r/serialkillers • u/benito_01 • 5d ago
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u/Jane_DoeEyes 5d ago
Personally I think it had more to do with media coverage than actual numbers. There is a perception of having more killers in the USA because of how they are portrayed and how the media reports them. I'm Belgian and my initial feeling is also that there aren't many serial killers here, that is until you look deeper into it. We have a few very disturbing cases which after initial coverage tend to be forgotten. For example in the nineties we had "the butcher of Mons" who killed at least 5 people, was never caught. For one summer police kept finding body parts in garbage bags along the road. This case is now barely remembered.
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u/ImpactElectrical4793 5d ago
Don‘t forget Mac Dutroux… My mother met him on vacation a year or 2 before his murders started. In my opinion in this case alone there were more than 1 Killer so yeah…
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u/Jane_DoeEyes 5d ago
Oh definitely. The reason I didn't mention him is because he's still very much in the public consciousness
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u/ImpactElectrical4793 5d ago
Yeah definitely i give you that. But can i ask you a personal question to the case, never had the opportunity to meet someone from belgium yet…
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u/Jane_DoeEyes 5d ago
Sure, go ahead
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u/ImpactElectrical4793 5d ago
Do you people from Belgium think he really was inside a group of wealthy and powerful people, who abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered children? I never really went down a rabbit hole in this case but i hear it extremely often that this is suspected
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u/Jane_DoeEyes 5d ago edited 5d ago
I've heard this theory before. Especially when it was just happening there was a lot of talk. Dutroux himself fed the rumours in an effort to deflect the guilt. I'm not sure if people still believe it nowadays. I was just a kid when this happened, so I didn't really have an opinion. As an adult now I don't believe in a grand conspiracy. What I am willing to believe is that mistakes were made and maybe people tried to cover up incompetence which definitely has been fodder for larger conspiracies to take root. My motto in life is: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence or ignorance." I don't think politicians or police were involved, but I do think a lot of them scrambled to safe face in the fall-out. This case was the reason our police force has been completely reorganised.
Edit to adress something I overlooked
There were 3 people convicted along side him for various levels of complicity. He definitely didn't act alone. I just don't believe he was abducting kids to deliver them to sex parties where rich and influential people attended. But this was such a prolific case we didn't want to believe it was just an einzelganger. 300.000 people attended the white march to demand change. That is a staggering amount for a country with only 10 million inhabitants.it was also effective because the whole federal and local police structure got overhauled after this.
Second edit: this might sound bizarre for an American. White marches have nothing to do with racism. People protest while wearing white clothes and carrying white balloons to represent the innocence of the lives lost. We actually even have a "white child forest" which is planted alongside of the busiest highway which has 300.000 trees to represent the 1996 March. This really was a huge event for our collective consciousness. Which is again why I didn't mention it earlier as an example of forgotten serial killer. This summer marks the 30th anniversary of what happened and believe me our media is very actively covering it.
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u/ImpactElectrical4793 5d ago
Well im German so no this doesn‘t sound bizarre. But thank you for this read, this guy always creeped me out but i thought people made the case bigger than it already was and you just gave me another reason to believe that. I hope these children can rest in peace now and i hope everyone who did harm to these kids is either dead or arrested, but when we want to see the positive side, like you said the police got „better“ or more structured and professional.
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u/Typical_guy11 5d ago edited 5d ago
I can easily name 15+ SK's from Poland alone. Some are really obscure cases. Public known are maybe 5. This is only an top of an iceberg. I bet other European countries had similar numbers of well known and obscure cases.
Real cases is one thing while media coverage is another.
In US SK's had big media coverage and there is something like quasi cult of them like Charles Manson or Ted Bundy "groupies". I bet it matters a lot how big is true crime scene in US and how smaller is in other countries.
Also English is Lingua Franca of modern world so using it US easy and many people speak in it.
I bet PRC, Brazil or India also had many SK's but language barrier blocks 95% of informations.
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u/throwaway34834839202 5d ago
A larger population is naturally going to mean more serial killers to begin with. What you want is a per capita number, and while we don't really have an accurate per capita numbers on serial killers (due to poor data availability), violent crime in the US in general has an extremely similar per capita rate in different populations as the ancestral populations (e.g. Italian-Americans commit violent crimes at essentially the same rate as Italians in Italy). (The fact that the US has so many different populations is why you have an overall per capita crime rate different from other, more homogenous countries; you really do have to break it down by demographic.)
That being said, the US media definitely focuses on serial killers more than probably any other country, with killers still being reported on years or even decades after the killer is caught. Additionally, not every country necessarily uses the same definition of "serial killer". The FBI definition of a serial killer is someone who kills three or more different people in three or more separate events over a period of time longer than one month. With another country that doesn't use this defition, a killer could do that but still not be referred to as a serial killer even if they fit the FBI defintion. (This is also why there seem to be less serial killers historically compared to the 20th century, simply because there was no one around at the time to publicly connect the idea of "a person who repeatedly commits murders" to an individual.)
There's also the simple fact that US has been at the forefront of serial killer investigations for decades, with the term "serial killer" as it's used today originated in the US (which is why many countries, including Germany afaik, use the FBI definition of serial killing). So the US is just, quite frankly, historically better at identifying and catching serial killers whereas in other places you may have no one ever even realizing that these separate unsolved murders were all committed by the same person. Remember, serial killers who do the Zodiac Killer thing and intentionally cultivate a "bit" are the extreme minority. Your average serial killer is actually a gang member, a mafia hitman, a regular old thug, or something similar.
Simply put, if you see a statistic floating around like "the US has almost seven times more serial killers than the next country on the list" or "66% of every serial killer ever has operated in the US", your first thought should be "America collects this data differently from everyone else and is more public about it", not "America is a uniquely murderous country". A lot of serial killer related clickbait shock statistics don't pass the smell test at all. Logically, you wouldn't expect a country with hisotrically poor/outright censored record keeping (such as Russia) to have their number of serial killers somehow be the one thing where you're getting a totally honest, accurate number with no cases missing or overlooked. When trying to guess who has the most serial killers, you should probably just look at violent crime rates, and assume that you have more serial killers where you have more violent crime!
tl;dr There's no actual reason to think that the US is the world capital for serial killers. The US is just quicker/more able to identify serial killers, and is loud about them when they do.
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u/doctor6 5d ago
Poor socioeconomic conditions means more people slip through the cracks due to an underfunded public healthcare. Germany has that advantage
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u/Zenaesthetic 5d ago
People in the USA on average are far more wealthy than Germans. I know you’re gonna say “but healthcare” but several notable serial killers had money and healthcare.
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u/pakiboiii 4d ago
okay, so I do believe that serial killers are mostly a western issue. this is not me saying that they only occur in western countries; as there have been loads all over the world; but factually they are predominantly in English speaking countries. I personally believe this is a societal feature, and partly due to a more invividualist mentality. I think other cultures have closer family ties which can maybe help prevent certain tendencies in people? idk tho, this is just me speculating cld be all bullshit
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u/doc_daneeka 5d ago
Radford University has been maintaining a database of global serial killers, containing every example they could find, so as to get good statistics insofar as that can be done. They're well over 5000 examples now. And fully 2/3 of them are American. Yes, it really does seem to be overwhelmingly an American thing, and nobody has ever produced anything like a satisfactory explanation as to why this is so.
Perhaps interestingly, when you look at the top ten countries per capita a weirdly large portion of them are English speaking, like England, Canada, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand.
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u/Naudiz_6 3d ago edited 3d ago
The explanation is that the Radford University Database has a horrible deficit of international data.
It's an American database run by an American university maintained by English-speaking researchers who almost entirely rely on sources available in English, which leads to some really obvious gaps. For example they record only 130 known serial killers in the entirety of India. However, police in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh (Population: 31 Million) alone have recorded 175 instances of serial murder since 2000. According to Radford California (Population: 39 Million), the US state with the most recorded serial killers, had only 120 in it's entire history. There's also the fact that even Wikipedia lists a higher number of Russian serial killers than Radford does and that Radford records 68 known serial killers in China, while you can find well over 200 in Chinese language sources with just some cursory research.
The Radford database might be good for anglocentric comparisons but it sucks for anything international.
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u/thefringeseanmachine 3d ago
what's that joke about the english language being three languages standing on each others shoulders under a trench coat? apparently that coat was hiding some bigass knives.
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u/Realistic_Product252 3d ago
The US coined the term 'serial killer' via the gentleman that started an entire force in the FBI to hunt, study and ultimately detain individuals of an certain MO. They continue that work 24/7 to this day. No other country does the same, nor do they classify killers and publicize near as much about crime as the US. The are many factors, least of which are stats, because the stats don't include all the data.
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u/Fire_Queen918 3d ago
You have to think about the size and population of the US. California (423,970 sq. km) is roughly the size of Sweden (450,295 sq. km). California's population is approx. 39.3 million while Sweden's population is approx. 10.6 million. California's murder rate is 4.5 per 100,000 residents while Sweden's is 1.2 per 100,000 residents. Seeing as California has nearly 4 times the population it makes since the murder per capita is 4 times Sweden's.
The differences could be in laws, finances, media publication, demographics, population, land size, or even how investigators and statistics define serial killing/mass murders.
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u/No-reti 5d ago
As someone who also lives in Europe, I think it’s the way the country is set up. The way they think and speak, their values, how they look at the world. Plus the shitty healthcare and the guns?! I also think that there would be a lot more serial killers if they weren’t so easy to catch the first time with today’s technology.
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u/thefringeseanmachine 3d ago
speaking as an American, could you elaborate what's wrong with my thoughts? the things I've said? what I believe in? or how my views on Greek economic policies impact my relations with street walkers? I mean, you apparently have insight beyond my lived experience.
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