“Now, would that cause that boy to become a sexual predator by itself? I doubt it. “Certainly, to a normal boy, that would be traumatic,” Holes says. Yet his father was in the Air Force and, according to family members, DeAngelo witnessed his sister being raped by two soldiers when the family was stationed in Germany.
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So, there’s this tendency to go, ‘Aha! You caught the serial killer and so that must be what created the serial killer.’ “ĭeAngelo was in the Navy he never saw combat. Most men had some affiliation with military because of the war, and they were drafted. “When I was working Golden State Killer, I was looking at a lot of men from that time period and their backgrounds. “It’s an over-simplification,” he tells Rolling Stone. In short: These children who were already predisposed to violence were raised in potentially violent, likely broken homes. “In cases like, for example, the BTK killer, Richard Cottingham, their fathers were returning war veterans with PTSD, which the Eighties,” he says. As such, he looked back at what was happening in the world when murderers like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy were growing up, and discovered a link: They were all born during wartime. Over the course of his work, which began in 1979, Vronsky has deduced that serial killers generally develop the personality and compulsion befitting a killer when they’re young - by the time they’re 14, they’re basically fully formed they generally start killing in their late twenties. The reason behind this is manyfold - encompassing everything from sociological changes, to biology, to technology, to linguistics. “It’s an era that was coined as the ‘ golden age of serial murder‘ by Harold Schechter, who was a crime historian,” Vronsky tells Rolling Stone. Why were there so many serial killers during this brief period? And where did they go?Ĭriminal justice expert Peter Vronksy, whose new book American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years looks to answer just that question, says that more than 80 percent of known American serial killers operated between 19.