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Sure, you’ve still got the occasional Beltway sniper or Grim Sleeper who terrorizes a community. (Definitions of serial murder” vary, but Fox defines it as “a string of four or more homicides committed by one or a few perpetrators that spans a period of days, weeks, months, or even years.” To avoid double-counting, he assigns killers to the decade in which they reached the midpoint of their careers.)Īs the raw numbers have declined, the media have paid less attention, too. And the 2000s saw only 61 serial murderers. In the ‘90s, the number of cases dropped to 141. Then serial killings took off: There were 19 in the 1960s, 119 in the ‘70s, and 200 in the ‘80s. According to his count, based on newspaper clippings, books, and Web sources, there were only a dozen or so serial killers before 1960 in the United States. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and co-author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, keeps a database of confirmed serial murderers starting in 1900. Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by-the FBI doesn’t keep numbers, according to a spokeswoman-but the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since. “It does seem the golden age of serial murderers is probably past,” says Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College of the City University of New York who studies crime.
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Philadelphia police have attributed the murders of three women in the city’s Kensington neighborhood to one “Kensington Strangler.” On Tuesday, an accused serial stabber in Flint, Mich., filed an insanity plea.īut the number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public’s fascination with them. Last month, Suffolk County, N.Y., police found the bodies of four women dumped near a beach in Long Island. Serial killers just aren’t the sensation they used to be.