People keep advancing ideas on why it went down so precipitously but that’s the wrong question to answer. It looks like the numbers went back to the norm. The interesting question is why it rose so dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s?
In my part of the world, the most notorious serial killers are from that era, too, so it’s not culture-specific.
One suggestion about a general decline in crime has to do with no longer using leaded gasoline. There are some problems with this hypothesis (as reported in this meta-analysis https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667) but since serial killers make up an even smaller percentage of the population than do people who murder once, it’s possible that they fall into some very vulnerable (or very over-exposed to lead) group. Politicians always want to take credit for being “tough on crime” but I find environmental hypotheses more likely.
I had thought the rise and the decline both connected to the prevalence of hitch-hiking, with the decline assisted by inter-agency and inter-state law enforcement communication, and at the tail end by the ubiquitization of cell phones and advent of dna profiling (imo this was the *smallest* contribution). My dad hitch-hiked extensively during that era, had a couple of run-ins with sketchy characters (once jumped from a moving vehicle when things looked like they were going south).
But I also wonder if the easy availability of hard drugs might play a role. Do the subset of low-inhibition, excitement-seeking, no-conscience people who became serial killers in a previous era… simply OD on heroin now, before they can get very far in that career?
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That is kind of a fun rabbit hole:
If this article can be trusted, some states didn’t have photo driver’s licenses until the mid-1970s, which would support the idea of an artificially low baseline, before the “serial killer golden era” on that chart. Maybe what that chart actually shows is an increase in the difficulty of moving around the country anonymously.
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“why it rose so dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s?”
The first thing I thought of was the roughly 30 crime cycle in the US. Very roughly crime tends to rise for about 30 years and then fall for about 30 years…
1960 low 1990 high 2020 low roughly correlates with that. That doesn’t explain the soviet case (though there’s also the issue of maybe not very records during 90s chaos…
It also might be that the prominence came with them being detected… and named as a thing.
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Yeah, at least part of that has got to be simply detection. I’ve seen several plausible historical investigations where hobbyists and historians take an old case– anywhere from 1890 through 1940ish– of someone nabbed for a pretty heinous murder-and-dismemberment, and then trace that person’s previous residences and find other similar murders that can very plausibly be attributed to them, that remained unsolved or were pinned on somebody else with very little evidence.
It used to be a lot easier to relocate, change your name, and start a new life in another town/state/whatever, or just disappear off the radar entirely. How many people without any kind of ID documents at all, were riding the rails during the Depression? Much the same situation in the years following WWI, with unattached men drifting from town to town in search of sparse work. The Social Security Death Index has only been a thing since 1962. Driver’s licenses took a surprisingly long time to catch on, and didn’t originally include a photo. When did they become universal photo ID? Later than you’d think, and inconsistently across states.
Perhaps the earlier baseline should be higher, and the apparent rise and peak represent greater ability to trace these things, connect multiple crimes across county and state lines.
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“In my part of the world, the most notorious serial killers”
A few years ago I read a book on one of the most famous cases in Poland, the “vampire” (a label often given to serial killers) of Zagłębie (part of the greater Katowice region the largest urban area in Poland) who was executed for killing 14 women.
As you wrote true crime books need a hook to be interesting and this one was about media coverage and the management of information regarding crime (esp by police) in communist Poland.
The author doesn’t openly say it but almost everyone who’s examined the case doesn’t think the person executed was the vampire. He was a barely literate idiot whose shrew wife turned him in to get rid of him. The real killer was surely another guy who had tried to confess to the police and was sent packing. A few months later he killed his family and himself at which point the killings stopped.
But… not mentioned in some sources there were only three or so murders. Most of the ones the accused was executed for were probably copy cat crimes or people trying to disguise their own crimes (the full profile of original crimes was not known to the public so it was easy to probably distinguish between killings by the vampire and others). But the police and media preferred for people to think there was one very crazy killer around rather than a half dozen or so….
The one who was executed was almost certainly involved in one murder but try to his style he killed the wrong person… the target was a university professor and enemy of his brother but he ended up killing her secretary instead….
So.. to sum up I wonder how many serial killers are used to clear books of murders the police don’t want to deal with….
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“serial killers are used to clear books of murders the police don’t want to deal with”A notorious case of that from Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sture_Bergwall
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There’s also the video-game theory of crime reduction:
TL:DR: Who plays most video games? Young men. Who commits most crime? Young men. Maybe some crime reduction since the advent of consumer video games is simply young delinquents frittering away their lives indoors in front of a screen, instead of out on the street doing crime.
I think there’s something to it, but it’s probably just one slice of the picture.
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If your taste runs to batsh*t insane conspiracy theories, someone named Dave McGowan wrote a book about how the prevalence of serial killers on the West coast during 70s and 80s was the result of CIA mind control experiments.
(commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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