. He targeted prostitutes in the slums of Bradford, a city in Northern
England. He chose a unique murder weapon: a crossbow. He claimed to have
eaten parts of his victims — two of them cooked, one of them raw. "I'm mis-
anthropic," he told police investigators when he was finally caught in 2010.
"I don't have much time for the human race.” When he appeared in court, he
gave his name as the "crossbow cannibal.” It was as if he'd studied up on the
art of serial murder. (In fact, he had: Griffiths was a part-time PhD student
at Bradford University, where he was studying criminology.) And yet, for all
his efforts, he got only one short blurb in the New York Times when he was
sentenced last month.
Serial killers just aren't the sensation they used to be. They haven't dis-
appeared, of course. Last month, Suffolk County, New York, police found
the bodies of four women dumped near a beach in Long Island. Philadelphia
police have attributed the murders of three women in the city's Kensington
neighborhood to one “Kensington Strangler.” On Tuesday, an accused serial
stabber in Flint, Michigan, filed an insanity plea.
But the number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the pub-
lic's fascination with them. “It does seem the golden age of serial murderers
is probably past,” says Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College of the
City University of New York who studies crime.
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4.
Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by — the FBI doesn't keep
numbers, according to a spokeswoman — but the data we do have suggests
serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since. James
Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and coauthor
of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, keeps a database of
confirmed serial murderers starting in 1900. According to his count, based on
newspaper clippings, books, and Web sources, there were only a dozen or so
serial killers before 1960 in the United States. Then serial killings took off:
There were 19 in the 1960s, 119 in the '70s, and 200 in the '80s. In the '90s,
the number of cases dropped to 141. And the 2000s saw only 61 serial murder-
ers. (Definitions of serial murder vary, but Fox defines it as “a string of four or
more homicides committed by one or a few perpetrators that spans a period
of days, weeks, months, or even years." To avoid double-counting, he assigns
killers to the decade in which they reached the midpoint of their careers.)
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 link-
ages between cases — especially across states that they would have other-
wise 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 downtrend?
5
-
6
Trends in Serial Killing
240
200
160
120
Killers/Teams
80
40
0
1960s
2000s
1980s
1970s
1990s
Before
1960
Decade
Source: James Alan Fox and Jack Levin. Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass
Murder. Sage Publications, 2011.
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Cause and Effect
catch would-be serial killers after their first crime. So could the increased
It's hard to say. Better law enforcement could have played a role, as police
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 thirty victims), John Wayne Gacy (stored bodies in his ceiling crawl-
space; thirty-three victims), or Jeffrey Dahmer (kept body parts in his closet
and freezer; seventeen 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 cam-
paign 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 kill-
ers were everywhere and repeating the erroneous statistic that there were
five thousand 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 fourteen-year-old boy by University of Chicago students Nathan
Leopold and Richard Loeb in 1924 captured the growing obsession with mod-
ern 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
Beam / Blood Loss
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Charles Lindbergh's son, became a symbol of societal decay during the Depres-
sion. 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 nar-
rative fade away. In 1927, Andrew Kehoe detonated three bombs at a school
in Bath Township, Michigan, killing thirty-eight 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, terror-
ists are to the early twenty-first century. After 9/11, fear of social unraveling
has been replaced by anxiety over airplanes, bombs, and instant mass anni-
hilation. Stephen Griffiths isn't the new Jeffrey Dahmer. The Times Square
bomber is.
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