Collage: Piranesi
Took a break from the cross stitch to get out something that's been rattling around in my brain ever since I re-read Piranesi.
While listening to an old episode of You're Wrong About, "Where Have All the Serial Killers Gone?"
This is an interesting and much chewed-over topic amongst those of us who are interested in true crime. I'm not sure there are "fewer" of them so much as a) they're getting caught after the first or maybe second murder, because technology has improved and there's so much more surveillance, and b) they're also focusing increasingly on what Purdue University professor Kenna Quinet referred to as "the missing missing" in a 2018 paper: undocumented persons; the unhoused and transient; and the lowest rung of sex workers, like the women who work truck stops.
But also I think there probably are less than there were in the latter half of the 20th century, and my pet theory is threefold:
1. Lead abatement on a massive scale;
2. Making children wear helmets;
3. No one being raised by WWII vet fathers who came home to zero mental help and were told "Well, the war's over, forget about all the people you killed and the truly awful things you saw! Therapy, what are you, some kind of pansy? Just deal with it by drinking a bottle of scotch and abusing your children, like a real man!!"
While listening to an old episode of You're Wrong About, "Where Have All the Serial Killers Gone?"
This is an interesting and much chewed-over topic amongst those of us who are interested in true crime. I'm not sure there are "fewer" of them so much as a) they're getting caught after the first or maybe second murder, because technology has improved and there's so much more surveillance, and b) they're also focusing increasingly on what Purdue University professor Kenna Quinet referred to as "the missing missing" in a 2018 paper: undocumented persons; the unhoused and transient; and the lowest rung of sex workers, like the women who work truck stops.
But also I think there probably are less than there were in the latter half of the 20th century, and my pet theory is threefold:
1. Lead abatement on a massive scale;
2. Making children wear helmets;
3. No one being raised by WWII vet fathers who came home to zero mental help and were told "Well, the war's over, forget about all the people you killed and the truly awful things you saw! Therapy, what are you, some kind of pansy? Just deal with it by drinking a bottle of scotch and abusing your children, like a real man!!"