Is the Serial Killer Culturally Obsolete?

Content note: This article discusses serial murder and sexual violence.

The age of Bundy and Gacy depended on a world where strangers could vanish without a trace. As that world faded, so did the killings. Whether forensic science tells the whole story is a harder question.

By Jack Malacat

For a stretch of the late twentieth century, the serial killer seemed almost built into American life. Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy became shorthand for a specific modern fear: that a man could keep a job and make small talk with the neighbors while hiding something monstrous behind his routines. That figure never really left the culture. Streaming services return to him constantly, and Jeffrey Dahmer’s story has been retold for an audience born after he died. What has changed is the tense. Most of the serial killers we now watch belong to the past, and their stories increasingly play like period pieces.

The numbers suggest this is more than a feeling. Criminologists James Alan Fox, Jack Levin and Emma Fridel, working from the Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database, count roughly 286 known American serial killers whose first murder came in the 1970s and 259 in the 1980s. For the 2010s, the figure falls to 42. Those totals only include killers who were eventually identified, so recent decades are probably undercounted, and some researchers suspect the earlier surge was less dramatic than the data imply. Even with both caveats, there is broad agreement that serial murder in the United States has fallen steeply from its late-century peak.

The most familiar explanation is that the world became much harder to disappear inside. DNA analysis matured from a crude tool that needed large biological samples into one that can work from a single hair, and genetic genealogy now lets investigators reach a suspect through his relatives. Surveillance cameras and the location history stored on phones make an abduction far harder to carry out unseen. Federal law caught up as well. The FBI was authorized to investigate violent crimes against interstate travelers in 1994 and serial killings specifically in 1998, narrowing the gaps between jurisdictions that killers once slipped through. Fox adds a blunter factor: between 1980 and 1992 the U.S. incarceration rate more than doubled, so many violent men were already in prison before they had the chance to become prolific.

Opportunity changed on the other side of the encounter too. Hitchhiking largely vanished, and parents grew far more protective of children who once roamed for hours unsupervised. Sex work, among the most dangerous occupations for women, moved partly indoors once online platforms let workers advertise and screen clients. Economists Scott Cunningham, Gregory DeAngelo and John Tripp estimate that the arrival of Craigslist’s erotic services section in American cities reduced female homicides by between 12 and 18 percent. Each of these shifts made repeated violence against strangers riskier to attempt.

All of those explanations concern opportunity, the practical matter of whether a killer can find victims and avoid capture. The same decades also changed something less visible, which is how people come to understand their own darkest impulses. Desires that once existed in private, often without vocabulary or any sense that others shared them, became easy to research and discuss. The internet gave obscure fantasies names and context, and in many cases a route toward consensual expression. That opens a more uncomfortable line of thought about whether the conditions surrounding dark impulses changed as well.

That line of thought needs a clear boundary before it goes any further. Kink and other unconventional fantasies should not be read as warning signs for violence. Fantasies involving dominance or pain are common; one scoping review of BDSM research found that somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of people report them, and roughly one in five report acting on them in some form. Studies of practitioners find little evidence that the interest itself signals psychopathology, and the DSM-5 now separates an unusual sexual interest from a paraphilic disorder, which requires that the interest cause distress or harm, including harm to people who have not consented. Consent is the line that matters. The question here is narrower: whether easier access to information and willing partners changed how some impulses are expressed before harm ever enters the picture.

Imagine having an intense, socially unacceptable fantasy fifty years ago with no name for it and no way to learn whether anyone else shared it. Shame tends to fill the space where information is missing, and secrecy can make a fantasy feel larger and more defining than it is. Today the same person can search for the impulse and find both a name for it and evidence that fantasy is a poor predictor of behavior. Some will discover people who share the interest and have built social norms around negotiation and limits. For someone who believed they were uniquely broken, that discovery could change a great deal about how the impulse is lived with.

Once a taboo desire becomes negotiable, its meaning can change. Fantasies about control or humiliation no longer have to exist only in isolation; some can be explored inside boundaries everyone involved has agreed to. That makes room for a question that was harder to ask in an earlier era: how much of the behavior once treated as inherently deviant was dangerous because of the desire, and how much because the desire had nowhere acceptable to go? Economists have tested a cruder version of this idea. Todd Kendall found that U.S. states where internet access spread fastest between 1998 and 2003 saw larger drops in reported rape, with the effect concentrated among offenders aged 15 to 19, the group whose access to pornography changed most. His study circulated as a working paper, its findings are correlational and contested, and it found no comparable effect on homicide. At most it suggests that outlets can matter for some forms of sexual offending, and it says nothing direct about murder.

There is also a hard limit to the idea. For some violent offenders, the victim’s unwillingness is the point. When the fear or domination they want depends on the absence of consent, no consensual setting can reproduce it, and no amount of cultural openness makes that impulse harmless. Nor is there evidence that the growth of kink communities or changing attitudes toward taboo caused the decline in serial murder. The possibility worth holding onto is smaller: that some people who once had few ways to understand a dark impulse now meet alternatives before it becomes dangerous. As far as published research goes, that remains largely untested.

Perhaps this is why the serial killer feels increasingly tied to another era. Fox refers to the famous names as “legacy killers,” and the label fits a figure who now survives mostly in documentaries and dramatizations. Forensic science and a more cautious public dismantled much of the anonymity that once let repeated violence go undetected, and that part of the story is reasonably well supported. Whether cultural change also gave some dark impulses safer places to exist is an open and far more speculative question.

If the archetype does belong to a vanished world, its afterlife says something about ours. I’m not writing from outside this. I made a dark-humor card game called Serial Killer, and I suspect it lands partly because my generation only knows that fear in its romanticized form, handed down from an era we never lived through. We keep returning to the serial killer at the moment he has become rare, and it may be easier to be frightened of a man from 1978 than to wonder where the impulses that drove him go now.

About the author

Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.

Sources and Further Reading

Aamodt, Michael G., Terence Leary, and Senthil Girimurugan. 2023. Radford/FGCU Annual Report on Serial Killer Statistics: 2023. Radford University / Florida Gulf Coast University. Longitudinal data on known serial killers and their victims, including the decline from the late-twentieth-century peak.

Mello-Klein, Cody. 2023. “Why Are There Fewer Serial Killers Now Than There Used to Be?” Northeastern Global News, April 26. Interviews criminologist James Alan Fox and reports the decade-by-decade counts from Fox, Levin and Fridel’s Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, along with the roles of DNA, surveillance, incarceration and changing public behavior.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2013. “Serial Killers, Part 1: The FBI’s Role Takes Shape.” Outlines the expansion of federal authority to investigate crimes against interstate travelers (1994) and serial killings (1998).

Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2014. “Serial Killers, Part 7: Jeffrey Dahmer.” August 8. Describes the Bureau’s forensic and investigative support role in the Dahmer case and how that role has evolved.

Cunningham, Scott, Gregory DeAngelo, and John Tripp. 2024. “Did Craigslist’s Erotic Services Reduce Female Homicide and Rape?” Journal of Human Resources 59(1): 280–315. Uses the staggered city-by-city rollout of Craigslist’s erotic services section to estimate effects on violence against women.

Kendall, Todd D. 2007. “Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.” Working paper, Clemson University. State-level analysis linking the spread of internet access to declines in reported rape; correlational and debated.

Brown, Amber, Edward D. Barker, and Qazi Rahman. 2020. “A Systematic Scoping Review of the Prevalence, Etiological, Psychological, and Interpersonal Factors Associated with BDSM.” The Journal of Sex Research 57(6): 781–811. Finds BDSM-related fantasies common across sexes and little support for treating BDSM interests as inherently pathological.

Dunkley, Cara R., and Lori A. Brotto. 2020. “The Role of Consent in the Context of BDSM.” Sexual Abuse 32(6): 657–678. Reviews consent within BDSM and outlines criteria for distinguishing consensual practice from abuse.

Dunkley, Cara R., and Lori A. Brotto. 2018. “Clinical Considerations in Treating BDSM Practitioners: A Review.” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 44(7): 701–712. Reviews psychological research on BDSM practitioners and reports minimal differences from the general population in psychopathology.

Williams, D. J., and Richard A. Sprott. 2022. “Current Biopsychosocial Science on Understanding Kink.” Current Opinion in Psychology 48. Summarizes contemporary research on kink, including prevalence, stigma and approaches that move beyond assumptions of pathology.

Moran, Mark. 2013. “DSM to Distinguish Paraphilias From Paraphilic Disorders.” Psychiatric News. Explains the DSM-5 distinction between atypical sexual interests and paraphilic disorders.

Jozifkova, Eva. 2013. “Consensual Sadomasochistic Sex (BDSM): The Roots, the Risks, and the Distinctions Between BDSM and Violence.” Current Psychiatry Reports 15(9): 392. Draws behavioral distinctions between consensual BDSM partnerships and violent or abusive ones.