Why Serial Killers Disappeared
The untold story of DNA, technology, and self-defense in America
22 chapters · 110 pages · EPUB & PDF
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Ted Bundy was caught because a Pensacola patrolman noticed a Volkswagen weaving down an empty street. David Berkowitz fell to a parking ticket, John Wayne Gacy to a smell rising from his furnace vents. The most widely used database shows active American serial killers falling from 768 in the 1980s to about 120 between 2010 and 2016.
This book argues that serial murder stopped working, and shows why, mechanism by mechanism. Case by case, it asks what each killer relied on and whether that still exists: a wilderness that left no record, victims whose absence started no search, a phone line BTK could cut with wire cutters.
In 1975, Bundy’s name sat on a King County list of roughly 3,500 suspects, submitted by four people; it took a detective a month on the county payroll computer to surface it. In 1987, investigators took Gary Ridgway’s saliva and could do nothing with it until DNA testing matched it in 2001. In 2022, the Idaho investigation took six weeks to put a name on a quadruple homicide.
You come away able to explain the decline in concrete terms: what each killer counted on, and what took it away.
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