0:01

Greetings, it's Mal. Call your

0:03

banners because it's time to head back to Westeros for

0:05

House of the Dragons season 2. The

0:07

Ringers' Dragonriders will soar alongside you each

0:09

week with a Harrenhal-sized slate of conversations.

0:11

The dragon has three heads, and on

0:13

Sunday nights immediately after Hot D concludes,

0:16

Chris Ryan, Joanna Robinson and I will

0:18

be with you for Talk the Thrones.

0:20

Then on Mondays, two more shows away.

0:22

Van Laith and Charles Holmes, Steve Alman

0:24

and Jomie Adenaron aka the Midnight Boys,

0:27

will head to the tourney grounds to share their reactions.

0:29

And of course, Chris Ryan and Andy

0:32

Greenwald will sip the arbor's finest vintage on

0:34

the watch. Then on Tuesdays, Joanna

0:36

and I will head to the bowels of the

0:38

pleasure den for our House of our Deep Dives.

0:41

Then on Thursdays, Joe, Neil Miller and

0:43

Dave Gonzalez will gather the ravens for

0:46

trial by content. In this season, full

0:48

episodes of Talk the Thrones, House of

0:50

our and the Midnight Boys will also

0:52

be available on video on Spotify and

0:54

the new Ringersverse YouTube channel. Podcast episodes

0:57

available on Spotify or wherever you get

0:59

your podcasts. This

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episode is brought to you by Workday.

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with Workday. Visit workday.com

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to learn more. Today,

1:36

a true crime mystery. What

1:40

happened to the American serial killer? So

1:43

I was talking to a friend a few months ago, a college friend, about

1:46

my favorite movies of all time. This

1:49

conversation was technically about the concept of

1:51

sensitive periods for developing taste in art.

1:54

The idea that the bulk of people's

1:56

cultural tastes are formed during our teenage

1:58

and 20-something years. So for better or

2:01

worse, most people have a sense of their favorite music, their

2:03

favorite food, their favorite art by the time they

2:05

turn 30. And then

2:07

they just sort of stop developing new opinions about

2:10

food and music and art. Anyway, it's a theory.

2:12

And I said this is true of movies as

2:14

well. I think most of my favorite movies either

2:16

came out sometime between the 1990s, say 1999, and

2:21

2016, between the year I became a teenager and

2:23

the year I turned 30. Or

2:25

maybe they're slightly older films that I happen to see in

2:27

those 17 years. So it's not

2:29

so much the golden age of movie making

2:31

matched up with that window, but rather that

2:34

the golden age of my developing opinions about

2:36

movies concretized during that window

2:38

of time. So anyway, my friend

2:41

asks me to name some of my favorite

2:43

movies. And I go, well,

2:45

I think Silence of the Lambs

2:48

is uniquely perfect from an acting

2:50

standpoint. And then I thought about the

2:52

films that I've rewatched the most in the last few years. And

2:55

somewhat gruesomely, Seven came to mind. And

2:57

then Zodiac, clearly a David Fincher fan.

3:00

And my friend goes, huh, you

3:03

really have a thing for serial killers, don't

3:05

you? Now, my first

3:07

reaction was to deny this outright. I'm

3:09

actually not really a grisly person. I'm not

3:12

a true crime person. I don't listen to

3:14

true crime podcasts. I'm not really obsessed with

3:16

true crime documentaries. But

3:18

then what really was there to deny in this case?

3:21

Hannibal Lecter, Buffalo Bill, Zodiac, Kevin

3:24

Spacey and Seven, serial

3:26

killer, serial killer, serial killer,

3:29

serial killer. Huh, I

3:31

thought. Now, maybe something to file

3:34

away for reflection on later. A

3:36

few months after that, I was reading The New

3:38

York Times when I came across a headline that

3:40

I was clearly psychologically primed to remember. It

3:43

was an article about new updates in the

3:45

so-called Gilgo Beach Serial Killings, a series of

3:48

murders on Long Island starting in the early

3:51

1990s by a perpetrator who's sometimes

3:53

known as the Long Island serial

3:55

killer or the Craigslist Ripper. After

3:58

reading the article, I had this. sudden

4:01

electric bolt of

4:03

energy, curiosity. The

4:06

Zodiac Killer, I remembered, allegedly

4:08

murdered his victims in the San

4:10

Francisco area in the late 1960s. The

4:13

most famous serial killers were associated with the

4:16

70s, 1980s, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, son of

4:19

Sam. The Silence of the Lambs was

4:21

written in the 1980s. The Long

4:23

Island serial killers started in the early 1990s.

4:27

This whole serial killer phenomenon, I thought,

4:30

seemed unusually bounded

4:32

in time, beginning in

4:34

the 1960s, ending in the early 1990s. The

4:38

entire genre seemed to fit within

4:40

a 30-year period of time. And

4:43

all the movies that I saw

4:45

about serial killers seemed to have

4:47

the grisly details

4:49

of that 1970s, 1980s era. Now,

4:54

maybe I'm wrong. I'm not a crime

4:56

expert. I certainly shouldn't develop my opinions about

4:58

the world just by reflecting on the art

5:00

direction of my favorite films. So

5:02

I went to the Radford University

5:05

serial killer database, which has an

5:07

admittedly liberal definition of serial killers,

5:09

anybody with more than two victims.

5:12

And the numbers were

5:14

astonishing. In

5:16

the first five decades of the 20th century, the

5:19

number of serial killers in the US did not

5:21

budge from a very low level. Between the 1950s

5:23

and 1960s, suddenly

5:27

serial killers tripled. Between

5:30

the 1960s and 1970s, they tripled again. In

5:34

the 80s and 90s, they just kept rising. But

5:37

then just as suddenly as the

5:39

serial killer emerged as

5:41

an identifiable American phenomenon, he,

5:44

and it really is mostly a he,

5:47

seemed to basically disappear. In

5:51

all, the number of serial killers by

5:53

decade went from less than a hundred

5:55

in the 1950s to 700 in the 1980s.

6:00

to less than 100 again in the 2010s. The

6:04

graph, when you look at it,

6:06

looks like Mount Kilimanjaro, this towering

6:08

surge surrounded by

6:10

a low flatness on either side.

6:14

So now I was obsessed with a new question. What

6:17

happened to the American serial killer?

6:20

And of course, this is a multi-part mystery. What

6:23

happened to create the phenomenon of the serial killer in the 1960s,

6:25

1970s? What

6:27

happened to end this phenomenon in the 1990s, early 2000s? And

6:31

maybe a part three, what does it

6:33

say about American society, criminology, technology, that

6:35

this phenomenon exists in the first place?

6:38

And you can say from the broadest

6:40

level, this more or less tracks the

6:42

rise and fall of the crime wave

6:44

that we saw in America. But

6:47

when I read experts' opinions, they

6:49

said actually, the rise and fall of

6:52

overall crime does not begin to

6:54

explain the actual

6:56

phenomenon of the rise and

6:58

fall of the serial killer himself. James

7:01

Alan Fox is the Littman

7:04

Family Professor of Criminology, Law,

7:06

and Public Policy at Northeastern

7:08

University. He has for many decades

7:10

been one of the nation's top experts in

7:12

serial and mass killing. The author of

7:14

18 books, he has actually been

7:17

publishing on this subject since before 1974, the year

7:19

the FBI coined the term serial killer. In

7:25

today's episode, Fox explains the

7:27

rise and fall of the serial killer, the

7:29

fact that it's not a statistical illusion,

7:32

why and how he's still trying to

7:34

perfectly understand it. And

7:37

today we run down the most plausible theories that

7:39

explain the scary rise and

7:42

eerie disappearance of

7:44

this brand of American monster. I'm

7:47

Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

8:12

James Attlen Fox, welcome to the show. Thank

8:14

you very much. You are a renowned

8:17

expert in serial and mass killing. How

8:19

does that happen? How does one become

8:22

one of the most well-known figures in studying

8:24

serial and mass killing? How did that become

8:26

your expertise? Well, to some extent I

8:28

fell into it. But early

8:30

in the 1980s, over 40 years ago, a

8:35

colleague of mine, Jack Levin, and

8:37

I were talking and he wondered,

8:39

has there ever been a systematic

8:41

study of mass killers? And by the

8:43

way, at that point in time, the

8:45

term serial murder didn't exist. It

8:48

was mass killers. So we

8:50

were interested in seeing what

8:53

patterns existed among serial killers.

8:55

And indeed, was the Hollywood

8:57

image of a glassy-eyed lunatic,

9:01

like Friday the 13th or things

9:04

like that, was that

9:06

realistic or just pure

9:08

fantasy? So we collected

9:10

data on 42 cases at the

9:13

time, both serial

9:15

killers and mass killers, ended

9:17

a paper on it. Then

9:20

there was an AP story, headlined

9:23

Extraordinarily Ordinary, not

9:27

quite what people expected. It

9:29

was in hundreds of papers. It

9:32

just kept snowballing. So

9:35

I've done half a

9:37

dozen books on the topic. So

9:40

I never planned on this, frankly.

9:42

I teach two courses. I

9:44

teach statistics and I teach

9:46

homicide. And for me,

9:49

if you go

9:51

to a cocktail party and someone says, what

9:54

do you do? If I said, oh, I'm

9:56

a statistician, they'd say, oh, where's

9:58

the bar? But

10:00

when I say I study serial murder,

10:04

they have all sorts of questions.

10:06

I guess become popular because the

10:09

topic is popular. I would

10:11

love you to explain how you found real

10:15

serial killers and mass killers to differ

10:17

from the Hollywood impression. I feel like

10:19

one of my favorite movies is Sounds

10:22

the Lambs. There, Buffalo Bill

10:24

is this recluse, he's socially

10:27

isolated, he's weird as

10:29

hell, he's certainly not married. In your

10:31

research, it seems like, you mentioned, they're

10:33

extraordinarily ordinary. The typical serial killer is

10:35

the opposite of Buffalo Bill. Social, living

10:37

with a partner. What are other important

10:40

ways in which you found the Hollywood

10:42

archetype of the serial killer differs from

10:44

the real thing? Well,

10:46

the thing about the Hollywood

10:49

image, someone who looks evil

10:51

and looks dangerous and acts

10:54

weird, is that

10:56

they wouldn't be dangerous because we'd avoid them. You

11:00

know, we're not gonna, guys walking around with a hockey

11:02

basket and a knife, we're not gonna go up and

11:04

say, where's the rink? So

11:07

the thing about these serial

11:09

killers in particular, is they're very

11:12

good at appearing safe, not

11:18

strange at all. And that helps

11:21

in their ability to attract

11:23

victims. You

11:26

know, the victims let their guard down

11:28

when they confront someone like Theodore

11:30

Bundy, who, you

11:33

know, good looking guy, not all of

11:35

them are good looking, let's understand that

11:37

too. But for the

11:39

most part, they don't, they're

11:42

not put offish. And

11:47

that's why they're dangerous, because

11:49

they're extraordinarily ordinary. The

11:52

ordinariness of serial killers must

11:54

be especially surprising for people, given that

11:56

serial killers in films are often represented

11:59

as... these

12:01

hyper-real villains, right? Jason, Freddy Krueger,

12:03

these are demons. They're

12:05

barely even people. There's like a

12:08

mystical invincibility about them. And

12:10

Hannibal Lecter is practically

12:12

a superhero in his ability to

12:14

outsmart everybody. So we

12:16

do, as a society, seem to hold

12:18

serial killers aside from the rest of

12:21

murderers and treat them like

12:23

superheroes of evil rather

12:25

than real threats, right?

12:29

You know, he mentioned Hannibal Lecter. So

12:32

years ago, I was giving a speech at

12:34

a college out in Midwest, and they made

12:38

a poster of my talk.

12:40

I had the picture of four serial killers.

12:44

There was Bundy, and it was Gacy,

12:46

and Dahmer, and Hannibal Lecter. Of

12:49

course, it was Anthony Hopkins. Anthony

12:53

Hopkins, looking like Anthony Hopkins, is

12:56

an actor. But the thing

12:58

is, for most people, Jeffrey

13:01

Dahmer and Hannibal Lecter, same thing

13:03

to them. People

13:06

aren't really terrorized and frightened

13:08

of serial killers. They feel that's

13:10

not gonna happen to them. And

13:14

so they can be entertained by serial

13:16

murder because they don't see

13:18

it as a threat in their lives. We're

13:23

not entertained by

13:25

mass shootings. People

13:27

worry about it. They think they're gonna be the

13:29

victim. And we know this, the statistics show that

13:33

six out of 10 Americans think there's gonna be a

13:35

mass shooting in their community. If

13:38

you ask them if there's gonna be a serial killer running

13:40

down your street, they'll think

13:42

no. So

13:46

people can be entertained by serial murder

13:48

because they don't feel threatened. Whereas

13:51

other kinds of crimes, date rape, mass

13:54

killing, mass shooting, so forth, school

13:57

shootings, that's not entertaining. It's

13:59

frightening. I

14:01

am most interested in talking about

14:03

the rise and apparent fall of

14:05

serial killers in this country. According

14:09

to the official statistics, the somewhat

14:11

bleakly named golden age of serial killing took

14:13

place between the 1970s and 1990s. Before

14:18

we talk about why there were so many serial

14:20

killers in these 20 to 30 years and what

14:23

happened to create the rise and create the fall,

14:25

I have two questions

14:28

of definition. Number one, do you

14:31

consider this rise and fall to be reflective

14:33

of reality or a statistical artifact because maybe

14:35

we just suddenly got really good at counting

14:37

serial killers in the 1960s and 1970s? And

14:41

two, before we go on with the rest of the story,

14:43

we should probably define what we began

14:45

to call in the 70s and 80s

14:47

serial killing and how it was different

14:49

than other kinds of killing. So one,

14:51

is this statistical artifact and two, what

14:53

is it that we're talking about when

14:55

we talk about serial killing? Well,

14:58

let me say there definitely was a rise in

15:00

the 70s and 80s and

15:03

it's the early 90s. But

15:06

there was also a rise in homicide. So

15:09

part of it was just reflected of

15:11

a general increase in lethal violence in

15:13

our country. Of course, the serial

15:15

killing being its most extreme

15:17

form. As

15:19

far as definition, there's two areas

15:22

of disagreement. One

15:24

has to do with what the threshold is, how

15:26

many does someone have to kill to be called

15:29

a serial killer? And

15:31

two, the MO,

15:34

the style, the pattern

15:36

of killing. Well,

15:39

in my book, literally, I guess, I've

15:41

always held to four or more victims.

15:45

Some people did three or more. There's

15:50

some degree of arbitrariness there. However,

15:53

then there was a conference. Oh,

15:56

it was in the 90s. FBI. hosted

16:00

conference wanted to come up

16:02

with a definition. Although

16:05

I totally disagreed, female

16:09

disagreed, they decided to make it two, two

16:13

or more. Well, yeah,

16:15

because that makes more serial killers, makes

16:17

more business, makes more money that

16:19

they might want out of Congress. By

16:22

reducing it to two, you

16:24

change the basic nature of

16:26

serial murder. In

16:29

terms of things like whether they use torture, whether

16:31

they keep souvenirs

16:34

of their crimes, all those things tend

16:37

to be true of people who kill a lot of

16:39

victims, but not true of those who killed two. So

16:42

four or more is a definition that I use.

16:46

It's a threshold that basically says that

16:48

these people are incredibly deadly.

16:52

This is morbid to ask, but I suppose we

16:54

are deep in the realm of morbidity here. Other

16:57

than the frequency of torture

16:59

and keeping souvenirs, how are

17:01

serial killers different than ordinary

17:03

killers? Some people

17:06

want to say that the

17:09

serial killer is a sexual sadist.

17:12

It is true that many

17:15

are, and even most. That's

17:17

the stereotype of a serial killer, is

17:21

a sexual predator. There

17:25

are other serial killers who kill for profit.

17:29

For example, a series of robberies, and

17:34

killing the witnesses to cover up

17:36

the crimes. We think

17:38

about Bonnie and Clyde, that kind of style of

17:40

killing. So

17:42

not all serial killers are sexual sadists,

17:45

but that's a frequent pattern. Those

17:52

are the ones that get all the attention. I

17:56

want to break the rise of serial killing in the 1960s and 1970s into

17:58

two. big explanatory

18:00

pieces. The first piece

18:03

is changes in opportunity. So

18:05

maybe there's always been a fixed amount

18:07

of psychopathic people in the world, but

18:09

for some reason, this was a golden

18:12

age of opportunity for people with a

18:14

psychological profile of serial killers. And

18:16

the second category I want to talk

18:19

about is behavior. Maybe there are societal

18:21

reasons why the 1970s to 1990s created

18:23

more innately violent behavior. But let's start

18:25

with opportunity. What was happening in

18:28

the 1960s, 1970s that you think

18:31

might have given serial killers more

18:33

opportunities to commit murder

18:35

in this period? Well,

18:39

in the 60s in particular, into the

18:41

70s, runaways,

18:44

hitchhiking was common. We didn't have

18:46

Uber, so people

18:49

stuck out their thumb. And

18:52

so there were lots of opportunities. And I

18:55

mean, streetwalkers, prostitutes, there were

18:58

lots of potential

19:00

victims for serial

19:02

killers in the 60s and 70s. Now, if

19:05

you add to that, we had

19:07

the sexual revolution and the

19:10

lowering of sexual mores. Well,

19:13

that affects sexual

19:15

status too. And

19:19

so the opportunities too of

19:21

hitchhikers and

19:25

prostitutes, there

19:28

were just lots of opportunities for serial killers.

19:32

People, they wouldn't have the term

19:34

stranger danger. People

19:38

weren't afraid of strangers. So

19:40

that's why people feel okay

19:43

with hitchhiking. Or

19:45

if their car

19:47

broke down, they would

19:49

welcome the help of some stranger who

19:51

stopped to help them

19:53

change the tire. So

19:56

it took a while and serial

19:59

murder was... part of it, it took a while for

20:01

people to become much more cautious.

20:05

Another explanation that I've seen is

20:07

that you mentioned that serial killing

20:10

was increasing at the same time

20:12

that the overall homicide rate was

20:14

increasing. One explanation

20:16

for the general increase in homicide

20:18

in this era, not only in

20:20

the US, but also around the

20:22

developed world, is what's

20:24

sometimes called the lead hypothesis. That

20:27

between the 1940s and 1970s, lead

20:29

was much more commonly used in

20:31

gasoline and also somewhat used in

20:33

paint. This led to increased

20:35

atmospheric lead levels. Exposure to

20:37

lead in childhood can lead to

20:40

lower IQs and impaired impulse control.

20:42

And the children of those decades

20:45

with high levels of lead exposure reached

20:48

their late teens and 20s in the 1970s,

20:50

80s, and 90s. Those

20:53

were exactly the years when you saw this increase

20:55

in crime and this increase in serial killing. As

20:58

far as it explains the rise of

21:00

serial killing specifically, how much

21:03

weight do you put on the lead hypothesis?

21:07

Probably about eighth or ninth in

21:09

terms of priority. It

21:12

could have some impact certainly, but

21:14

I don't think anyone has been able

21:16

to substantiate that

21:18

in terms of serial murder. In

21:21

terms of murder, generally, there's other theories. One

21:26

of the things that I've studied in

21:28

my dissertation now, 50 years

21:30

ago, was

21:33

the age structure of the population. We had the

21:35

baby boomers born

21:37

after World War II, an

21:40

unprecedented number of births who

21:43

grew into their crime-prone years in

21:46

the 60s and 70s. We

21:51

had an unprecedented percentage of the population were

21:53

in that age category where they're more likely

21:55

to be violent. That

21:58

also contributes to serial murder too. But

22:01

it certainly was related

22:03

to homicide and other violent crimes. And

22:07

then eventually when the

22:10

baby boomers aged, the

22:13

percentage of population that was in that crime

22:15

prone age group started to shrink. And

22:17

the homicide rate started to shrink. In

22:20

international relations, I think this is called the

22:22

youth bulge theory of violence. The idea that

22:25

in developing countries, when there's a large proportion

22:27

of young adults, you tend to see more

22:29

youth and employment and more

22:31

civil unrest. So for my

22:33

summing up purposes, we'll say that the

22:35

most plausible reasons for the rise of

22:38

serial killers in the 1970s is

22:40

in the category of more opportunity.

22:43

This was a period with more hitchhikers,

22:45

more sex workers, pre-stranger danger,

22:48

a latchkey culture, a

22:50

youth quake. And I'm just

22:52

going to throw on top of all of this, although I think it'd be

22:54

very hard to prove. Some

22:56

theory of social contagion, I think whenever we

22:59

see a social trend take off, at

23:01

least one causal ingredient tends

23:03

to be mimicry. Perhaps

23:06

serial killers became a kind

23:09

of mimetic trend among people predisposed

23:11

to psychopathic murder and sadism. They

23:14

were seeing that other people were

23:16

getting all of this attention for

23:19

these achievements, if we could even call it that.

23:21

And so that may have drive some kind

23:23

of social contagion among this group. So

23:26

that's the rise of serial killers. And you

23:28

see this rising to the 1970s, 1980s, and the early 1990s.

23:33

I want to turn now to the

23:35

biggest question I have, the biggest mystery

23:37

I think there is to solve here,

23:39

which is where did serial killers go?

23:42

And I do feel like our categories of

23:44

opportunity and behavior might be useful to hold

23:46

onto. So let's start with changes to victims.

23:49

You and a couple other criminal

23:52

justice historians have said that serial

23:54

killers almost seem to move from

23:56

one group to another. You started

23:58

with a different. a disproportionate number

24:01

of hitchhikers and people

24:03

on the move being killed. And then you

24:05

had a rise of stranger danger and

24:07

people hitchhiked less and locked their doors more. And

24:10

then you saw more crimes among the sex

24:12

worker community. But then maybe sex workers got

24:14

savvy and that victim pool dried up. How

24:16

much of the decline in serial killing do

24:19

you think was about changes in behavior

24:22

to essentially the potential

24:24

victim pool? A

24:26

lot of it. And

24:28

as I mentioned before, people

24:33

became very wary of

24:35

strangers. And

24:39

that meant, for example, if someone

24:41

awkwards you a help, you're

24:44

walking, you're off to a ride, to

24:47

help you change a flat tire,

24:50

people were hesitant to accept that because

24:53

they were nervous about it. So

24:55

that stranger danger notion

24:58

permeated our society. And

25:01

then we had far less hitchhiking.

25:04

People just were too afraid to hitchhike.

25:06

There were too many stories of hitchhikers

25:08

ending up dead. And

25:10

of course, nowadays, there's

25:12

Ubers. So

25:15

you don't have to hitchhike. I

25:18

feel like in several stories that I've read,

25:20

or several documentaries that I've seen about serial

25:22

killers like the Golden State

25:25

Killer, for example, again and

25:27

again, you have this phenomenon that

25:29

I believe you've called linkage blindness. That is, a

25:31

killer convinced. I did not admit it to her.

25:33

You didn't admit it to her. You just used

25:35

it. OK. The killer

25:37

commits a felony in one jurisdiction and

25:39

then commits the exact same felony in

25:42

the adjacent jurisdiction. And the police are

25:44

utterly blind to see the similarity. They

25:46

can't get their data together. It

25:49

seems to me like in the 1960s, 1970s, both

25:52

the FBI and local jurisdictions

25:54

were much more purposeful about

25:56

allowing different

25:58

police departments to share data. Can you

26:00

just tell that story about how police

26:02

technology essentially seems to have caught up

26:04

to the serial killer? During

26:07

the heyday of serial murder, there are a lot

26:09

of killers who would kill

26:12

and travel. By the

26:14

time the police find a body,

26:18

the perpetrators in some other jurisdiction. At

26:22

that time, there really wasn't the

26:25

large-scale databases and ability

26:28

to communicate with other

26:32

police departments in terms of missing

26:34

persons or unsolved homicides. In

26:37

today's world, much more, much more easily

26:39

for police to communicate. That

26:44

was a big factor. Also, some of the... The

26:47

thing about serial killers is there's a

26:49

self-selection process. It's

26:53

more than just the will. There

26:58

are actually individuals who

27:01

are sexual sadists but

27:03

aren't very good at covering up their

27:05

crimes. I think

27:08

the term disorganized killer, someone who

27:13

kills and are frenzy, doesn't take

27:15

efforts to

27:19

try to cover up. Those

27:21

individuals are easy to catch because

27:24

they leave lots of clues. Sometimes

27:26

they even abduct people in plain

27:29

view. There is

27:31

a catch. They don't become a serial

27:33

killer. The ones who

27:35

are able to kill repeatedly victim

27:38

after victim as

27:41

victim have demonstrated

27:44

their skill. They're

27:47

cunning. Now, people have to

27:49

say that serial killers are smart. Well,

27:52

they're not necessarily smart in an academic

27:54

sense, although there's some

27:56

who... A couple have a very

27:58

high IQ. But

28:01

they're street smarts. They know

28:04

what to do to avoid detection.

28:09

The serial killers who dispose of

28:11

bodies far away from where they

28:13

were killed, a

28:15

so-called dump site, whether it be

28:18

a mountainside, forest, lake, by

28:20

the time the police find the body, they

28:23

don't have a lot of evidence because most of

28:25

the evidence is at the crime scene, where

28:27

the person was killed. But

28:30

the police don't have a crime scene. They

28:32

only have a dump site. And if the

28:34

body is left in some remote area for

28:37

the animals to feed at and for the

28:40

rain and the snow and the wind to

28:42

erode some of the physical evidence, by the

28:44

time they find the body, they have

28:46

a hard enough time figuring who the victim is,

28:48

much less who the killer is. The

28:55

Golden State Killer, who

28:57

committed something like 13 murders

28:59

and 51 rapes between 1974 and 1986,

29:03

he was eventually caught because

29:05

of a genetic test that showed a

29:07

relationship with a cousin

29:09

or some family member. Familial

29:11

DNA, yeah. Familial DNA. How

29:14

much has the existence or

29:17

the emergence of, let's just

29:19

call it, higher-tech crime scene

29:21

data made a difference

29:23

here and made it easier

29:25

for police to catch killers

29:27

who almost by definition are

29:29

by committing serial murders, creating

29:31

more opportunities for them to

29:33

shed something like DNA? A

29:36

significant effect. The

29:38

first time that DNA was used for forensic purposes was

29:41

in the late 80s. Of

29:43

course, our bodies always had DNA, but

29:46

it wasn't until the late 80s that there

29:48

was the ability to try to use to

29:50

solve crimes. But even then, the testing techniques

29:52

were very crude. You

29:55

needed a lot of physical evidence

29:57

to do it. a

30:01

DNA test. You need a lot of saliva,

30:03

not just a little bit. A lot

30:06

of blood, not just a little

30:08

bit. You couldn't get DNA back

30:10

then from hair. Now you can.

30:13

Now you

30:15

can get DNA from a very

30:17

small amount of evidence. So

30:22

when you think

30:24

about the era

30:27

when serial murder was raging,

30:30

it was prior to testing.

30:37

So it's very hard for someone

30:39

now to commit crimes, sexual

30:41

crimes in particular, where there is lots of

30:44

physical evidence because of the contact with the

30:46

victim. Unlike a

30:48

shooting where a bullet doesn't have DNA.

30:54

The only problem now is to try to

30:56

identify. You may have the DNA, but

30:58

you have to figure who does that belong to. So

31:02

then we started having DNA database, and

31:05

we have a federal one, but there

31:07

weren't very many samples

31:09

in it. So

31:12

we were collecting DNA in the 90s into the 2000s, but

31:18

there weren't any hits with the database because the database

31:20

didn't have lots of people in it. Even

31:24

now, you have someone who

31:27

has never been arrested, being

31:29

a serial killer, that even though

31:31

you might have the DNA from the crime scene, you

31:34

won't be able to figure who it is.

31:36

Then coming along with the familial DNA. So

31:39

it doesn't have to be that that person has

31:43

their DNA in a data bank. It

31:46

could be a relative. And

31:49

so you find out that there's someone

31:51

in a data bank who

31:54

has this familial connection, then you

31:56

start investigating the relatives

31:58

of that person. and that's been used

32:01

in a number of cases to identify

32:05

sero-killers, also to confirm cases in

32:10

yesteryear like the Boston Strangler. The

32:13

way we were able to figure out that indeed

32:15

Alper de Salvo was the Strangler, despite all the

32:17

controversy over the years, was

32:20

through a collecting evidence

32:25

from relatives. That

32:27

clears up a mystery that I was puzzling

32:30

over, which is that on the one hand

32:32

we're in an era where serial killing is

32:34

in clear decline, but we had an episode

32:36

of this show last year where we talked

32:38

about how according to FBI statistics, whereas

32:41

the 1960s and 1970s majority

32:43

of murders were cleared by police, typically

32:45

by arrest, in 2022 the clearance rate

32:48

hit an all-time low of about 50

32:50

percent. So I was thinking how could

32:52

we have the simultaneous facts

32:54

that on the one hand we believe that serial

32:56

killers are in decline, but also half of all

32:59

murders in the U.S. are going unsolved according to

33:01

FBI data, which means that maybe I thought there

33:03

could be a lot of serial killers, we're just

33:05

not catching them. What we just

33:07

said was seems very critical, which is that

33:09

serial killers don't tend to be sharpshooters. They

33:12

tend to have contact with their victims, they

33:14

tend to or they're disproportionately likely to be

33:16

sexual sadists. The reason why so many crimes

33:18

and so many murders in the U.S. seem

33:21

to be going unsolved is because there's more

33:23

gun violence, but this

33:25

is not, serial killing is not a

33:28

phenomenon of long distance gun violence for

33:30

the most part. It's a phenomenon of

33:32

close contact sadistic killing, and so these

33:34

things can be true at the same

33:36

time, a decline in the clearance rate

33:39

and a decline in serial killing. Does that match

33:41

up with your expertise? Absolutely.

33:43

The client clearance

33:45

rates can

33:48

be traced to things like a lot of gang violence, where

33:52

there's a code of silence and no one's coming forward

33:56

because they're concerned about

33:58

retribution. retaliation,

34:01

and also the changing

34:04

pattern of homicide. Over

34:06

the years, it used to be that the confessional

34:08

wisdom was that most

34:11

homicides occurred in the home.

34:15

Well, we've taken the home on a homicide, and

34:18

the percentage of homicides that

34:21

involved strangers, which

34:24

are very small in the early 60s,

34:26

like 4-5 percent, has

34:28

grown. It's

34:31

extremely difficult to solve a homicide when there's

34:33

no connection between

34:36

the perpetrator and the victim. That's

34:40

true of sexual

34:42

predators because they

34:44

don't pick on people they know. Those

34:48

are difficult to solve. But

34:52

again, there's other kinds. The

34:54

percentage of homicides that are committed with guns

34:57

rose from about 50 percent up to almost

34:59

70 percent. Again,

35:02

there's no DNA with a gunshot. It's

35:05

also difficult to solve. What

35:08

happened on the part of

35:10

the sexual revolution, do you think? Obviously,

35:12

we still live in an era where there's lots

35:15

more sexual promiscuity than there was in the 1940s

35:17

and 1950s. But

35:19

this is a period when serial

35:21

killing has generally declined tremendously, rather

35:23

than stayed at an elevated

35:26

level. Well, there are other outlets of sexual

35:28

status that don't involve live victims in

35:31

terms of pornography, and even

35:36

more so in terms of artificial

35:38

intelligence, and what that will mean

35:40

in terms of the ability of sexual

35:42

status to satisfy their

35:45

urges with fantasies.

35:48

I never thought about that. You think

35:50

it's conceivable that the existence of and

35:54

frictionlessness of digital porn may

35:57

have mechanically reduced... and

38:00

the growth of digital porn, which

38:03

may give sexual status a

38:05

way to satisfy their urges that

38:09

doesn't involve murdering somebody. What

38:11

came to that story, what did I miss?

38:13

Yeah. Cell phones. Cell

38:16

phones. Cell phones. And

38:18

surveillance cameras. It's

38:22

very hard for someone to commit

38:25

a crime in a public place

38:27

without it being recorded. On

38:30

some security camera. On terms

38:32

of cell phones, if

38:36

you are stranded because of

38:38

a flat tire, you have an option

38:41

to call for help and

38:44

not be at risk to some individual

38:47

who could have stopped and offer you help

38:49

and then of course kill you. So

38:52

the cell phone

38:55

has had a major effect and

38:57

then people have cameras on their

38:59

phones. So they're always

39:01

taking photographs of things that

39:04

was not possible before. And

39:08

even in terms of, for example,

39:10

street prostitution, they could

39:13

take pictures of license

39:16

plates. So

39:18

there's some record of who

39:21

they're going with. So

39:25

cell phones, surveillance cameras, and also

39:29

we talked earlier about children. So

39:31

we have Amber alerts. So

39:36

if a child is abducted by

39:38

a stranger, there

39:40

is a greater possibility of finding

39:45

that person because we

39:47

basically deputize every motorist

39:50

by alerting them to the

39:52

vehicle that this person may

39:54

be driving. Very

39:56

last question and I really appreciate the time that you gave us.