"Culture is backlash." This is such an important idea, and one that is too frequently ignored or rejected by people who want to legislate (or talk about) culture rather than the social circumstances that impact culture. In particular, economic insecurity causes, or at least contribute to, a broad range of negative cultural features, yet so many politicians prefer to focus on those features rather than economic issues. This focus is easier and it is emotionally much more appealing to voters, thus we are consumed by culture wars. You cannot make effective policy that targets culture, but you can study culture for insights into potential policy changes that could achieve positive cultural results. Of course, you would need a government interested in policy for that to occur.
Derek: Fox is an expert in serial killers—an important perspective to consider. I study environmental health, but you wouldn’t ask me about climate change since my research focuses on lead and other toxic chemicals. Before dismissing the lead–crime hypothesis, I’d suggest speaking with researchers who’ve spent decades studying it. The evidence is consistent, compelling, and hard to ignore.
The lead theory was put forward to explain the overall large rise and then fall in crime in the US (1960s-1990s). In my view it's discredited because if you talk to any criminologist outside the US, they'll note that the rise/fall occurred at roughly the same time globally, whereas the removal of lead from gasoline happened at different times globally.
The theory basically suffers from having American blinkers on and not taking into account global trends. The Roe v. Wade theory that was very sexy a decade or so ago is not valid IMO for the same reason.
A British criminologist I heard interviewed recently endorsed some of the theories in this post as well.
Tonyhams: Actually, the evidence shows the opposite of what you suggest. Rick Nevin found a strong and consistent association between preschool blood lead levels and crime trends over several decades in the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. You can read more about it here:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17451672/
Interesting, thanks! I imagine that's not the final word on the subject since the criminologist on the British More or Less podcast I heard a while ago doesn't like this theory.
Tonyhams: It’s fascinating how some hypotheses are quickly embraced by society—while others are ignored or resisted. I hope the fate of an idea doesn’t rest on a single scientist; some have blinders, and when it comes to toxic chemicals like lead, some are even paid to manufacture doubt. By 2005, I was confident that low-level lead exposure caused IQ deficits in children—because I had conducted much of the original research. It took nearly a decade for other scientists to catch up, and broader acceptance didn’t come until the Flint crisis. Meanwhile, other shaky ideas—like the claim that 70% of asthma, ADHD, and nearly every major condition is genetic—were accepted with little evidence.
Great post. Mindhunter does a great job showing how the "stranger danger" norms really have changed in the arc about the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 70's early 80's where the victims were almost entirely black children from low income families. In many of communities the victims came from teens and younger kids would earn pocket money by going to grocery stores and shopping malls and such and offering to carry your bags to your car in exchange for a small tip. And some other young people would use "the grocery hustle" as sort of cover to engage in prostitution. The result is a sort of perfect storm where "I'm going to go get in this strange man's car now" is a normal thing to see and to do. Which of course Wayne Williams* (only convicted of two murders but probably did most or all of them, and he was convicted using then ground breaking fiber analysis, see Door 4.) exploited with wild abandon.
In fact I remember seeing CBS News report on YouTube from back then where a journalist conducted a thoroughly unscientific (and perhaps ethically dubious) experiment that none the less illustrates the point. He drove up in his car to a kid hanging out on a corner and it went like this.
-Hey kid
-Yeah?
-Come over here
[Kid walks over]
-Do me a favor and get in the car
[Kid opens door and sits in shotgun]
-So what's up?
I can't see a lot of Gen Alpha youngsters doing that today.
*Seems like a lot of serial killers have the name "Wayne", we need Derek to look into Wayne Theory.
One of the recent Ted Bundy documentaries talked about how he used the relatively new interstate highway system to drive into a town, kill, and spirit away from some of his murders. To your point about the dearth of cross-county cooperation between police departments, killers could take advantage of this lack of cooperation by leveraging the highway system to get in and out of their murder sites fast.
30-50% of all convicted murderers have alcohol in their system at the time of the offense and in 40% of all violent crime, alcohol is involved. There was also a surge in alcohol consumption around COVID, which probably led to a surge in violent crime. The dramatic decline in crime is probably correlated to the big declines we are seeing in alcohol consumption and that excessive drinking is falling. Replacing alcohol with cannabis consumption is helping as well as people drink a lot less alcohol when they consume cannabis. There is a whole post you could write with the data showing how much better society would be if everyone stopped drinking and instead consumed cannabis. For one, 170K people die every year because of alcohol and the CDC estimates there is $250 billion of economic damages.
The personality types and motivations just seem wildly different, though. Most serial killers had a sexual component, and while we’ve had a handful of incel mass shooters, there’s more often a political angle than a sexual sadism one.
But they don’t want sex. They want to own women and believe they are owed women. They want control and they want revenge. Thats the same motive as many serial killers
As far as mutilation goes, gunshots are catastrophic injuries. It’s not a knife but it’s pretty mutilative
Killers, it’ll be in rural areas - Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Rockies, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma - ironically much of Ted bundy operated - bc it’s so much harder to carry out electronic surveillance there.
I remember the FBI releasing some data suggesting there were hundreds of serial killers that worked as truck drivers who’d never been caught due to their transient lifestyles and access to vulnerable people across state lines (hitchhikers, sex workers, runaways etc.). I think a big piece of the puzzle is they ( traditional serial killers) tend to target people that no one would miss or at the very least report missing, and marginalized demographics that the police might not necessarily look too hard for, so there are potentially many that exist that we don’t know of. Like you said, location/privacy I’m sure also plays a role.
I also agree that the rise in surveillance technology/forensics has likely diverted much of this into mass/spree killings, since it is much harder to be a serial killer than it was in the 70s. The amount of people of that inclination/temperament are likely still present, but with less opportunity to act leading to an evolution in how homicidality is expressed (mass shootings etc). One question is whether the psychology behind the traditional serial killer has shifted due to opportunism or social factors, leading to why we see more mass shooters, or if there are those with the psychology/motivation of a traditional serial killer that enact mass/spree killings due to a lack of opportunity otherwise. I think a good example would be that nitwit in Idaho I won’t even dignify with naming. He committed what is technically mass murder (lack of cooling off period, multiple victims at once etc.), but with features of what you might expect from an organized serial killer. As you also aptly said, incel ideology plays a role in this as a popular articulation of expressing antisocial behavior.
The psychology of a mass shooter tends to differ from that of a spree killer and traditional serial killer, and I wonder whether some spree/mass killings are due to forced adaptation of means or other social factors leading to a change in psychological profile, or perhaps both.
I think this is at least part of it. Maybe there are always a few hyper-violent outliers among us; on the margins this is affected by opportunity and maybe lead; but they will get that out of their system in whatever way is easiest and/or trendiest in their culture. Being a serial killer is too difficult now, so that urge goes to mass shootings. In other countries this manifests as mass stabbings or even terrorism. More recently we have people driving cars into crowds.
Before I saw the list I was thinking about the decline being caused by information sharing, forensics and then things like personal CCTV. I saw a "true crime" recently about a kidnapping where they followed a car from a place via all the CCTV. Homes, businesses. The car came past for a few seconds. At the next junction find all the CCTV on each exit.
I'm surprised that car ownership isn't in the "up" list. An era from cars getting common, but not so common that everyone had them. Which meant more hitch-hiking, easier for people to disappear into other places. And at some point, car ownership became so common, people just drove instead, and that we probably catch murderers much earlier.
Derek: You were too quick to dismiss lead poisoning as a factor in the crime wave. I’ve been studying lead and it impact on humans for 30 years, and while it’s nearly impossible to prove that any one factor—lead included—causes serial killers (just as it's hard to prove the cause of a cancer cluster), the weight of evidence points to lead poisoning as a major contributor. Even the EPA—hardly known for moving quickly—has acknowledged that lead exposure is a likely cause of increased criminal behavior. You can read more here: https://blanphear.substack.com/p/a-criminal-element
Gunnar: You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe lead poisoning caused the largest mass poisoning in human history—you just need to be a scientist who’s studied the evidence. You can read more about the science here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMra2402527 If you can't access the journal article, send me a request for a pdf of the article here: blanphear@sfu.ca
I want to add to your thoughts on the 1970s: In that era, police departments routinely dismissed missing teenagers as" runaways" until presented with a body. This enabled people like Dean Corrl in the Houston Heights to get away with their crimes and commit new murders. The founder of EquuSearch was also, sadly, inspired to begin that group by the non-response he got when his teenage daughter went missing. Police simply did not take missing teenagers seriously, which enabled killers to keep going.
I feel like the explanations for the rise in the first place is undertheorized.
My very very tentative theory is that serial killers always existed but moving from place to place to cover their tracks made it so that no one realized that serial killers existed in the first place. Once we got good at tracking them, we solved the problem within 3 or 4 decades.
Reading about Dahmer, it's mind-blowing how much he was basically murdering people in plain sight, and was too weird for most people to be in the same room with him, but got away with it for so long because his victims were a sexual and racial minority not even regarded as human by many police and bystanders. It seems many killers focus on either prostitutes or minorities and, for all our faults, society has improved to the point where it's harder to get away with killing disfavored people.
When I was in college, I was in an anti-death penalty group and visited a women's prison, where I met multiple murderers, including a Black Widow killer -- which if not a real serial killer, was close enough to one for her husbands. (Her name was Blanche Taylor Moore, and they even made a tv movie about her. She was only ever caught because her last husband had a Rasputin-like tolerance for arsenic.) Anyway, even speaking with her for a minute was extremely unnerving. She gave off uncanny psychotic vibes that I would guess she would have trouble hiding, even before incarceration, if people were paying attention. As unhealthy as much of the focus on true crime is, it may mean that more people are paying attention.
To be flippant, an upside to the kids not going out and touching grass is they don’t encounter eachother in their peek hormone years and kill eachother
I'm not sure what's unpleasant about #5. It sounds like an awesome win-win. Someone who would have been out murdering people instead gets to watch a bunch of gory movies that use makeup and special effects. Nobody dies and some filmmakers get to make some cash.
#5 also sounds plausible to me as at least a contributing factor. I recall reading about serial killers who managed to suppress their urge to kill, at least temporarily, by fantasizing about it. Those fantasies probably decreased their total number of victims, it's not implausible that access to more and better ways of fantasizing might reduce their need for victims entirely.
I suppose one unpleasant thing to consider is that #5 implies that anti-porn activists are idiots who are making society worse, especially when they protest gross violent porn. But I already suspected that was the case.
That crossed my mind as well. I still think Dennis Rader knew the floppy disk would damn him. A jailbroken AI might even give less "gifted" serial killers the tools necessary for evasion. Imagine seeing Ted Bundy's personal AI prompts though...
If we could somehow quantify the anger and resentment in our country across years and decades, and compare that to the murder rate/serial killer numbers, I feel there may be an interesting correlation. Between the cultural and political polarization, as well as the liberation movements the 1970s decade and early 2020s share, it would make sense that anger would be shown in somewhat similar ways.
Lucas: I reviewed some relevant evidence in my post. "Lead didn’t just stunt IQs or trigger tantrums—it reshaped personalities. A study linking atmospheric lead to personality traits in 1.5 million people across the U.S. and Europe found that kids exposed to more lead grew into adults who were less agreeable, less conscientious, and more neurotic. In short, lead dissolved the social glue: trust, responsibility, emotional stability.
Children born after the phaseout of leaded gasoline—thanks to the 1970 Clean Air Act—showed healthier personalities. The same trends appeared in Europe. If you wanted to sabotage a city’s ability to function, lead was the perfect weapon."
"Culture is backlash." This is such an important idea, and one that is too frequently ignored or rejected by people who want to legislate (or talk about) culture rather than the social circumstances that impact culture. In particular, economic insecurity causes, or at least contribute to, a broad range of negative cultural features, yet so many politicians prefer to focus on those features rather than economic issues. This focus is easier and it is emotionally much more appealing to voters, thus we are consumed by culture wars. You cannot make effective policy that targets culture, but you can study culture for insights into potential policy changes that could achieve positive cultural results. Of course, you would need a government interested in policy for that to occur.
So mad you didn’t talk about lead poisoning because I’m reading Murderland rn and that seems like the kinda theory you’d like
Fox didn’t endorse the lead hypothesis when we spoke and I’m trying to represent his expertise here
Derek: Fox is an expert in serial killers—an important perspective to consider. I study environmental health, but you wouldn’t ask me about climate change since my research focuses on lead and other toxic chemicals. Before dismissing the lead–crime hypothesis, I’d suggest speaking with researchers who’ve spent decades studying it. The evidence is consistent, compelling, and hard to ignore.
The lead theory was put forward to explain the overall large rise and then fall in crime in the US (1960s-1990s). In my view it's discredited because if you talk to any criminologist outside the US, they'll note that the rise/fall occurred at roughly the same time globally, whereas the removal of lead from gasoline happened at different times globally.
The theory basically suffers from having American blinkers on and not taking into account global trends. The Roe v. Wade theory that was very sexy a decade or so ago is not valid IMO for the same reason.
A British criminologist I heard interviewed recently endorsed some of the theories in this post as well.
Tonyhams: Actually, the evidence shows the opposite of what you suggest. Rick Nevin found a strong and consistent association between preschool blood lead levels and crime trends over several decades in the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Australia, Finland, Italy, West Germany, and New Zealand. You can read more about it here:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17451672/
Interesting, thanks! I imagine that's not the final word on the subject since the criminologist on the British More or Less podcast I heard a while ago doesn't like this theory.
Tonyhams: It’s fascinating how some hypotheses are quickly embraced by society—while others are ignored or resisted. I hope the fate of an idea doesn’t rest on a single scientist; some have blinders, and when it comes to toxic chemicals like lead, some are even paid to manufacture doubt. By 2005, I was confident that low-level lead exposure caused IQ deficits in children—because I had conducted much of the original research. It took nearly a decade for other scientists to catch up, and broader acceptance didn’t come until the Flint crisis. Meanwhile, other shaky ideas—like the claim that 70% of asthma, ADHD, and nearly every major condition is genetic—were accepted with little evidence.
Great post. Mindhunter does a great job showing how the "stranger danger" norms really have changed in the arc about the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 70's early 80's where the victims were almost entirely black children from low income families. In many of communities the victims came from teens and younger kids would earn pocket money by going to grocery stores and shopping malls and such and offering to carry your bags to your car in exchange for a small tip. And some other young people would use "the grocery hustle" as sort of cover to engage in prostitution. The result is a sort of perfect storm where "I'm going to go get in this strange man's car now" is a normal thing to see and to do. Which of course Wayne Williams* (only convicted of two murders but probably did most or all of them, and he was convicted using then ground breaking fiber analysis, see Door 4.) exploited with wild abandon.
In fact I remember seeing CBS News report on YouTube from back then where a journalist conducted a thoroughly unscientific (and perhaps ethically dubious) experiment that none the less illustrates the point. He drove up in his car to a kid hanging out on a corner and it went like this.
-Hey kid
-Yeah?
-Come over here
[Kid walks over]
-Do me a favor and get in the car
[Kid opens door and sits in shotgun]
-So what's up?
I can't see a lot of Gen Alpha youngsters doing that today.
*Seems like a lot of serial killers have the name "Wayne", we need Derek to look into Wayne Theory.
Fascinating! Well done
One of the recent Ted Bundy documentaries talked about how he used the relatively new interstate highway system to drive into a town, kill, and spirit away from some of his murders. To your point about the dearth of cross-county cooperation between police departments, killers could take advantage of this lack of cooperation by leveraging the highway system to get in and out of their murder sites fast.
30-50% of all convicted murderers have alcohol in their system at the time of the offense and in 40% of all violent crime, alcohol is involved. There was also a surge in alcohol consumption around COVID, which probably led to a surge in violent crime. The dramatic decline in crime is probably correlated to the big declines we are seeing in alcohol consumption and that excessive drinking is falling. Replacing alcohol with cannabis consumption is helping as well as people drink a lot less alcohol when they consume cannabis. There is a whole post you could write with the data showing how much better society would be if everyone stopped drinking and instead consumed cannabis. For one, 170K people die every year because of alcohol and the CDC estimates there is $250 billion of economic damages.
could the rise of Ozempic (which reduces that consumption) then reduce crime?
I imagine so!
Nothing happened to serial killers; we have mass shooters now
The personality types and motivations just seem wildly different, though. Most serial killers had a sexual component, and while we’ve had a handful of incel mass shooters, there’s more often a political angle than a sexual sadism one.
I’d argue incel mass shooters are highly sexual in their motive
I don’t think wanting to have sex/a relationship and wanting to sexually mutilate a woman’s body belong in the same category.
But they don’t want sex. They want to own women and believe they are owed women. They want control and they want revenge. Thats the same motive as many serial killers
As far as mutilation goes, gunshots are catastrophic injuries. It’s not a knife but it’s pretty mutilative
I suspect that when we do find “classic” serial
Killers, it’ll be in rural areas - Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Rockies, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma - ironically much of Ted bundy operated - bc it’s so much harder to carry out electronic surveillance there.
I remember the FBI releasing some data suggesting there were hundreds of serial killers that worked as truck drivers who’d never been caught due to their transient lifestyles and access to vulnerable people across state lines (hitchhikers, sex workers, runaways etc.). I think a big piece of the puzzle is they ( traditional serial killers) tend to target people that no one would miss or at the very least report missing, and marginalized demographics that the police might not necessarily look too hard for, so there are potentially many that exist that we don’t know of. Like you said, location/privacy I’m sure also plays a role.
I also agree that the rise in surveillance technology/forensics has likely diverted much of this into mass/spree killings, since it is much harder to be a serial killer than it was in the 70s. The amount of people of that inclination/temperament are likely still present, but with less opportunity to act leading to an evolution in how homicidality is expressed (mass shootings etc). One question is whether the psychology behind the traditional serial killer has shifted due to opportunism or social factors, leading to why we see more mass shooters, or if there are those with the psychology/motivation of a traditional serial killer that enact mass/spree killings due to a lack of opportunity otherwise. I think a good example would be that nitwit in Idaho I won’t even dignify with naming. He committed what is technically mass murder (lack of cooling off period, multiple victims at once etc.), but with features of what you might expect from an organized serial killer. As you also aptly said, incel ideology plays a role in this as a popular articulation of expressing antisocial behavior.
The psychology of a mass shooter tends to differ from that of a spree killer and traditional serial killer, and I wonder whether some spree/mass killings are due to forced adaptation of means or other social factors leading to a change in psychological profile, or perhaps both.
I think this is at least part of it. Maybe there are always a few hyper-violent outliers among us; on the margins this is affected by opportunity and maybe lead; but they will get that out of their system in whatever way is easiest and/or trendiest in their culture. Being a serial killer is too difficult now, so that urge goes to mass shootings. In other countries this manifests as mass stabbings or even terrorism. More recently we have people driving cars into crowds.
Exactly
When I think of guys like Elliot Rodger and Adam Lanza, my first thought is "Yeah these guys are like John Wayne Gacy and the BTK" 🤣🤣
ok
I’ll reconsider. Well said
I agree
🤣🤣 just clueless
I’d love to read more about this
Defintiely something I need to think about
Good point
Brilliantly observed, I’ll reconsider
Ok cool good point
Well stated
Before I saw the list I was thinking about the decline being caused by information sharing, forensics and then things like personal CCTV. I saw a "true crime" recently about a kidnapping where they followed a car from a place via all the CCTV. Homes, businesses. The car came past for a few seconds. At the next junction find all the CCTV on each exit.
I'm surprised that car ownership isn't in the "up" list. An era from cars getting common, but not so common that everyone had them. Which meant more hitch-hiking, easier for people to disappear into other places. And at some point, car ownership became so common, people just drove instead, and that we probably catch murderers much earlier.
Derek: You were too quick to dismiss lead poisoning as a factor in the crime wave. I’ve been studying lead and it impact on humans for 30 years, and while it’s nearly impossible to prove that any one factor—lead included—causes serial killers (just as it's hard to prove the cause of a cancer cluster), the weight of evidence points to lead poisoning as a major contributor. Even the EPA—hardly known for moving quickly—has acknowledged that lead exposure is a likely cause of increased criminal behavior. You can read more here: https://blanphear.substack.com/p/a-criminal-element
I just saw this today https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/did-lead-poisoning-create-a-generation-of-serial-killers , and although I'm not a conspiracy theorist whatsoever, I believe it may indeed have been a factor.
Gunnar: You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe lead poisoning caused the largest mass poisoning in human history—you just need to be a scientist who’s studied the evidence. You can read more about the science here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMra2402527 If you can't access the journal article, send me a request for a pdf of the article here: blanphear@sfu.ca
I want to add to your thoughts on the 1970s: In that era, police departments routinely dismissed missing teenagers as" runaways" until presented with a body. This enabled people like Dean Corrl in the Houston Heights to get away with their crimes and commit new murders. The founder of EquuSearch was also, sadly, inspired to begin that group by the non-response he got when his teenage daughter went missing. Police simply did not take missing teenagers seriously, which enabled killers to keep going.
I feel like the explanations for the rise in the first place is undertheorized.
My very very tentative theory is that serial killers always existed but moving from place to place to cover their tracks made it so that no one realized that serial killers existed in the first place. Once we got good at tracking them, we solved the problem within 3 or 4 decades.
Reading about Dahmer, it's mind-blowing how much he was basically murdering people in plain sight, and was too weird for most people to be in the same room with him, but got away with it for so long because his victims were a sexual and racial minority not even regarded as human by many police and bystanders. It seems many killers focus on either prostitutes or minorities and, for all our faults, society has improved to the point where it's harder to get away with killing disfavored people.
When I was in college, I was in an anti-death penalty group and visited a women's prison, where I met multiple murderers, including a Black Widow killer -- which if not a real serial killer, was close enough to one for her husbands. (Her name was Blanche Taylor Moore, and they even made a tv movie about her. She was only ever caught because her last husband had a Rasputin-like tolerance for arsenic.) Anyway, even speaking with her for a minute was extremely unnerving. She gave off uncanny psychotic vibes that I would guess she would have trouble hiding, even before incarceration, if people were paying attention. As unhealthy as much of the focus on true crime is, it may mean that more people are paying attention.
To be flippant, an upside to the kids not going out and touching grass is they don’t encounter eachother in their peek hormone years and kill eachother
I'm not sure what's unpleasant about #5. It sounds like an awesome win-win. Someone who would have been out murdering people instead gets to watch a bunch of gory movies that use makeup and special effects. Nobody dies and some filmmakers get to make some cash.
#5 also sounds plausible to me as at least a contributing factor. I recall reading about serial killers who managed to suppress their urge to kill, at least temporarily, by fantasizing about it. Those fantasies probably decreased their total number of victims, it's not implausible that access to more and better ways of fantasizing might reduce their need for victims entirely.
I suppose one unpleasant thing to consider is that #5 implies that anti-porn activists are idiots who are making society worse, especially when they protest gross violent porn. But I already suspected that was the case.
Has the volume of missing persons risen? Is it possible that serial killers are still out there, but they’ve just gotten better at hiding the bodies?
That crossed my mind as well. I still think Dennis Rader knew the floppy disk would damn him. A jailbroken AI might even give less "gifted" serial killers the tools necessary for evasion. Imagine seeing Ted Bundy's personal AI prompts though...
If we could somehow quantify the anger and resentment in our country across years and decades, and compare that to the murder rate/serial killer numbers, I feel there may be an interesting correlation. Between the cultural and political polarization, as well as the liberation movements the 1970s decade and early 2020s share, it would make sense that anger would be shown in somewhat similar ways.
Lucas: I reviewed some relevant evidence in my post. "Lead didn’t just stunt IQs or trigger tantrums—it reshaped personalities. A study linking atmospheric lead to personality traits in 1.5 million people across the U.S. and Europe found that kids exposed to more lead grew into adults who were less agreeable, less conscientious, and more neurotic. In short, lead dissolved the social glue: trust, responsibility, emotional stability.
Children born after the phaseout of leaded gasoline—thanks to the 1970 Clean Air Act—showed healthier personalities. The same trends appeared in Europe. If you wanted to sabotage a city’s ability to function, lead was the perfect weapon."
You can find the substack article and citations here: https://blanphear.substack.com/p/a-criminal-element