He isn’t a household name, yet the California inmate’s confessed death toll, across 14 states and four decades, appears to be triple Bundy’s. If such estimates are right, why aren’t more killers getting caught? Take Samuel Little. Michael Arntfield, a retired police detective and the author of 12 books on serial murder, agrees that the FBI’s projections are off (he blames patchy data, among other things) but thinks the number of active serial killers is more like 3,000 or 4,000. He believes that at least 2 percent of murders are committed by serial offenders-translating to about 2,100 unidentified serial killers. Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit that compiles data on homicide, has examined how many unsolved murders are linked by DNA evidence. Some experts believe that serial killers are responsible for a significant number of these unsolved murders. In other words, about 40 percent of the time, murderers get away with murder. By 2017, it had dropped to 61.6 percent, one of the lowest rates in the Western world.
As the number of serial killings has supposedly fallen, so too has the rate of murder cases solved-or “cleared,” in detective lingo. Better forensic science is also credited, as are cultural and technological shifts: less hitchhiking, more helicopter parents, 60 million security cameras.īut here’s a curious fact. Several reasons are commonly cited for this decline, among them longer prison sentences and a reduction in parole (many serial killers are convicted murderers who, after serving time, kill again). Since then, data suggest, the number of serial killers-defined by the National Institute of Justice as those who commit two or more separate murders, often with a psychological motive and a sadistic sexual component-has plunged, falling 85 percent in three decades the FBI now says that serial killers account for fewer than 1 percent of killings. T he helter-skelter 1970s and ’80s are remembered as the serial killer’s heyday-think of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz.