There Will Be A Surge of Serial Killers In 25 Years

A new theory says a "broken generation" of soldiers returning from WWII spawned the "golden age" of serial killers.

serial killers
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. (Curt Borgwardt/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)
Sygma via Getty Images

Author Peter Vronsky has a shocking hypothesis about serial killers: That a “broken generation” of soldiers coming home from World War II spawned America’s so-called “golden age” of serial killers. Vronsky’s third book, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present, catalogues 17,000 years of murderers, from Cain to Jack the Ripper to the Green River Killer, reports New York Post. 

Vronsky searched for reasons behind the atrocities that he was documenting, namely, where there was such a huge influx of serial killers between 1950 and 2000. He came to the controversial conclusion that a “hidden surge of war-traumatized fathers” came home from battlefields and spawned a generation of murderers. And if this reasoning is correct, we can expect another surge of serial killings around 2030, because the crash of 2008 “destroyed” a lot of families in ways that we cannot even begin to measure.

“So when we start talking to those serial killers,” Vronsky told New York Post, “the stories we might hear is: ‘We were living as a family in a home and come 2008, my dad committed suicide. My dad lost his job. He became a drug addict. He was an alcoholic. He was never the same. He lost his pride and I lost my dad.’ That may be the emerging narrative.”

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