Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky Read Free Book Online Page A

according to the statistics. 22
    The fate of missing adults is even harder to determine—if anybody notices them missing in the first place. In 1971, when Juan Corona initiated the era of big-number serial murder, none of his twenty-six transient victims were reported missing until their graves were discovered. Five remain nameless to this day. Some of the victims for whose deaths Henry LeeLucas was convicted remain unidentified. During his trial they would be named for articles of clothing they were wearing when their bodies were found. A young woman Lucas picked up hitchhiking in Oklahoma City was found dead in a culvert wearing only socks. She remained known to the police and the courts only by the name “Orange Socks.” Richard Cottingham’s teenage victim found in the Times Square hotel with her head severed remains unidentified. Some of the bodies dug up from under Gacy’s house remain anonymous.
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    While serial murder is not a new phenomenon, its dramatic rise in incidence in the last three decades is. Eighty percent of all known male serial killers in the United States appeared between 1950 and 1995. Serial killers between 1975 and 1995 accounted for 45 percent of the total of both male and female killers in the United States between 1800 and 1995. 23 Between 1960 and 1990, confirmed serial homicides increased by 940 percent. 24 By early 1980, the rapid rise in serial murder was causing a panic that seized the nation. Most frightening were statistics that began to emerge from reliable sources that a huge number of children were being abducted by serial killers. Congress began to look into the issue, declaring that the nation was facing a “serial killer epidemic.” Even Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control got into the controversy with its assessment of serial murders as an increasing cause of death in America.
    In the 1990s there were all sorts of secondary stories related to serial killing. First was the movie Silence of the Lambs, which introduced into mass consciousness the idea of FBI profilers and the character of serial killer Hannibal Lecter. The controversies of Bret Easton Ellis’s book American Psycho, the marketing of serial killer trading cards, AOL’s closing of Sondra London’s serial killer Web site, the market for artworks created by serial killers, and online auctions of their artifacts all contributed to a prevailing serial killer culture.
    The 1990s marked a continuing wave of serial homicides heavily covered by the media. Television satellite trucks rushed to Gainesville, Florida, to cover practically live the five gruesome mutilations of college students in August 1990. In July 1991, an estimated 450 journalists covered the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer, who was charged with cannibalizing seventeen victims in Wisconsin and Ohio. The capture of serial bomber Ted Kaczynski—theUnabomber—after twenty years of bombings dominated headlines in the mid-1990s, and media organizations paid $6,500 for the privilege of access to his subsequent trial. The murder of Italian fashion mogul Gianni Versace in Miami propelled the issue of serial spree homicide into the headlines in 1997. In 2001 there was the arrest of Gary Ridgway, the suspect in the Green River murders, which had remained unsolved for twenty years.
    It just keeps coming and coming. In the autumn of 2002, the Beltway Sniper murders were covered on live television as they unfolded—another case of serial spree killing. In May 2003, police arrested a man suspected in a series of seven rape murders in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and later that year police in Washington State announced the closing of the Green River Killer case with Gary Ridgway’s guilty plea in an astonishing forty-eight murders. In February 2004, law enforcement in Arkansas and Mississippi joined agencies from Texas and Oklahoma to search for a killer who police say is a long-haul truck driver and preys on women around truck