We’re No Longer in the Age of the Serial Killer - The American Spectator

We no longer live in the age of the serial killer. The serial killer yielded to the mass murderer by the time Columbine occurred in the late 1990s.

“Nearly 770 serial killers operated in the U.S. throughout the 1980s, and just under 670 in the ’90s, based on data compiled by Mike Aamodt of Radford University,” Cody Cottier wrote at Discover magazine in 2020. “The sudden plummet came with the new century, when the rate fell below 400 in the aughts and, as of late 2016, just over 100 during the past decade.”

Deoxyribonucleic acid killed the serial killer.

Cops arrested the Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect over the weekend. They used cell-tower triangulation and a witness to hone their search.

The Long Island Press reports that police “surveilled the suspect to match DNA from his discarded pizza crust with hairs found in restraints used to tie the victims’ feet, arms and head.”

Even this intelligent (if quite evil) architect, who undoubtedly imagined he could outsmart the police by using burner phones, succumbed to the dragnet unleashed by modern technology.

Murdering other human beings over a prolonged period of time happens less frequently because one can no longer get away with it as easily as the Zodiac Killer did. What’s a psycho to do? Mass murder occurs to them as the logical alternative.

The decline in one form of sport murder and rise in the other indicates that people dismissed as nutters actually retain a degree of impulse control.

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Daniel J. Flynn

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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.