The Question That Would Not Leave Me Alone
I keep coming back to this question because something about it will not leave me alone. When I think about the 1970s and 1980s, America seemed obsessed with serial killers. Names like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and others became part of the national imagination. News reports, police task forces, books, television specials, and later documentaries turned these men into household names. Parents became afraid to let children walk alone because stranger danger felt like it was everywhere. Then somewhere along the way, the national panic seemed to fade. We did not stop having violent crime, but the era of the celebrity serial killer appeared to shrink. That naturally raises a strange question. Did the killers disappear, or did something about society change? The FBI itself says serial murder remains rare and that the exact number of active serial killers cannot be reliably quantified. The more useful question may therefore be not where they went, but why the phenomenon became less visible and what we sometimes mistake for it today.
Serial Killers Never Completely Disappeared
The first thing I had to correct in my own thinking was the idea that serial killers simply vanished. They did not. The FBI still investigates serial murder and maintains national systems designed to connect violent crimes across jurisdictions. The Bureau’s research emphasizes that serial homicide represents only a small fraction of American murders. Some offenders remain unidentified for years because their victims are spread across different cities or states. Samuel Little is a powerful example because DNA and later investigative work connected him to killings committed decades earlier. The FBI ultimately identified him as the most prolific serial killer in United States history after he confessed to ninety-three murders and investigators matched him to dozens of victims. That story tells me killers can operate without becoming famous while they are active. Fame often comes after arrest, confession, or investigators finally connect cases that once looked unrelated. So the quieter news cycle does not mean the crime itself disappeared.
Why the Golden Age of Serial Murder Declined
There are good reasons to believe serial killing became harder to sustain over long periods. DNA technology changed criminal investigations dramatically. Fingerprint databases improved. Surveillance cameras spread through stores, parking lots, streets, and homes. Cell phones began leaving location records and communication trails. Credit cards and digital payments created additional records of where people had been. Law-enforcement agencies also became better at sharing information across jurisdictions. A killer who moved from one city to another once benefited from police departments failing to connect their cases. That weakness has not disappeared, but computerized systems have made it harder to remain invisible. Criminal behavior did not suddenly become less violent because technology improved. The environment simply became less forgiving for somebody trying to kill repeatedly without eventually leaving a pattern.
Our Daily Lives Became Harder to Disappear From
Modern life leaves footprints almost everywhere. If I drive on a toll road, there may be a record. If I use my telephone, there can be location information. If I enter a store, somebody’s camera may capture me. If I search online, digital records may exist. Cars themselves increasingly contain sophisticated electronic systems. Neighbors have doorbell cameras pointed toward sidewalks and streets. None of this guarantees that every crime will be solved. People still disappear and murder cases still go cold. But compare that world with 1975, when somebody could travel with cash, use pay phones, and cross county lines without carrying a device constantly communicating with towers. The ordinary citizen may debate whether all this surveillance is healthy, but from a serial killer’s point of view it creates serious complications. The modern world is simply harder to move through without leaving traces.
The Media Changed Too
Another reason the serial killer seems less visible may have nothing to do with the number of offenders and everything to do with the way we consume information. In the 1970s and 1980s, a few television networks and major newspapers could dominate national attention. When one terrifying case became a national story, millions of Americans were watching essentially the same story together. Today our attention is scattered across hundreds of television channels, websites, podcasts, streaming platforms, and social-media feeds. One person is following politics while another is watching true crime and somebody else is watching sports. A regional series of killings can therefore remain a regional story much longer. When a case does attract national attention, it competes with an endless stream of other information. Ironically, we have more crime media than ever while experiencing fewer moments when one killer owns the entire national conversation. The serial killer may not have disappeared as completely as the shared national audience did.
The Problem With the “FBI Checklist”
I have also heard people describe an old FBI serial-killer checklist containing traits such as superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying, lack of empathy, manipulation, impulsivity, and lack of remorse. Those traits sound familiar because many come from the study of psychopathy. But they are not a checklist proving someone is a serial killer. Robert Hare developed the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, commonly called the PCL-R, as a structured assessment of psychopathic traits and behaviors. Researchers describe psychopathy as involving interpersonal, emotional, lifestyle, and antisocial characteristics. A person can show certain traits without being violent. A violent criminal may also fail to meet criteria for psychopathy. Psychopathy and serial murder overlap in some cases, but they are not interchangeable categories. That distinction matters because once we turn personality traits into a killer checklist, almost anybody we dislike can suddenly begin looking dangerous. Real psychological assessment is much more careful than social-media diagnosis.
Psychopathy Is Not the Same as Murder
This is where the conversation gets especially interesting to me. Psychopathic traits can include grandiosity, deceitfulness, shallow emotion, reduced empathy, impulsivity, irresponsibility, and disregard for social norms. None of those traits automatically produces homicide. Research does find relationships between psychopathy and antisocial conduct, but the connection is statistical rather than destiny. Plenty of people with elevated psychopathic traits never become serial killers. Some may work in ordinary professions and never commit a serious violent crime. Others may behave badly in relationships or workplaces without ever crossing into criminal violence. That should make us cautious about calling politicians, executives, pastors, or anybody else psychopaths simply because we dislike their behavior. Traits exist on dimensions. Diagnosis requires much more than watching somebody on television and checking boxes in our heads.
Robert Hare Did Study the Corporate World
There is truth behind the claim that Robert Hare and colleagues became interested in psychopathic traits outside prisons. Hare worked with researchers studying what they called corporate psychopathy. One study examined 203 corporate professionals participating in management-development programs. Other work developed and studied tools designed to examine psychopathic characteristics in business settings. Researchers became interested because certain interpersonal traits, such as confidence, charm, fearlessness, and willingness to take risks, may sometimes help people advance professionally. The problem comes when those traits are combined with dishonesty, exploitation, lack of empathy, and irresponsibility. That can produce an employee who appears impressive upward while leaving damage underneath. But corporate psychopathy research does not prove that executives are basically serial killers wearing suits. It shows that some personality traits associated with psychopathy can appear in noncriminal environments. The difference between noticing overlapping traits and claiming the same person simply chose a boardroom instead of a basement is enormous.
Politics Has Been Studied Too
Researchers have even examined psychopathic personality traits in American presidents. One study estimated personality traits for forty-two presidents through historical expert ratings and compared those traits with leadership measures. It found that a trait called Fearless Dominance was associated with qualities such as persuasiveness, leadership, crisis management, and presidential performance. Traits related to impulsive antisocial behavior, however, were associated with some negative indicators. That is fascinating because it shows how one characteristic can become useful or harmful depending upon what accompanies it. Fearlessness may help somebody make difficult decisions. Fearlessness combined with recklessness can create disaster. Confidence can inspire people. Confidence combined with deceit and lack of accountability can become dangerous. Psychology is usually more complicated than labeling one personality style good or evil.
Leadership Rewards Some Traits That Can Become Dangerous
I do think modern institutions sometimes reward characteristics that deserve closer examination. We admire confidence. We reward people who make decisions quickly. We praise somebody for being tough, aggressive, competitive, and willing to do what others will not do. In business we even use expressions such as “killer instinct” as compliments. None of those qualities makes somebody violent. But when confidence is detached from humility, power can magnify the problem. When ambition is detached from conscience, people can become expendable. When decisiveness is detached from empathy, suffering starts getting converted into numbers on a spreadsheet. That is where the metaphor connecting power and psychopathy becomes useful to me. I do not need to claim the leader is secretly a serial killer to ask whether the institution rewards emotional coldness too heavily.
Violence Can Be Direct or Structural
The original argument also raises a difficult moral question about what society chooses to call violence. A person physically killing another person clearly commits violence. But public policy can also create suffering on a large scale. Unsafe water, reckless corporate decisions, preventable workplace hazards, wars, and denial of essential resources can result in deaths. Political philosophy and public health often discuss something called structural violence to describe social arrangements that systematically expose people to preventable harm. The moral responsibility in those situations can become much harder to trace. A serial killer personally attacks identifiable victims. A bad policy decision may affect thousands of people through layers of bureaucracy. That does not automatically make the policymaker equivalent to a murderer. Intent, knowledge, legal authority, alternatives, negligence, and causation all matter. But I understand why people become disturbed when deaths caused indirectly receive less emotional attention than deaths caused by one visible offender.
Body Counts Can Become Statistics
There is something about large institutions that can make human suffering feel abstract. Ten people dying in one dramatic crime can dominate television for weeks. Ten thousand people suffering gradually from poverty, pollution, inadequate health care, war, or preventable disease may appear as numbers in a report. Our brains respond differently to identifiable victims than to enormous statistics. Psychologists sometimes call part of this the identifiable-victim effect. One face can move us emotionally in ways that a million anonymous people cannot. That does not mean every large-scale policy failure is criminal. It means scale can create emotional distance. The person signing a document may never see the family living with the consequences. That distance makes empathy especially important in leadership. Decisions involving millions of lives should require more moral seriousness, not less, simply because the victims are spread across a map.
We Should Be Careful About Calling Politicians Psychopaths
Political anger can make psychological labels very tempting. If I believe a politician is cruel, dishonest, egotistical, or manipulative, calling that person a psychopath may feel satisfying. But a clinical concept should not become a political insult. We cannot reliably diagnose public figures from television appearances or speeches. Psychopathy assessment involves structured information and professional judgment. The same caution applies across parties and ideologies. People can make harmful decisions without having a personality disorder. They can lie because they are ambitious, tribal, frightened, corrupt, or simply dishonest. Diagnosing everyone we oppose can actually weaken criticism because it shifts attention away from documented behavior toward amateur psychology. I would rather say exactly what somebody did and explain why I believe it was wrong. Evidence is stronger than a label.
The Same Goes for Executives and Religious Leaders
The temptation does not stop with politicians. A ruthless executive can look psychopathic to employees. A manipulative religious leader can appear to fit every trait on a checklist. Sometimes those observations may point toward genuinely exploitative behavior. But behavior should still be examined directly. Did the leader lie? Did they manipulate finances? Did they exploit vulnerable people? Did they punish dissent? Did they knowingly expose people to harm? Those are questions we can investigate. Saying somebody has a disorder without sufficient evidence can become a shortcut around doing that work.
What “Successful Psychopathy” Really Means
The phrase successful psychopathy can sound like psychology has discovered a secret class of killers running society. That is not what the research means. The term generally refers to people with elevated psychopathic traits who function relatively successfully in society without the severe criminal outcomes seen in forensic populations. Researchers debate how useful the concept is and how it should be measured. The idea is not that successful psychopaths are necessarily committing hidden murders. It is that some traits associated with psychopathy may coexist with professional achievement when antisocial behavior is limited or expressed differently. Fearlessness, social boldness, emotional detachment, and stress resistance may sometimes confer advantages. Deception, exploitation, and lack of empathy can obviously create serious disadvantages for everyone around them. The scientific question is how these traits combine and which patterns predict harmful behavior. That is much more nuanced than “serial killers discovered suits.”
Serial Murder and Corporate Harm Are Different Moral Categories
I understand the metaphor comparing the serial killer with the ruthless executive, but I would not collapse them into the same category. Intentional homicide is direct criminal violence. A business decision that causes harm may range from an honest mistake to negligence to deliberate criminal conduct. Those distinctions matter morally and legally. Someone knowingly dumping poison into drinking water is different from somebody making a policy choice with uncertain consequences. A government deliberately targeting civilians is different from a policy producing unintended economic hardship. If we call everything murder, the word eventually stops helping us distinguish degrees of responsibility. Still, institutional power should not become a shield from accountability. When decision-makers knowingly cause preventable harm for profit or political advantage, society has every reason to investigate and punish wrongdoing. Accountability should follow evidence rather than social status.
Why Some Powerful People Seem Untouchable
One part of the argument resonates because power changes the way wrongdoing is processed. A poor person committing a street crime encounters one legal system. A corporation may have teams of attorneys, political relationships, insurance, and complex regulatory structures. Powerful people can sometimes negotiate outcomes that ordinary citizens could never obtain. That does not mean every wealthy defendant escapes accountability. Executives go to prison, corporations pay major penalties, politicians lose office, and institutions can face civil liability. But resources clearly affect the ability to defend oneself and shape public narratives. That can leave ordinary people feeling there are two different standards. When trust in institutions weakens, theories about hidden predators become easier to believe. The best response is stronger accountability and transparency, not assuming every powerful person is secretly a psychopath.
Serial Killers Became Entertainment
There is another irony in this whole conversation. America may no longer obsess over active serial killers the same way it once did, but we certainly have not stopped consuming them as entertainment. Streaming services produce documentaries, dramatizations, podcasts, and limited series about killers who died decades ago. Dahmer became a streaming phenomenon long after the murders ended. Bundy continues appearing in documentaries and films. Sometimes the killer becomes more famous than the victims. That troubles me. Curiosity about evil is understandable because people want to understand how another human being could do something so terrible. But entertainment can cross a line when murder becomes content and victims become supporting characters. If we are going to remember these crimes, I would rather spend more time remembering the people whose lives were taken than polishing the mythology of the person who killed them.
The Victims Were Often People Society Overlooked
Serial killers have historically benefited from society’s tendency to overlook certain victims. Samuel Little murdered many women whose deaths did not initially receive sustained attention. The FBI noted that he targeted vulnerable people, including women involved in prostitution or struggling with addiction, and that some deaths were originally misclassified or inadequately investigated. That tells us something important about whose disappearance receives urgency. A killer does not need supernatural intelligence when institutions fail to connect the victims. Marginalized people can disappear without national headlines. That remains a concern today. The absence of a Netflix documentary does not mean nobody was harmed. Sometimes the people least visible to the wider public are precisely the people predators learn they can target.
Modern Forensics Changed the Hunt
DNA deserves special credit for changing serial-murder investigations. Biological evidence preserved from decades-old crimes can now identify suspects or connect separate cases. Genetic genealogy has added another powerful tool in some investigations. Cold cases once believed unsolvable have been reopened. Families have received answers after decades of uncertainty. That changes the calculation for offenders because evidence can remain dangerous long after the crime. A killer may escape detection today and still be identified twenty years later when technology catches up. Serial killers of earlier decades operated in a world where evidence could lose value over time. Modern forensic science sometimes makes the opposite true. Evidence collected today