Serial Killers Are Disappearing. Here's Why.
Quick Answer
Why are serial killers disappearing? Serial killers peaked in the 1980s, when criminologists estimate roughly 200 were active in the United States at any given time. By the 2010s that number had dropped to approximately 30. The decline is attributed to several factors: forensic DNA testing (introduced 1986), which links crimes across jurisdictions and decades; ubiquitous surveillance cameras and cell phone location data that track movement continuously; the near-disappearance of hitchhiking, which eliminated a primary hunting ground; and improved inter-agency coordination through systems like ViCAP and CODIS that connect cases across state lines within days instead of years.
The peak was the 1980s. Around 200 serial killers were active in the United States at any given time during that decade. Today criminologists estimate that number is somewhere around 30. The decline is real, it's well-documented, and it's one of the stranger success stories in American crime history.
Understanding why requires going back to what made the 1980s such a productive era for people who wanted to kill multiple strangers and not get caught.
The numbers behind the decline
Criminologist Mike Aamodt at Radford University maintains the most comprehensive database of serial killers in American history. His data shows a clear peak in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a sustained and dramatic decline. The FBI's own records track the same curve.
The 1970s-80s roster reads like a who's who that the true crime industry has been living off ever since: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, BTK, the Green River Killer, Son of Sam, the Night Stalker, Jeffrey Dahmer. These were not flukes. They were a product of specific conditions that no longer exist in the same form. We have an entire piece about why Americans are obsessed with true crime, and a significant part of the answer is that the 1970s and 1980s gave us so much material to be obsessed with.
Serial murder as a category never disappeared. Murder didn't go away either. The husband remains the statistically likely suspect in a wife's death, which we covered in the husband did it post. But the specific phenomenon of an unidentified killer committing five, ten, twenty murders before anyone even connects the cases. That has become rare. Here's why.
DNA changed the game in 1986
The first criminal conviction using forensic DNA evidence happened in 1986 in England. Colin Pitchfork was convicted of murdering two teenage girls in Leicestershire. The technique crossed the Atlantic quickly. By the late 1980s American prosecutors were using DNA as evidence. By 1990 the FBI had launched CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, which allows DNA profiles from crime scenes to be matched against a national database of known offenders.
The implications for serial killers were immediate and permanent. Before DNA, a killer who moved from Washington to Utah to Florida was in three separate jurisdictions with three separate sets of case files that might never be compared. After DNA, a single hair or drop of blood at a crime scene creates a biological signature that follows that person everywhere, across every state line, for the rest of their life and beyond.
The Golden State Killer proved what DNA can do in the long run. Joseph DeAngelo committed at least 13 murders and 50 rapes across California between 1974 and 1986. He wasn't caught until 2018. Investigators used a consumer genealogy database called GEDmatch, which allowed them to identify distant relatives of the killer from DNA left at crime scenes, then build a family tree back to a single suspect. DeAngelo was 72 years old when they arrested him. He had been living as a retired police officer and grandfather for three decades. DNA found him anyway.
A person who planned to commit serial murder starting in 2024 would need to leave zero biological material at every scene, every time, forever. Ted Bundy left DNA at multiple scenes. He was tried and executed before the technology existed to test it. That gap no longer exists.
Cameras are everywhere and phones are tracking devices
Ted Bundy walked onto Florida State University's Chi Omega sorority house on the night of January 14, 1978, attacked four women, and walked out. He did this in a populated area of a college town. There were no cameras. His presence in Tallahassee that night was not recorded anywhere until he was arrested weeks later for an unrelated traffic stop.
This is not possible today. The average American in an urban area is captured on camera hundreds of times per day. ATMs, traffic lights, Ring doorbells, retail cameras, parking garages, bus stations, highway systems. The camera grid is not complete but it is dense enough that reconstructing a person's movements through a city on a specific night is routine police work.
Cell phones made it worse for potential killers and better for everyone else. Every phone pings cell towers continuously, creating a location history that can be subpoenaed. In the aftermath of a murder, investigators can obtain tower records and place every phone that was in a given area at a given time. This doesn't catch every killer. It closes off the category of killer who operates repeatedly in populated areas over years without ever being near a crime scene on record.
The hitchhiker disappeared
In the 1960s and 1970s, hitchhiking was a normal form of transportation in the United States. Millions of people did it. College students, young workers, travelers without cars. They stood on highway on-ramps with their thumbs out and got into cars with strangers as a matter of course. The cultural moment that produced this: cheap gas, low violent crime rates through most of the 1950s and early 1960s, and a prevailing trust in strangers that eroded over the subsequent decades largely because of serial killers.
Hitchhikers were ideal victims for a certain kind of predator. They got voluntarily into a car with a stranger, they were often traveling alone, they had no fixed route anyone was expecting them to follow, and their disappearance might not be noticed for days. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and dozens of less famous serial killers from this era used the hitchhiker as a primary method of victim acquisition.
Hitchhiking has almost entirely disappeared in the United States. The culture changed, in large part because the serial killer cases of the 1970s made the danger visible. Uber and Lyft replaced the economic need for it among people without cars. The hunting ground closed.
Jurisdictions started talking to each other
Before 1985, American law enforcement agencies had almost no systematic way of comparing open homicide cases across state lines. A murder in Washington and a murder with the same signature in Utah were two separate cases in two separate filing systems that might never be put side by side. This was Ted Bundy's operational environment. He moved. Cases didn't.
The FBI launched ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, in 1985. It created a national database of violent crime cases that investigators could search for pattern matches across jurisdictions. It was underfunded and underused for years, but it represented a structural change: the idea that serial crime is by definition a cross-jurisdictional problem and requires a cross-jurisdictional response.
Today, NamUs (the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System), CODIS, ViCAP, and genetic genealogy tools work together in ways that would have seemed like science fiction in 1985. A Jane Doe in a ditch in Nevada gets entered into a DNA database. Her profile gets compared against profiles of missing persons. Her dental records get cross-referenced nationally. The case doesn't disappear into a county filing system.
Or they're just getting caught faster
Some criminologists push back on the "serial killers are disappearing" framing. Their argument: the psychology hasn't changed, but the operational ceiling has dropped dramatically. Someone who would have committed twenty murders in 1985 before getting caught now gets caught after two. They never reach the threshold that makes them a recognized "serial killer" in the data.
If this is right, the number of people who attempt serial murder hasn't declined as much as the number who succeed at it repeatedly. The decline in the data would be real, but what it's measuring would be a change in clearance rates rather than a change in human nature.
There's a separate theory, put forward by researchers including Peter Vronsky, that the psychology that produced the serial killers of the 1970s-80s found a different outlet starting in the 1990s. Mass shootings increased as serial killings decreased. The two trends run almost inverse to each other over the same thirty-year period. The desire for recognition, the grievance, the willingness to kill strangers. The theory is that these impulses are finding a different form, not disappearing.
The data on that is contested. What isn't contested is that the golden age of the uncatchable serial killer is over. The conditions that produced it are gone. Whether the people who would have done it are gone, or just getting caught faster, or doing something else. Nobody fully agrees. But the era of a man murdering a dozen people across three states over ten years while the cases sit in separate filing systems is done.
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Frequently asked questions
Are serial killers really declining?
Yes, according to the data. Criminologist Mike Aamodt's database at Radford University, the most comprehensive of its kind, shows a peak in serial killer activity in the 1970s and 1980s followed by a sustained decline. The FBI's records track the same trend. Estimates put roughly 200 serial killers active in the US at the peak; current estimates range between 25 and 50. The decline is real. The reasons are technological and sociological, not a change in human psychology.
When were serial killers most common in the US?
The 1970s and 1980s were the peak, which criminologists sometimes call the "golden age of serial murder." Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, BTK (Dennis Rader), Gary Ridgway (Green River Killer), Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), and Richard Ramirez (Night Stalker) were all active during this period. The clustering was not coincidence. It reflects the specific conditions of that era: no forensic DNA, weak inter-agency communication, heavy hitchhiking culture, and low surveillance that allowed predators to operate undetected for years.
How did DNA change the serial killer problem?
Forensic DNA testing was first used in a criminal case in 1986 and spread rapidly through American law enforcement. The FBI's CODIS system, launched in 1990, created a national database allowing DNA from crime scenes to be matched across jurisdictions. Before DNA, a killer who moved between states was effectively invisible to connecting investigations. After DNA, biological material at a crime scene creates a permanent signature that can identify a person decades later. The Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, was convicted in 2018 for crimes committed between 1974 and 1986 after investigators identified him through consumer genealogy databases.
Did hitchhiking really help serial killers?
It was one of their primary hunting grounds in the 1970s. Hitchhikers were alone, voluntarily entering a stranger's vehicle, often without anyone knowing their planned route. Multiple serial killers from the era, including Ted Bundy, specifically targeted hitchhikers. Hitchhiking was mainstream in the 1960s-70s. It has nearly disappeared as a practice in the United States. The removal of that specific vulnerable population from public access is one of the cleaner explanations for the decline.
Why didn't police catch serial killers faster in the 1970s and 1980s?
The main structural problem was jurisdictional fragmentation. American law enforcement is organized by locality. A murder in King County, Washington and a murder with the same signature in Salt Lake County, Utah were two separate case files in two separate agencies with no systemic way of comparing them. Ted Bundy committed murders in five states before anyone connected them. The FBI's ViCAP system launched in 1985 to address this. Before that, and for years after due to underuse, the cases just didn't travel.
Have serial killers been replaced by mass shooters?
Some criminologists have proposed this. Mass shootings and serial killings have trended in opposite directions since roughly the 1990s: one declining, the other increasing. The theory is that the same psychological profile that once produced serial killers is finding a different expression: immediate, public, aimed at a crowd rather than sequential individual victims. The research on this is ongoing and contested. What isn't contested is that the two trends are inversely correlated over the same time period. Whether the explanation is psychological displacement or coincidence depends on who you ask.
