Plain English with Derek Thompson - Whatever Happened to Serial Killers?

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

In the first five decades of the 20th century, the number of serial killers in the U.S. remained at a very low level. But between the 1950s and 1960s, the number of serial killers tripled. Between the 1960s and 1970s, they tripled again. In the 1980s and 1990s, they kept rising. And then, just as suddenly as the serial killer emerged as an American phenomenon, he (and it really is mostly a he) nearly disappeared. What happened to the American serial killers? And what does this phenomenon say about American society, criminology, and technology? Today's guest is James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern University. The author of 18 books, he has been publishing on this subject since before 1974, the year that the FBI coined the term "serial killer." If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: James Alan Fox Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Greetings, it's Mal. Call your banners because it's time to head back to Westrose for House of the Dragon, season two. The ringers, Dragon riders will soar alongside you each week with a heron-hall-sized slate of conversations. The dragon has three heads, and on Sunday nights immediately after Hot D. Concludes, Chris Ryan, Joanna Robinson, and I will be with you for Talk the Thrones. Then on Mondays, two more shows away. Dan Lath and Charles Holmes, Steve Allman, and Jomea Denneron, aka the Midnight Boys, Pugh!

we'll head to the tourney grounds to share their reactions. And of course, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald will sip the Arbor's finest vintage on the watch. Then on Tuesdays, Joanna and I will head to the bowels of a pleasure den for our House of Our Deep Dives. Then, on Thursdays, Joe, Neil Miller, and Dave Gonzalez will gather the Ravens for trial by content. In this season, full episodes of Talk to Thrones, House of Ar, and the Midnight Boys will also be available on video on Spotify and the new Ringervverse YouTube channel. podcast episodes available on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today, a true crime mystery. What happened to the American serial killer?

So I was talking to a friend a few months ago, a college friend, about my favorite movies of all time. This conversation was technically about the concept of sensitive periods for developing taste in art, the idea that the bulk of people's cultural tastes are formed during our teenage in 20-something years. So for better or worse, most people have a sensitive period. of their favorite music, their favorite food, their favorite art by the time they turn 30. And then they just sort of stop developing new opinions about food and music and art. Anyway, it's a theory. And I said this is true of movies as well.

I think most of my favorite movies either came out sometime between the 1990s, say 1999, and 2016, between the year I became a teenager and the year I turned 30. Or maybe there's slightly older films that I happen to see in those 17 years. So it's not so much that the golden age of movie making matched up. with that window, but rather that the golden age of my developing opinions about movies concretized during that window of time. So, anyway, my friend asks me to name some of my favorite movies, and I go, well, I think Silence of the Lambs is uniquely perfect from an acting standpoint. And then I thought about the films that I've rewatched the most in the last few years,

and somewhat gruesomely seven came to mind, and then Zodiac, clearly a David Fincher fan. And my friend goes, huh, you really have a thing for serial killers, don't you? Now, my first reaction was to deny this outright. I'm actually not really a grisly person. I'm not a true crime person. I don't listen to true crime podcasts. I'm not really obsessed with true crime documentaries. But then what really was there to deny in his case?

Hannibal Lecter, Buffalo Bill, Zodiac, Kevin Spaceon 7. Serial killer, serial killer, serial killer, serial killer. serial killer? Huh, I thought. Maybe something to file away for reflection on later. A few months after that, I was reading the New York Times when I came across a headline that I was clearly psychologically primed to remember. It was an article about new updates

in the so-called Gilgo Beach serial killings, a series of murders on Long Island starting in the early 1990s by a perpetrator who's sometimes known as the Long Island serial killer or the Craigslist Ripper. After reading the first, the article, I had this sudden electric bolt of energy, curiosity. The Zodiac killer, I remembered,

allegedly murdered his victims in the San Francisco area in the late 1960s. The most famous serial killers are associated with 70s, 1980s, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, son of Sam. The Silence The Lambs was written in the 1980s. The Long Island serial killers started in the early 1990s. This whole serial killer phenomenon, I thought, seemed unusually bounded in time, beginning in the 1960s, ending in the early 1990s. The entire genre seemed to fit within a 30-year period of time. And all the movies that I saw about serial killers seem to have the grisly details of that 1970s, 1980s era. Now, maybe I'm wrong. I'm not a crime expert. I certainly shouldn't develop my opinions about the world just by reflecting on the art direction of my favorite films.

So I went to the Radford University Serial Killer Database, which has an admittedly liberal definition of serial killers, anybody with more than two victims. And the numbers were astonishing. In the first five decades of the 20th century, the number of serial killers in the U.S. did not budge from a very low level. Between the 1950s and 1960s, suddenly serial killers tripled. Between the 1960s and 1970s, they tripled again.

In the 80s and 90s, they just kept rising. But then just as suddenly as the serial killer emerged as an identifiable American phenomenon, he, and it really is mostly a he, seemed to basically disappear. In all, the number of serial killers by decade went from less than 100 in the 1950s to 700 in the 1980s to less than 100 again in the 2010s. The graph, when you look at it, looks like Mount Kilimanjaro, this towering surge surrounded by a low flatness on either side.

So now I was obsessed with a new question. What happened to the American serial killer? And of course, this is a multi-part mystery. What happened to create the phenomenon of the serial killer in the 1960s, 1970s, what happened to end this phenomenon in the 1990s, early 2000s, and maybe a part three, what does it say about American society, criminology, technology, that this phenomenon exists in the first place? You can say from the broadest level, this more or less tracks the rise and fall of the crime wave that we saw in America. But when I read experts' opinions, they said actually the rise and fall of overall crime does not begin to explain the actual phenomenon of the rise and fall of the serial killer himself. James Allen Fox is the Litman family professor of criminology, law, and public policy at Northeastern University. He has for many decades been one of the nation's top experts in serial and mass killing, the author of 18 books.

has actually been publishing on this subject since before 1974, the year the FBI coined the term serial killer. In today's episode, Fox explains the rise and fall of the serial killer, the fact that it's not a statistical illusion, why and how he's still trying to perfectly understand it, and today we run down the most plausible theories that explain the scary rise and eerie disappearance of this brand of American monster. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. James Atlin Fox, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. You are a renowned expert in serial and mass killing. How does that happen? How does one become one of the most well-known figures in studying serial and mass killing? How did that become your expertise? Well, to some extent, I fell into it. But early in 1980s, over 40 years ago, a colleague of mine, Jack Levin, and I were talking, and he wondered, has there ever been a systematic study of mass killers?

And by the way, at that point in time, the term serial murder didn't exist. It was mass killers. So we were interested in seeing what patterns existed among serial killers. And indeed, was the Hollywood image of a glass-eyed lunatic, you know, like Friday the 13th or things like that. Was that real realistic? just pure fantasy. So we collected data on 42 cases at the time, both serial killers and mass killers, ended a paper on it. And then it was an AP story, headlined extraordinarily ordinary, not quite what people expected. And it was in hundreds of papers. It just kept snowballing.

So, I've done half a dozen books on the topic. So I never planned on this, frankly. You know, I teach two courses. I teach statistics and I teach homicide. And for me, you know, if you go to a cocktail party and someone says, what do you do? If I said, oh, I'm a statistician, they'd say, oh, where's the bar? But when I say, you know, I studied serial murder. They ask all sorts of questions.

I guess I become popular because the topic is popular. I would love you to explain how you found real serial killers and mass killers to differ from the Hollywood impression, right? I feel like, you know, one of my favorite movies is Silence the Lambs. And there, Buffalo Bill is this recluse. He's socially isolated. He's weird as hell. He's certainly not married.

In your research, it seems like, you know, you mentioned, they're extraordinarily ordinary, the typical serial killer is the opposite of Buffalo Bill. Social, living with a partner. What are other important ways in which you found the Hollywood archetype of the serial killer differs from the real thing? Well, the thing about the Hollywood image, someone who looks evil and looks dangerous and acts weird, is that they wouldn't be dangerous because we'd avoid them. And we're not going to, guys walk around with a hockey basket and a knife, we're not going to go up and say, where's the rink? So the thing about these serial killers in particular is they're very good at appearing safe, not strange at all. And that helps in their ability to attract victims.

You know, the victims let their guard down when they confront someone like Theater Bundy, who, you know, good-looking guy. Not all of them are good-looking. I understand that, too. But for the most part, they don't, they're not put offish. And that's why they're dangerous because they're extraordinarily ordinary. The ordinariness of serial killers must be especially surprising for people, given that serial killers in films are often represented as these hyper-real villains. Jason, Freddie Kruger, these are demons. They're barely even people. There's like a mystical invincibility about them. And Hannibal Lecter is practically a superhero in his ability to outsmart everybody. So we do, as a society, seem to hold serial killers aside from the rest. of murderers and treat them like superheroes of evil rather than real threats, right?

You know, you mentioned Hannibal Lecter. So, like, years ago, I was giving a speech at a college out in Midwest, and they made a poster of my talk and had the picture of four serial killers. There was Bundy and it was Gacy and Dahmer and Hannibal Lecter. Of course, it was Anthony Hopkins. Anthony Hopkins looking like Anthony Hopkins is an actor. But the thing is for most people, Jeffrey Dahmer and Hannibal Lecter, same thing to them.

People aren't really terrorized and frightened of serial killers. They feel that's not going to happen to them. And so they can be entertained by serial murder because they don't see it as a threat in their lives. We're not entertained by mass shooting. People worry about it. I think they're going to be the victim. We know the statistics show that six out of ten Americans think there's going to be a mass shooting in their community. You ask them it's going to be a serial killer that running down your street?

They won't. They'll think no. So people can't be entertained by serial murder because they don't feel threatened. Whereas other kinds of crimes, date rape, mass killing, mass shooting, so forth, school shootings. That's not entertaining. It's frightening. I am most interested in talking about the rise and apparent fall of serial killers in this country. And according to the official statistics, the somewhat bleakly named golden age of serial killing took place between the 1970s and 1990s.

before we talk about why there were so many serial killers in these 20 to 30 years and what happened to create the rise and create the fall, I have two questions of definition. Number one, do you consider this rise and fall to be reflective of reality or a statistical artifact because maybe we just suddenly got really good at counting serial killers, the 1960s, 1970s, and two, before we go on with the rest of the story, we should probably define what we began to call in the 70s and 80s. serious killing and how it was different than other kinds of killing. So one is this narticistical artifact and two, what is it that we're talking about when we talk about serial killing? Well, let me say there definitely was a rise in the 70s and 80s, it's the early 90s. But there was also a rise in homicide. So part of it was just reflected of a general increase in lethal violence in our country. Of course, serial killing being its most, extreme form. As far as definition, people, there's two areas of disagreement. What has it

do with what the threshold is? How many does someone have to kill become to be called a serial killer? And two, the the ammo, the style, the pattern of killing. Well, in my book, literally, I guess, always held to four or more victims. Some people, three or more. There's some degree of arbitrariness there. However, then there was a conference, oh, I think it was in the 90s, FBI hosted conference, wanted to come up with a definition. And although I totally disagreed, vehemently disagreed, they decided to make it two, two or more.

Well, yeah, because that makes more serial killers. Makes more business, makes more money that they might want out of Congress. By reducing it to two, you change the basic nature of serial murder in terms of things like whether they use torture, whether they keep souvenirs of their crimes. All those things tend to be true of people who kill a lot of victims, but not true of those who kill two. So four or more is the definition that values. that's a threshold that basically says that these people are incredibly deadly. This is morbid to ask, but I suppose we are deep in the realm of morbidity here. Other than the frequency of torture and keeping souvenirs, how are serial killers different

than ordinary killers? Some people want to say that the sexual, the serial killer is a sexual sadist. And it is true that many are, even most. And that's the kind of the stereotype of a serial killer is a sexual predator. There are other serial killers who kill for profit. For example, a series of robberies and killing the witnesses to cover up the crimes. You know, you think about Bonnie and Clyde, that kind of style of killing. So not all serial killers are sexual status, but those are those are the ones.

That's a frequent pattern. And those are the ones, again, that get all the attention. So I want to break the rise of serial killing in the 1960s and 1970s into two big explanatory pieces. The first piece is changes in opportunity. So maybe there's always been a fixed amount of psychopathic people in the world. But for some reason, this was a golden age of opportunity for people with a psychological profile of serial killers. And the second category I want to talk about is behavior. Maybe there are societal reasons why the 1970s to 1990s created more innately violent behavior.

But let's start with opportunity. What was happening in the 1960s, 1970s that you think might have given serial killers more opportunities to commit murder in this period? Well, in the 60s in the 60s in the 70s, runaways hitchhiking was common. And we didn't have Uber. So people stuck out their thumb. And so there were lots of opportunities. And, you know, street walkers, prostitutes. There are lots of potential victims for serial killers in the 60s and 70s.

Now, you add to that, we had the sexual revolution and the reduction in the lowering of sexual mores. Well, that affects sexual satis, too. And so the opportunities too of hitchhikers and prostitutes and there were just lots of opportunities for kid, for serial killers. People, they wouldn't have the term stranger danger. People weren't afraid of strangers. So that's why people feel okay with hitchhiking. or if they, if the car broke down, they would welcome the help of some stranger who stopped

to help them change the tire. So it took a while, and serial murder was part of it. It took a while for people to become much more cautious. Another explanation that I've seen is that you mentioned that serial killing was increasing at the same time that the overall homicide rate was increased. And one explanation for the general increase in homicide in this era, not only in the U.S., but also around the developed world, is what's sometimes called the lead hypothesis, that between the 1940s, 1970s, lead was much more commonly used in gasoline and also somewhat used in paint. This led to increased atmospheric lead levels. Exposure to lead in childhood can lead to lower IQs and impaired impulse control.

And the children of those decades with high levels of lead exposure reached their late teens and 20s in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Those are exactly the years when you saw this increase in crime and this increase in serial killing. As far as it explains the rise of serial killing specifically, how much weight, do you put on the lead hypothesis? Probably about eighth or ninth in terms of priority. I mean, it could have some impact, certainly. But I don't think anyone has been able to substantiate that in terms of serial murder. In terms of murder generally, there's other theories.

One of the things that I've studied in my dissertation 50 years ago was the aid the population. We had the baby boomers, born after World War II, an unprecedented number of births who grew into their crime-prone years in the 60s and 70s. So we had an unprecedented percentage of the population were in that age category where they're more likely be violent. That also could contribute to serial murder too. But it certainly was related to of homicide and other violent crimes. And then eventually, when the baby boomers aged, the percentage of population that was in that crime-prone age group started to shrink.

And the homicide rate started to shrink. In international relations, I think this is called the Youth Bulge Theory of Violence. It's the idea that in developing countries, when there's a large proportion of young adults, you tend to see more youth unemployment and more civil unrest. So for my summing up purposes, we'll say that the most plausible reasons for the rise of serial killers in the 1970s is in the category of more opportunity, that this was a period with more hitchhikers, more sex workers, pre-stranger danger, a latchkey culture, a youth quake. And I'm just going to throw on top of all of this, although I think it'd be very hard to prove. some theory of social contagion.

I think whenever we see a social trend take off, at least one causal ingredient tends to be mimicry. Perhaps serial killers became a kind of mimetic trend among people predisposed to psychopathic murder and sadism. They were seeing that other people were getting all of this attention for these achievements, if we could even call it that, and so that may have derived some kind of social contagion among this group. So that's the rise of serial killers.

And you see this rising to the 1970s, 1980s in the early 1990s. I want to turn now to the biggest question I have, the biggest mystery I think there is to solve here, which is where did serial killers go? And I do feel like our categories of opportunity and behavior might be useful to hold on to. So let's start with changes to victims. You and a couple other criminal justice historians have said that serial killers almost seem to move from one group to another. You started with a disproportionate number of hitchhikers and

people on the move being killed. And then you had a rise of stranger danger and people hitchhiked less and locked their doors more. And then you saw more crimes among the sex work community. But then maybe sex workers got savvy and that victim pool dried up. How much of the decline in serial killing, do you think was about changes and behavior to essentially the potential victim pool? A lot of it. As I mentioned before, people became very wary of strangers. And that men, for example, not, you know, if someone offered you a help, help you

walking, out of you a ride, to help you with, with you. change a flat tire, people were hesitant to accept that because they were nervous about it. So that stranger danger notion permeated our society. And then we had far less hitchhiking. People just were too afraid to hitchhike. There were too many stories of hitchhikers ending up dead. And of course, nowadays there's Uber, so you don't have to hitchhike. I feel like in several stories that I've read

or several documentaries that I've seen about serial killers like the Golden State Killer, for example, again and again, you have this phenomenon that I believe you've called linkage blindness. That is a killer. I did not have been a term. You didn't offend that term. You just used it.

Okay. But the killer commits a felony in one jurisdiction and then commits the exact same felony in the adjacent jurisdiction, and the police are utterly blind to see this similarity. They can't get their data, together. It seems to me like in the 1960s, 1970s, both the FBI and local jurisdictions were much

more purposeful about allowing different police departments to share data. Can you just tell that story about how police technology essentially seems to have caught up to the serial killer? During the heyday of serial murder, there are a lot of killers who would kill and travel. And by the time the police find a body, the perpetrators in some other jurisdiction. And at that time, there really wasn't the large-scale databases and ability to communicate with other police departments in terms of missing persons or unsolved homicides. In today's world, much more, much even more easily for police to communicate. So that was the big factor. But also some of the thing about serial killers is there's a self-selection process.

It's more than just the will. There are perhaps, there are actually individuals who are sexual sadists but aren't very good at covering up their crimes. Often the term disorganized killers, someone who killed. in her frenzy, doesn't take efforts to try to cover up, those individuals are easy to catch because they leave lots of clues. Sometimes they even abduct people in plain view. So there is a catch. It don't become a serial killer. The ones who are able to kill repeatedly, victim after victim as victim, have demonstrated. their skill.

They're cunning. Now, people have to say the serial killers are smart. Well, they're not necessarily smart in an academic sense, although there's some who, a couple who have a very high IQ, but they're street smarts. They know what to do to avoid detection. And so the serial killers who dispose of bodies for, far away from where they were killed, a so-called dump site, whether it be a mountainside, forest, a lake. By the time the police find the body, they don't have a lot of evidence because most of

the evidence is at the crime scene where the person was killed. But the police don't have a crime scene. They only have a dump site. And if the body is left in some remote area for the animals to feed at and for the element, the rain and the snow and the wind to erode some of the physical evidence by time they find the body, they have a hard enough time to figure who the victim is, much less who the killer is. The Golden State Killer, who committed something like 13 murders and 51 rapes between 1974 and 1986, he was eventually caught because of a genetic test that showed a relationship with a cousin or some family member.

familial DNA, yeah. Familial DNA. How much has the existence or the emergence of, let's just call it, higher tech crime scene data made a difference here and made it easier for police to catch killers who almost by definition are, by committing serial murders, creating more opportunities for them to shed something like DNA? That's a significant effect.

You know, the first time that DNA was used for forensic purposes with the late 80s. Of course, our body's always had DNA, but it wasn't the late 80s that there was ability to try to use to solve crimes. But even then, the testing techniques were very crude. You needed a lot of

physical evidence to do a test, DNA test. Needed a lot of saliva, but not just a little bit. A lot of blood, not just a little bit. You couldn't get DNA back then from from hair now you can so and you can get now you can get a dna from very small amount of evidence

so when you think about the the era when serial murder was raging was prior to testing so it's very hard for someone now to commit crimes sexual crimes in particular, where there is lots of physical evidence because of the contact with the victim, a shooting where, you know, a bullet doesn't have DNA. The only problem now is to try to identify, you have may have the DNA, but you have to figure who does that belong to. So then we started having DNA databases, and we have the federal one. but there weren't very many samples in it

so we were collecting DNA in the 90s into the 2000s but there weren't any hits with the database so the database didn't have lots of people in it and even now you have someone who who's never been arrested

being a serial killer that even though you might have the DNA from the crime scene you won't help you won't figure it who it is then come to the along the familial DNA. So it doesn't have to be that that person has their DNA in a data bank could be a relative. And so you find out that there's someone in a database who has this familial connection,

then you start investigating the relatives of that person. And that's been used in a number of cases to identify serial cancer. kill us, also to confirm cases of the, in yesterday year, like the Boston Strangler. We were able to figure out that indeed, Alper de Salvo, was the strangler, despite all the controversy over the years, was through a collecting evidence from relatives. That clears up a mystery that I was puzzling over, which is that, on the one hand, we're in an era where serial killing isn't clear decline. but we had an episode of this show last year

where we talked about how, according to FBI statistics, whereas the 1960s and 1970s, majority of murders were cleared by police, typically by arrest, in 2022, the clearance rate hit an all-time low of about 50%. And so I was thinking, how could we have the simultaneous facts that in the one hand, we believe that serial killers are in decline,

but also half of all murders in the U.S. are going unsolved, according to FBI data, which means that maybe I thought there could be a lot of serial killers we're just not catching them. What we just said seems very critical, which is that serial killers don't tend to be sharpshooters.

They tend to have contact with their victims. They tend to, or they're disproportionately likely to be sexual sadists. The reason why so many crimes and so many murders in the U.S. seem to be going unsolved is because there's more gun violence, but this is not,

serial killing is not a phenomenon of long-distance gun violence, for the most part. It's a phenomenon of close contact sadistic killing. And so these things can be true at the same time, a decline in the clearance rate and a decline in serial killing. Does that match up with your expertise? Absolutely. The decline is that decline clearance rates can be traced to things like a lot of gang violence where there's a code of silence and no one's coming forward because they're concerned about retribution, retaliation. And also,

a changing a pattern of homicide. Over the years, it used to be that the conventional wisdom was that most homicides occurred in the home.

Well, we've taken the home on a homicide. And the percentage of homicides that involved strangers, which were very small in the early 60s,

like four or five percent, has grown. And it's extremely difficult to solve a homicide when there's no connection between the perpetrator and the victim. So that's true of sexual predators, because they don't pick up people they know. Those are difficult to solve.

But then again, there's other kinds. The percentage of homicides that are committed with guns rose from about 50% up to almost 70%. and again, there's no DNA with a gunshot. So it's difficult to solve. What happened on the part of the sexual revolution, do you think? I mean, obviously, we still live in an era where there's lots more sexual promiscuity than there was the 1940s and 1950s, but this is a period when serial killing has generally declined tremendously rather than stayed at an elevated level. Well, there are other outlets for sexual sadists that don't involve live victims.

in terms of pornography, and even more so in terms of artificial intelligence, and what that will mean in terms of the ability of sexual status to satisfy their urges with fantasies. I never thought about that. You think it's conceivable that the existence of, and sort of frictionlessness of digital porn may have sort of mechanically reduced serial killing because it gave them this outlet that didn't involve another live human being? What I'm saying is digital pornography itself, the ability of even even before digital and have videos on VHS tapes, the ability to acquire and watch pornography and in particular violent pornography didn't really exist.

in the era when serial murder was growing, but when we had more and more outlets for sexual sadists, they're not necessarily serial killers, but they have, you know, prurient interests and violent fantasies. And they could find ways to satisfy that without having to do with live victims. what I said about artificial intelligence is going forward there's the ability to create fictional characters that look real

sound real and conform to one's fantasy so to summarize what I think I've learned here and I've learned a lot serial killing took off the 1960s and really 1970s not so much because of a sudden increase in innate deviant behavior

but rather because of an increase in opportunity for people with deviant behavior. More hitchhiking, more sexual permissiveness, the sexual revolution, a general latchkey attitude, which was a holdover from the 1950s, but a part of that culture. And as behavior changed, serial killing maybe began to come down, but that decline was accelerated by police technology, crime scene investigation technology. And also, potentially, the existence of and the growth of digital porn, which may have, may give sexual status a way to satisfy their urges that doesn't involve murdering somebody. What in that story? What did I miss?

Yeah. Cell phones. Cell phones. Cell phones. And other kind of, and surveillance cameras. it's very hard for someone to commit a crime in a public place without it being recorded on some security camera. In terms of cell phones, if you are stranded because of a flat tire, you have an option to call for help and not be at risk to some individual who are stop and offer you help. and then, of course, kill you.

So the cell phone has had a major effect. And then people have cameras on their phones. So they're always taking photographs of things that was not possibly for. And even in terms of, for example, street prostitution, they could take pictures of of license plates. So there's some record of, for example, of street prostitution. who they're going with. So cell phones, surveillance cameras,

and also we talked earlier about children, so we have Amber Alerts. So if the child is abducted by a stranger, there is a greater possibility of finding that person because we basically deputize every motorist by alerting them to the vehicle that this person may be driving. Very last question,

and I really appreciate the time that you gave us. You study both serial killing and mass killing. And I feel like this is an era where serial killing is in decline, but mass killing is not. You know, at least anecdotally from news reports, it seems like, you know, crimes where murder sprees,

where, you know, a dozen people are killed in a college campus, or in a school or at a mall, that these are maybe becoming more frequent, albeit from a low base. They're just sort of inherently random events. But mass killing seems to be becoming more frequent at a time when serial killing isn't clear decline.

Do you have a clear explanation for why you were seeing this shift from one of your pieces of expertise to another in the 2020s? I don't think that there's a causal reason that, Because one's going down, there's a substitution in another. I'm not suggesting that. But in terms of mass shootings, there has been an increase compared to the past century. If you go back, you know, the 70s, 80s, there were relatively a few mass shootings. And then in this century, many more.

There hasn't been, people tend to overstate what's happened in the past. past 15 years. There really hasn't been this acceleration in the past 15 years. We did see somewhat of an increase in the past three years. And by the way, this year, mass shootings were way down. In fact, there hasn't been a public massacre of the Lewiston Maine variety this whole year. In fact, the last public massacre with lots of victims killed was the Louisston. main shooting. We tend to have an average about six or seven of those, and we've had none this year.

So what goes up? Must come down. That's true with serial murder. And maybe that's true with mass shootings as well. James Allen Fox, thank you so much. Sure. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Baraldi.

Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays. We'll see you next week. I'm