American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Shortly after his arrest, I wrote about him in my book Serial Killers, describing him as “typical,” but looking at him now with twenty years’ hindsight, I can place him better in the historical pantheon. Ridgway was a creature who came crawling out at us from a pool of DNA collected in the vanished past of the big-number epidemic years. He killed an extraordinary forty-nine women (and maybe more) between 1982 and 1998. He remains at this writing the American sexual serial killer with the highest number of murder convictions. (Samuel Little, it was revealed in 2019, is suspected to have killed between fifty and ninety-three victims but has not gone to trial on most of them, and might not.)

  Despite Ridgway’s huge victim count, and even though he was a cold case throwback of that epidemic era and everything it represented, once caught and identified, he was a yawn. He had none of that “celebrity heat” and colorful personality of the “golden age” superstars. He was a banality in evil—an Adolf Eichmann of serial killers—high in victim numbers, low in charisma. Ridgway was a monotone, mealymouthed, gnat-stupid, Bible-beating necrophile with an IQ tested in the low eighties. He earned perfect-attendance awards at work, where he labored as a truck painter for thirty years. He would bring his young son along with him to visit his secret stash of corpses in the forest, leaving him sleeping in the cab of his truck, as he would go off into the woods to have sex with his most recent victims before they completely decayed.

  But Ridgway was gifted with natural-born serial killer instinct and cunning. He was a savant of “forensic awareness.” He compulsively bought new tires every time he thought he might have left tracks, donned gloves when killing and, if any of his victims scratched him as he raped and strangled them, he’d clip their fingernails afterward. He randomly collected chewed gum and discarded cigarette butts on the street and seeded them at some of his crime scenes to mislead investigators sampling for DNA.

  Over a period of sixteen years, as the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway somehow managed to sleepwalk his way unapprehended through at least forty-nine (he claimed seventy-one) manual and ligature strangulations of predominately marginalized runaways and street sex workers. In 1998, he appeared to retire from killing, as some serial killers do once they burn out on the realization that they can never satisfactorily transform their fantasies into reality, no matter how many times they try. He could have gone the way of Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer, a mystery forever that only became bigger with every year it remained unsolved.

  But once identified and arrested, the Green River Killer made for boring news fodder. In the climate of the 2000s, he no longer fascinated us. He was a serial killing Wizard of Oz: when the curtain was pulled back, there was nothing there but a dumb-dog mediocrity called Gary.

  After pleading guilty, Ridgway was quietly sentenced to life imprisonment in December 2003 and has not been heard from or of since. The two decades that followed saw a significant decline in the number of serial killers being apprehended: 371 in 2000 to 2009, a decline of nearly 50 percent from the 1990s, and an estimated 117 serial killers in 2010 to 2019, again a decline of more than 50 percent from the previous decade. Not only were serial killers figuring less in the news stream; there actually were fewer of them, just like there were fewer murders overall.

  In the argument about whether serial killers have become better at evading law enforcement or law enforcement has become more effective in detecting and apprehending serial killers, the general consensus is that the latter is the case, with advances in DNA technology, the ubiquitous carrying of cell phones by both offenders and victims and ever-present video surveillance cameras becoming major game changers in the investigation of serial murder.

  Indeed between 2000 and 2020, the serial killers who attracted national press attention were often confessed or recently arrested serial killers “left over” from the epidemic years of the 1970s to 1990s, such as Dennis Rader, the BTK, in 2005; Lonnie Franklin Jr., “the Grim Sleeper,” in 2010; Rodney Alcala, “the Dating Game Killer,” who was finally convicted in 2010; Joseph James DeAngelo, “the Golden State Killer,” in 2018; and Samuel Little and Richard Cottingham, “the Times Square Torso Killer,” who both made spectacular confessions in 2019.

  If any one thing symbolized the end of the epidemic era, it is probably the FBI’s new definition of what constitutes serial murder as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) in separate events” for any reason, including “anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking.” People joked that the FBI was running out of serial killers and lowered the threshold from three to two to “stay in business.” Which brings us to the FBI’s crown jewel from that era: ViCAP.

  The Failures of ViCAP

  FBI profiling, especially its simplistic organized/disorganized/mixed trinity of categories, is sometimes unfairly criticized without taking into account how the BSU intended it to be used. In any regard, NCAVC has not embraced the organized/disorganized dichotomy since 2004 and no longer uses it when reviewing cases in day to day operations. In 2014 the FBI admitted “Applying the organized/disorganized dichotomy to active serial murder cases has limited utility in serial investigations.”1

  The other product of the “serial killer epidemic” era congressional hearings, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) database, has come under scrutiny too. All is not well at ViCAP.

  When it was implemented in 1985 after years of lobbying by Pierce Brooks, the objective of ViCAP was to create a central national database at the FBI containing details of all homicides and rapes and other violent crimes committed in the United States. Various police agencies could submit to it detailed descriptions of unsolved murders in their own jurisdiction, which would hopefully result in a computer match to similar crimes in other jurisdictions. The problem was that it required a substantial amount of paperwork. Need I say more? Overworked cops and paperwork don’t mix well. The ViCAP form was fifteen pages long, with 189 detailed questions, many of them multipart.2 It was as painstaking as an income tax form, if not worse . . . and then it had to be put in the mail! Computers were still a rare commodity, and the postal service or courier was the only way to send a document as long as a ViCAP form.

  To derive any benefit from ViCAP, a police agency not only had to fill out and submit the form; it also had to make a formal request to the FBI to process it through their database and report back the results, if any.

  By 1990, things improved a little bit: police agencies were able to fax their forms rather than rely on snail mail. By 1995, everybody had a PC, and the FBI distributed ViCAP packages as computer software, where at least a police officer could digitally fill out the form and e-mail it to the FBI as an attached electronic file. The 189 questions were reduced to 95 in the hope of encouraging police departments to submit data. But again, to derive any result from ViCAP, a police agency had to file an official request for the FBI to search their database and report back to them on possible “hits” in their system. There was no way for a police agency to log on directly to conduct a search of their own. As a result, police departments ignored ViCAP.

  In 1997, out of 18,209 murders and 96,122 forcible rapes, ViCAP received only 1,500 case data submissions. That was a record high, but still only a minuscule fraction (0.013 percent) of annual reported murders and rapes in the United States. In the first twelve years that ViCAP had been in operation, it had successfully linked only 33 cases, none of which led to the apprehension of any serial killers.3

  By the mid-2000s, a lot of police departments had lost touch with ViCAP’s existence. Many police officers who were first introduced to ViCAP in the 1980s had retired, while police departments were constantly swamped with updates, bulletins and info packages in which the FBI’s reminders of ViCAP were easily overlooked by a new generation of overworked officers on the force.

  After twenty-two years in operation, in 2007 ViCAP for the first time successfully made a link in a serial murder case, but
only after the serial killer was captured by the parents of a victim when he entered their daughter’s bedroom as she slept and attempted to kill her. Truck driver Adam Leroy Lane committed two murders and a number of attempted murders along his truck route through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Two Massachusetts State Troopers who were not directly involved in the investigation had recently attended a seminar reintroducing ViCAP to a new generation of police officers. They suggested to a neighboring police department to make a submission to ViCAP, and it successfully linked Lane to a number of incidents for which he was eventually prosecuted.4

  Finally, in 2008, the FBI announced a major upgrade to ViCAP that made it directly accessible for online queries by authorized police agencies. In its press release, the FBI claimed it had a database of 150,000 closed and open cases, submitted over the years by some 3,000 agencies, including unsolved homicides going back as far as the 1950s.5 A ProPublica investigation in 2015, however, found that patently untrue, reporting that “only about 1,400 police agencies in the U.S., out of roughly 18,000, participate in the system. The database receives reports from far less than 1 percent of the violent crimes committed annually. FBI has about 89,000 cases on file.”6

  In the same 2008 press release, the FBI claimed that reports are “continually compared” for matches as new cases are entered into ViCAP. But according to ProPublica, “In an interview, program officials said that does not happen. ‘We have plans for that in the future,’ said Nathan Graham, a crime analyst for the program. The agency said it would update the information on its website.” At this writing, twelve years later, the web page remains uncorrected.

  ViCAP is all smoke and mirrors. In its entire thirty-five year history, the FBI reports it has led to no apprehensions of serial killers at large and has been instrumental in only four cases of serial killers who were all already identified and under arrest: Adam Leroy Lane in 2007; Bruce Mendenhall, a trucker arrested in 2007 who was linked to the murder of four women; Israel Keyes, a serial killer who committed suicide after his arrest in 2012 and who was linked to eleven killings; and in 2019, Samuel Little, whose helpful confessions were entered into ViCAP for confirmation. Hardly a resounding success.

  Just how hollow ViCAP is becomes evident when one compares it to a similar system used in Canada, where the population is about one tenth of the US’s and the violent crime rate a fraction of that. The Canadian system, called ViCLAS—Violent Criminal Linkage Analysis System—is run by their equivalent to the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Compared to ViCAP’s current annual $800,000 budget and staff of twelve, the Canadian federal ViCLAS system currently has a budget in the range of $10 million a year and a staff of one hundred officers and analysts.7 Moreover, municipal and provincial police departments each have a huge ViCLAS budget of their own for the purposes of collecting, compiling and submitting data to the national database, including pay for police officers when liaising with ViCLAS. The ViCLAS budget in 2017 for the Toronto Police Service, just one city, albeit Canada’s largest, was an astounding $218,000!8 That’s just for a city of 2.9 million people but equivalent to 25 percent of the entire total of ViCAP’s $800,000 budget, serving 328 million Americans.

  As a result, Canada’s ViCLAS maintains a database containing more than 500,000 criminal case profiles and has linked together some 7,000 unsolved crimes since 1995.

  By 2013, submission to ViCAP had declined significantly from the high of 1,500 cases in 1997. Local and state police departments submitted only 232 homicide cases out of 14,196 murders and 240 cases of sexual assault out of 79,770 forcible rape incidents. In 2014, ViCAP provided analytical assistance to local cops just 220 times.

  Hardly any law enforcement agency in the United States uses it. ViCAP is a joke.

  Golden Ager Nostalgia

  The few hundred “freshman” serial killers (as opposed to “epidemic era” Golden Age carryovers) apprehended over the last twenty years are just as anonymous as those arrested in the 1990s following Jeffrey Dahmer. Who has heard of Terry A. Blair, Joseph E. Duncan III, Paul Durousseau, Walter E. Ellis, Ronald Dominique, Sean Vincent Gillis, Lorenzo Jerome Gilyard Jr., Mark Goudeau, William Devin Howell or Darren Deon Vann?

  The recent surge of television shows like Mindhunter and highly watched documentaries and dramas on epidemic years serial killers like Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas and Ted Kaczynski confirm that few new narratives of any interest are emerging, and the serial killer true-crime genre is falling back into nostalgia for the old reliable and familiar epidemic era “celebrity serial killers” of twenty and thirty years ago, to which this book is itself a testament. A whole bunch of Ted Bundy movies and documentaries in recent years have introduced him to a new generation that had not even been born when Bundy first came to infamy.

  Serial killers are still out there in the United States. Conservative estimates suggest there might be as many as thirty-five unidentified serial killers on average any given year. Leading in coverage of ongoing unsolved serial killings at this writing is probably the Long Island Serial Killer (LISK, also known as “the Gilgo Beach Killer” or “the Craigslist Ripper”), suspected in as many as sixteen murders between 1996 and 2013. Other unsolved cases include the Bone Collector, linked to eleven female victims found buried together in West Mesa, New Mexico; the Seven Bridges Road Killer in North Carolina linked to the murder of eleven African American prostitutes; the Jeff Davis 8 Killer in Jennings, Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, suspected in eight murders; the Daytona Beach Killer in Florida with four murders; the February 9 Killer, who has killed at least two women in Salt Lake City on the same date in different years; and the Eastbound Strangler Killer near Atlantic City, who left his four strangled female victims behind a dilapidated motel carefully posed facing east, fully clothed but stripped of their shoes and socks, and who some suspect might be the same person as the LISK.

  The ditches and roadsides of the American interstate freeway system alone are the scene of so many unsolved homicides—almost five hundred over thirty years—that the FBI in 2009 to 2011 launched a special Highway Serial Killings Initiative (HSKI) targeting serial killers suspected to be working as truckers. At least 25 truckers have been convicted in serial homicide cases, while the HSKI is investigating a suspect list with more than 275 names, almost all long-haul truckers.

  While the overall decline in American serial killers since the 1990s might be bad news for sensation-seeking media and true-crime authors, it is good news for the rest of humanity.

  For now.

  If I am right that the serial killer “epidemic era” was a result of a “perfect storm” diabolus in cultura of Great Depression and World War II parental traumas plus true-detective / men’s adventure “sweats” rape culture that twisted a generation of male children in the 1940s to 1960s into the surge of serial killers of the 1970s to 1990s, then we’re in for nasty weather.

  I dread what will come from the familial traumas of the financial crisis of 2008, the unspeakable secrets of a War on Terror fought by not only the warrior fathers of the current generation of kids, but now their warrior mothers too, and finally the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic we are in the midst of today. In World War II that brought on the American Noir at home, 405,000 American GIs were killed over a period of forty-five months of brutal combat; in 2020 at this writing in early November, in just nine months, 236,000 Americans have been killed—more than half of the World War II deaths. You do the math if COVID lasts as long as World War II did.

  Unlike our scattered dead that Ernie Pyle saw on distant foreign hillsides, we are collectively seeing ours here at home. We are looking into the abyss of a new American Noir like the one in 1940s but worse. This time there will be no solemn homecoming flotillas of the dead in flag-draped coffins from overseas; they are already here with us in mass graves like New York’s Hart Island and in refrigerator trucks in hospital and funeral home parking lots.

 
Throw into that mix of diabolus in cultura the current unfettered availability of absolutely anything on the Internet, including those old images from the true detectives and the “sweats” and far more graphic and explicit material, and see what happens next with the generation of children we are raising today.

  If books had soundtracks, this one would close with John C. Fogerty.9

  I see a bad moon a-rising

  I see trouble on the way

  Notes

  Introduction: The “Golden Age” of Serial Murderers

  1. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2011/01/blood_loss.html.

  2. Eric W. Hickey, Serial Murderers and Their Victims, 7th ed. (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2016), 241; “FBI Seeking Assistance Connecting Victims to Samuel Little’s Confessions,” US Department of Justice, FBI, October 6, 2019, https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/samuel-little-most-prolific-serial-killer-in-us-history-100619.

  3. Hickey, Serial Murderers and Their Victims, 239.

  4. M. G. Aamodt, “Serial Killer Statistics,” September 4, 2016, retrieved July 28, 2019, http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu killer information center/project description.htm.

  5. US Department of Justice, FBI, Behavioral Analysis Unit, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, Serial Murder: Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Investigators (Washington, DC, 2008), 10; https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder.

  Chapter 1. Sons of Cain: A Brief History of Serial Murder from the Stone Age to 1930

  1. Peter Vronsky, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present (New York: Berkley Books, 2018).

  2. For example: Owen D. Jones, “Sex, Culture, and the Biology of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention,” California Law Review 87, no. 4 (July 1999): 827–39; Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 45; João Ricardo Faria, “What Happened to the Neanderthals?—The Survival Trap,” KYKLOS 53, no. 2 (2000): 161–72; Kwang Hyun Ko, “Hominin Interbreeding and the Evolution of Human Variation,” Journal of Biological Research-Thessaloniki 23, no. 17 (December 2016); Grant S. McCall and Nancy Shields, “Examining the Evidence from Small-Scale Societies and Early Prehistory and Implications for Modern Theories of Aggression and Violence,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 13, no. 1 (2008): 1–9.