CRIME HUNTER: Is the Age of Serial Killers at an end?

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When prison officials jabbed a death-dealing needle into the chubby arm of serial killer John Wayne Gacy that should have been the end of it.

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But even with his ticket punched “MORGUE”, the Killer Clown – executed on May 10, 1994 – has persevered in the public’s consciousness.

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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.

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.

“Part of it has to do with the same reason the murder rate has gone down,” Northeastern University criminology professor James Fox said.

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“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 by-ways.

According to the book, the number of serial killers hit its apogee in the late 1970s when there around 300 known monsters 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.

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From the late 1960s onward, there were thousands of young men and women on the move, hitchhiking and traveling across the country. That made for a target-rich environment. No more.

But more important have been quantum leaps in forensic and other technologies along with policing itself.

These advances have made it extremely difficult for serial killers like Gary Ridgeway – the Green River Killer – to commit their heinous acts.

“There are still plenty of serial killers,” one expert said on condition of anonymity. “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 in the late 1980s, it made it more difficult for killers to escape scrutiny. Crime dropped because so many villains were caged.

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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 unsolved homicides that have in some cases been on ice for decades.

“The first case I was involved with in 1990, I was on a task force investigating the murders of five college students,” Fox said.

“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 geneology to capture the elusive maniac known as the Golden State Killer.

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DeAngelo terrorized 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 geneology, 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 power. There is less widespread drug use, nearly zero hitchhiking and less rebellion today than in 1971.

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Public fears of being butchered by a serial killer have increased even though the number of killers has supposedly dropped.

“(People are) much more aware and cautious than we used to be,” Fox said, adding fewer would hop into a stranger’s car, no matter how benign they appear.

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 slain by serial killers since 1970, more than half were female.

About 30.2% of those female victims were between the ages of 20 and 29 and 23% were between the ages of 5 and 19.

But even as the number of serial killers stalking the streets of America declines, these sadistic misfits remain front and centre in the culture at large.

Fox calls members of the serial killing hall of fame “legacy killers.” Because there has been a dramatic drop in their bloody mayhem, TV, books and movies have reached into the canon.

“The Boston Strangler killed 13 people and impacted their loved ones, but also was able to hold this entire city (Boston) in a grip of terror for years,” Fox said.

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