version

Well-known member
It seems as though they either ceased to exist or simply stopped being interesting after 9/11. When's the last time you heard of a Gein, a Dahmer or a Bundy? Where did they go? Are they now the "lone wolves" and terrorists we see plastered across the news? Are they too easily caught in the age of mass-surveillance, social media and smart devices? They've obviously appeared all over the globe for hundreds of years, but it seems as though there was a period in the latter half of the 20th century where a uniquely American cult of personality sprung up around them - prison marriages, fan mail, documentaries, high profile interviews - then vanished.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
great post verj.

in the states their's an epidemic of mass shooting, which has supplanted serial killing at least in terms of media attention.

columbine seems to be something of a turning point; murder that speaks no longer to the murderer's own personal psychological symbolism but rather as something to communicate and be broadcast to the world.

terrorism is by nature about attacking mass cultural symbols. the world trade centre, westminster bridge, the israeli olympic team.

there's a theory that jihadism by westerners results from the 'islamisation of nihilism' rather than by people provoked by religious teachings.

in the states you can see this with that incel attack; the attempt to imbue an emotional propensity for violence with some sort of ideological resonance.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
we tend to portray serial killers as vulnerable; mentally unwell, victims of tough childhoods, etc.

so i wonder if there's an attempt to remove any notion of pathology from murderous acts these days. try to present murder as motivated by something grand, rather than it just be for weirdos.

you'd get this with the ideological spin terrorism lends murder.

in drill there's a preoccupation with depersonalising murder and making it numerical. 'scoreboard', 'they say 150, but it's 146 instead', 'olympic chinging', 'shh', etc. an attempt to make it clinical and gladiatorial rather than emerging from something emotional or psychological.

murder for murder's sake has become a bit 'gay' in other words.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Definitely harder to get away with it these days. Did you see what a mess the police made of catching (and holding onto) Bundy?
 

luka

Well-known member
Way easier to spray a room with gunfire then shoot yourself, kids are bone idle these days
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"Crime in the United States has been recorded since colonization. Crime rates have varied over time, with a sharp rise after 1963, reaching a broad peak between the 1970s and early 1990s. Since then, crime has declined significantly in the United States,[1] and current crime rates are approximately the same as those of the 1960s"
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i think most of them become ceo's of big companies these days. perfect way to kill people and to get away with it.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I think most of them had the genetic makeup that allowed them to become serial killers, but even born psychopaths don't tend to become violent without being encouraged to by the circumstances of their youth. The percentage of psychopaths who become serial killers is miniscule. But the percentage of serial killers who ARE psychopaths is high.

There's a good book about the question of where these disorders come from biologically "The Anatomy of Crime". For example, the presence of mercury in household products (now illegal) would have had an effect on many people's brains. The percentage of iron a pregnant mother gets in their diet has a direct link to the chance of their unborn baby growing up delinquent. Etc.
 

droid

Well-known member
The majority of serial killers have several things in common. Bed-wetting, animal abuse, arson - but the most critical factors seem to be abusive parents and suffering a head trauma in childhood that damages the pre-frontal lobe.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Those things haven't stopped occurring though yet serial killers apparently have, that or they've simply become much less visible.

the disappearance of the contemporary serial killer in the popular imagination. there aren't any zeitgeist defining serial killers.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
pedophiles have replaced serial killers in british culture at least.

ian huntley was the crossover point of this cultural attention shift.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
in the states the black lives matters thing has gone all post-modern and subversive. now the cops are the murderers.
 

muser

Well-known member
People just don't have the patience and dedication to play the long game anymore, just want to get it all the killing done in a couple of days, makes for a less interesting story. Brookers piece about mass murders in the media always stuck in my mind I guess they could have developed a conscionce, I some how doubt it though.

 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Are you all forgetting Shipman? For sheer numbers he's certainly the UK's most prolific.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And the Wests, arguably the nastiest.

The most recent one here was Levi Belfield.

Oh, and the guy up in Ipswich, who was something of a serial killer fanboy, I believe?

A guy in America who was already in jail recently confessed to dozens more unsolved murders. There was that policeman in Russia or thereabouts who is tied to something like 80 murders. And they're trying to get the Australian backpacker murderer to confess to more killings at the moment as he's dying of cancer.
 

version

Well-known member
... the most critical factors seem to be abusive parents and suffering a head trauma in childhood that damages the pre-frontal lobe.

Alexander Yuryevich Pichushkin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ю́рьевич Пичу́шкин, born 9 April 1974), also known as The Chessboard Killer and The Bitsa Park Maniac, is a Russian serial killer. He is believed to have killed at least 48 people, and possibly as many as 60, between 1992 and 2006 in southwest Moscow's Bitsa Park, where a number of the victims' bodies were found. In 2007 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Pichushkin is remembered to have been an initially sociable child. However, this changed following an incident in which Pichushkin fell backwards off a swing, which then struck him in the forehead as it swung back. Experts speculated that this event damaged the frontal cortex of Pichushkin's brain; such damage is known to produce poor impulse regulation and a tendency towards aggression. Since Pichushkin was still a child, the damage would have been more severe, as a child's forehead provides only a fraction of the protection for the brain than an adult's.
 
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