How Many Serial Killers In America
Do you want to know who are the most evil serial killers ever? If so, you’re not alone. Our society seems to have both a repulsion and fascination with serial killers stories. Just look at all the serial killers movies and serial killers documentary out there! There are serial killers of every race and ethnicity. Not all serial killers are white. In fact, serial killers span all racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. In America blacks only make up 13%. Each state in American has been touched by a horrifying serial killer. We rounded up the cases of some of the most notorious serial killers in America, one from each state. Mar 27, 2018 Some experts suggest when you start analyzing homicide data, there are actually roughly 2,000 serial killers at large in the United States right now. 10 Terrifying American Serial Killers Still At Large Radu Alexander, Updated March 12, 2019 According to the FBI, there are up to 50 serial killers active in the United States at this moment. John Douglas, a former chief of the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit and author of 'Mind Hunter,' says, 'A very conservative estimate is that there are between 35 and 50 active serial killers in the United States' at any given time. Often, Douglas told me, they will, 'kill two to three victims. The world has known many serial killers. The list of such people who have committed inhumane crimes is endless. But then there are some who have actually stolen the spotlight for the hideous.
If you're anything like me, you like to come home after a long day at work, pour yourself a nice chilled glass of chardonnay, pop on some smooth jazz, and ask yourself, 'How many active serial killers are operating in the United States right now?' OK, fine, your own after-work ritual may vary. But you clicked on this article, so you're obviously just as curious as I am about whether serial killers are as common as they once seemed.
Serial killers often feel like a relic of the past — a totally terrifying relic, sure, but a relic nonetheless. Our culture's most notorious serial killers, like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Richard Ramirez, were all active more than 20 years ago. And while several major serial killers have been active in the 2000s — like Israel Keyes, 'D.C. Snipers' Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad, and Anthony 'Cleveland Strangler' Sowell' — the recent arrests of high-profile serial killers like the Golden State Killer and Samuel Little hinged on crimes committed several decades ago.
The stats bear out this feeling that serial killing is on the decline. According to the Radford University/FGCU Serial Killer Database, an exhaustive collection of serial killer data assembled by forensic psychology professor Dr. Mike Aamodt, serial killers proliferated in the U.S. from the 1970s through the 1990s: there were 104 active serial killers operating in the US in 1974, 147 in 1984, and 151 in 1994.
But after peaking in the '90s, those numbers went down. And in 2015, the last year data was collected by Radford, they estimated that only 30 serial killers were operating in the U.S. — numbers equivalent to the number of active serial killers in the 1960s.
These numbers aren't that far off from those given out by John E. Douglas, the groundbreaking FBI profiler whose life inspired the Netflix series Mindhunter. In 2014, Douglas told People, 'there are between 25 and 50 active serial killers in the United States' at any given time.
There are a number of ideas as to why this drop in serial killings occurred, ranging from the theory that DNA technology has made it easier to catch killers after their first crimes, to the fact that people engage in fewer activities today (hitchhiking, etc) that bring them into contact with strangers, to the (way more depressing) hypothesis that violent murderers today simply veer towards mass killings instead.
But not everyone is necessarily convinced that serial murder has dropped off. Thomas Hargrove, the former journalist behind nonprofit organization the Murder Accountability Project, told the New Yorker in 2017 that he believes that 2,000 serial killers are currently at large in the U.S.
But while 25 to 50 serial killers isn't that many compared to the stats of the '80s, it's still..you know, too many serial killers to feel totally comfortable. And what exactly makes one count as an active serial killer, you might be very nervously asking yourself right now, while subtly checking to make sure that your door is dead bolted? According to the FBI, a serial killer is someone who has killed 'two or more victims' during 'incidents .. occurring in separate events, at different times' after 'the time period between murders [that] separates serial murder from mass murder' has passed.
This means that someone who kills several people in a very short period of time, but does not kill again, is a mass murderer, not a serial killer (see: many of the perpetrators of mass shootings). A serial killer is someone who has committed at least two murders which were staggered out.
How Many People Do Serial Killers Actually Kill Each Year?
Well, you might want to get some really nice pajamas, because you're about to spend some serious time with your duvet pulled over your head. According to some expert estimates, serial killers kill 150 people each year. Now, granted, that's not a huge number of people — as the FBI website takes pains to point out, they make up less than 1 percent of the 15,000 murders committed annually in the U.S. But it's still .. kind of more than you expected, right? Of course, 150 people are also killed by falling coconuts each year, and it's way lower than the number of people who, say, die from food poisoning (3,000 deaths each year). But that doesn't really make it any less freaky.
And again, not everyone is convinced by the FBI statistics. Hargrove, of MAP, believes the percentage of murders committed by serial killers is several points higher than the FBI's estimate.
Who Are These Serial Killers?
The obvious answer, of course, is 'The police don't know, or they'd arrest them.' But the larger answer is: Not necessarily who we think they are. It turns out that our film- and TV-fed belief that serial killers are loner white male geniuses carrying out evil schemes, a laHannibal or Dexter, are pretty far off from reality.
According to the FBI's serial murder fact sheet, serial killers as a group diverge from our stereotypes in many major ways. They're more ethnically diverse and include more women (17 percent of serial killers are female) than we might expect. And most serial killers don't live in isolation. Many of them, including the infamous John Wayne Gacy and Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, were married and active in their communities throughout the years they committed their crimes.
And most importantly, they're usually not evil geniuses who have lost touch with reality. As the FBI notes, 'As a group, serial killers suffer from a variety of personality disorders, including psychopathy, anti-social personality, and others. Most, however, are not adjudicated as insane under the law.'
So as fascinated as our culture remains with them, most serial killers are a far cry from the brilliant, charismatic terrors who pop up on our TV screens. Far more often, they're just violent, ruthless people who kill for enjoyment, profit, sex, convenience, or other sadly straightforward reasons.
But as fun as it can be to spook ourselves out thinking about Dexter and the like, the facts remain that, though most of us will probably never encounter a serial killer, they are actually a very real threat to certain vulnerable populations — including the homeless and sex workers. By some expert estimates, one third of serial murderers will kill a sex worker. The West Virginia sex worker who killed a suspected serial killer in self-defense in 2015 is a reminder that, while this stuff may be scary Halloween entertainment to many of us, it's a real life hazard for others. And it would be disrespectful to pretend otherwise.
This post was originally published on September 22, 2015. It was updated on September 10, 2019.
Thirty-two years after his last murder, the Golden State Killer may be behind bars, according to California authorities.
Local and federal law enforcement arrested Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. on Tuesday, saying that DNA evidence shows him to be responsible for 10 murders and at least 46 rapes from the 1970s to 1986. According to the Los Angeles Times, DeAngelo, now 72, has been married since 1973. He and his wife have three children.
DeAngelo's apparent quiet suburban life may not be unusual for serial killers, experts say. There is no foolproof estimate for how many such criminals are living in communities, uncaptured, but Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the Murder Accountability Project, argued that there are as many as 2,000 serial killers at large — and that financial woes affecting city services could be making the problem worse. [Mistaken Identity? 10 Contested Death Penalty Cases]
'We are becoming less likely to solve murders,' Hargrove told Live Science.
Unsolved mysteries
The FBI defines a 'serial killer' as someone who murders two or more victims, with a cooling-off period between crimes.
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Hargrove, a retired investigative journalist, arrived at his estimate of about 2,000 at-large serial killers by asking some contacts at the FBI to calculate how many unsolved murders linked to at least one other murder through DNA were in their database, he explained to The New Yorker last year. Those officials determined that about 1,400 murders, or 2 percent of those in the database, met that classification.
However, not all murder cases involve DNA evidence, and not all cases are reported to the FBI, so that 2 percent is a low estimate, Hargrove said. Two thousand is a ballpark figure, but the numbers shouldn't be a surprise, he said.
'There are more than 220,000 unsolved murders since 1980, so when you put that in perspective, how shocking is it that there are at least 2,000 unrecognized series of homicides?' he said.
The most prolific serial killer of the modern era was probably Harold Shipman, an English doctor who may have murdered as many as 250 patients with fatal doses of painkillers. The 2,000 theoretical killers don't have to meet such a staggering standard, considering that killing a minimum of two victims in separate incidents meets the FBI definition of serial killer.
By a far more conservative method of accounting, there are about 115 serial killers dating back to the 1970s in the United States whose crimes have never been solved. That estimate comes from Kenna Quinet, a criminologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. It's based on linkages between cases made by journalists or law enforcement, and includes a slightly different metric than Hargrove's estimate: The killer had to have murdered at least three victims, not two.
In the same time period as Quinet's estimate for unsolved serial murders, there were roughly 625 solved serial murder cases, she told Live Science. There aren't many differences between unsolved and solved cases, geographically or in terms of factors like the type of victims, Quinet said. But her database doesn’t include cases where no one has ever made the link between murders. If a serial killer killed a person in one state and then drifted off to the next to kill two more, for example, the crimes might have never been flagged by anyone as related and thus wouldn't appear in Quinet's count.
'Somewhere in between my number and Thomas Hargrove's number is probably the right number,' she said.
According to research by psychology professor Mike Aamodt at Radford University in Virginia, there were likely about 30 active serial killers operating in the United States as of 2015.
Serial killings peaked in the 1980s, Quinet said. Aamodt estimates that an average of 145 serial killers (under the two-victim minimum definition) were active in the 1980s each year, compared with an average of 54 each year between 2010 and 2015. There doesn't seem to be any single reason for serial killings' decline, Quinet said. People engage in fewer behaviors today that make them a target — hitchhiking is far rarer now than 30 years ago, for example — but the decline has largely tracked with an overall drop in the homicide rate since the early 1990s, a drop that criminologists cannot fully explain.
Why serial killers avoid capture
The biggest reason that killers of two or more people can still live free is the problem of 'linkage blindness,' Hargrove said. Homicide detectives are assigned single cases, and unless one happens to chat with a colleague who has a very similar case on his or her docket, those cases are unlikely to be linked, he said.
'If the murders occur at separate jurisdictions, such conversations never happen,' Hargrove said.
Despite an advent of forensic DNA databases, there is still no central clearinghouse for homicide cases or serial killer cases, said retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, who worked on several serial killing cases during her career.The FBI collects data through the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), O'Toole said, but it is not mandatory for local law enforcement to report their cases to that program. If it were, she said, it might be easier to connect homicide cases.
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In the Golden State Killer case, proper storage of forensic evidence plus advances in technology seem to be the key to cracking the murders. It's possible to process very old forensic evidence with new methods, O'Toole told Live Science.
'The case itself may be cold, but forensic evidence doesn't die,' she said.
Unfortunately, if technology opens new doors for solving serial murders, a lack of money may slam them shut. Insufficient funding for detectives and technicians keeps police from solving many murders, Hargrove said. According to FBI estimates, only 59 percent of homicide investigations in the U.S. have resulted in an arrest, much less a conviction. The numbers are even worse for rape (36.5 percent) and robbery (29.6 percent).
Who Is The Most Recent Serial Killer
The rate for cleared homicide cases is 'the lowest in the Western world,' Hargrove said.
Other reasons may also explain the low rate of arrests, including a high bar for making an arrest as well as what some call an increasing no-snitch culture, especially among some minority groups who are reluctant to come forward as witnesses, according to experts interviewed by NPR.
'The problem is,' Hargrove said, 'everything's going the wrong way.'
How Many Serial Killers In America Were White
Original article on Live Science.