#SERIAL KILLERS NEAR ME SERIAL#

#SERIAL KILLERS NEAR ME SERIAL#

“You have a surging number of people behind bars, so some of the would-be serial killers were likely behind bars as opposed to in the bars looking for victims.” James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University. “Part of it has to do with the same reason the murder rate has gone down,” Fox says. The decline that started in the 1980s mirrors a decrease in a nationwide crackdown on crime that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s made it difficult for serial killers, let alone anyone involved in violent crime, to stay out of prison.

This data is based on numbers from the Radford University/Florida Gulf Coast University Serial Killer Database that have been further analyzed, combed through and published in the recently-updated “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder” by James Alan Fox, Jack Levin, Emma Fridel.īut what accounts for this dramatic decrease over the last 40 years?Īccording to Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, it comes down to several major changes in forensic science, policing, criminal justice and technology that have made it harder than ever for the BTK Killers of the world to escape capture. By the time the 2010s rolled around there were fewer than 50 known active killers. In the 1980s, there were more than 250 active killers who accounted for between 120 and 180 deaths per year. Numbers peaked in the 1970s when there were nearly 300 known active serial killers in the U.S. Since the 1970s and 1980s, a high activity period for serial murderers, the numbers have dropped significantly. The stories of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and the Boston Strangler still loom large––even if the likelihood that you’ll encounter another Zodiac Killer has never been lower. Looking at the most-streamed movies or television shows on any given streaming service, it would be easy to assume that serial killers lurk behind every corner.

Serial killers near me