The Sunday Morning Post: Whatever Happened to Serial Killers?
Welcome back to The Sunday Morning Post, this newsletter’s weekly digest of discoveries and developments that violate the rules of the news cycle. The goal of TSMP is to ignore the vast majority of stories that are sudden and negative and to highlight those that are slower-moving, often positive, and more consequential—stories, in other words, that are likely to be as relevant in 10 years as in 10 hours.
Today, we’re talking about one of my favorite and most gruesome sociological mysteries of the last 100 years—and why I think it’s especially relevant for an under-reported story in 2025.
My favorite movie is The Silence of the Lambs. Close behind is David Fincher’s film Se7en. I think the best film of the 21st century is No Country For Old Men, and somewhere in the top 10, I’d have to include Fincher’s Zodiac, as well.
Beyond exceptional cinematography, the thing that unites all of these films is they’re all about serial killers and repeat murderers and generally bloody mayhem. 1 Another thing these films have in common is that they were all made in, or take place in, the years between 1965 and 1995. In fact, most of the real-life serial killers that still have name recognition—including Zodiac, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Golden State Killer, BTK, and Son of Sam—were active in that same period, between 1965 and 1995.
