Are US serial killers harder to catch?

[OldClothes]

Had a random creepy thought today that Peter Sutcliffe might have never have been caught if he had been committing his crimes in a remote part of America rather than (mostly) northern England.

This of course could apply more generally - logically, serial killers operating in big, empty areas (e.g. Wyoming) would be harder to catch than those in well-populated areas such as, for example, West Yorkshire or Greater Manchester. But, do the stats support this?

www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-explains-the-decline-of-serial-killers

stats suggest fewer serial killers than there used to be

There is a great podcast about Israel Keyes who travelled all over the US killling people.

I think it's called True Crime Bullshit.

He was very much caught by accident and was extremely aware of US jurisdictional "issues".

It's good that things have improved here.

Yes because:

1. All the States have their own LE so if a killer is crossing state lines and travelling around to kill then it might even be hard for police to understand they're looking for a serial killer in the first place. Example: see Henry Lee Lucas.
2. US a hell of a lot bigger with big stretches of uninhabited rural land and no CCTV, so much easier to kill and dump a body with less lieklihood of being seen. example: see Green River Killer, Highway of Tears.
3. US has guns which facilitate a killing at a distance and a quicker cleaner getaway than other methods of murder. Example: see Zodiac killer.

The police have improved their ability to share information in the last several years in terms of fingerprints, DNA and other types of data banks but that information has to have been collected before in can be recorded. Sadly, we have too many people whose disappearances are not investigated by police and too many remote areas where remains can be placed and never found. Individual crimes may be investigated but it is not always likely that a missing person would be linked to another case in another jurisdiction unless there was something to tie the incidents together.

I fascinated by true crime ,there were five serial kilkers all operating at the same across America during the 70,s and 80,s apparently,
Ted Bundy
Jeffrey Dhamer
BTK
The Green River killer and
John Wayne Gacy

I remember reading a theory a while back that the prevalence of serial killers in the 70's and 80's was in part caused by having fathers who were WW2 veterans.

Highway of Tears is Canada, not USA. At least one serial killer was linked to some of the murders. The issue there was, TBH, that the RCMP dismissed the deaths of Indigenous women.

Terrible that indigenous women didn't matter to them. I seem to remember seeing a doc suggesting that public transport near the highway was so poor that many women (and men) had no option but to hitch hike.

I grew up in rural Kansas, same era and state as BTK. He was uncaught for so long that he basically wasn’t news any more and that is quite an odd feeling looking back.

In terms of how much violent crime there is and what gets police attention, I agree with PP that there is often just too much and it gets pushed aside. I lived outside a farm town and went into town to go to school. The population there was about 2000 at the time and there were four murders that I remember - not serial cases, just murders. One was not a mystery at all and the murderer was arrested within hours. Two I don’t remember what happened. The fourth was a student at my high school and it’s still a cold case. This is where I feel small town cases just get pushed aside - there was lots of local speculation about what happened and there is still talk about people who think they know what happened and there’s just never been a proper investigation. It was beyond the means of the small town force I think.

In general it was very easy to be off the grid in rural America in the days before mobile phones. I assume now phone tracking would make it easier to pinpoint the same person pinging you near all the different victims. But before that, solitary life was relatively easy.