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The more grotesque the deed, the greater the killer's appeal. In the panoply of murderers, Long Island landscaper Joel Rifkin, who goes on trial this month for the death of 17 young women, is just a garden-variety killer. The man- eating Dahmer is the pick of the crop. "People are getting very morbidly involved in violence, especially violent sexual behavior," says criminologist Robert Ressler, who says he first coined the term serial killer 20 years ago when he worked in the FBI's behavioral-research branch. Americans now wallow in the horror and gore and take a guilty delight in killers' eluding capture. (Indeed, it is a chilling emulation of Gacy's reaction to the film Silence of the Lambs: "When I see a movie like that, I'm rooting for the killer," he told his Chicago lawyer Greg Adamski.) "Our society is actively breeding serial killers," says William Birnes, co-author with Joel Norris of the book Serial Killers, "and society's fascination with them is only adding to that."
Some experts believe the number of serial killers is rising. "Going back to 1960, you had about 10,000 homicides a year in the U.S., and most of these were solved and very few of them represented multiple or serial killers," notes Ressler, now a forensic consultant in Spotsylvania, Virginia. "Today we're running 25,000 homicides a year, and a significant number of those homicides are going unsolved. We're seeing a great increase in stranger killing and in many of these cases, the victims are falling to serial and multiple killers." Still, the notoriety these killers enjoy is out of proportion to their numbers. The FBI estimates there may only be dozens of serial killers operating in the U.S. Yet serial murder remains a peculiarly American phenomenon: 75% of the 160 or so repeat killers captured or identified in the past 20 years were in the U.S.
Birnes and Norris have divided the serial-killer life into seven phases of activity, a repeating cycle that begins with desire and ends with morose feelings -- aura, trolling, wooing, capture, murder, totem and depression. They kill to satisfy some inner psychological and sexual pressure, and they favor such killing methods as hanging, strangling or stabbing, which put them in intimate contact with their victim. "The only time serial murderers have control is when they kill," says Birnes. "That's why they keep totems." For instance: the body parts Dahmer put in his refrigerator, the victims' jewelry that Rifkin kept or the bodies buried in basements and yards. These mementos allow them to hang on to the highlights and relive them.
"Serial killing is an addiction," says crime author Ron Holmes of Louisville, Kentucky. The murderers "get caught because they stop paying attention to detail." Holmes recalls Bundy's words: "You learn what you need to know to kill and take care of the details, like changing a tire. The first time you're careful; the 30th time you can't remember where you put the lug wrench."