For the past two years, rumors of a serial killer have preoccupied residents of Austin, Texas, and beyond as body upon body kept turning up at a lake in the city. The killer was even given a name: the Rainey Street Ripper.
But authorities now say some 36 drownings in the lake, near Rainey Street neighborhood, were probably related to alcohol and drug consumption and the reservoir’s proximity to the city’s famous bar scene.
There is almost certainly no serial killer. But will that be enough to put the rumors to bed, or does the broader American fascination – both in fact and in fiction – with macabre mass killers mean that facts and truth have little say in the matter?
The report by Texas State University researchers in collaboration with the Austin police department that reviewed 189 cases over a 20-year period found no evidence of a serial murderer, no pattern of clustering or hotspots of similar criminal activity.
“While social media speculation has suggested otherwise, the independent academic study supports the findings of APD investigations and confirms that Austin is not facing a serial killer,” the Austin police department said in statement.
The study found that men are more likely to drown than women, and that could explain why more men than women were drowning in Lady Bird Lake.
Dr Kim Rossmo is professor of criminal justice at the university who developed the field of geographic profiling that helped locate serial killer Robert Pickton, known as the Pig Farmer Killer, in 2001. He told a local news outlet that social media has been “propagating something that’s sensational to get a few more clicks”.
“Let’s not spend money and time chasing phantom serial killers,” he added.
But the absence of evidence of foul play, and efforts to debunk serial killer theories, may not be enough.
Last year, New York police said there was no evidence of a serial killer at work near two nightclubs in Brooklyn, after the bodies of three men were found in a nearby creek over the course of a little over a year.
In August, police in Boston addressed online discussions about a potential serial killer in New England after multiple corpses were found across six states since April. The Massachusetts state police have said there is no evidence to suggest a serial killer. Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, author several books on the subject, said: “There is little commonality among the victims.”
But the interest in serial killers is scarcely on the wane, despite a striking drop in their numbers since the dark heyday of Ted Bundy, who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls between 1974 and 1978, and Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991.
Fox estimates there has been an 80% drop-off since serial killing peaked in the 1970s. At that time there were nearly 300 known active serial killers in the US. A decade later there were 250 active killers, who accounted for between 120 and 180 deaths a year. In the 2010s, there were fewer than 50 known active killers.
Fox points to several factors that might collectively suggest why the numbers have fallen so dramatically.
“We have very few hitchhikers now,” he said. “Back then people put them at significant risk when seemingly good Samaritans gave them a ride.”
The same can be said for motorists accepting help with a flat tire, leading to a serial killer in Indiana being dubbed “The Flat Tire Killer”. “But now we have Uber, so we don’t to hitchhike, and we have cellphones to call for help. Overall, people are much more aware about strangers.”
Equally significant is the adoption of DNA technologies, which did not become available until the 1990s, and the availability of large DNA databanks that can lead to direct identifications or of family members.
Idaho mass murderer Bryan Kohberger was identified in part when genetic genealogy pointed to his family in Pennsylvania. Kohberger, while not strictly a serial killer, studied under DeSales university forensic psychology professor Katherine Ramsland.
“Advances in DNA technology have given authorities the ability to identify killers before they assemble large body counts,” Fox says, adding that cameras, cross-jurisdiction law enforcement agency communication, and reduced street prostitution have helped to reduce opportunities for serial killers.
Thus Kohberger – who killed four students in a single house in Moscow, Idaho – was caught before he could commit a second crime.
Fox, who manages the Associated Press/USA Today/Northeastern University Mass Killing Databasealso points out that in the 1970s there weren’t so many outlets for sexual sadists to satisfy their urges. “With violent imagery available to all they can to some extent satisfy themselves without having to use an unwilling victim,” he says.
But while serial killers fade in reality, there’s a certainly been a surge in interest around serial killers in popular entertainment.
Accused Long Island serial killer Rex Heuermann, who faces trial on charges of murdering seven women next year, has already had two documentaries made about his alleged crimes. The Netflix murder series “Monster”, has looked at Dahmer and Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield, who inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Both shows have been audience hits.
“It’s the killers of yesteryear that are entertaining to people,” says Fox. “And that reflects the fact that we have so many. So many, in fact, that two killers in California that were named Freeway Killer One and Freeway Killer Two.”
Horrifically, the decline in serial killers has coincided with the rise of something equally horrifying and maybe even more of a threat: mass shooters, especially in schools.
“Because of their bizarre and extreme nature, serial killers inspired attention but not necessarily fear, except in a particular community,” Fox argues. “Mass shooting engender fear. So now we have Americans avoiding certain places because they don’t want to get caught up so it’s a different kind of thing.”
Still, the societal need to understand the motivation, or lack of it, for murder remains intact. In a new book, The Monsters We Make, published next week, journalist Rachel Corbett threads together her own family’s experience with murder with a study of criminal profiling, a pursuit that’s more art than science.
“Society needs monsters,” Corbett writes. “They remind us of who we are – and who we are not. They are terrifying because they break down the boundaries between what we consider human and inhuman, and warn us of what we could become.”
The need to create monsters where they may not exist, including the Austin, Massachusetts and Brooklyn scares, confronts a reality identified by Fox that the serial killer era, such as it ever was, has been supplanted.
“Even at it’s height the serial killer epidemic it was vastly overblown,” she says. “Now we’re catching old serial killers but the new ones are doing one-off murders here and there.”
Corbett point out that the stories do serve a purpose.
“A serial killer is Frankenstein – a patchwork for anything you want to project on to it. Conservatives said Ted Bundy was the creation of the loss of religiosity in society, family breakdown and women’s rights. On the left, you had people saying we need advance social programs and understand mental health. Let’s study them and not just kill them.”
Regardless of the real world decline of the crime, the American fascination with serial killers lives on.
