Hunting Serial Killers with Michael Hobbes

This week, Mike and Sarah reunite to hunt for serial killers, and try to figure out whether they’re really endangered. Digressions include crow funerals, Carrie Bradshaw, and how we feel about being called mom and dad.

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Transcript

Sarah: By the way, right before I got back on, I was distracted for a minute because I saw a mother raccoon carrying a rat in her mouth and walking along my fence with her two babies following behind her.

Michael: Oh my god.

Sarah: It was so nice. 

Michael: It’s actually kind of cute. Yeah, I like them. 

Sarah: It's super cute. It sucks for the rat, but every day in nature is very complicated, morally.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. Today we are looking for serial killers with Michael Hobbes, my favorite person to look for serial killers with. We are addressing the pressing question of whether there are fewer serial killers now than there were in what some people call the ‘golden age’ of serial killers, the seventies and eighties. This is an interesting question to try and answer. It's kind of like how many pythons are there in the Everglades, because it's really hard to count the pythons in the Everglades. So you could say, well, there's fewer now than there used to be because we're catching fewer. I don't know if that's true of pythons, but it does seem to be true of serial killers. Or you could say these pythons, there's thousands and thousands of pythons. There's more than there have ever been, and they're just better hiders than they used to be.  

I wanted to talk about this with Mike, largely because this is a topic for an article that I'm working on and will be out soon. And this has just been filling up my brain for a couple of months now, and I really wanted to bring back one of my favorite people to talk through ideas that I'm trying to figure out and understand, because it was always such a wonderful part of doing the show that we got to bring our ideas and our questions to each other. And so this is me and Mike going on an Everglades adventure, and we have some ideas. We are less confident in our assertions than the FBI, but we're going on an adventure and we're excited for you to come with us.  

And our live shows are about to happen. I can't believe it. The Portland show is coming up this Friday, the 16th. The Seattle show will be on the 18th. LA on the 20th, and San Francisco on the 22nd. I really hope you can make it. And if not, I feel like unless this goes singularly horribly, we're going to do more of these, is my hope. And that means you'll get more chances. In the Portland and Seattle shows, I'm going to be joined on stage by Chelsey Weber-Smith. In the San Francisco and LA shows, I will be up there with Jamie Loftus, two of my favorite people in the world. And in all of the shows, Carolyn Kendrick will be there playing the most amazing music in the world. And we've got some shirts and stuff over on Tee Public. You should check them out if you love Vocal Fry, if you're a sadistic switch hitter, if you are rushed, sloppy, irritated, and alive, we have designs for you. 

Also, this is a ‘choose your own adventure’, because if you're listening to the main feed version of this episode, it's going to be about an hour long and be edited down. And if you're listening to this either on Patreon or on your Apple+ subscription, then we have done the thing that people asked us to do for years, which is to give you a super-sized version of the show that is less edited down so you can hear more of the cul-de-sacs and digressions and sort of random moments between me and Mike. And if you're subscribing to bonus episodes, thank you so much for doing that. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. All right, let's go get our big butterfly nets and catch some serial killers. 

My money don't jiggle jiggle, it folds. I like to watch you wiggle wiggle, fo sho. Damnit. I've heard this like hundreds of times, and then it's like, six foot two in a compact, driving in a Fiat, you really ought to see it. Yeah, it's great. It's a Louis Theroux rap. 

Michael: Just release that this week instead of a podcast. That’s great.

Sarah:  No podcast for you, just the Louis Theroux rap.

Michael: It's just a novelty rap podcast at this point. 

Sarah: Okay. Would you like to do an intro? Let's do it. 

Michael: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes dad visits from the downtown hotel.

Sarah: Are you still living in the downtown hotel? I thought you'd gotten a house with a nice lady. 

Michael: I didn't want to tell you about it, but since you came over the other day, I guess the secret's out.

Sarah: Yeah. We love a nice lady. We could always use another in the world. Who are you? Have you been here before? 

Michael: I'm Michael Hobbes. I did some research before coming on. Seems like a legitimate show. 

Sarah:  Oh yeah. You've heard of us?

Michael: Yeah, it's good. 

Sarah: We do get written about a little bit sometimes. Michael Hobbes, you are the dad of all of our show, of all of the shows.

Michael: After you were on Maintenance Phase, people made it real weird with the dad and mom metaphors. 

Sarah: I did see a little bit of that. And honestly, it warmed my heart, because that's how I see it. Which I realize is ridiculous, but I do.  

Michael: A lot of them were real cute, but then a couple of them took it too far and it was like, okay. 

Sarah: What were they like? Were they like, I want to sleep on a pillow made out of Michael Hobbes's bones? 

Michael: It was like, mom and dad have invited a third into their relationship or something, and I'm just like… 

Sarah: Because we're both having sex with Aubrey. 

Michael: Let's just come up with a whole new metaphor, everybody. 

Sarah: Yeah. Well, I see us more as sitcom parents than as sexual parents. 

Michael: Me too. Thank you for clarifying that. Yes.  

Sarah: Okay. I feel as a pure numbers game, there's at least one person who this is their first ever episode that they've ever listened to. And they're like, what the fuck is going on? Why are these people so fucking giddy? So Michael Hobbes, who are you? Who am I? What is this show? What? What is what? 

Michael: We once did a podcast together for roughly three years and 130 episodes.  And then I moved to a downtown hotel, and you came to visit last week. And so I'm coming to visit you.

Sarah: Thank you for the ciabatta.

Michael: So I realized the other day that my head is still here somehow, because I'm still avoiding spoilers for numerous historical events that happened in the eighties and nineties. 

Sarah: That's so nice.

Michael: I'm like, don't tell me what happens in the OJ Simpson trial. I'm waiting. 

Sarah: Yeah. When you run into Ryan Murphy on a yacht drinking negronis, you're like, “Stay away from me, Ryan Murphy. Don't talk to me. And also don't spoil OJ Simpson for me. But yes. Also, don't talk to me. I'll be by the shrimp.” That's why you talk. Yeah. But really, you live in Berlin, which is very exciting.  I've heard that it will take your breath away. 

Michael: And I'm hosting Maintenance Phase with the wonderful Aubrey Gordon. And sometimes we get wonderful visitors. 

Sarah: And you always make wonderful episodes. 

Michael: And I'm back for what I think is an OJ episode, but I'm hearing that something may have changed.

Sarah: Well, yeah. Here's the thing. This is both terrible and great news in a way. So to break it down, I was like yes, I'm going to do our favorite thing - my favorite thing to do with you - which is read Paula Barbieri's memoir. And use that to turn the pages of time between the runaway grand jury, which is what we ended with, and the start of the trial, which happens roughly 48 years later. And then I could not find my Paula Barbieri book in my house. And truly Paula Barbieri's memoir as an object in my home is my toothbrush, it’s just always there and I'm always like, there it is. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know. I don't know. She's absconded. And I will find her first. 

First I flailed around and I was like, what if I do this other OJ thing? And I was like, no, none of this is quite right and I'm not ready to do these on the fly like this. And then I thought, Michael, what if I talked to you about the thing that I have been very focused on recently and also for all my adult life, which is serial killers, who are like one of the great unspoken currents - or often spoken, but rarely explicitly focused on -currents running through all of You’re Wrong About.

Michael: Yeah, I'd love that. Yes. 

Sarah: Hooray.

Michael: I feel like if you leave Paula Barbieri's memoir under your pillow, Michael Bolton comes and gives you a dollar. 

Sarah: I thought you were going to say a kiss on the forehead. I was like, well, this is annoying and I'm very sorry to listeners, but also serial killers are an okay substitute, you have to admit. And also this means that Michael, you have to come back soon. 

Michael: Yeah, anytime. And also, this is sort of an undercurrent of the show, right? For as long as it's been going. And also two weeks ago's episode, too. This is something you've returned to a lot. It's one of the main societal You're Wrongs About I feel like that we've all kind of grown-up in. 

Sarah: Yeah. So I am working on an article, which I am in process on. And so I'm using this actually the way that you often did when you had a Huffington Post feature. 

Michael: Procrastination. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yes. Well, I would've described that as you using your friend and trusted colleague to help gain insight into a complicated topic. But yes. Procrastination. 

Michael: I also wanted to steal your insights for my articles, but yes. Also avoiding actually writing it. 

Sarah: Well yes. This is me getting to harvest your insights, give those sweet insights. And so I'm going to do a Carrie Bradshaw here and offer more questions than I have answers. And Mike, some of them I think you're going to be able to help me answer in ways I never would've got to on my own. And some, I think will both just be like, I don't know, we don't have the data. Cause I think one of the main themes of the show is the right to respond to a question with, I haven't formed an opinion yet. Or Insufficient data. 

Michael: Yeah. So what is your article about?

Sarah: The frame is the question of, are there fewer serial killers today than there used to be? Which is a hypothesis you see a lot of people making. And this brings me to Exhibit A, which is a headline, which I shall read to you. So this was in The Guardian in September 2018. And the headline is, “Are American Serial Killers a Dying Breed?” And I just think that's like a hilarious headline. 

Michael: It should have been, Millennials Killed Serial Killers.

Sarah: Exactly. Exactly, Michael. Exactly. Something that's an undercurrent for you is millennials, because you wrote a great, big, very important Huffington Post piece on how millennials got completely screwed. I believe the word screwed was in the title. 

Michael: Yes. Generation Screwed. 

Sarah: Can you talk about that? And how we would be accused of killing the serial killer.

Michael: Well, I mean, younger generations now just objectively have fewer opportunities than younger generations in the past. And we're doing less well than our parents. And the gap in wealth between older generations and younger generations obviously has always existed, but it's much more exacerbated now, especially due to housing costs, housing wealth. And so younger people just objectively have it worse. And yet the societal discourse around young people hasn't really accepted that it's still the same old, are young people spoiled? And they don't want to work anymore. And it's the same sort of panicky articles that we got about every previous generation. And they're just completely, they've always been somewhat detached from reality, but they're becoming increasingly untethered from reality now.

Sarah: So I saw Bodies Bodies Bodies recently, which I really loved, except for this one scene that seemed to be being snarky about Gen Z and I was like, “Hey, leave them alone.”

Michael: Yeah, the kids are fine. 

Sarah: They're less ridiculous than every other generation. And also if you think that they're annoying, what do you think the consequences were for naming them in a way that would alert them to the fact that all of humanity's going to die out after them?

Michael: Yeah. It's, we're ending soon. That's the last thing, it’s the last chapter. We've made it clear. Yeah. I mean, I do think if this show has a guiding principle, it is that in general, the kids are fine. It's never the kids that are the problem. It's 99.9% of the time it's the adults. And we just project it all onto the kids.

Sarah: Yes. Okay, so that was Exhibit A. And before I get deeper into that, let me show you my first visual aid. So this is a cartoon that was in Punch Magazine, and I believe 1845. And it's printed in Judith Flanders’ the Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and created Modern Crime, which is a very fun book, obviously. 

Michael: Fun title. Fun book. Fun title. 

Sarah: And here is the cartoon. I don't know if you can read that. What do you see? 

Michael: It’s a guy standing at a counter and there's a woman holding a baby. That's about all I can see. The dude is a short king. 

Sarah: It's like this kid is not a Newsie, but he has the demeanor of a newsie to me.

Mike: Oh, he is a kid. Okay. 

Sarah: He looks like a kid. Although it would be hard to guess because there's lines graven into his face. But I think he's supposed to be a kid. Yeah, because the caption says “boy”. So he's at the newsagents and there are those little placards that say what the headline is. And they say, “Horrid murder”. And then the other one says, “Full particular's, dreadful murder, portrait of murderer”. And then the caption is, the news vendor says, “Now my man, what is it?” And boy says, Ivan Son Illustrated newspaper with a horrid murder and a likeness in it. So there he is. 

Michael: Wait, I don't get it. He wants to buy something that's as lured as possible. 

Sarah: Yeah. He says, I want an illustrated newspaper with a horrid murder and a likeness in it. He's basically like, “I am a child. My needs for a newspaper. Just sell me something that describes a horrid murder and has a likeness of the murderer, and I'll be set. Thank you.” 

Michael: Wow. So we had a critique of true crime 200 years before Princess Weekes made her videos. 

Sarah: Yeah. She is groundbreaking in quite a few key ways. But yeah, the existence of criticism about true crime and the idea that people are being a little bit ghoulish in what often seems to verge on fandom is, as far as I can tell, as old as media, basically. As well as criticism, the knowledge that people want this. People will buy your newspaper if it says ‘horrid murder’ on it. Which just makes sense.  

Michael: Why do you say that it makes sense? What does that mean to you?

Sarah: To me it makes sense that we've always been interested in murder because it's just, isn't it just naturally a very interesting thing, it's scary and scary things are interesting. Well, you know what I read recently? I was looking up, ‘do animals grieve?’ Because I know that they do. But I was like, which ones do it and what have we observed? And I was reading about crow funerals and apparently crows gather around the corpses of their dead fellow crows to communicate and share information about what the fuck happened to this crow?

Michael: No way. 

Sarah: Which makes sense, because they're smart and they need to survive. And so they're trying to figure it out. 

Michael: They're getting the black box, they're writing up a report. 

Sarah: And I think that's what we do too, partly. We have talked for many, I would say dozens or possibly hundreds of hours about, yeah, let's say hundreds. I think it's been hundreds, about the things people do out of a sincere desire to feel that they are making themselves safer from crime, but that actually manifests as if someone has taped a dollar bill to your car, don't touch it cuz the traffickers have soaked it in PCP. 

Michael: Yeah. It's always these things that seem to reinforce the same kind of meta narrative. It's less intellectually challenging to watch an episode of Law and Order than it is to watch some new HBO show with new characters and it's going to take four episodes to get into it. It's just sort of easier on your brain. It's less like doing jumping jacks mentally to watch something where you know exactly what the components of it are going to be. 

I feel like we all kind of want to think that we're above doing that in nonfiction. But partly some of these grizzly true crime stories do sort of fulfill that purpose. There's a bad person and he killed a bunch of innocent people. And he's bad and we arrested him and he's going to pay. That's sort of comforting, the same way that you want to watch the same episode of the Office you've seen 50 times. Yeah. Sometimes when you're home with the flu and you just can't handle anything mentally taxing. I feel like there's something to that. There's just a kind of ease with those stories. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. I mean, and do you ever watch Forensic Files or something? 

Michael: No, I only get it through you. I don't get it through what you've described to me. So I think I have a sense of it.

Sarah: That makes me feel like your relationship to true crime is like my relationship to The Bachelor. I'm like, I know there's a whole world out there, but I have other people to summarize it to me instead of watching it. Because those episodes are really long and I have a short attention span. All that's to say that I find it particularly hilarious when people are like, true crime is having a moment. And it's like, no, no it isn't. Or like moments can be hundreds of years long. Which, if you're a rock, then Yes. That would be a moment, yeah. It's like Everything Everywhere, All at Once, time. 

Michael: Okay. Can I give you my try hard theory about this? So I am fascinated by the fact that in all of the history of mainstream television, I don't know that there's ever been a journalist procedural.

Sarah: I bet there have been a bunch of ones that were on for six episodes, and then Fox was like, “Nevermind, no one's watching it. Shut it off.” 

Michael: I know. Whenever you say this publicly, someone's like, actually, in 1974 there was this, and okay. 

Sarah: They're like, What about the Newsprint gang? It was epic. It was on for two weeks. And you're like, Well, yeah. 

Michael: I'm sure that there have been attempts, but it's like, the structure of a procedural where it's like every episode's basically the same. You have a crime, you have an investigation, you have a trial. And you could very easily do that with journalism, right? You're a reporter, you get assigned a story, you investigate the story, you publish an article. The structure of the work actually lends itself very well to procedurals. 

Part of me feels like the reason we haven't had very many attempts at journalistic procedurals is because most of the stories would be about accountability for people in power. Your stories that you're investigating would be like municipal corruption or somebody who's like a serial sexual harasser who's the mayor or something like that. It would be those kinds of stories that are more difficult to digest. Whereas all these true crime procedurals tell a story that is extremely easy to digest, which is like there's bad people out there, they're committing crimes against innocence and those people go to jail. And that's why we've gotten so many of those and not the other way around. 

Sarah: Well, yeah, and also what that makes me think of is the fact that I've long thought that Law and Order actually functions as if it's about journalism because it's oh my God, a crime has been committed and then the crime is always interesting in some way, right? Because in reality, murder is fairly boring. It happens for the same reasons. Someone was committing armed robbery and then things escalated. That happens so often and there's nothing. It's interesting in that you're like, these people are interesting, their lives are interesting. Why did they do this? What are their circumstances? 

Every human being is interesting. But in terms of a murder where you're like, oh my God, the mayor's daughter was caught on the security cameras. What? You know that doesn't happen as often as law order behaves as if it does, and then the cops get to be like, oh my goodness, this murder was committed and the intriguing new world of IVF. Let's interview a bunch of people. This is a real episode I'm thinking of. And they're like, we have to learn how to understand IVF and the science behind it if we're going to understand this murder. 

Michael: That's perfect. 

Sarah: And because they're TV cops, they're fairly cordial as they interview people a lot of the time, and they're like, “Tell me more about your interesting job that you're doing while you talk to me, of course.” 

Michael: And somebody reads out of the Wikipedia entry that the screenwriters looked up while they were writing the episode. So what was the case for, there's no serial killers in the case against, there's no serial killers anymore.

Sarah: So I am now going to bring in Exhibit C. And I'm going to put a picture in the chat and you're going to read it to us.

Michael: Okay. Okay. So it's a news article that looks like it's from, I guess the eighties or something. It looks old. Ooh, look at the kerning. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, it's from June 1985. This is from the Anniston Star in Anniston, Alabama. I referenced this in the Henry Lee Lucas episode. 

Michael: Oh, yeah. The headline is, “Serial Murders, Clearly on the Rise”. And it's by Bob Benson. And it's labeled a comment, so I guess it's like an op-ed or a take of some kind. 

Sarah: Which is really funny, because he's “It is my opinion that statistically this is happening.” 

Michael: This fact is true, comment.

Sarah: Yeah. Can you read until it says Ted Bundy? 

Michael: It says “He is young, smart, charming, charismatic, described by friends as concerned and caring. These characteristics portray America's deadliest criminal, the serial murderer. Crimes of Jack the Ripper, whose victims numbered not more than seven pale in comparison with those of most contemporary serial killers. Albert Fish murdered and cannibalized more than 200 boys and girls in New York. Ted Bundy slaughtered 365 young women in six states.”

Sarah: Possibly slaughtered, it says. I will point out, oh, which is a very interesting caveat.

Michael: “Ted Bundy, possibly slaughtered 365 young women in six states. The apprehension of serial killers occurs almost by accident rather than by design. Most local law enforcement professionals are baffled by the lack of motivation and the dearth of evidence in homicides committed by these human predators. The serial killer acts neither out of passion nor premeditation. As with the Boston Strangler, personal gain is almost never a consideration. 

Interviews with convicted serial murderers indicate they are usually sociopathic, they kill without remorse. Serial murders are clearly on the rise. An estimated 5,000 people, three times as many as two decades ago, fall victim to the serial killer each year. Between 1960 and 1982, the solution rate for homicides declined from over 90% to approximately 76%. The number of motiveless homicides have increased from 6% in 1966 to about 20% today. Just as frightening as the rise in serial murders is the apparent lack of awareness by most people of their vulnerability. Serial murders take advantage of this. They possess a sixth sense about which victims are good targets.”

Sarah: That was great. 

Michael: This is a fascinating artifact.

Sarah: It isn't it? 

Michael: I mean, it's all there. 

Sarah: Right? It's all there, baby. 

Michael: It's like a manifesto of why you should be afraid of stranger danger, basically. Serial killers, they kill without warning, they kill without remorse, they are these masterminds, they don't even really have a motivation. There's sort of these inhuman killers and the number of crimes is increasing, and the police are incapable of solving it because I guess they're so cunning or something. So it's just like, yeah, be scared. It's bad out there essentially. 

Sarah: Which we've talked about before is something that really emerges in the Reagan eighties. It's part of Reagan's policy and we started to see it under Nixon as our first law and order president and are seeing this shifting of our carceral system away from things like furloughs and work release programs and these kinds of economically pragmatic approaches that are like, yeah, sometimes if you have someone out on work release, they might escape or they might re-offend or even commit a worse crime than what they're in for, but it's a good program and it makes sense. 

So we're not going to end it just because of something like that happening, which was an argument made by Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California. And I feel like the serial killer for one thing, was so useful toward this culture in the eighties that was like, Listen, Americans, you're being dupes. You are not being careful enough and none of you are thinking about serial killers. Everyone needs to think about serial killers more. 

Michael: Yeah. And also, have you looked into the numbers in this at all? I mean, did dead Bundy really kill 365 people? 

Sarah: Mike, I wrote a whole article about how Ted Bundy almost certainly didn't kill 365 people for one thing, because it's really hard to kill that many people.

Michael: Didn't you kill six people or something? 

Sarah: I love how you're like negging Ted Bundy based on his low numbers. Ted Bundy did, I think our confirmed number of women and girls that he actually murdered is somewhere in the thirties. I'm unsure of the exact number, but he did kill alot of people, he confessed to a lot of murders. But the interesting thing about that, and I wrote about this in an article for the Believer that came out in 2018, is that there were two forces at play there, I think. Even after he confessed, which he only did when he was hours away from execution, which was a) that people were like, snooze. What if he killed more people than that? What if he killed hundreds? What if he killed everybody? And then law enforcement agencies from all these different jurisdictions, had him available as someone who could be the culprit in an unsolved murder that was haunting the community, or that it would be great to be able to close for all the reasons that you try and close these cases.

Michael: So they just threw it on. It must have been Bundy. We can't solve this random person who's from a subgroup of the population who we don't really care that much about and don't want to get to know. So, Bundy probably got them. 

Sarah: And the interesting thing about Ted Bundy was that, typically the victims that he did kill were like middle class because that was how his taste ran. So it wasn't so much about shunting the deaths of sex workers onto him, although I'm sure that happened as well. 

But I think it's, because there's so many reasons why it makes sense to drive his numbers up. And to be like, what if he killed like 10 times as many people as he actually admitted to as opposed to speaking euphemistically about some theoretical serial killer, which he did with law enforcement for years. When he was like, I'm not a serial killer, of course, but here's what a serial killer could have done. And sometimes it seemed like he was just directly talking about himself in third person. And sometimes it was like, are you? What are you doing? Is it about you or is it about… Because it was all hypothetical, is the thing. 

Michael: If I did it. 

Sarah: Yeah, the original if I did it. Yeah. And so these random guesses that people made over the years about how many people he might have killed, I think are made in the spirit of there's all these unsolved murders are solved, our solved rate is down to 76%, which is very low compared to what it used to be. 

And as Rachel Monroe pointed out when she came on and talked about Henry Lee Lucas, our solve rate is I think 61% now for murders. It's much lower than that. And we're not freaking out about it. We're just like, meh, which I think is relevant. Because I suspect that today to jump ahead and to sort of like millennials killed the serial killer, that maybe there's an illusion of a higher solve rate because we all live in a surveillance state. 

Michael: For some reason, the people tasked with solving the murders are somehow not given responsibility for the falling solve rate, which is just very weird. The IRS is catching fewer tax sheets these days. Wouldn't you be like, oh, well the IRS needs to be better at this? On this. We're like, oh, it's just because all of the criminals are sociopaths now. There's no real explanation for why that would be the case, why there would be more sociopaths now than there were in 1940 or whatever. But oh, they're sociopaths now. And like the cops, try as they might, they are powerless to stop them. Are they? 

Sarah: Yes. Our good friend of the show, Candace Opera, said to me recently, she was like, I feel like the thesis of everything you've done is it? These are some of the most important questions that we can ask about history and sociology and everything else.

Michael: Have you ever looked into this thing of an estimated 5,000 people falling victims to serial killers each year? That seems… 

Sarah: Yes! Well, Rachel talked about this as well, and what she pointed out was that this was actually something very similar to what we've talked about on this show before, which is the number attached to the figure of missing children who have been abducted. What happened with that? 

Michael: Well, I mean, 99% of them come back. It's people that were reported to be abducted, but most people that are reported to be abducted, they got in a fight with their parents, they ran down to Fred Meyer, and they wander home three hours later. It's not the number of kids that we can't find, it's just the number of kids who were reported for some period of time that their parents didn't know where they were.

Sarah: Or also non-custodial parent kidnapping. Or a parent doesn't bring their child over for a scheduled handover. 

Michael: DC snipers. Yeah. You just take the kids, right? 

Sarah: Yeah. Which sometimes escalates into stealing the kids and going to another country, but often doesn't. But the point is also that it's not a stranger abduction, which is what that statistic is claiming to represent and what people are being asked to picture. Yeah. 

So this is the same thing where it's 5,000 is the figure of murders where the cause isn't understood, where you're not able to be like, oh, her husband murdered her. You're like, oh, someone murdered her. So it's a serial killer and as we've just discussed, you have to go, is it? Yeah. So basically, it's like anyone who the police can't figure out who they are or why they did what they did, is a serial killer.

Michael: And the idea that just they are everywhere and if we don't have specific evidence of them, that is also evidence of them. There's something we can't explain. So it must have been a serial killer. It's this kind of conspiratorial thinking pattern. 

Sarah: Yeah, and as you've pointed out, it also lets the police off the hook because whether you think the police need to be defunded because they shouldn't exist and they've never been useful, or if you think they should get a ton of money and resources and be able to somehow deal with what they're being asked to deal with. In either of those cases, whether you think either of those two things, you're wrong because the police are operating at peak police. They're as good as they can possibly be, but the serial killers are sociopathic geniuses. And they’re to blame for the solve rate being down. So it's awfully convenient, really. 

Michael: Again, it's about power, right? It's about the institutions of power and which groups of people don't have power. 

Sarah: Well, and also then all the statistics are a little bit wonky in this, and not wonky in the good way. So we have, as examples of modern serial killers, Ted Bundy, possibly slaughtered 365 young women in six states, which by the way, I do think that it's disrespectful to the people who actually died to have their deaths be part of this total that a bunch of random men are trying to argue for being impressively low and it needs to be higher. I do think there's also a little bit of an arms race quality to all this where Americans, we want to have the worst serial killers. That's a theory I have about us. Does that make sense to you? 

Michael: Yeah. I mean it's the same thing as we have now with the mass shootings. It's like the only way to get attention to this as an issue is when they're really grizzly. It's oh, you got to get your numbers up. Because Columbine-sized mass shootings don't make headlines anymore. To get in the newspaper, you now have to kill 150 fucking people at a time, just so fucking grim. But otherwise, literally it's so routine at this point that like, yeah, we're not going to pay attention. So he's murdered 365 women. Yeah, that's more exceptional than murdering 30 women.

Sarah: The gymnastics team. In this projected reality, because I don't think serial killers are like this. I think one of the most interesting things about this whole thing is that people like Bob over here are really invested in this narrative of like serial killers doing it for the media to some extent, being invested in upsetting the public and terrorizing us. And some of them are like, some of them are very articulate about that, but a lot of them just seem to be driven by horrible compulsions and of indifferent to everybody but themselves, which is sort of the point. 

So then his other example of a modern serial killer is Albert Fish, who, I don't know if that statistic is correct or reliable. I haven't researched him ever really. But he was active in the 1920s, in the early 1930s. So I don't know, Bob. 

Michael: That just isn't like a relevant example for this, basically. 

Sarah: Right. I don't know any argument where you're implying that being a serial killer below a certain numerical threshold is unimpressive. I think that's dangerous rhetoric to be putting out in the world. 

Michael: That number that serial killers kill an estimated 5,000 people sounds too high, but it also in some ways sounds too low considering how many homicides there are in the United States every year. Because the question is like, okay, well why should I care about this murder as opposed to other types of murder? Because we all know you're the most likely to be killed by somebody you know. So is 5,000 murders a lot compared to the total number of murders? It's just a meaningless number without a denominator.

Sarah: Well, here's the statistic because the murder rate in America is a very interesting topic, obviously. For a long time it was falling. It fell for about 30 years, steadily, and then we had an uptick. In recent years, we have seen upticks in murder and another crime. In 2020, according to the FBI there were 21,570 murders, which is a forty nine hundred and sixty one murder increase over 2019. And 77% of them were committed by gun. So, I mean, something that immediately occurs to me reading that statistic is that serial killers take the pressure off of guns because it's comparatively very rare for the public to become fixated on a serial killer who uses a gun as a primary weapon.

Michael: Focusing on serial killers, also, it's like you're focusing on the hard thing rather than the easy thing. Because restricting guns is like something that kind of tangible that you can do, whereas we got to get the sociopaths!

Sarah: No, Mike, it's impossible. It does seem to me that restricting gun access is rendered impossible effectively at this point by how much of a choke hold the gun lobbies and everybody have on the government in the US. So yes, it has been made impossible, but in a theoretical world it would be very possible, like in Australia, they did it in about 20 minutes. 

Michael: Yeah. And then you compare that to, there's too many sociopaths in the population. Okay. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that. Like what? There are some kinds of people who just suck, but I guess we should lock them up because they have a propensity to kill people. Like that seems bad. There's no implied solution to the problem that he's talking about other than this kind of individual ‘stay inside your home, don't talk to strangers’ approach. Which is okay, but again, that's not really solving what is fundamentally a public problem. 

Sarah: Well, and I'm curious, that makes me think about the fact that you are living outside of the United States. And you are an American and you are watching the United States from far away.

And just, I wonder if that has created any new insights for you and just thinking about what our problems are and like why we're so fucked? Or why we seem so fucked. I think there's a lot of hope, but we got to grab for the right stuff, you guys. 

Michael: I think the biggest thing to miss is just how boring politics is in like quietly functioning countries. That sounds nice. You don't really follow it and obviously politics really matters everywhere, but it's like you can check out in Germany and just not pay attention for a couple weeks.

Sarah: Yeah. Good old Germany where you can just be like, I'm sure everything is in good hands. It's fine. Like, how the turntables, if you will.

Michael: And then you check back in and you're like, oh, they passed this thing and like this thing got delayed and like that sucks, but it's still on the agenda and it's still probably going to happen. How have you been holding up with all the chaos? 

Sarah: Great question. I mean, I feel like I'm focusing on serial killers as a way to actually do what a lot of people do with serial killer media, which is to be like, stop talking to me about all the horrible things that are leading to the intense sickening of democracy all around me. Show me the scary guy. Show me one scary guy. He's going to be really scary but there's going to be one of him. And I think that's a really important function of these stories too. Like, life is fucking scary. And if you think about the Victorian interest in true crime, of course you want to read about a horrid murder when the people you love are dying all around you. It makes complete sense. 

The thing that occurs to me, and then I guess I'm wondering if you see this also is how the story of the serial killer is one that played in concert with other stories, but all sort of like tough on crime, don't trust anybody, everyone's trying to kill you stories that I think helped sell us on making prison so much more, to use the technical term, evil than it was before the eighties. And how the golden age of the serial killer really created the golden age of incarceration. 

And then quietly after the fact, the FBI recently was like, we actually think that about 1% of murders are committed by serial killers. And that there are maybe like 25 to 50 of them. So if you take 1% of 21,000 murders in 2020, then you get 200 murders. Which is like a lot of murders. And again, we've made it so that it's like hard to even pay attention to a real problem because we've invented a giant made up problem, which as you and I have talked about, and many other episodes is an American pastime.

Michael: Well, do you think that there's fewer serial killers now? Are there any actual numbers or any evidence on this? 

Sarah: What we have is this adjusted number that was like this inflated statistic that people trusted in the eighties and that we have now scaled back to something realistic. So the data has possibly not changed, our ability to assess it has changed. And then there are still a lot of people who are like, listen, there's tons of serial killers out there. There are people who are arguing that there are like 1000 to 2000 serial killers active. And it's like, well God, they must be exercising great restraint is all I can say. Either that or they’re fucking geniuses and nobody is suspecting a thing across tens of thousands of murders. 

Michael: They're too busy driving for Uber. Everybody's stretched thin these days.

Sarah: But then wouldn't they be easier to catch if they're so tired all the time?

Mike: Like the rest of us.

Sarah: I mean, oh, I see what you're saying. They're too busy driving for Uber to commit murder. I mean, now I'm just going to do my Carrie Bradshaw section and ask a bunch of questions for which I have no answers. Okay, something I thought for a long time was that Millennials are being accused of killing the serial killer because as with every other thing, millennials have been accused of killing, we just can't afford it. We might like to do it, but we can't. It costs too much. I would often say that to be a serial killer, it really helps to have real estate. 

Michael: Because like hiding the bodies and cutting people up and stuff?

Sarah: Yeah. It's just like you need some kind of a place to do that. And yet also there's plenty of serial killers, Ted Bundy lived in a boarding house and Ed Kemper lived with his mom until he killed her. We often actually have serial killers who drive around and commit their crimes out there. And so something that makes me wonder about is our solve rate is lower than it ever was, or at least lower than it was in a time when we imagined America to be crawling with serial killers all the time. But is it just difficult for the kinds of serial killers that we're interested in to operate today because, if you look at somebody like Ted Bundy or Ed Kemper, they were murdering quote unquote nice, clean cut, middle class, white, co-ed girls, specifically girls who had affiliations with college campuses? And that was part of why it was so huge in the news and why it was so shocking. 

And also, I think why it became such a potent part of this kind of national conversation we were all having and feeling about women entering the world and entering the workforce and entering higher ed at unprecedented numbers and having all these new freedoms. And it almost feels to me like the serial killers we focused on, those stories became part of the backlash against women and girls entering the world in the way that they had because Ed Kemper and people like him murder some young women who are hitchhiking and who he picks up because they're hitchhiking. And within 10 years hitchhiking effectively dies out as a mode of transportation. Ginger Strand writes about this in a book called, Killer on the Road, which you would love because it's like serial killers are bad, but cars are worse. And yet, women are killed by their husbands or their male romantic partners all the time, and yet we continue to get married. So I don't know. 

Michael: Well, do you think the serial killer thing and the Kemper/Bundy co-ed stuff, do you think that's partly like, well, we tried to warn you about women taking a more prominent role in society and of course this happened. Do you think that was under the surface? 

Sarah: I do. I think for some people probably, a lot of men and also women looking on it was. I do think that there are probably plenty of serial killers at large. I don't think there's thousands of them, but I think there's probably at least a few dozen, like that makes total sense. It's a big country. And I do think the technologies we have available specifically of surveillance probably make it harder to murder a string of people who law enforcement takes seriously the disappearance of, which at this point and throughout time tends to be middle class white women.

Michael: I mean, there've been a few cases in Europe of serial killers targeting refugees and immigrants. Yeah. The discourse around those has not been the sort of sexy, true crime discourse. It's often seen as sort of meticulously cast as isolated incidents until it becomes really too obvious to ignore. There's also the thing of like, where do you find patterns? And where do you like, refuse to see it? A coed disappeared and then a week later, another coed disappeared. People probably start connecting those dots faster than, oh, a poor Afghan refugee was killed in the street, and then another Afghan refugee, and then a Somalia refugee. People won't necessarily see those as part of the same things. They're like, eh, they're refugees, they're poor, this happens. But where are you finding the patterns? And the faster you find the patterns, you know what you're actually looking for. 

Sarah: Right. And this question of who you expect society to keep safe, right? Or whose life you consider permissively dangerous. Cause the whole construct we run into constantly here with serial killers is that sex workers should expect to be murdered. And it's like, when did, what? Who signed off on that? And to that, I would like to turn to Jack the Ripper. So we're going to head back to 1888 and I would actually just love to hear your impressions of Jack the Ripper as a not terribly crime-y person, but someone who obviously understands culture, which I think Jack the Ripper has transcended crime-y culture and is just part of all culture.

Michael: All I know is from whatever I read in that Alan Moore book From Hell when I was like 13 or something. 

Sarah: Oh yes. That was a very educational book. It opens with a hand job, as I recall. 

Michael: Yeah. I loved that book, but I don't remember a lot of the details. I know that it was 1888 in White Chapel, and it was mostly sex workers, but that's basically where my knowledge stops cause I've been saving it.

Sarah: That's a very good recall. And what is White Chapel like today? Do you know?

Michael:  I mean, it's like post gentrification, like cool now.

Sarah: Do they have a bunch of blue bottle coffee franchises? 

Michael: Yeah. The last time I was there was a high-end breakfast cereal place. You could get like artisanal breakfast cereal for 12 pounds. That's all I know about the current White Chapel, but that was years ago.

Sarah: Somehow that feels more disrespectful to Jack the Ripper's victims than anything else I've encountered. But what do you know about Jack the Ripper? Do you have any impressions of his sort of deal? 

Michael: I honestly don't. I know that it's an enduring mystery, who it actually was. I've really been avoiding it. Whatever the book was, everybody said it was really good, but I just, I've been waiting for you to tell me all about it.

Sarah: Ah. It is really good and we're just going to talk about it a little. So it's The Five by Hallie Rubenhold. The argument that she makes very early on is basically of the quote, canonical five victims whose death have been assigned to Jack the Ripper, although there's quite a lot of debate about that, it appears that there's solid evidence that three of them were engaging in sex work. The other two, there's nothing to indicate that, and yet, the media story at the time was very fixated on the idea that essentially, they had attracted the murderer by being sex workers. 

And what Hallie Rubenhold argues is what appears to be the case, is that all of these women, the finding at the time was that they had been murdered while in a reclining position. No one had heard a scream. No one had heard any sound. One of the victims was killed on the street underneath the window of a light sleeper who did not hear a thing. All of which indicates, again, according to Holly Reinhold, that Jack the Ripper struck while they were sleeping. Which to me really does change everything because he didn't give a shit really who they were or what they were doing, aside from the fact that they were women, and they were accessible to him because they were out on the street for the most part. To me, the idea that the murder was connected to sexuality feels like it's one of the things that makes Jack the Ripper the first modern serial killer, which is what people just accept him to be. And the other thing is media engagement. 

Michael: Yeah. So basically it was a sensation at the time.

Sarah: It was a sensation at the time. There was very thick competition between newspapers, of which there were 1 million. So Jack the Ripper was fantastic business, and what also happened was that there were hundreds and hundreds of letters sent to the police, to newspapers from God knows where, from people claiming to be Jack the Ripper. There were in excess of a thousand of these letters. And some of them became very famous and were evaluated as potentially credible. And three of these are the Dear Boss Letter, the Saucy Jacky Postcard, and the From Hell letter, which is where the Allen Moore book gets its title. 

Michael: So what did they say?

Sarah: So the ‘’Dear Boss letter was received by the Central News Agency in September 1888. And multiple people over the years have hypothesized that this was written by a journalist. So the call was coming from inside the house, and the attempt was basically to drum up coverage for the newspapers by creating news. “25 September 1888. Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about leather apron gave me real fits. I am down on sex workers.” He doesn't say sex workers, “and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work, the last job was, I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now? I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I save some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can't use it. Red ink is fit enough, I hope. Ha, ha. The next job I do, I shall clip the ladies' ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep the letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp, I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck. Yours truly, Jack the Ripper. Don't mind me giving the trade name. PS wasn't good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands. Curse it. No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. Ha ha.” 

Michael: What does that say to you? 

Sarah: What does it say to you? 

Michael: I mean, it sounds convincingly disturbing and disturbed. It's a little bit disjointed. It's funny because all of these things have become such tropes now of the serial killer that writes to the newspapers and stuff and they're sort of like the almost Joker-ish intonation of making jokes as you're saying these horrifying things about the red ink on my hands or whatever. So I don't know if those tropes even existed at the time, but it's very trope dense.

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like tropes about the murderer and the newspaper must have existed to some extent in cultural artifacts we forgot about now because there were plenty of murderers and plenty of newspapers throughout the 1800s. But it feels to me like this is really what sets the tone for the serial killers that we find interesting. Then jumping ahead to David Berkowitz, who killed a paltry six people, oh no. 

Michael: Get those numbers up, Dave. 

Sarah: I think that one of the reasons that series of crimes became as huge as it was it was the first serial killer to operate in New York as far as anyone noticed since the 1930s and he wrote letters. He wrote a letter to Jimmy Breslin. He interacted with the media. And also the New York Daily News and the New York Post, which Rupert Murdoch had just purchased, were having a circulation war.

Michael: So we need a main character basically, and a storyline. 

Sarah: This is what we're asking really. It's like where have all the serial killers with main character energy gone. Where are they? I guess really that's what I think is going on is that one of the questions we have is where have all the main character serial killers gone? And how that connects with mass shooting, I'm still trying to figure out. More statistics and more possibly reliable statistics I'm still trying to find. I'm mid process with this, but that's one of my theories. What do you think? 

Michael: Well, I feel like with crime especially, crime is so socially constructed, right? That your sense of how much crime is taking place in your area is almost entirely dependent on the media and maybe a friend of yours got their car broken into or something like that, right? 

Sarah: Yeah. And next door. 

Michael: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There was just an analysis of this in the UK that attitudes about immigration, how big of a crisis is immigration in the UK do not track immigration levels whatsoever, they track news coverage of immigration, right? If an immigrant killed his whole family, right? Most people do not have any idea how many immigrants arrived last year to the country, whatever country they live in, and most people do not have any idea how many murders there were in their city last year. What we know is well, there's just a lot of stories in the media and something bad happened to my friend, or something was sketchy, or oh, I felt unsafe somewhere. It's super anecdotal and super given to you, right? 

If journalists want to make you think that we're in the middle of a crime wave, that's really easy. All they have to do is make anecdotes about crimes more prominent in the newspaper, right? We're all going to think that we're in the middle of some kind of unprecedented crime wave, which arguably is what happened over the last year, right? There's a lot of media coverage of ultimately a relatively small uptick in crime. And so for all of these things, have serial killers disappeared, it's almost irrelevant whether serial killings have disappeared. It's almost entirely a story of media coverage. Yeah, there's thousands of murders every year and you can turn almost any of them into national frenzies if you want to. If you dedicate enough attention.

Sarah: Or at least a podcast. 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. I mean, most of them have.

Sarah: I agree with you mostly, but I also think that, Americans, that we actually have like fairly specific requirements in terms of the murders we want to hear about. And it's actually hard to please us. I feel like we're like somebody who rolls up to a restaurant and is like, just surprise me. And then the chef gives you something and you're like, No. And then it turns out that what you wanted was panna cotta. And it's well, you could just ask for panna cotta. I just I love stories about murder and it's okay. What about the like 7,000th story this year of an argument escalating? And it's like, no. What about like the girl who had everything going for her, but then she only said goodbye to her boyfriend at the entrance to her gated community, and it was only 900 feet right to her driveway and somehow, she vanished. It's like okay, so panna cotta. 

Michael: I mean, even the definition of serial killer, right? I assume it's two or three people who are unknown to the killer. 

Sarah: Yeah. I believe the FBI requirement is for three people that you don't know on different occasions with cooling off periods in between. 

Michael: Okay. Like you said, there must still be those people.

Sarah: But we're just like, three? Forget three! I think that probably our standards are too high. It's like dating. It's like when you're like, why are there no single guys in Portland? And it's like there are literally tens of thousands of them. You just hate everything about most of them. That's the reason it feels like there aren't any. My friend said that.

Michael: I mean, the weird thing is like stories of serial killer still resonate obviously, because people are still fucking retelling the stories of the same goddamn 12 serial killers in American history on various like documentaries and podcasts 

Sarah: Including this one.

Michael: And yet contemporary serial killers, we're not seeing those stories as much. I assume that they still happen. 

Sarah: Yeah, of course. Yeah. I think it's just, it's all a matter of what's a local story versus what's a national story. I wouldn't confidently make this argument, but I wonder if we're actually afraid of serial killers anymore. I think possibly they seem to us like lions where if you see a lion at a zoo, you're like, oh I've seen lots of depictions of this. I'm familiar with it. It feels like something sort of caged, if we frame it that way, maybe it actually feels like the world is safe. We catch all the big scary guys now. Or they're just gone or whatever. Maybe white women are less likely to be killed by strangers and everyone else is just getting murdered as often as before. I don't know. 

Michael: Yeah, step it up out there. Serial killers, you got to produce good content. 

Sarah: So that's the moral, you guys, is that if you're a serial killer, you have to be on TikTok every day.

Michael: The key is consistency.

Sarah: And again, like this is sort of, I'm just guessing randomly, like FBI agents do, but I would say that generally our sense of what's happening crime wise and what the numbers are and how much of which type of crime is happening out there in the world tends to be very disconnected and an entirely different story from what's actually happening out there because we live in the world and we also live in this world of our own creation about what we believe we should be most worried about and most protecting ourselves against. 

And yeah, I mean speaking of kind of other things that have changed nationally in the last few years, I know that this is obvious, but we're living in a time of the rise of fascism in the United States and fairly unchecked white supremacy and queer people being accused of grooming. Which, as someone who has read a couple books about the Satanic panic, reminds me of something. I mean, maybe our feeling that serial killers aren't the thing we should most be afraid of right now, maybe that sometimes at least reflects the fact that we understand that the thing we need to fear is all around us and very visible in talking to us on TV. Ah, Mike, do you feel like your questions have been answered? 

Michael: Yeah, it's a very Sarah Marshall joint in that it's like, it's complicated. It depends on how you look at which, like you're, I don't think the headline of your article is going to be like, serial murder is clearly on the fall or something. That's not what I expect from Sarah Marshall. 

Sarah: Nah, I'm happy to have delivered and yeah, I guess my question that I offer is, is it? Thank you for coming over.

Michael: Anytime. Happy to come outta my little hotel into the sunlight. It's nice. Back to mom. Oh wait, it's going to get weird. All right. Nevermind. 

Sarah: Yeah, let's let it go. Goodbye, metaphor. Goodbye. There it is.

By the way, a couple of corrections. The homicide clearance rate or solve rate, which refers to the number of homicides where someone is arrested and formally charged was 61% in 2019, but it actually was 54% in 2020, not great, Bob. Also, I gave an outdated definition of the serial killer. The FBI standardized their definition of serial killer in 2005, and therefore the rest of ours at their San Antonio Serial Murder Symposium, which was held at the Sheraton. Which I just find funny that, I don't know, you have to have your serial killer conference somewhere and I'm sure the Sheraton is very nice. 

So the current definition of a serial killer is, quote, “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender or offenders in separate events”, which doesn't mean that the victims have to be strangers and it honestly seems like a participation trophy, but that's the definition today. 

Thank you so much to Michael Hobbes, my co-host Emeritus. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing. And thank you always to you, the listeners. See you in two weeks or sooner if you're coming to a live show.