Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky
Authors: Peter Vronsky
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bodies they chopped into pieces and partially ate. In Nanjing, a snack-shop owner who grew worried about competition put rat poison in a rival’s products, killing thirty-eight people.
Back on the Pacific coast of the U.S., not far from where Gary Ridgway murdered forty-eight victims, David and Michelle Knotek—husband and wife—stand accused of the torture murders of at least four people at their idyllic white-picket-fence farmhouse decorated with smiley faces. At this writing they are awaiting trial. Meanwhile, farther south along the coast, in California, as Scott Peterson stands charged with the murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, his defense is hinting that he has been “framed” by a serial killer, the real perpetrator of her murder.
As I write here, you cannot turn on the TV without major network news magazine shows like Dateline or 20/20 running previously broadcast episodes or updated shows on some serial killer. Tune in to the Discovery Channel for the “science of catching serial killers.” Go to the History Channel and you will find the “history of serial killers.” PBS offers us “The Mind of a Serial Killer,” while the Biography Channel . . . well, you guessed it. Only the Food Network seems to have resisted presenting serial killer cannibal recipes.
No wonder they call this the age of serial slaughter; we seem to live in a world truly plagued by an epidemic of crazy homicides that do not appear to be waning.
Behind the Making of the “Serial Killer Epidemic”
If I have been doing my job right as a popular writer so far, you should be breathlessly alarmed by this described sudden and steady three-decade onslaught of crazed serial killers threatening us in every corner of the world. The alarm you feel feeds sales of books, magazines, and commercial time on television. The historian in me, however, wants to know what really happened, even if the truth is more prosaic than the myth. This wave of serial murder is not as simple a story as a lot of true-crime literature, the government, and the media have been presenting it.
Yes, it felt as if an epidemic of serial murder were starting in the 1970s, just the way I described it, but first we need to acknowledge that the population had risen rapidly over the last half of the century. More people; more victims; more serial killers.
Second, in the earlier part of the century, television did not exist and newspapers were not linked by wire services and syndication deals to the extent they are today. Stories of serial murder often did not get reported beyond a local region, and therefore historians have a hard time identifying cases in the past with which comparisons can be made. By the 1960s, news reporting had become highly centralized by wire services, modern communication, and corporate amalgamation, and thus stories of serial murders, even in remote regions, were more likely to be broadly reported during the 1970s and 1980s, giving us this sense of a sudden epidemic of unprecedented serial killings. Reports of almost any multiple homicides anywhere would be big news and received national distribution on the wire services.
Finally, our “serial killer epidemic” can be attributed to the fact that many of the startling crime statistics in the early 1980s were issuing forth from the U.S. Department of Justice and anticrime lobbies and victim advocate groups. The FBI at precisely that time was lobbying the government for funding for new programs. The FBI had realized that some murders were not being recognized as having been committed by the same person because of jurisdictional disparities (a failure called “linkage blindness”) and was calling for a massive database system to address this issue.
The FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) at Quantico, Virginia (of Silence of the Lambs fame), which was first formed for psychological studies of hostage takers, began to investigate the psychology and techniques of serial killers in an attempt to
Back on the Pacific coast of the U.S., not far from where Gary Ridgway murdered forty-eight victims, David and Michelle Knotek—husband and wife—stand accused of the torture murders of at least four people at their idyllic white-picket-fence farmhouse decorated with smiley faces. At this writing they are awaiting trial. Meanwhile, farther south along the coast, in California, as Scott Peterson stands charged with the murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, his defense is hinting that he has been “framed” by a serial killer, the real perpetrator of her murder.
As I write here, you cannot turn on the TV without major network news magazine shows like Dateline or 20/20 running previously broadcast episodes or updated shows on some serial killer. Tune in to the Discovery Channel for the “science of catching serial killers.” Go to the History Channel and you will find the “history of serial killers.” PBS offers us “The Mind of a Serial Killer,” while the Biography Channel . . . well, you guessed it. Only the Food Network seems to have resisted presenting serial killer cannibal recipes.
No wonder they call this the age of serial slaughter; we seem to live in a world truly plagued by an epidemic of crazy homicides that do not appear to be waning.
Behind the Making of the “Serial Killer Epidemic”
If I have been doing my job right as a popular writer so far, you should be breathlessly alarmed by this described sudden and steady three-decade onslaught of crazed serial killers threatening us in every corner of the world. The alarm you feel feeds sales of books, magazines, and commercial time on television. The historian in me, however, wants to know what really happened, even if the truth is more prosaic than the myth. This wave of serial murder is not as simple a story as a lot of true-crime literature, the government, and the media have been presenting it.
Yes, it felt as if an epidemic of serial murder were starting in the 1970s, just the way I described it, but first we need to acknowledge that the population had risen rapidly over the last half of the century. More people; more victims; more serial killers.
Second, in the earlier part of the century, television did not exist and newspapers were not linked by wire services and syndication deals to the extent they are today. Stories of serial murder often did not get reported beyond a local region, and therefore historians have a hard time identifying cases in the past with which comparisons can be made. By the 1960s, news reporting had become highly centralized by wire services, modern communication, and corporate amalgamation, and thus stories of serial murders, even in remote regions, were more likely to be broadly reported during the 1970s and 1980s, giving us this sense of a sudden epidemic of unprecedented serial killings. Reports of almost any multiple homicides anywhere would be big news and received national distribution on the wire services.
Finally, our “serial killer epidemic” can be attributed to the fact that many of the startling crime statistics in the early 1980s were issuing forth from the U.S. Department of Justice and anticrime lobbies and victim advocate groups. The FBI at precisely that time was lobbying the government for funding for new programs. The FBI had realized that some murders were not being recognized as having been committed by the same person because of jurisdictional disparities (a failure called “linkage blindness”) and was calling for a massive database system to address this issue.
The FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) at Quantico, Virginia (of Silence of the Lambs fame), which was first formed for psychological studies of hostage takers, began to investigate the psychology and techniques of serial killers in an attempt to
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