I'm watching the netflix documentary on Ted Bundy, and i realized that most serial killers i have heard of were active during the 60's - 70's. Why was there a rise in serial killers during this period?
EDIT: Didn't recieve any notifications for this post, went to check on it just now and hot dang did this blow up! Thanks for the answers everybody!
Is it okay to ask a follow up question?
Pure speculation on my part. I know this would be incredibly difficult to prove. I just wondered if this has ever been a point of consideration.
A follow up question: If it turns out that there weren't more serial killers in the '60s and '70s, why did famous killers from those decades become so famous and not those from other decades?
This is a great question with a lot in it -- right off the bat, I'm going to be dealing largely with the United States in this answer, and largely in terms of historical hindsight rather than whether contemporary Americans of the 1960s and 1970s had the impression that they were dealing with more instances of a unique type of crime than Americans of the 1940s and 1950s, for that matter Americans of the 1980s and 1990s. The OP mentions the number of serial killers they've heard of, as well as the objective number of serial killers, and that might be a decent place to start. Indisputably some of the most famous American serial killers hail from these decades, but they hardly have a lock on grotesque violent crime, and some of the elements of these killings that might have appeared uniquely terrible to audiences in 1965 or 1975 are old hat to modern students of the 24-hour news cycle. Why do we still remember this particular cohort of criminals to the exclusion of later criminals? Why are the serial killers from this decade so oddly high-profile? Why might there appear to be a rise in the number of serial killers apprehended in the 1960s and 1970s?
One conventional answer might be better reporting and study by law enforcement resulting in more frequent apprehensions than in previous decades, and thus a brief peak in the prominence of serial murder before these developments in criminal detection resulted in fewer successful serial murderers, either because they were apprehended before escalating to murder or because of a reduction in the background criminal factors that lend themselves to repeat offenses. Midcentury America saw a number of exciting developments in communications technology as employed by law enforcement, from the growth of 911 as a standardized emergency reporting number to the implementation of two-way radio, improved standards of data retention and evidence storage, and the large-scale implementation of law enforcement databases. These technologies facilitated cross-jurisdictional cooperation and communication, to an extent, but the transition from viewing serial murders as individualized local phenomena was also aided by changes made on a federal law enforcement level.
The national crime database began to take shape in the 1960s and 1970s on first a regional level and then a national one, facilitated by federal law enforcement's interest in tracking crimes across state lines. The FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database was founded in 1967 with the express goal of facilitating interdepartmental cooperation and centralizing law enforcement resources. Initially, the NCIC tracked only wanted persons and four categories of stolen property (guns, vehicles, license plates, and other articles) across a limited number of states, but its regional scope quickly expanded in 1975 a database of missing persons was added.
Biometrics databases really began to flower as well in the 20th century, and Hoover's FBI participated in those developments from the 1920s onward. Physical paper cards were still located in a physical card catalog, indexed by human technicians, and developments in card computing technology made the process quicker but not remotely quick enough for the amount of material that needed to be indexed. Beginning in the early 60s, a substantial effort was made by the FBI's Identification Division to automate the fingerprint identification process, and by the late 1970s and 1980s, these automated systems began to gain traction on a city and state level. Increases in centralization and automation facilitated the identification of crimes that may not have initially appeared obviously linked -- homicides spread across a broader geographic spread, or with less initially conspicuous common links in their victim profile or modus operandi. At the same time, the FBI was also working on harnessing this and similar data for the sake of internal conclusions -- new approaches to serial crime, new conceptualizations of sex crime, and the developing field of behavioral analysis. In the 1970s, local policing was also under new scrutiny -- analyses like the Rand Corporation's three-volume Criminal Investigation Process report sought to identify shortcomings in the orthodox investigative process, and federal law enforcement agencies took notice of the implications for American law enforcement.
The initiative to interview a sample of living, incarcerated, sexually motivated serial killers, fictionalized in David Fincher's series Mindhunter, sprang out of a similar initiative to improve local policing methods by briefing local law enforcement members on best practices, including imposing a more uniform understanding of the motivations of serial murder. Traveling from city to city teaching "road school" lectures might not be as glamorous as interviewing sexual deviants or even sitting around in a basement office spitballing alternative ways to describe multiple murderers, and that's why media about FBI profilers (real and fictional) tends to focus on the latter aspects of agents' activities rather than the former, but both types of initiatives (in-house and local) would have a big impact in terms of facilitating local law enforcement's identification of possible serial killers -- even state law enforcement's understanding of the psychology of crime and the procedures of criminal investigation. This push helped unify the idea of serial murder as a national (and international) phenomenon, rather than a series of localized aberrations.
Developments in the study of criminal psychology within the FBI took off in the 1960s and 1970s -- pioneers like Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany used the principles of criminal psychology as they understood them to develop offender profiles and oversaw the formation of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. Formal offender profiling wasn't new to the 1960s, but the formalization of its practice at a federal level facilitated the funding of projects that would ultimately form much of our understanding of what serial killers are and what they do, as well as harnessing the expertise of specialists in other kinds of serial crime to develop formal models of sex crime that reflected the psychological understandings of the 1960s rather than a jumble of holdovers from previous eras. Hallmarks of the modern idea of the "serial killer" from this era include an understanding that crimes might escalate -- from burglary with intent to ransack to serial rape, to serial murder, for instance -- as well as many of the psychological landmarks associated with serial killing that still persist.
We can credit some of the prominence of the serial killer in this era (when viewed in hindsight) to the emerging definition of the serial killer, including the term itself as a coinage. Broader terms like "maniac" and "pervert" and even terms with a more medical ring to them like "psychopathic personality", didn't function well as synonyms or as diagnostic terms in the developing field of criminal profiling as practiced by the FBI. There certainly was a well-developed presence for a sort of proto-serial-killer figure in American pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s -- from the Merry Widow Murderer of Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt, who in many ways fits the stereotypical profile of the white male serial killer from tip to toe, to the woman-strangling Lonely One killer of Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story "The Whole Town's Sleeping" -- but you'll very, very seldom find the term "serial killer" in English-language crime literature before the 1970s. Laypeople's understandings of offender motivations were all over the map, influenced by pop-psychology and anecdotal evidence. The (re-)coining of the term "serial killer" was an effort to clear out some of the detritus of previous decades, and it was accompanied by attempts at a clinical and evidence-based analysis of offender histories and behavioral patterns. (I say "re-coining" because there's evidence to suggest much earlier usage in the German-language works of criminologist Ernst Gennat. I suspect that if we weren't talking about the 60s and 70s in the United States as a sort of golden age of serial killing, we'd be talking about Gennat's stomping grounds, the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s.)
This attempt at constructing a coherent scientific profile of the serial killer as a type of criminal distinct from the (murderous but non-serial) mass-murderer or (non-murderous, sexually-motivated) child molester (or, for that matter, the messy loosely-categorized types of criminal described in journalistic sources) coincided with some pretty significant changes in how child abuse, sexual assault, and domestic violence were culturally viewed and the institutional responses their survivors received. This sea change was achieved through the concerted effort of both specialists and laypeople, and in some respects was facilitated by parallel developments in psychology and feminist theory. All that might be too little too late for serial criminals who were themselves victims of child abuse, sexual abuse, and domestic violence (which is to say, many of them) but it still contributed significantly to the developing professional understanding of the psychology of interpersonal violence.