Free Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky

kill again. On May 3 he killed a four-year-old boy playing in a hallway and stuffed his body under a tenement staircase. The offender was never identified.
    Again in New York City, in 1915 the corpses of fifteen newborn infants were recovered, suspected to be linked to some sort of “baby farm” operation.
    These murders were all spectacular crimes, some widely reported in their time, others not, but all forgotten today. Jack the Ripper with his five victims is immortalized, but the Louisiana-Texas axe murderer with forty-nine victims is entirely forgotten. The primary difference is that London was the center of a huge newspaper industry while Louisiana and Texas were not. The story of Jack the Ripper was retold and entered popular myth and literature—while the Louisiana-Texas axe murderer faded from public consciousness. Serial murder “epidemics” are as much about reporting as they are about killing.
The Global Rise of Serial Murder
    The rise in cases of serial murder in the last three decades is not a uniquely American problem. Although the United States is the primary location for serial murders, it does not exclusively harbor this trend. While 76 percent of all recently reported serial killings in the world took place in the United States, 21 percent occurred in Europe, where England led with 28 percent of the European total, followed by Germany with 27 percent and France at 13 percent. 41
    Serial murder was once considered only an American phenomenon, but Europe is also increasingly reporting a resurgent rise in the rate of serial murders. In England, police uncovered twelve murders committed between 1971 and 1987 by Rosemary and Fred West in Gloucester, England, including that of their sixteen-year-old daughter, who vanished in 1987.
    In another case, the residents of a London apartment building complained that their toilets were not flushing properly. When a drain company operator inspected the plumbing he found it blocked by greasy fragments of human remains. Dennis Nilsen, a former police constable who lived in the same building, confessed to killing sixteen young men, cutting them up into pieces, and flushing them down the toilet.
    In 2000, English doctor Fred Shipman was convicted of murdering fifteen of his elderly patients, while the actual number of his victims is believed to be four hundred—making him the possibly the most prolific serial killer in recent history. (Once a serial killer is successfully convicted for a few murders, authorities often do not pursue further convictions in the same jurisdiction.)
    In France, Paris police announced in 1998 the arrest of Guy Georges—the “Beast of Bastille”—who raped and murdered seven women. Described as “unstable,” Georges is said to be a persistent sexual offender who had been living in cheap hotels and squats for some time. In court, Georges was described by the public prosecutor as “the incarnation of evil,” and psychiatrists warned that he could not be cured of his desire to kill. Born and raised in Angers, he is also being questioned about three rapes and murders committed there between 1991 and 1994. All the victims were young women, some found tied to their beds with knife or razor cuts to their throats. In 2001 he was sentenced to life with no chance of parole for twenty-five years.
    In Copenhagen, Denmark, two surgeons, one of them a police pathologist, were sentenced to life in prison for the murders of ten women. The police pathologist had performed the forensic autopsies on some of his own victims.
    Italy is not immune to the current rise of serial murder in Europe, as illustrated by the well-known case of the Monster of Florence, who killed eight couples between 1968 and 1985 and mailed pieces of their bodies to police and the media. In another case, two young men in their twenties—“yuppies”—one the son of a renowned plastic surgeon in Verona, the other of a managing