Which Generation Is Most Likely to Be a Serial Killer?

I love a good true crime show. Growing up, I enjoyed traditional detective shows like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote. Later, I enjoyed Monk and Psych, among others. If it wasn't one of those, I remember watching Forensic Files or Cold Case Files with my family.

This essay is a bit different and almost a behind-the-scenes look at how I chase down different ideas to see if they're viable or just interesting. While working on my book, I scoured old notes with different ideas and concepts I had jotted down. One note caught my attention: “Serial Killers and the Sexual Revolution.”

With all the skeleton and ghoul decor this time of year, I decided I would write a spooky essay of sorts.

On my note, I listed five names: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Rader, and Gary Ridgway. Underneath were these questions: “Is there a connection between serial killers, media, and the sexual revolution?” and “Did a certain generation breed more serial killers than another?”

My hypothesis was that Boomers or maybe the Silent Generation would be the deadliest generation…so here is what my research turned up.

Start with birth years. Gacy, 1942. Rader, 1945. Bundy, 1946. Ridgway, 1949. Dahmer, 1960. By generational definitions, that is two Silent Generation and three Boomers. But, considering the generational blur, you could argue that the tight band of 8 years’ difference is an interesting coincidence.

So I dug further… 3 of the 5 grew up in or near the Midwest. Four of them started killing between ages 27 and 33 (Biography, n.d. Oxygen, n.d.).

Then the strange details.

Gacy started in 1972. Rader and Bundy both started in 1974 (Biography, n.d.). Bundy and Ridgway grew up in the same corner of Washington (Harvard Gazette, 2025). Years later, Bundy wrote to the lead Green River detective from death row and offered to help catch a killer who turned out to be Ridgway (Biography, n.d.). You can watch some of these interactions on yet another Netflix special.

I looked at other angles to see if they had anything similar in appearance or birth order or favorite breakfast cereal (surprisingly, that one turned up no results ;). The only similar physical characteristic is that Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer stood 5'11", 5'10", and 6'0" (Crime + Investigation, n.d.).

And just for one other odd coincidence, Bundy’s birthday is November 24. And his 17th birthday, in 1963, was the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television.

Psychologists argue about the exact window that forms people’s identity, but they agree generally. Early experiences shape the brain's architecture from birth to about age 6 (Center on the Developing Child, n.d.). It is adolescence that reshapes identity. The World Health Organization defines adolescence as ages 10 to 19, and a 2018 Lancet paper argues for 10 to 24 (Sawyer et al., 2018). Regardless of the “exact” ages, the punchline is the same—What you see, and what happens to you and around you during these formative years, leaves a mark.

In November 1963, JFK was assassinated, and all eyes turned to the Television. At that moment in history, Gacy was 21, Rader was 18, Bundy was 16 (he turned 17 that Sunday), and Ridgway was 14. (Dahmer, born in 1960, was three.) That week, the networks dropped regular programming and NBC alone stayed on the air for nearly 72 hours (Inquirer, 2013, Flashback Dallas, 2018). On Sunday, NBC's cameras caught Oswald's shooting live. It was the first real homicide shown on national television (American Heritage, n.d.).

We like to blame the 24-hour news cycle for shaping Millennials the most, but it didn’t start with them.

Many prolific serial killers are sadists. Naturally, looking at their formative years, I wondered what role the Sexual Revolution might have played in their development. In 1964, as the movement was gaining traction, Rader was 19, Bundy was 18, and Ridgway was 15. Gacy was 22. Only Dahmer, at four, was too young. Gacy started killing in 1972, and Rader and Bundy in 1974, with the revolution still in full swing. Add the new flood of sexual imagery, music, and media, and I wondered whether it overwhelmed someone already headed down a dark road.

So I dug a bit further... the timing fit, but the cause did not. Everyone born in the 1940s grew up in that era, so there is no comparison group. A review of 20 years of research on young people and sexual media concluded the evidence “precludes internally valid causal conclusions” (Peter & Valkenburg, 2016). I could not find a single study that links the sexual revolution to serial murder.

To this point, nothing was conclusive, and the data were circumstantial at best. In the Radford University database, 72 U.S. serial killers began killing in the 1950s. In the 1980s, 768 did. That is more than 10.7 times as many. Then it fell: 669 in the 1990s, and 371 in the 2000s, a drop of nearly half (Radford University Serial Killer Information Center, 2016). Recent years are undercounted because killers take years to be caught but it is a fascinating chart to look at.

There are many theories for why we saw a spike and a fall. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser, in Murderland (2025), points to lead and smelter pollution, a link she calls one ingredient among many, and that is inferred from maps and addresses, not measured in the men themselves (Harvard Gazette, 2025; Yoder, 2025). Historian Philip Jenkins credits the sexual revolution, a drug subculture that pushed people into red-light districts, and Baby Boomers' willingness to take risks with strangers (Jenkins, 2025). Again, much of this is speculative.

Here is one that lines up. In my own findings, DNA evidence began convicting violent offenders in the late 1980s (A&E Network, n.d.). But technology moved more slowly then than it does now. The FBI's national DNA database, CODIS, launched as a pilot in 1991 and took until 1998 to become fully operational (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2007). Economist Jennifer Doleac found that state DNA databases deter crime by the offenders profiled in them and are associated with lower overall crime (Doleac, 2017). The count slipped in the 1990s, then fell hard in the 2000s. The odds of getting caught seemed to increase, potentially deterring future criminals.

The impact and fear caused by these horrific acts have still left their mark. Lenore Skenazy, founder of Let Grow, told me on The Ryan Vet Show that something changed in the 1980s. Cable gave us the 24-hour news cycle. A couple of high-profile kidnappings, including Adam Walsh, whose father, John Walsh, started America's Most Wanted, made missing children a national story and a fear for many parents. Then came the kids on the milk cartons. Skenazy shared a staggering stat on the podcast. She stated that you would have to leave a child outside, unattended, for 750,000 years before a stranger kidnapping became statistically likely. I wrote about how that fear reshaped childhood in When Freedom Became Fear.

Kidnapping and serial killers had a consequential crossover. At a July 1983 Senate hearing on serial murder, John Walsh testified alongside a true-crime author and a retired LAPD detective (U.S. Senate, 1984). While both crimes are independently horrific, putting them in the same hearing likely amplified fear.

We may be physically safer now than in the 1980s and 1990s. Statistically, fewer serial killers is encouraging. But are we actually safer as a society? DNA led to more convictions and higher accuracy in cases; security cameras became more polific in the 1980s and 1990s. By the mid-2010s, smartphones and even home security devices like the Ring Doorbell became almost ubiquitous and far more intimidating than the “Beware of Dog” sign.

While progress may have elevated safety from some heinous crimes, there are silent killers now, too. Anxiety, depression, and the kind of isolation that quietly wears a body down. I’ve shared this many times and will share it again. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared an epidemic of loneliness. His advisory reports that poor social relationships raise the risk of heart disease by 29% and stroke by 32%, and it compares the mortality impact of social disconnection to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023). I wrote more about this in We've Never Been More Alone.

None of this makes light of any loss of life. Murder is horrible, whether it is one victim or many. Kidnapping is devastating.

But there are two big points I want you to walk away with….

The first is to show you my process and how I chase down generational labels to see if they are real or just simply culturally established labels. I use the Generational Prism for this analysis quite a bit. And as you can see here, most of the data is circumstantial. But it does matter how we treat our team today…

I often ask what's wrong with Gen Z. Why are they lazy or anxious? What is Gen Alpha going to be like? We have mostly grown out of the Millennial name-calling. Not entirely, but mostly.

It is easy to cluster things together because we see some patterns—but we have to chase them down and get to the bottom of it. For example, if you have two team members who are both Gen Z, and they show up late, leave early, and complain. But have you looked at the other four team members who are also Gen Z and performing exactly how you'd hope?

And then the second takeaway: Progress and technology and science have allowed us to solve crimes faster, as well as deter crimes from even happening in the first place. That is a good thing. But what are we silently trading? Are we placing our trust and faith in security in cameras and surveillance and devices? If so, are there additional consequences?

Thanks for taking a detour from my standard essay to be a bit more on theme with Halloween this weekend!

Inspire Forward,

Sources: full Works Cited with this essay on ryanvet.com