A year after his son’s murder, the tragic figure of John Walsh was broadcast nationwide as he testified before the Senate committee describing recent cases of serial murder and suggested that missing children are in large measure murdered by serial killers. The problem, Walsh said, was linkage blindness and the failure of law enforcement agencies to coordinate information and intelligence across multiple jurisdictions. Because of this weakness, young people were disappearing without a trace, until they might be found in a mass grave somewhere. Using a controversial Department of Health claim that 1.8 million children go missing every year, Walsh stated that every hour 205 children go missing and that many of them would be found murdered. What Walsh failed to explain was that 95 percent of those missing were confirmed runaways, of whom 95 percent would return home within fourteen days. Instead, hysterical headlines screamed, quoting him: “205 MISSING CHILDREN EVERY HOUR!”16
Walsh later narrowed down the number to predatory “stranger” abductions, claiming in his testimony to Congress, “The unbelievable and unaccounted-for figure of fifty thousand children disappear annually and are abducted for reasons of foul play.” Walsh claimed that organized rings of pedophiles were systematically abducting children: “The kidnappers are more organized than we are.”17 “This country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped and strangled children,” he ominously warned.18
On February 3, 1984, in her nationally syndicated column, Ann Landers published a letter written by the executive director of the Adam Walsh Center. It opened, “Dear Ann: Consider these chilling statistics: Every hour 205 American children are reported missing. This means 4,920 per day and 1.8 million per year.”19
It was spooky stuff and it frightened parents across the nation. But where did that fifty-thousand figure that Walsh cited come from? According to research by John Gill, it was Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island who in 1981 was the first public official to formally claim that the Department of Health and Human Services stated that fifty thousand children vanish each year. Officials at HHS denied making that estimate and Pell’s staff “could not remember” which official they spoke to.20 It was an early example of “fake news” in American public discourse.
As the hearing progressed, all kinds of ridiculously speculative statements were entered into the Congressional Record and presented at press conferences. The most prevalent gimmick was to combine the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports homicide categories of unknown and stranger into one figure, pumping up the percentage of killings that appeared to be motiveless murders by unknown perpetrators, presumably roaming serial killers. Using this kind of “fuzzy math,” it was claimed that nearly 25 to 30 percent of all murders—some four thousand to five thousand each year—could be attributed to serial killers. The message was: the only thing that could save us now was increased funding from Congress.
These numbers were never realistic. The total maximum number of all known serial-killer victims in the United States over a span of 214 years from 1800 to 2014, as cataloged by Eric Hickey, is estimated at only 5,515.21 (The low estimate is 3,740 victims.) Of this number, at most 1,878 victims were murdered between 1975 and 2004, at an average rate of 63 victims a year. The Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database lists 11,680 victims identified worldwide over hundreds of years and the highest number of documented annual serial-killer victims in the United States was in 1987: 361.
Even if we allow for unknown or “missing missing” victims, the total number of serial-killer victims comes nowhere near the 3,500 to 5,000 annual number so often claimed even today. But in the quest for Congressional funding, 5,000 victims a year sells better to the public than 63. As Joel Best put it in his analysis of child abduction statistics in the 1980s, “Three principles seem clear: Big numbers are better than small numbers; official numbers are better than unofficial numbers; and big, official numbers are best of all.”22 Yet even today, some distinguished academic criminologists like Ronald M. Holmes and Stephen T. Holmes continue to cling to the ridiculous 5,000 annual victims.23
For the record, a study of 1,498 child murders in California between 1981 and 1990 determined that parents and relatives were the most frequent killers of children under the age of ten, not strangers who are serial killers as John Walsh claimed. Strangers were involved in only 14.6 percent of homicides of children between ages five and nine and 28.7 percent of those between ages ten and fourteen.24
Back in 1981 to 1983, as the committee hearings unfolded in Washington, the press darted like schools of fish to the Senate hearings and the various press conferences. Articles in large-circulation magazines such as Time, Newsweek, Life, Omni, Psychology Today, Playboy and Penthouse painted a picture of the United States plagued by an “epidemic” of random homicides committed by roaming monsters who often victimized our children.
To draw parallels between the Great Serial-Killer Epidemic in the 1980s and the Great Witch Hunt of 1450 to 1650 is not entirely gratuitous. In the same way that witch-hunting would become institutionalized by state and church in the 1450s, serial-killer hunting became institutionalized in the secular American state in the 1980s with the emergence of state-funded serial-killer-hunting bureaucracies and programs, databases, manuals, both state- and self-appointed profiler experts of varying degrees of competence and qualification, and a heightened and exaggerated awareness among the public of a “serial-killer threat.” The only difference was that while there were no witches, serial killers, although rare, were very real.
THE RISE AND DECLINE OF VICAP (VIOLENT CRIMINAL APPREHENSION PROGRAM)
All those fearful and exaggerated cries of roaming serial killers threatening our children paid off. In 1982 Congress passed the Missing Children’s Act and in 1984 the Missing Children’s Assistance Act. President Ronald Reagan personally announced in 1984 the establishment of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), to be housed at the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico, Virginia.
The data collected by the BSU sexual homicide study led by John Douglas, Robert Ressler and Ann Burgess were implemented into the FBI’s profiling system and into a homicide-data collection program called ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program). LAPD detective Pierce Brooks had been calling for such a computerized interjurisdictional homicide database for twenty-seven years since having successfully identified the “Glamor Girl” serial killer Harvey Glatman in 1958 by linking newspaper reports of similar homicides.
Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Brooks proposed that California police install a computerized database of unsolved homicide descriptions, an astute idea in a time when most people were unfamiliar with computers. His plan called for every police department in California to have a computer terminal linked with a central mainframe that stored data on every unsolved homicide in the state. Every department would have access to shared data on homicides in other jurisdictions. Aside from the fact that most of his superiors had no idea what a computer was, back then computers were huge elephants costing millions of dollars. Nobody took his proposal seriously. Brooks put the idea aside and went on to become the head of the Los Angeles homicide unit, and later a chief of police in Oregon and Colorado during the 1960s and 1970s.
In the early 1980s FBI behaviorists Robert Ressler and John Douglas returned to the issue of linkage blindness during the “serial-killer epidemic” and lobbied for the establishment of a national homicide database system. Ressler learned that Pierce Brooks had retired from active police work and had just received a small grant of 35 thousand dollars to revive and update his original proposal of an unsolved-homicide computer data network. Brooks was now based at Sam Houston University in Texas, and Ressler went down to see him.
The following year, Brooks and the FBI joined forces and got a one-million-dollar research grant to design a data collection, analysis, and distribution system that today is known as ViCAP and is run out of the NCAVC. Pierce Brooks was appointed its first director.
From
1985 onward, local police could fill out a standard ViCAP questionnaire about their homicide case and submit it to the Investigative Support Unit and request a profile of the unknown offender and other possible cases linked to him. The questions on the form addressed information that ranged from the description of the location where the victim’s body was found down to the details of the assault and mutilations, and if known, things like the condition of the suspect’s car and his method of approaching the victim.
The problem was that it required a substantial amount of paperwork. Need I say more? Overworked cops and paperwork do not mix well. The ViCAP form was fifteen pages long with 189 detailed questions, many of them multipart. It was as painstaking as an income tax form, if not worse . . . and then it had to be put in the mail!25 (Before the ubiquity of fax and e-mail.)
To derive any benefit from ViCAP, a police agency not only had to file the form, but also had to make a formal request to the FBI to process it through their database and report back the results, if any. Of course, many local agencies were reluctant to allow an outside agency to get formally involved in their cases.
By 1990 things improved technologically: police agencies could fax the form rather than rely on snail mail. After 1995 almost everybody had a PC, and the FBI distributed ViCAP forms as computer software, so at least a police officer could fill out a digital form rather than manually write or type it up on paper. But again, to get any result from ViCAP, the police agency had to file an official request for the FBI to search their massive database and report back on possible hits in their system. There was no way for a police agency to log directly on to the FBI database and make a search of its own.
By the mid-2000s, after twenty-five years of operation, many American police departments had lost touch with ViCAP’s existence. Many police officers who were first introduced to ViCAP in the 1980s had retired, and for a new generation of overworked officers it was easy to overlook the FBI’s reminders of ViCAP. Nor did local police care to wait while the FBI looked for possible matches in the ViCAP database.
In 2007, only a last-minute referral to ViCAP led to a breakthrough in the Adam Leroy Lane “Hunting Humans ‘Ninja’ Truck Driver” serial killings.26 As a result, the ViCAP database can now be directly queried online by authorized police agencies.
But all is not well with ViCAP.
It is rarely used by police in the US. An investigation in 2015 by journalists at ProPublica revealed the depth of ViCAP’s dismal decline, despite the FBI’s claims of success. While the FBI has an 8.2-billion-dollar yearly budget, ViCAP receives only 800 thousand dollars a year. Although ViCAP claims that 3,800 state and local law enforcement agencies have contributed to its databases since its founding, currently only 1,400 police agencies in the US, out of some 18 thousand, participate in the system. The database receives reports of less than 1 percent of the violent crimes committed annually.27
A review in the 1990s found ViCAP had successfully linked only thirty-three crimes in twelve years. More recently, in 2014 the FBI claimed that three serial killers were apprehended through ViCAP in the previous eight years and characterized this as “a success.” In fact, in 2014 ViCAP provided analytic assistance to local law enforcement on only 220 occasions, with mixed results.
It is not even clear how many crimes the database has helped to solve, because the FBI does not release any raw data on ViCAP use. The FBI’s Office of Public Affairs at Quantico declines to answer specific questions about ViCAP from journalists, academics and researchers, including my own. Instead they referred me to the FBI’s website.28 But on its website, the FBI misrepresents itself in its public statements on ViCAP. While the FBI claims that new data are “continually compared” to the case files on record, program officials have said elsewhere that does not happen. “We have plans for that in the future,” said Nathan Graham, a crime analyst for the program.
The FBI subsequently said it would update the information on its website, according to ProPublica’s report. Indeed, the FBI has “updated” its website on ViCAP advances, by changing nothing and only adding the following disclaimer: “This is archived material from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) website. It may contain outdated information and links may no longer function.”29
The FBI claims on the same webpage that it has case data on “150,000 open and closed violent crime investigations submitted by some 3,800 state and local law enforcement agencies—and includes some ‘cold cases’ that go back to the 1950s.” ProPublica reports that the FBI has only 89 thousand cases on file and only 1,400 police agencies currently contribute data to the system. ViCAP has a skeleton staff of only 12 people. Training of police officers in the use of the ViCAP interface has declined as well, from about 5,500 officers in 2012 to 1,200 by 2014.
In comparison, in the 1990s Canada set up its own federal database system called ViCLAS (Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System). Despite Canada’s population of 36 million compared to the 325 million of the US, ViCLAS has an annual budget of 15 million dollars, a database of over 400 thousand case files and a staff of more than one hundred police officers and analysts. On average, ViCLAS analysts send 175 to 200 potential linkage reports each year.30 This is similar to the ViCAP total number of linkage reports (220 reports in 2014) but the US has nine times the population and twenty-three times more murders than Canada.31
Dissatisfied with the FBI’s lame ViCAP system, some jurisdictions have set up their own database systems, like HITS (Homicide Investigation Tracking System) in Washington State and TracKRS (Task Force Review Aimed at Catching Killers, Rapists and Sexual Offenders) in Orange County, California.
TWILIGHT OF THE GOLDEN AGE
Those of us from the baby boom generation who knew the names of the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men to walk on the moon, would became just as familiar with the names of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, the “moonwalkers” of serial killing. But after Jeffrey Dahmer in the early 1990s, serial killing became one long, hazy Apollo 12 moon mission—who knows who was on it? How many cases can you name of the 782 new serial killers who appeared in the United States and the world after the year 2000 in the way most of us can rattle off the names of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Edmund Kemper, Henry Lee Lucas, Richard Ramirez, and any other of the many “super serial killers” from the “golden age”?
The “golden age” arguably began to fade after the arrest and trial of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1991 to 1992, which was breathlessly covered by all the media at the time. Two years later, all that media attention turned to the O. J. Simpson celebrity murder case. As mentioned earlier, the trial of serial killer William Lester Suff, suspected in the murder of twenty-two women in Riverside, California, was barely covered when he went on trial at the same time O. J. Simpson did. Serial killers were no longer newsworthy, no matter the number of victims; enraged homicidal celebrities were now the new media flavor of the month.
We can perhaps nudge the end of the “golden age” slightly later, to the early 2000s, with the cold-case arrests of the serial killers Gary Ridgway, the “Green River Killer,” in 2001 and Dennis Rader, the “BTK Killer,” in 2005. Both had been killing back in the “golden age”; their reputations and fame as unidentified serial killers from that era had preceded their arrests. They had “retired” in the waning years of the century, Rader apparently killing his last victim in 1991 and Ridgway killing his in 1998. But when these cold cases made the news in the 2000s, the coverage was relatively muted and relegated to second and third place in the news lineups, compared to the lead coverage of the Jeffrey Dahmer case. Since then, the news media have become relatively blasé about serial killers.
Part of the waning interest in news reporting of serial-killer cases has to do with the decline of national network news and the rise of the Internet and specialty cable channels. When Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, cable networks and the Internet were in their infancy,
and there were only four dominant sources of national television news: NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN. FOX was just creeping up onto the channel lineup. They all covered the Dahmer case with a unified chorus of lead-story furor. Since the rise of the Internet and the emergence of the thousand-channel television universe in the mid-1990s, our culture is no longer blanketed by a few “high-concept” stories on the big four channels but instead is fragmented into thousands of subjects, each subscribed to by viewers with narrow interests and serviced by media focused on those interests to the exclusion of other subjects. Serial-killer news today is rarely “breaking news.” Serial murder is matter-of-factly reported on the evening news, or featured in true-crime TV programing, which itself is subdivided between serial killers, cold cases, “snapped wives with knives,” mass killers, teen killers, wife killers, family annihilators, CSI forensic cases, fugitive pursuits, reality policing and multiple other parallel but stand-alone true-crime subcategories, each with its own precise electronic “penny dreadful,” pornlike paraphilic specificity. Now serial-killer news comes into our homes like hot and cold water and their novelty has worn thin.
The exaggerated reports in the 1980s of serial-killer zombie hordes swarming over us and our children left a deep impression on our paranoid public psyche, our culture and our fear-selling media and entertainment industry. With “ordinary” homicide rates escalating an astounding 300 percent in the twenty-year period between 1970 and 1990, there was an accompanying peak of unsolved stranger-on-stranger killings; it certainly felt as if there was an epidemic of serial killings; monsters seemed to lurk everywhere and Americans appeared to be dying in a plague of so many mysteriously unsolved homicides that even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began to look into the phenomenon of serial murder.32
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