Crime Time Office Hours
This is a podcast that cuts through the noise to make crime and justice clear, one issue at a time. I’m Kevin Buckler, PhD in Criminal Justice, and a professor at a four-year public university. I plan to bring you sharp, unfiltered conversations and content about the issues shaping our legal system, our communities, and the academic world.
Crime Time Office Hours
S 1 E 1 Houston Serial Killer Panic: Serial Killers in American (Popular) Culture
This is the first episode of a four-part series on the Houston serial killer panic of 2025. This installment traces the panic’s deeper lineage, following its evolution from the serial killer anxieties of the 1970s and 1980s through the rise of true crime culture and into the social media era, where fear can rapidly intensify into full-blown frenzy.
I'm Kevin Buckler, your host, and this is Crime Time Office Hours. This podcast explores crime and justice topics by cutting through the noise to make crime and justice clear, one issue at a time. Here, we examine social, cultural, and political forces that shape America's crime and justice narratives while giving you the straight information on what's going on in the world of crime and justice and why.
MEDIA SUPPLEMENT:MEDIA
Kevin Buckler (Host):That is a stand-up routine from comedian Chris Gethard. In it, he centers his humor on several themes apparent in this episode: generational shifts and cultural panic from the 1980s. It seems like an appropriate and fun way to begin this episode. The 1970s and 1980s were full of cultural panics. This is the first episode of several that deal with serial killers. It is in response to a recent social media-induced serial killer panic in Houston, Texas.
Kevin Buckler (Host):We begin with a little history. Episode one traces the rise of the serial killer as a national obsession in the 1970s and 1980s, the era often called the golden age of the American serial killer. We examine how law enforcement, politicians, news media, Hollywood, and the public all helped to construct a cultural narrative in which serial murder wasn't just a crime, but a symbol of moral disorder. This episode shows how the panic didn't simply happen. It was produced, repeated, marketed, and sustained, persisting into the 1990s and reshaping true crime well into the 21st century.
MEDIA SUPPLEMENT:This photograph of the man accused of killing six and wounding seven was taken by police this morning. The composite on your right was the first of five released by the police over a year as they attempted to get the public's help in finding the maniac murderer. Police transported David Berkowitz from headquarters to Brooklyn Central Booking. After my sources say he confessed to being the 44 killer. After he told them he was a killing machine, ordered by a voice speaking through a neighbor's dog to carry out his bloody outrages against young pretty women. Police discovered in this car the 44 Bulldog revolver and the Thompson submachine gun. In Los Angeles, a killer, the police are calling the Hillside Strangler, has murdered 10 young women and left their bodies on the hillsides along the highways. Today the police found another, number 11, they think. Two young paperboys discovered what appeared to be the latest victim. The body had been dumped 15 feet down an embankment in a residential neighborhood. The victim was a woman, about 20 years old, and the body was new. The series of murders has had a chilling effect upon the people of the city. In Los Angeles, more women than ever before are learning how to defend themselves. Susan Ball skipped night school for a week. She says she can't sleep because of the murders. I guess I just want to learn how to maybe give myself a few seconds so I can live. Today, the Los Angeles police say they have a suspect, a man in jail in another state. Los Angeles police say they have enough evidence to charge 27-year-old Kenneth Bianchi with 10 of the Hillside stranglings. Police focused on Bianchi only after he was arrested last January for the murder of two college students in Washington State. The long-awaited trial of Night Stalker suspect Richard Ramirez got underway today, more than three years after he was arrested. Paul Landers reports the jury heard a grisly tale of murder and other crimes in today's opening arguments. Ramirez wearing sunglasses entered the courtroom slowly, due at least in part to chains around his ankles to make sure he doesn't go anywhere. Twenty-eight years old, he is charged with 13 murders, 30 other charges, including rape, sodomy, that terrorized California in 1985. It is three and a half years since his capture in East LA. He is unpredictable, and court has yelled out, Hail Satan! Hail Satan. Drawn a pentagram on his hand. The alleged serial killer has reportedly said that he loves to kill people, loves all the blood. Ramirez reportedly has said he loves to watch people die, shoot them in the head, and watch them wiggle, and stop.
Kevin Buckler (Host):It started as local news. A crime scene, a suspect, a name whispered throughout the city. But by the time the cameras arrived, the stories had already grown larger than life. 1977 and 1985. Two decades, two states, three arrests, moments that changed how America thought about crime.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In the late twentieth century, killers like David Berkowitz, Kenneth Bianchi, and Richard Ramirez weren't just arrested, they were introduced to the public. Their faces filled the evening news, their motives dissected in living rooms across the country. It wasn't just about law enforcement anymore. It was about storytelling, spectacle, and fear made personal.
Kevin Buckler (Host):These cases were the beginning of an era when the news cycle, the government, and the viewing public all helped create the idea of the serial killer as a cultural figure, part criminal, part celebrity, part myth. Today, we're revisiting the history that shaped our national fascination with serial killers, and asking why, decades later, Houston may be reliving that same story in real time. This segment is called "The Serial Killer Craze as Moral Panic." In this segment, we will discuss what a moral panic actually is. A moral panic doesn't mean a threat is imaginary. Serial killers do exist. Violence happens. But a moral panic happens when a real danger gets turned into something larger than life. When media, politicians, and the public amplify the fear, dramatize it, and ultimately exaggerate the scale of the threat. It's fear that grows faster than the facts.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The American serial killer moral panic has origins in the 1970s and 1980s. Several of America's most infamous serial killers were caught and convicted during this time. Others operating during the same period would not be identified or apprehended until much later.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Among those captured in the 1970s was Ted Bundy. Active from 1974 through 1978, he became an archetype, the handsome, charming killer. He preyed on young women across multiple states. He fiend injury before abducting and murdering them.
Kevin Buckler (Host):John Wayne Gacy was active from 1972 through 1978 in Illinois. Gacy murdered over 30 young men and boys. He buried most of them beneath his suburban home. He earned the grim nickname the Killer Clown.
Kevin Buckler (Host):David Berkowitz was known as Son of Sam. He terrorized New York City between 1976 and 1977. He shot couples in parked cars and taunted police and media with letters. This helped make him one of the first true media-made serial killers.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Dean Coral was the candy man of Houston. He murdered over 20 teenage boys between 1970 and 1973. He was eventually killed by one of his teenage accomplices.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Edmund Kemper was the co-ed killer. He was also caught in the early 1970s after murdering 10 women in California. His victims included his own mother.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Rodney O'Colla became known as the dating game killer. He was arrested in 1979 after a spree across California and New York. His body count included at least seven victims his case grew attention because he appeared on a television dating show while actively killing.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Meanwhile, others began killing during the 1970s but were not caught until years later. Gary Ridgway was the Green River killer. He operated from the late 1970s through 2001. He targeted sex workers in Washington state. Ridgway would become America's most prolific confirmed serial murderer. He had over 40 victims.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Dennis Rader was known as the BTK killer. He began his murders in 1974 but evaded capture until 2005. He maintained contact with the media and police for decades.
MEDIA SUPPLEMENT:February of 2005, I will never forget that day. The police says, your dad is BTK. The serial killer who terrorized Wichita for years, a sexual sadist BTK. Can you imagine finding out that your father is one of the most evil people on earth? My father just flew under the radar and they didn't find him for 31 years because he was right under their noses. He didn't just fool his family. He fooled an entire city. He literally fooled everybody.
Kevin Buckler (Host):By the late 1970s, America was on edge. Headlines grabbed the public's attention. Another arrest. Another monster caught. To many, it felt like a wave of evil had swept across the country.
Kevin Buckler (Host):This continued into the next decade. Several of the most notorious American serial killers were caught and convicted during the 1980s. Others operating in that period would remain unidentified or unapprehended for years afterward.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Among those captured in the 1980s was Richard Ramirez, the night stalker. He terrorized California between 1984 and 1985, breaking into homes and murdering or assaulting victims of all ages before being captured in 1985.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Larry Elder came to be known as the highway killer. He murdered over 20 young men in Indiana and Illinois between 1982 and 1984. He targeted hitchhikers and left their bodies along rural roads.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Wayne Williams was linked to the Atlanta Child Murders between 1979 and 1981. He was arrested in 1981 and convicted of two murders, though many believe he was responsible for more.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole were also arrested in the early 1980s. Their stream of confessions, many later proven false, helped inflate the perception of a national serial killer epidemic.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Bueno were the hillside stranglers. They were both caught in 1979 and convicted in the early 1980s for the murders of ten women in Los Angeles. Their case became a defining example of how media coverage transformed killers into nightly news fixtures.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Serial killers who began their crimes in the 1980s would continue operating into the next decade before being caught. Jeffrey Dahmer was active from 1978 to 1991. He murdered 17 men and boys in Wisconsin and Ohio. His murders involved sexual assault, dismemberment, and cannibalism. His 1991 arrest marked the end of the golden age of the serial killer. It was also the beginning of America's televised true crime obsession.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Eileen Wournos killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. She was not arrested until 1991. Widely sensationalized, she was one of the first female serial killers to dominate media coverage.
MEDIA SUPPLEMENT:Those men were shot just. Just shot. And something said, boom, boom, boom. You know, they weren't cut out, they weren't sliced out, no OJ jazz, you know. And he said, I did the most horrendous crime in the whole wide world. Not true? I guess not. All they were was shot and left. If it was a horrendous crime, why didn't I shoot them between the eyes, cut their penis off, stick it in their mouth, you know, do all kinds of gross stuff. All they were was shot and left, you know?
Kevin Buckler (Host):Together, these cases illustrate how the 1980s intensified and exhausted America's serial killer fascination. Many of the most infamous offenders were finally brought to justice, even as others continued to operate in the shadows, sustaining the public's enduring fear that the menace was never fully contained.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But what if that nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties public fear, real as it felt, was also something else? What if it wasn't just a crime story, but a moral panic? Sociologist Stanley Cohen coined that term in the 1970s. It describes what happens when society reacts, sometimes wildly, to a perceived threat to its moral order. There's always a pattern. Fear comes first, then the media amplification, then the hunt for villains, the folk devils, that we believe embody what's gone wrong in the world.
Kevin Buckler (Host):When we talk about a moral panic, it's easy to imagine it as a spontaneous eruption of fear, something that just happens when people get scared. But moral panics are almost never accidental. They're built, sustained, and circulated through a network of institutions, media outlets, government officials, politicians, and even academic experts, each with their own motives and incentives.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The media often lights the first spark. When a story hits that taps into deep cultural anxieties about safety, morality, or social change, journalists know what they found, a narrative that captures attention. In the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, that meant front page coverage of serial killers, televised manhunts, and late night news anchors warning viewers to lock their doors. Those images created an emotional reality, one that felt bigger than the facts themselves. The rarest crimes were framed as common dangers, and isolated incidents became evidence of a national epidemic.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Then come the politicians. They recognize fear as political currency. At the height of the serial killer era, political leaders embraced tough on crime rhetoric. Republican, Democrat, Party did not matter. They promised more police, harsher penalties, and greater federal coordination. Policies like mandatory minimums, expanded FBI powers, and victims' rights legislation, all sold as responses to a terrifying new age of violence. Fear became not just a reaction, it became governance.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The government itself, through agencies like the FBI, had a stake in sustaining the narrative. In the years after Watergate and COINtelPro, the Bureau needed to rebuild its public image. Profiling and the language of behavioral science gave the agency a new kind of heroism. The serial killer became a problem that only the FBI could solve.
Kevin Buckler (Host):And then there are the experts, psychologists, criminologists, and cultural commentators. They lend moral panic its academic legitimacy. Their interviews and commentaries gave fear a vocabulary. Psychopath, predator, sociopath, organized, disorganized, even when well intentioned, their analyses reinforce the idea that the threat is not ordinary, but extraordinary, that evil has a pattern, and that only trained specialists can decode it.
Kevin Buckler (Host):All of these voices together form the moral panic feedback loop. The media amplifies fear, politicians legislate around it, government agencies operationalize it, and experts interpret it. It all gives just enough science to sound inevitable.
Kevin Buckler (Host):By the time the public enters the conversation, the framework is already built. The panic feels organic, but it's actually a kind of cultural choreography, one that tells us who to fear, what to fear, and how to feel about it.
Kevin Buckler (Host):And in that era, the folk devils had names Bundy, Gacy, Berkowitz. They weren't just criminals, they became symbols, avatars of corruption, danger hiding behind ordinary faces.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The coverage was relentless, nightly newscasts, tabloids, talk shows. It was fear serialized. The FBI seized the moment. Agents at Quantico began using the term serial killer, not just to classify offenders, but to position the bureau as the nation's moral guardian.
Kevin Buckler (Host):And it worked. The public believed there was an epidemic. Even though serial murders made up less than one percent of all homicides, the panic justified new funding, new surveillance tools, and new ways of talking about crime. Ways that made the threat feel everywhere.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But beneath the headlines something else was happening. America was wrestling with much deeper anxieties. Urban decay, gender liberation, the collapse of trust in government, the fear that modern life itself was spinning out of control. The serial killer became the face of all of that unease, a symbol of moral disorder that could be caught, punished, and understood.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Films in the Halloween franchise from 1978 to 2022, Manhunter in 1986, The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, they all exploited that imagery and turned it into entertainment. The line between reality and performance blurred, and crime became culture.
Speaker 14:No reason, no uh conscience, no understanding, and even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil.
Kevin Buckler (Host):That's the strange power of a moral panic. It tells us as much about what we fear as it does about what we face.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The serial killer craze wasn't just about murder. It was about meaning, about trying to impose order on chaos, to name our collective anxiety, and to believe that if we could identify the monster, maybe, just maybe we could keep the darkness at bay. This segment is called Profiling the Panic, the FBI and the Serial Killer Narrative. It further highlights the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agency fed the original serial killer panic. America wasn't just afraid of serial killers in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, it was organized around the idea of them. And no institution did more to formalize that fear than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In 1972, the FBI created the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. It was a small team of agents who began interviewing convicted murderers. They wanted to study their motives, methods, and psychology. Out of those interviews came a new language for violent crime, terms like signature behavior, organized versus disorganized, and most importantly the phrase serial killer.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The concept didn't formally exist in official law enforcement language before this. Agents like Robert Ressler and John Douglas began using serial killer. They used it to describe offenders who, between pauses, murdered repeatedly. This indicated a psychological cycle where the killer pursued compulsion and then relief.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The definitions of serial murder vary, but most incorporate notions of multiple victims killed over a period of time, with a cooling off period between each murder. Some definitions additionally include that the motive is for personal gratification.
Kevin Buckler (Host):It was a clinical formula, but it gave shape to the fear. Suddenly what had been isolated local crimes could be classified, compared, and connected across the country. The FBI gave that pattern a name. Then the media gave it a face.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The Bureau didn't just study these crimes, it built infrastructure around them. In nineteen eighty five, the FBI launched VICAP, the violent criminal apprehension program. It was a national database designed to collect and connect cases. Homicide, sexual assault, and missing persons could be linked by behavioral patterns.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The Bureau touted it. Here's how the FBI described it: " VICAP Web is the only national law enforcement database that contains both investigative and behavioral information related to specific types of cases."
Kevin Buckler (Host):That database and the narrative behind it gave the serial killer a kind of bureaucratic immortality. The FBI had turned an investigative method into a national mythology, a belief that these predators were everywhere, crossing state lines, eluding police, and waiting to be caught by the scientific mind of Quantico.
Kevin Buckler (Host):This wasn't malicious. It was institutional survival. The FBI was just out of the scandals of the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies. The organization needed to redefine its purpose. The serial killer became the new frontier, a domestic enemy that justified funding, research, and cultivated public trust.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But in the process, the Bureau helped create a feedback loop. The FBI talked about serial killers, then the media reported on them. The media reported on them, then the public feared them. The more the public feared them, the more indispensable the FBI became.
Kevin Buckler (Host):When we look back at the so-called golden age of the serial killer, we're not just looking at crime history. We're looking at institutional storytelling. It was a jointly built narrative by law enforcement, journalists, the audience itself, a nation terrified and fascinated by its own reflection in the darkness. This segment is titled You're a Fifty Year Old Woman Living Alone. Beware the Boogeyman. Its focus a government task force that helped translate fear into policy. A federal initiative meant to support victims, also reinforce the emotional and symbolic framework that defined the serial killer era.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Public anxiety about crime in the nineteen eighties was already running high. Serial killers dominated headlines, cable news found its rhythm in televised tragedy, and politicians understood that fear was a powerful organizing tool. Against that backdrop, President Reagan's task force on victims of crime became a moral appeal and a narrative intervention.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The task force report wasn't just a policy document, it was a story, one about danger, vulnerability, and the restoration of order through state power. The task force didn't invent the language of fear, but it learned to speak it fluently. It transformed the statistical reality of crime into a personalized nightmare that every American could imagine.
MEDIA SUPPLEMENT:Why are you doing this to us? Because you were home.
Kevin Buckler (Host):That epic line from the film The Strangers from 2008. Although nearly 20 years later, it captures well the essence of the serial killer fear. Victimization could be as random as being at home. We often think about journalists and filmmakers shaping public fear, but the government told a version of that story too. One that gave moral and political weight to the same imagery of threat and vulnerability.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In 1982, President Ronald Reagan established the Task Force on Victims of Crime. Its goal was noble to recognize the suffering of crime victims and give them a voice. The justice system had long ignored them, but the language the report used was more than administrative. It was theatrical, even cinematic.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The report opens not with statistics or charts, but with this: "You’re a fifty-year-old woman living alone. You’re asleep one night when suddenly you awaken to find a man standing over you with a knife at your throat. As you start to scream, he beats and cuts you. He then rapes you. While you watch helplessly, he searches the house, taking your jewelry, other valuables, and money. He smashes furniture and windows in a display of senseless violence. His rampage ended. He rips out the phone line, threatens you again, and disappears into the night. At least you have survived. Terrified, you rush to the first lighted house on the block. While you wait for the police, you pray that your attacker was bluffing when he said he'd return if you called them."
Kevin Buckler (Host):In that report, it's not policy language. It's a script. It reads like the opening of a true crime special or a horror film. By addressing the reader as you, the report transformed crime from a social issue into a personal threat.
Kevin Buckler (Host):That was more than empathy. It was ideology. The task force personalized fear, reinforcing the idea that victimization was random, predatory, and ever present. It invited citizens to imagine themselves as potential victims, and to see unknown violent stranger offenders as the central danger in American life.
Kevin Buckler (Host):That framing echoed the same cultural logic driving the serial killer panic, that evil was lurking outside your door, that ordinary people could be prey at any moment, and that safety could only come through stronger policing and tougher laws.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But there is an irony buried inside that narrative. One that reveals just how powerfully fear can override fact. The task force chose as its emblematic victim a fifty year old woman living alone, a vivid, terrifying image and one almost entirely disconnected from the statistical realities of violent crime. Late middle-aged women have long been among the least likely groups in America to be victims of homicide, sexual assault, or stranger violence. They are dramatically safer than young adults, teenagers, or children, and far less vulnerable to lethal victimization than young men.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Yet the report centered on them. Not because they were the most endangered, but because they were the most symbolically potent. By choosing a victim who represented domestic stability, maturity, and respectability, the task force amplified a sense of universal vulnerability. If she could be attacked in her own home, then no one was safe. The statistical outlier became the emotional centerpiece. It redirected public fear away from the groups most at risk and toward an imagined threat against those who symbolize the moral center of society.
Kevin Buckler (Host):This rhetorical move didn't just tug at heartstrings. It reshaped the landscape of fear. It reinforced a worldview in which crime came from the shadows, committed by faceless outsiders who invaded peaceful homes and shattered ordinary lives. It pushed aside the more complicated truths, that violent crime involves acquaintances, that victims and offenders are often demographically similar, that danger is patterned rather than random. In turning the least likely victim into the archetypal one, the task force helped cement a cultural script that matched perfectly with the era's serial killer panic. Fear the stranger, fear the night, fear the unexpected, knock at the door.
Kevin Buckler (Host):And that script, once established, would echo for decades.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The task force helped accomplish a major policy milestone. Let's give it some credit. It elevated victims' rights. But it also contributed to the emotional architecture of fear that dominated the nineteen eighties. It spoke the same language as the headlines, the same rhythm as the true crime specials, and the same sense of menace that made serial killers the folk devils of modern America. The FBI built the language of the serial killer. Government officials reinforced it, but by the 1990s it was the media that kept the story alive. Media transformed investigation into entertainment, and turned fear into a kind of national fascination.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The 1970s and 1980s hunt was over, but the story endured into the 1990s. The serial killer stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight, immortalized not for their crimes, but by the cameras that never stopped rolling.
Kevin Buckler (Host):This segment is titled The End of the Golden Age. But it's with a question mark. The golden age of the serial killer wasn't defined by the crimes alone, but by the stories that surrounded them. From Bundy to Dahmer, America built an entire language of fear, one part criminal investigation, one part cultural fascination.
Kevin Buckler (Host):By the early nineteen nineties, the killers themselves began to fade, but their mythology had already taken on a life of its own. For twenty years the nation had lived under the shadow of dangerous men, figures who blurred the line between horror and reality, between the nightly news and the movie screen. But as the decade closed, something shifted. The story of crime in America was changing.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The 1970s and 1980s golden age of the serial killer began to fade. Not because the public lost interest, but because technology, policing, and the media itself were evolving.
Kevin Buckler (Host):When Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, the story dominated headlines worldwide. Unthinkable in detail, almost cinematic in scope, his crimes seemed to mark both the climax and the collapse of an era.
Kevin Buckler (Host):That same year, DNA analysis was transforming criminal investigation. The new science made it harder for predators to operate across state lines. It was easier for police to connect crimes once considered isolated. The mystery that had defined the serial killer's myth was slowly giving way to forensic science.
Kevin Buckler (Host):DNA databases, digital fingerprints, and national information systems like CODIS and VICAP each pulled much of the mystery out of the hunt. Technology closed one chapter, but the cultural appetite never closed at all.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Technology didn't end the fascination. It just changed its shape. The serial killer retreated from the headlines, but the shape never left our imagination. We stopped fearing the serial killer as a national epidemic, but we started consuming these killers as entertainment. The line between crime and culture had blurred once again.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Audiences didn't have to wait for the evening news. They could follow investigations in real time through the 24-hour cable cycle, tabloid TV, and by the late 1990s, the internet.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Even as the number of active serial killers declined, the storytelling machinery never stopped. The 1990s produced a new wave of killers whose crimes mirrored a more modern kind of anonymity. Truck drivers like Keith Jesperson, the happy face killer.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Angel Rosendez, known as the Railroad Killer, moved invisibly across state lines.
Kevin Buckler (Host):And Aileen Wuornos. Her trial blurred the boundaries between gender, justice, and spectacle.
Kevin Buckler (Host):They were killers built for a media age that was learning to commercialize true crime itself. Fascination, once driven by nightly newscasts and paperbacks, migrated to court TV. The nation experienced the first generation of online crime forms. The serial killer had become a kind of cultural brand. Frightening, familiar, but strangely profitable.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The nineteen nineties gave us the first taste of interactive fear.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Television blurred the line between reporting and reenactment. Shows like Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted, these originated in the late 1980s but became television staples in the 1990s. These shows invited viewers to watch, to analyze, and even help.
Kevin Buckler (Host):On the screen, viewers are provided a website to visit if they have information about the case. The living room became part of the investigation.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The 1990s decade also gave us a plethora of films depicting serial killers. Not just as monsters to be feared, but as puzzles to be solved.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The Silence of the Lambs opened the decade in 1991. It turned Hannibal Lecter into the new face of cinematic evil. Intelligent, articulate, and terrifyingly self-aware.
Kevin Buckler (Host):A few years later came Seven in 1995. It is a rain soaked meditation on sin and justice. It made the killer's philosophy central to the story.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Copycat in 1995i and Kiss the Girls in 1997 followed. There was a merging of procedural realism with psychological horror. These weren't slashers or creature features, they were moral thrillers. These films reflected a nation that wanted to understand darkness, not simply flee from it.
Kevin Buckler (Host):And then there is Natural Born Killers from 1994. It served as both serial killer narrative and cultural parody. It followed Mickey and Mallory Knox. They were lovers turned murderers. And they rampaged across the American landscape. The couple left behind bodies, headlines, and an adoring public. The film was a mirror held up to the media itself, a grotesque reflection of how television and tabloid news turned murderers into celebrities, audiences into voyeurs. It was less about crime than about consumption. A commentary on the way the camera could make violence seductive.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Each of these films carried forward the fascination that began in newsrooms and FBI files, but they reframed it for a new era of sophistication and self-awareness. The serial killer was no longer a faceless drifter or blue collar predator. He was urbane, methodical, even charismatic. He belonged as much to the boardroom as to the basement. His crimes became case studies in morality, his victims symbols of cultural anxiety.
Kevin Buckler (Host):That evolution reached its sharpest edge at the dawn of the new millennium with American psycho in 2000. In Patrick Bateman, audiences met the fully domesticated serial killer, not the lurking stranger of suburban nightmares, but the man in the designer suit sitting next to you in the conference room.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The serial killer had finally gone mainstream. He embodied not the fringe of society but its ideal type, successful, attractive, and utterly hollow. By the end of the decade, the serial killer had become more than a figure of fear. He was an idea, a template. He represented control in an increasingly chaotic world, order twisted into obsession. Audiences, perhaps unwittingly, were drawn to that paradox. The horror had become intellectual, the fear aesthetic. These stories, on screen, in print, and on television, each ensured that the serial killer never truly disappeared. Even as real world cases declined, the killer remained omnipresent in the cultural imagination. Reincarnated with each new film, each new headline, each new investigative series promising to unlock the mind of evil.
Kevin Buckler (Host):By the close of the 1990s, America had entered a new phase, one where the killer's mythology belonged as much to Hollywood as to law enforcement. The fear that once felt raw and immediate had been domesticated into ritual. The monster was now a household name, living between the cracks of entertainment and reality.
Kevin Buckler (Host):And in that transformation, from crime to content, from panic to pop culture, the golden age didn't end at all. It simply moved to a different screen. That new screen changed everything.
Kevin Buckler (Host):As the twenty first century began, the serial killer no longer needed the nightly news to remain in the public imagination. The story had migrated from print to pixels, from broadcast to broadband. What had once been an anxious national flirtation became a kind of cultural routine, repackaged for the true crime era. Shows, networks, and eventually streaming platforms discovered that murder was more than a headline. It was a format. The serial killer, once a source of moral panic, had become the backbone of a billion dollar entertainment industry.
Kevin Buckler (Host):By the early 2000s, America's obsession with the serial killer had entered its next phase. The panic that once defined the evening news had become routine. The stories that once terrified the nation were now part of its regular programming.
Kevin Buckler (Host):As the decades turned, the serial part of the story began to dissolve. TV producers realized that audiences don't need a killer with dozens of victims. Just one murder told the right way. The same narrative techniques once reserved for Bundy or Dahmer, the profile, the motive, the moment of capture, were now applied to ordinary homicides. The serial killer's mythology had taught viewers how to consume crime as a story, and true crime television expanded the formula. Every murder became a mystery, every neighborhood a potential crime scene.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The nightly broadcast had given way to the age of true crime television, forensic files, cold case files, city confidential, shows that filled cable lineups promising to reveal how killers get caught. Their tone was clinical, almost reassuring, science over fear, process over panic.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But there was always another message underneath. This could happen anywhere. Each episode opened not in a distant city, but in a place that looked very familiar. A quiet suburb, a small town, a stretch of interstate you might have driven yourself. The narration made every murder sound local, every tragedy sound transferable. The killer could be next door.
Kevin Buckler (Host):True crime television sold more than justice. It sold proximity. Crime was no longer an abstract danger or a relic of some golden age. It was coming to a city near you. And viewers weren't just watching the crime. They were watching its resolution. The DNA swab, the lab test, replaced the manhunt and the profiler's hunch. This offered a comforting illusion that for every unspeakable act there was a matching science ready to explain it.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In this new landscape, fear had become educational, a kind of participatory criminology for the living room. Each episode offered the same ritual, a crime, a mystery, and a soothing, precise, forensic resolution. The serial killer, once the symbol of chaos, had become a case study in order.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Television didn’t just report on killers anymore. It archived them. Cable channels discovered that crime was evergreen in content, endlessly repeatable, permanently marketable. The FBI files, Dateline NBC, forty eight hours mystery, each blurred the line between investigation and entertainment. Viewers were no longer terrified, they were enthralled.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Then came the docuseries boom. The twenty tens marked a new chapter in the serial killer's afterlife. Netflix, Hulu, and HBO each resurrected long closed cases, reconstructing them with cinematic precision. The Jinx in 2015 transformed Robert Dirtz's alleged crimes into a suspense thriller. Making a murderer, also from 2015, turned the justice system itself into the villain. It reframed the narrative from fear of the killer to skepticism of the law itself.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Manhunter's premiere on Netflix in 2017 completed the cultural feedback loop. The show dramatized the birth of the FBI's behavioral science unit, the very institution that had first named and classified serial killers decades earlier. Fiction was now reflecting history, and history had already been shaped by fiction. The myth had gone fully meta.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But this new wave of storytelling did more than retell old crimes. It redefined the relationship between audience and killer. Viewers became detectives, archivists, and moral philosophers. Viewers debated guilt, evidence, and motive on Reddit threads and podcasts. Serial from 2014 made this participatory model mainstream. With each episode, listeners were invited to solve a murder alongside the host, proof that true crime was no longer just something to consume. It was something to join.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In the process, the serial killer's image became strangely democratized. He belonged not to the FBI or to the newsroom, but to everyone. The killer was now a shared cultural project, a ghost the public could collectively chase, a story constantly rewritten by amateur sleuths and streaming algorithms alike.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The platforms perfected what earlier decades had only hinted at, the serial killer as serialized content. Viewers didn't have to wait for news updates or trial verdicts. The binge model delivered all ten hours at once. Every clue and confession arranged for maximum dramatic effect. The fear was controlled, the horror neatly packaged, and the killer eternally available, waiting in a queue of recommendations.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Yet beneath the glossy production and pristine storytelling, the old patterns endured. The same tropes that shaped the nineteen seventies journalism and nineteen eighties horror reappeared. The profiler and the monster, the victim as a symbol, the crime as a morality tale. The difference was simply scale. What once played out in a handful of newsrooms now unfolded across millions of screens. Each viewer curated their own version of evil.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Crime became a streaming comfort food. We gave the serial killer a strange kind of immortality. The monsters of the late twentieth century live on their interviews remastered, their mugshots digitized, their crimes re-edited for high definition. They exist not in the shadows but in the search results.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In this new media ecosystem, the serial killer no longer represents the breakdown of society. He represents its continuity. He is the proof that our appetite for fear, mystery, and moral order never really disappeared. It simply adapted.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The result is a paradox. The more we know about killers, the safer we feel and the more stories we demand. The monster has been domesticated, transformed from headline to homepage, from terror to ritual.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But here's the thing, this transformation from terror to ritual, from menace to media, it isn't unique to serial killers. It's something that happens over and over in American popular culture. A threat emerges, grips the public imagination, and becomes larger than life. Then as years pass, the fear softens. The story remains, but the sting fades. Eventually the monster becomes familiar, even nostalgic.
Kevin Buckler (Host):You can see this pattern clearly in how the public reacted to Jaws back in 1975. When Spielberg's film hit theaters, it was more than a blockbuster. It was a cultural event. Beach attendance plummeted. Shark hunts soared. Entire coastal economies felt the impact of a fear stoked by a single fictional predator. As a child, once I was of an age to watch Jaws, I was suspicious of water thereafter, even in a swimming pool. And for a time, that fear felt real, visceral, imminent, undeniable.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But decades later, Jaws occupies a very different place in our imagination. Today, it's a summer tradition. A movie we revisit for excitement, suspense, and nostalgia.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The public no longer behaves as though there is a great white shark waiting just offshore. The concern faded, even as the imagery endured. We now recognize the film as entertainment rather than prophecy, as thriller rather than threat. The monster, the shark, and more importantly, the evil you couldn't see didn't disappear. It simply changed category.
Kevin Buckler (Host):And that's exactly what we've done with the serial killer. The fear that once felt like a national emergency has been reabsorbed into the rhythms of culture. Something we binge, analyze, and debate rather than something that keeps us up at night. Jaws turn from a cautionary tale into a cinematic classic. Similarly, the serial killer transitioned from a symbol of societal collapse to a durable genre, a story structure, a character type, a cultural artifact we know how to use.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The pattern is familiar. First comes fear, then fascination, then normalization. The monster becomes myth, and the myth becomes media. And once it becomes media, it becomes ours, shaped, remixed, and replayed until the danger feels less like a threat and more like a tradition. The serial killer, like the shark, didn't vanish. We simply learned to live with him on screen instead of in our nightmares.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The story that began in FBI offices and newspaper headlines now streams endlessly. Its edges are polished by production, its fear repackaged as fascination. From news to Netflix, the serial killer endures. No longer a threat in the dark, but a reflection on the screen.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Every generation has its monsters. The difference now is that we stream ours. This segment is called "Hashtag True Crime, how social media resurrects the serial killer." In the twenty first century, the serial killer didn't return through the back alley or the evening news. He returned through the scroll. Today, mythology of the serial killer has found new life. The resurrection is in the world of likes, shares, and hashtags. A digital afterlife fueled by our desire to know, to warn, and perhaps most powerfully, to belong.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Social media turns curiosity into currency. Each post, each video, each theory, they offer users a way to participate in a collective investigation, to feel not just informed, but involved. When a tragedy breaks, we open our phones, not only to learn what happened, but to say something about it, to process, to react, to perform concern or expertise.
Kevin Buckler (Host):TikTok, Reddit, and X, these platforms amplify that impulse. Instant feedback, viral visibility, features that give everyday users the same power once reserved for journalists. You don't need a press badge or an editor. All you need is a camera, a microphone, and a sense of timing. The line between reporting and speculating dissolves. It is replaced by something more seductive: participation.
Kevin Buckler (Host):There is comfort in that role. To post is to matter, to comment is to connect. Each interaction becomes a tiny act of control. This in a world that feels unpredictable. And when the topic is murder, especially the possibility of a serial killer, the emotional payoff is magnified. It's not just entertainment, it's community built on vigilance.
Kevin Buckler (Host):But this new media ecosystem runs on attention. Verification plays no role. Unlike traditional newsrooms, social media spaces are largely unregulated. There are no editors, no fact checkers, no ethical review boards. Rumor and evidence travel at the same speed.
Kevin Buckler (Host):When a post about a possible serial killer hits a platform, it's rarely questioned. It's shared. Algorithms reward engagement, not accuracy. The more shocking the claim, the faster it spreads. And once a narrative takes root, there's a killer in the city. The police are covering it up. The bodies are connected. It's almost impossible to uproot.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In this environment, users are amplifiers and authors. A single video filmed at a bayou, a screenshot of a police report, or a dramatic caption can ignite a chain reaction. Each repost adds credibility even when no investigation supports the claim. The result is a new kind of storytelling, crowdsourced, decentralized, and almost impossible to correct.
Kevin Buckler (Host):Speed, emotion, community. These are features that make social media engaging. Yet these same qualities make it volatile. Fear spreads faster than fact because fear demands a response. A post warning that a killer is on the loose doesn't just inform, it mobilizes. People comment to warn others, share to protect friends, speculate to feel involved. What begins as concern quickly becomes a collective performance of vigilance.
Kevin Buckler (Host):This is how a panic is born in the digital age. In earlier decades television news could spark moral panic through repetition. Now, social media achieves the same effect through replication, thousands of users echoing the same fear, believing they are spreading awareness, but often amplifying misinformation.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In Houston, for instance, what began as isolated discoveries of bodies became the seed of an online legend, a viral narrative of a serial killer stalking the bayou. The posts didn't originate from law enforcement or from journalists, but from ordinary users connecting dots that weren't yet evidence. As the theory spread, the logic of fear took over. If this many people are posting about it, it must be true.
Kevin Buckler (Host):The psychology is simple but very powerful. Fear gives shape to uncertainty. And in the social media marketplace, fear also gives visibility. A tweet about safety gets ignored. A video about danger gets views. The more frightening the claim, the higher the engagement, the further the reach. In that sense, panic isn't a glitch of the system. It is the system functioning exactly as designed.
Kevin Buckler (Host):What social media resurrected wasn't just the serial killer as a character, it resurrected the feeling that he produced, that mix of dread, curiosity, and moral urgency. These feelings once filled news broadcasts and talk shows, but now the fear is personalized. It sits right there in your pocket. It follows you through your feed.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In this new world, there's no anchor to sign off and end the broadcast. The story never stops. It refreshes, and every refresh reminds us that the killer is always still out there, whether real, rumored, or a function of social media. The story of the killer waits for the next share, the next theory, the next post to bring him back to life. And that brings us to the end of our deep dive into the serial killer panic of the 1970s and the 1980s, and the legacy it still leaves behind.
Kevin Buckler (Host):In the next episode, we turn our attention to the Houston serial killer scare of 2025. We'll talk with two experts who will help us separate the popular culture image of the serial killer from the actual empirical and legal realities behind the term. It is a conversation about how we define danger, how we measure it, and why the myth persists.
Kevin Buckler (Host):If you learned something or laughed, even nervously, go ahead and give that like button some love. Believe me, it's a lot easier than my course exams and writing assignments.
Kevin Buckler (Host):I am Kevin Buckler, your host, and I hope you return for additional episodes of Crime Time Office Hours, the podcast where we cut through the noise to make crime and justice clear one issue at a time.