Are Human Monsters Being Killed Off?

DNA testing is the key to help close many unsolved homicides

- BRAD HUNTER

WHEN prison officials jabbed a needle containing a cocktail of death into the chubby arm of serial killer John Wayne Gacy that should have been the end of it.

But even with his ticket punched "MORGUE", the Killer Clown - executed on May 10, 1994 has persevered in the public's consciousness.

Gacy isn't alone, a slew of documentaries of his fellow twisted brethren dominate Netflix and other streaming services.

Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, and the Boston Strangler among others have been given the treatment.

There is no shortage.

At one point in the early 1980s, southern California had so many serial killers hunting its sun-kissed landscape that there were two Freeway Killers.

If the late 1960s to the 1980s were the golden age of the serial killer, boffins now say this terrifying breed of monster is in decline. Northeastern University in Boston criminology professor James Fox said: "Part of it has to do with the same reason the murder rate has gone down.

"You have a surging number of people behind bars, so some of the would-be serial killers were likely behind bars as opposed to in the bars looking for victims." Fox is one of the co-authors, with Jack Levin and Emma Fridel, of a new book entitled Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder.

Serial murder hit its peak in the 1970s and 1980s when desperate loners scoured the United States looking for victims on the country's highways and byways.

According to the book, the number of serial killers hit its apogee in the late 1970s when there around 300 known serial killers at work in the U.S.

By the 1980s, the number had dropped to 250 active killers who accounted for between 120 and 180 murders per year.