‘Society needs monsters’: why are Americans so obsessed with the idea of serial killers? | US crime
For over the past two years, rumors of a serial killer have preoccupied residents of Austin, Texas, and beyond, as body after body has turned up in a city lake. The killer was even given a name: the Rainey Street Drill Man.
But authorities now say nearly 36 drownings at the lake near Rainey Street are likely related to alcohol and drug consumption and the reservoir’s proximity to the city’s famous bar scene.
There are almost certainly no serial killers. But will this be enough to dispel the rumors, or does America’s fascination with gruesome mass murderers in both fact and fiction mean that facts and truth have little say in the matter?
Report The study, which examined 189 cases over a 20-year period by Texas State University researchers in collaboration with the Austin police department, found no evidence of a serial killer, any clustering patterns or hotspots of similar criminal activity.
“Although social media speculation suggests otherwise, the independent academic study supports the findings of APD investigations and confirms that Austin is not facing a serial killer,” the Austin police department said in a statement.
The study found that men are more likely to drown than women, which may explain why more men than women drown in Lady Bird Lake.
Dr Kim Rossmo is a professor of criminal justice at the university who developed the field of geographic profiling that helped find serial killer Robert Pickton, known as the Pig Farmer Killer, in 2001. He told a local news He said social media was “propagating something sensational to get a few more clicks”.
“Let’s not waste money and time chasing ghost serial killers,” he added.
However, the lack of evidence of the murder and efforts to debunk serial killer theories may not be enough.
Last year, New York police said there was no evidence of a serial killer working near two Brooklyn nightclubs, just over a year after the bodies of three men were found in a nearby stream.
Police in Boston in August addressed Online discussions about a potential serial killer have begun in New England after multiple bodies were found in six states since April. Massachusetts state police say there is no evidence of a serial killer. Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, author of several books on the subject, said: “There is little similarity between the victims.”
But interest in serial killers has hardly waned since the dark heyday of Ted Bundy, who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls between 1974 and 1978, and Jeffrey Dahmer, who murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.
Fox estimates there has been an 80 percent decline in serial murders since their peak in the 1970s. At the time, there were nearly 300 known active serial killers in the United States. Ten years later there were 250 active killers, causing 120 to 180 deaths per year. In the 2010s, the number of known active killers was fewer than 50.
Fox points to several factors that may collectively explain why the numbers have dropped so dramatically.
“We have very few hitchhikers now,” he said. “Back then, people were putting them at serious risk when seemingly good Samaritans walked them around.”
The same can be said for drivers who accept help with a flat tire; This led to a serial killer in Indiana being dubbed the “Flat Tire Killer.” “But now we have Uber, so we don’t hitchhike, and we have cell phones to call for help. People in general are much more aware of strangers.”
Equally important is the adoption of DNA technologies that were not available until the 1990s and the availability of large DNA data banks that can lead to direct identification of family members.
Idaho mass murderer Bryan Kohberger was identified in part because genetic genealogy pointed to his family in Pennsylvania. Although Kohberger was not a full-fledged serial killer, he studied under forensic psychology professor Katherine Ramsland at DeSales University.
“Advances in DNA technology have given authorities the ability to identify killers before they accumulate large body counts,” Fox says, adding that cameras, cross-jurisdictional law enforcement communication and reducing street prostitution have helped reduce opportunities for serial killers.
Thus, Kohberger, who killed four students in a single house in Moscow, Idaho, was caught before he had the opportunity to commit a second crime.
Fox executive Associated Press/USA Today/Northeastern University Mass Homicide DatabaseHe also points out that in the 1970s, sexual sadists did not have many outlets to satisfy their urges. “With images of violence being publicly available, they can satisfy themselves to some degree without having to use an unwilling victim,” he says.
But even though serial killers have actually disappeared, there is definitely an increase in interest in serial killers in the world of popular entertainment.
Accused Long Island serial killer Rex Heuermann, who will stand trial next year on charges of murdering seven women, has already had two documentaries made about his alleged crimes. Netflix murder series “Monster” follows Dahmer and Ed Gein, the Plainfield Butcher, who inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Both shows were appreciated by the audience.
“What entertains people are the killers of the past,” Fox says. “And that reflects the fact that we have so many killers on our hands. So many, in fact, that there are two killers in California called Highway Killer One and Highway Killer Two.”
Horrifyingly, the decline in serial killers has coincided with the rise of something equally horrifying and perhaps a greater threat: mass shootings, especially in schools.
“Due to their bizarre and extreme nature, serial killers attracted attention but did not necessarily create fear outside of a specific community,” Fox argues. “Mass attacks create fear. Now Americans are avoiding certain places because they don’t want to get caught, so that’s a different thing.”
Yet the societal need to understand the motivation, or lack thereof, for murder remains unchanged. In her new book, The Monsters We Make, to be published next week, journalist Rachel Corbett combines her own family’s experience with murder with a study of criminal profiling that is more art than science.
“Society needs monsters,” Corbett writes. “They remind us of who we are and who we are not. They are frightening because they break down the boundaries between what we consider human and inhuman, and they warn us about what we might become.”
The need to create monsters in places where they might not exist, including the horrors of Austin, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, confronts the reality that, as Fox detects, the age of the serial killer has, as always, been replaced.
“Even at the height of the serial killer epidemic, it was greatly exaggerated,” he says. “We’re catching the old serial killers now, but the new ones are committing one-off murders here and there.”
Corbett notes that stories serve a purpose.
“The serial killer is Frankenstein; a patchwork of everything you want to project onto him. Conservatives said Ted Bundy was the work of the loss of religiosity in society, the collapse of the family, and women’s rights. There were people on the left who said we needed improved social programs and that we needed to understand mental health. Let’s study them, not just kill them.”
Even though real-world crime is on the decline, America’s fascination with serial killers remains.
