AMERICAN SERIAL KILLERS-Peter Vronsky

So join me and the fun. Sign up now at Chumba Casino dot com.

the history of serial killers. In his first definitive History of the Golden Age of American serial Murder, when the number and body count of serial killers exploded, Vronsky tells the stories of the most unusual and prominent serial killings from the nineteen fifties to the early twenty first century,

from Ted Bundy to the Golden State Killer. Our fascination with these classics serial killers seems to grow by the day, American serial Killers gives true crime junkies what they crave, with both perennial favorites Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer in lesser known cases, Melvin Rhees, Harvey Glatman. The book they were featuring this evening is American serial Killers the Epidemic Years nineteen fifty to two thousand, when my special guests historian,

journalist and author Peter Vronsky. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Peter Vronsky, Hi, Dan, thanks for having me on. Thank you so much for joining me once again with this incredible American serial Killers. Tell us just the genesis of this book and what you intended to prove I guess and determine with this American serial Killers.

then fled with the heads. And as she was doing that, he held up the elevator, which really annoyed me because I was in the lobby trying to go up and take a look at this hotel, whether I wanted to stay there or not. You know, this was a rough period in New York's history. You would check into a hotel if you're not familiar with it without first looking around. So you know, he probably held up the elevator for maybe forty seconds tops. But I'm twenty three, I'm impatient, and so he annoys me.

So that was my first encounter. Who it was I later learned about almost eight months nine months later he had been arrested, and I saw his pictures and I realized, you know who it was I encountered on the elevator, and he was this ordinary looking guy, Richard Cottingham, the Times Square Corso killer, and so fascinated with what the hell this was? And the term serial killer did not

exist at that time, certainly not in public usage. Law enforcement had been using it amongst themselves, but newspapers didn't use it. It really doesn't enter into our popular lexicon until May of nineteen eighty one, when The New York Times uses that term to describe Wayne Williams, the child murderer in Atlanta. So, you know, not having that word made me kinda left an impression of almost like a

supernatural monster and Alfred Hitchcock movie serial Killer. I mean, serial killers have been in our consciousness certainly since easily since Jack the Ripper eighteen eighty eight and Blonde before that, but we didn't really have a word for them, and without the word, there was no concept. We called them recreational killers. We refer to them as stranger on stranger killers. Sometimes we call them as mass killers, which of course today has a whole different meaning than it did when

that term was used. So I didn't have any of those concepts to kind of comfort me in on understanding what it was that I had encountered. And so it was this lifelong fascination with these monsters, and as the word serial killer entered into our lexicon, I I kind of realized what that was, but remained fascinated with their history,

their origins and so forth. And you know, when I retired from television production and decided to take a shot at writing a book, you know, they say write what you know, and that's what I started up with and really haven't looked back since. I think this is maybe my fourth book on serial killers. And this era of the nineteen seventies and nineteen nineteen seventies to nineteen the end of nineteen nineties, when.

So I look kind of at the ramp up starting from nineteen fifty essentially where you start beginning to see the steady rise of cerial homicides in the United States, and then with the nineteen seventies, you suddenly have this surge that essentially will run until the mid nineteen nineties, when we begin to see the first time not only a decline in the number of serial killers being apprehended, but as well in general murders and violent crime in

the United States begins to dramatically drop at that point.

of upheavals around that. We have the Vietnam War protests, we have the emergence of youth culture, we have the sexual revolution, the kind of disintegration of the nuclear family, and you know, there is a rise, as I say, in violence and disorder in general in American society, and so we often associated serial murder with that period and

with contemporary serial killers at that time. The problem with this model is that on average, a serial killer kills their first victim around the age of twenty seven twenty eight, but their obsessions, their psychopathology begins developing as early as the age of five, and often you have a kind of a complete cycle by the time they're around the

age of fourteen. And so that means that if we're going to look at you know, Ted Bundy, for example, you got to back him out of the era in which he was committing as murders to the era in which he was a child when he's being kind of formed, and that of course brings us back, you know, twenty twenty five years Ted Bundy, typically of that generation is born in nineteen forty six, and so we got.

And you know, you have now a generation of women that have to single handedly bring up their children. And one thing we do see, and there are various psychological explanations for it, but one thing we do see in many serial killer biographies, not at all, but in many is the presence of a kind of a controlling, dominant mother.

That would be the expression, you know, we might use what you know, more politely put, what we're seeing is of course, independent, assertive women that have to play both role of father and mother, and that is only more intensified by the Second World War as the husbands begin to leave and women are single handedly raising children. And of course when the husband's return from the Second World War,

they're not the same. And we completely underestimated the trauma that our fathers and grandfathers went through in the Second World War. We think it was like it's portrayed in the movies, and it wasn't at all that. And you know, I discovered that astonishing thirty seven percent of GI ground combat troops deployed in World War Two were discharged and sent home as neuropsychiatric casualties thirty seven percent, So that's a a huge amount. And we didn't have the kind

of diagnosis we have of post traumatic stress disorder. In the post Vietnam War era. We had these vague terms combat stress reaction CSR, battle fatigue, battle neuroses, but we didn't understand what it was. And basically, traumatized soldiers come home, they're told to just suck it up. There's no treatment,

there's no understanding of what they were experiencing. And as I looked at that era of serial killers and began to, you know, collect these accounts of serial killers describing, you know, their fathers, particularly those who served in the Pacific, coming back from the war and just totally disconnected from them, their family, just in this kind of sullen silence in which they you don't have to suffer. So that adds yet another level to the childhoods of these young males

that are born in the baby bloomer generation. Adding to that, on top of it, it's never one thing. Adding to that, we have this ubiquitous popular literature in the form of true detective magazines and pulp advent men's pulp adventure magazines that well, first of all, we're sold mainstream next to Life magazine, Time Magazine, Ladies, Home, you know, Home, Garden Journal, and so forth, which depicted and celebrated the abduction, restraint, torture, rape,

and murder of women. It you know, all the detective magazines often featured a model who posed in the photograph. She was bound, she was you know, her clothing was in a sense of disorder. None of these were blatantly pornographic, but clearly the implication was here that this is a woman who's abducted, tortured, rape, sexually assaulted, and will probably be murdered. And often the victim in these cover magazines

looked out at the buyer of the magazines. It was, you know, you could have her for the price of the magazine. Was essentially the message, and the same thing with the men's adventure magazines, except the covers were painted rather than posed the photographically. So by the nineteen fifties has homicide investigations of serial homicides begin to unfold the presence of these magazines and kind of scripts from these

magazines become evident. In some of these cases, particularly I described in my book the case of Hardy Glackman, who was so obsessed with these magazines that he actually would lure in Los Angeles freelancing photo bottles, telling them that he had an assignment to shoot a true detective magazine cover, and he would pose them as if they were in a true detective magazine cover and then enter into the cover and do what he wanted with them. They killed

a number of women that way. Those photographs are you know, survived, and at that time, those photographs of you know, actually a serial killer's victim in the process of being victimized were published throughout the United States. They still circulate on the Internet today, and their absolute duplicates of what Harvey Blackman was seeing in these two detective magazines. He as well was subscribing to bondage literature as well, which also

wasn't you know, technically pornographic either. Right, So these this now on top of kind of the parental trauma whatever you know, serial killers experience. There's a whole matrix of things that happened to children who become serial killers. Plus these magazines begin to kind of give them a script on which to express their obsessions, express their compotions, So it's not that these magazines necessarily made them into serial killers, but it inspired what they would do their their script.

You know, other serial killers are inspired by biblical passages, you know. Dennis Radar, the BTK Killer, described how he would be turned on by Boom Winkle cartoons, you know, the ones that feature Dudley do Right d r CMP the mountie who's rescuing now and now is often bound and tied to a railway track by the villain right, and Dudley do Right comes to rescue her. Well, Dennis Radar described how, you know, he was aroused by these cartoon images of now being tied to the railway track.

So anything, anything can inspire a you know, budding serial killer in expressing already what's inside of them was brewing inside of them and gives them shape and gives the form. And of course that's what profiles begin to focus in on in the nineteen seventies. They begin to discern certain patterns, certain imprint signatures, as they call it, and those signatures

come from our culture, from our era. You know, when I looked at serial murder in the nineteenth century, for example, you know, there was a period where serial killers had an obsession with servant girls the way later serial killers have an obsession with sex workers, right, so, servant girls and the type of silk clothing they wore. So in the early you know, from about eighteen hundred to about eighteen fifty eighteen sixty, you had a number of serial

killing cases where the victims were servant girls. They were lured into some remote place, and often they were killed for their clothing and the whole servant girl fetish. In fact, it is still with us today. I mean, you know, walk through the aisles of the costume department in any kind of adult novelty spoor and there you'll see the you know, servant girl costumes. It's still a theme in kind of sexual play.

you mentioned, about Glatman. Meanwhile, you talked about Glatman being featured in a True Detective magazine and Dennis Raider finding a True Detective magazine in his father's truck apparently and being influenced and seeing, geez, look at these are the kinds of things I've been dreaming of.

suddenly captured his attention. And we can see it kind of an escalation from the kind of more innocent now the cartoon figure tied to the rails to now an actual photograph of a bound woman that Harvey Gladman used to resynthesize the fake detective magazine covers, and now you have the next generation Dennis Radar, who begins to reenact these kinds of bondage scenarios, often using himself as a

model in them. He kind of uses himself as almost a three dimensional image of his fantasy, imagines himself being actually the woman. So it's a very kind of creepy, circular psychological process that eventually spins out of just being inside the mind of the serial killer. It spins out of that into an actual murder when he takes it on the road essentially, and again that statistically begins to

occur around the age twenty seven twenty eight. You know, that's when many of serial killers really mature into it. That's the term we might use, mature into you know, real serial killers who are no longer just fantasizing about it, but are doing it. But the fantasies are often decades old, slowly evolving.

had a much more simplistic motion of sexual murders. You know, if somebody say, for example, you know, strangled an adolescent girl, but then maybe suffocated a teenager, it was considered to be too different for it to be the same perpetrator. And so, you know, serial killings weren't linked. And I'm working on a particular case right now as an investigative historian with jurisdictions in New York and in New Jersey, in fact, dealing with the serial killer that I had

encountered way back in nineteen seventy nine. I've been introduced to him several years ago by the daughter of a victim, and the you know, some of his cases which are now being closed. Last year I announced that three cases from nineteen sixty eight and sixty nine of schoolgirls in New Jersey, he confessed to those killings.

other murder. It just was inconceivable to police, and often is inconceivable today, you know, because serial homicide, despite kind of the prominence it has in our culture and our entertainment and so forth, it's an extraordinarily rare crime, and more so today, and so often there is a resistance in policing to jump to the serial killer scenario. It's one that the police, and they have good reason to

usually contemplate as the last possibility. And we had that problem here in Toronto a few years ago with the Bruce MacArthur murders. These were murders of you know, gay males who had a similar ethnic background. They vanished in the gay community here, and you know, the police were very resistant to declaring this as a serial homicide case because they simply didn't have, you know, any evidence confirming that.

And and so without that solid evidence, the by police departments essentially as you know, this is not a serial murder until we have evidence, even though they suspected it was that, investigated it as that, and eventually when they found the evidence, you had the apprehension. But you know, there's there's an inquiry now as to whether the Toronto

police should have treated this in a different way. So there is a reluctance, as I say, to declare something as a serial murder case unless they have just absolute evidence like you know, DNA for example.

activities that we enjoy and just haven't neglected. My wife, Lisa was so excited to get her Fat Fit Fun spring Box and wanting to get a head start this year for planning seeds for our garden, and so she was anxious to get her led indoor planter by Short Stories and get started planning seeds for our garden this summer. Lisa loves all the fab Fit Fun items relating to skincare like Grown Alchemist body cream with mandarin and rosemary leaf,

Josie Moran one hundred percent pure argan oil. Lisa loved her super I Serum by Verso with Retinol eight and pure Iconic Glow moisturizing face and body dry oil. Lisa literally relies on all of these fab Fit Fun and their marvelous health and beauty products they deliver to our door. Twenty female founded brands are in the spring box this season. You can choose from a wide variety of products when

you order receive seasonal must haves without leaving home. This fab Fit Fun spring Box is still excit for Lisa to receive. Even after receiving fabfit fundboxes for almost four years now, Lisa tells everyone she encounters about the amazing products and the incredible value and the perks of membership. Order your spring box today. Sign up now so you can snag amazing products like the led indoor Planner by

Short Stories or Verso super Iserum when you customize. Use coupon code murder for ten dollars off your first box at www dot fabfitfund dot com. Use coupon code murder for ten dollars off your first box at www dot

fabfitfund dot com. Now, Peter, we were talking about the police and their difficulty even wrapping their minds around the phenomena of serial killing until it until they had a confession or they had some overwhelming as that put this together, and we didn't talk and you do talk about we didn't mention, but you do talk about the FBI when they finally became a clearinghouse for a serial murder, when they first became involved in any serial murder, and also

the rise of profiling and the mind hunters.

it's often they're invited in. So the Behavioral Sciences Unit in the nineteen sixties was primarily formed to deal with hostage takers and the psychology applied to talking down a hostage taker or a hijacker. And at that period, this was shortly after Hoover had passed away. Jan Gar Hoover. The Behavioral Sciences Unit a FBI agents. They also were

teaching in quantical the academy. There they would give various courses on criminal psychology for visiting police detectives who were you know, upgrading their qualifications, and they were encouraged to look on a camp on a civilian university to carry out their own research and and and so a number of these behaviorists began to notice that there's this increase of serial homicides. They didn't quite know as a you know, what to call it. That all different names for it.

Robert Ressler eventually, and I think most historians have kind of settled on the Robert Ressler version of how that term was coined. Robert Wrestler said it came to him when he was lecturing in in in England, in fact,

at the police Academy there. He used the term serial and it was inspired by Saturday Afternoon serials cliffhangers, and he described serialal murder as kind of that kind of cliffhanger where the perpetrator commits the murder but it's left unsatisfied by it, kind of a cliffhanger if he wants to see the next episode or commit the next episode. And so A Wrestler says that in the mid seventies

that inspired that that term serial killer. But these guys began to in the way that they were interviewing hostage takers and you know, why did they surrender and things like that, they began privately interviewing serial killers as well, and mass killers and assassination assassins, attempted assassins as well. And so wrestler John Douglas that late generation began this intensive series. They got a brand to make this official.

Man began interviewing serial killers. I think they interviewed something like thirty two serial sexual murders and maybe another four or five sexual murderers who weren't serial killers. They engage a forensic nurse and Burgess to give them kind of an academic discipline approach to this research project. And so they started in the late seventies and nineteen eighty six

they published their results. It's kind of this monumental book still is Sexual serial Murder Patterns and Motives is the title. This becomes kind of almost a handbook for profilers. They categorized serial killers is either organized or disorganized or mixed category serial killers. I should say, by the way, FBI profiles today don't use that model. That's just the movies. You know, nobody comes to a scene and says, you know, this is an organized or disorganized you know, that's that's

not the model that's that's used. But at that time it was the first attempt to first of all name the phenomenon, and so serial killer, you know, becomes that that term, you know, and rules book on Ted Bundy, which I think is kind of the seminal true crime book that introduces us to the notion of a serial killer. When that book was published at first time in nineteen eighty, the term serial killer never appears in it. Imagine a book on Ted Bundy without the word serial killer in it.

So they now create this kind of diagnosis and what's expected the organized, disorganized serial killer, and and and and so that's how the behavioral sciences unit comes into this. This position is kind of a clearing house on serial murder.

And and of course you as well. At that point in time, politicians began to dig into this and and and so there is this kind of call, especially after Ted Bundy, a call for kind of a centralized database system where unsolved homicides data on them can be entered into this database, various characteristics perhaps being able to make a match to other serial killers. And so you get

the birth of VISCAP. This this database which acts is not a gain used as often as it's you know, purported to be in popular literature or or or the movies. And and so there's very few, if any serial killers that have been apprehended solely by the virtue of profiling, you know, profiling is a good tool. It helps. It particularly helps once you have a suspect in mind, you know, does he come near the profile. It helps as well

in interviewing the suspect. There you know, there's a psychological approach that a certain type of serial killer might be more vulnerable too. So you know, that behavioral issue is important to policing. But it's not the magic bullet that we see portrayed in Hollywood or on television. But definitely these congressional hearings that's where the term serial killer epidemic is actually used. In these congressional hearings, in particular the

question of missing children. And there were these allegations and of course John Welsh from America's Most Wanted he you know, his son was a murder victim, possibly victim of a serial killer. And so Walsh had testified before the congressional hearings. But and Rule did too, and they made some outlandish claims as to how many serial killers were out there and how many children were being abducted by serial killers. That helped, certainly, those dramatic numbers helped the FBI get funding.

But as Robert Wrestler himself later wrote, you said, you know, we needed the money. We just you know, exaggerated the extent of the epidemic, and it turned out that most child abductions in fact are you know, by by family members or people who are known to the children rather than strangers the way it was you know, implied during those fearings. But it brought funding for VISCAP. It you know, it's still running, it's still going, it's gone through several generations.

And you know the problem with vi CAP, of course, is firstly, you know, it required the completion of very complicated and long form. There's like over a hundred questions and paperwork and cops don't mix very well, right, so very few police officers were ready to you know, fill out this long form then mail it all right and and and get nothing out of it. Eventually, once you everybody had you know, desktop computers, you could now fill

out this form on a piece of software. You can you know, you rather than filling it out by hand on a typewriter or a typewriter, you can now do it on this piece of software and then facts the form. The third kind of prereation was you can just now just go online and complete the form. But until the early two thousands, police departments could not query ViCAP. You had to submit the form and then wait for ViCAP to do the analysis and then sing you the you know,

their results it. You know, individual police departments did not have access to the ViCAP database. And that changed, you know in let's say around two thousand and five, somewhere in there. Police departments now are can tap into the master database themselves rather than waiting for FBI analysts to do that. But those things kind of hindered the use of vi CAAP and so by the two thousands, a lot of new police officers who came on you know, enlisted in the in the police, weren't even aware of

v CAP. You know, the FBI kind of stopped sending bulletins on it. They stopped sending FBI asians to kind of brief police departments on what's available. And so it's in the two thousand, around two thousand and five that the FBI kind of again restarted the bulletins on the VISCAP and and began informing officers and or hey, you know, there is this tool that's available to you, and and so forth. So it had its ups and downs, as you know, the whole profiling, and it is an art essentially.

It's not exactly a science. It's kind of an art. I guess the way you know, psychiatry is kind of a little bit of intuitive understanding of your patient and their psychology, and you know some degree of sciences on mental illness and so forth. The same thing applies to profiling. It's a bit of an art, it's a bit of a science, and it's only as good as the profiler themselves. And some people are better, more adapt at profiling, while others are not so. Certainly, it's a talent.

can deep scan brains. Doctor Keel in New Mexico is kind of the leading current forensic psychiatrist who has looked at tens of thousands of brain scans of incarcerated inmates who tested positive for psychopathy, and he can now he can actually look at a brain scan and say this

individual will test positive on the hair psychopathy test. There's a test we use forty questions that are not filled out by the subject but actually are filled out by the analyst kind of behavioral issues and historical issues around a particular subject, and you score them on this forty point mark, and anybody who scores twenty five or upwards would be technically diagnosed as a psychopath. This is a test that's used by parole boards, by sentencing boards and

so forth. It's a Canadian doctor hare that came up. A hair h A. R. E came up with this test, and so Keil discovered that there are certain physical brain abnormalities similar to those that we began to recently see in NFL players who have as well frontal lobe injuries, and so kill suggests that a lot of serial killers are actually not psychopaths or organic psychopaths, but have induced

psychopathy from head injuries. And we have all these anecdotal stories from serial killers of brain injuries, you know, from Richard Ramirez to William Herron's to a lot of serial killers. There's a record of brain injuries, particularly in frontal lob injuries in their childhood history. But now over the recent decade, we could actually physically begin to make links between frontal lobat normalities and a psychopathy and of course criminal behavior,

including serial homicide. So certainly, in the case of as I like to describe my serial killer, Richard Conningham, one of the things that interested me about him was his very stable childhood. I mean, here's an individual who both his parents were remained married. He came from a middle class family. He you know, was a boy scout, a choir girl. He had three younger sisters who absolutely adored

him right to the end. Couldn't believe that he was a serial killer, and I couldn't figure out, you know, the trauma was. And he certainly claimed to me that he had a completely normal childhood, there's nothing wrong in it, And indeed I couldn't find anything. But doing a search of newspapers, remarkably, I discovered that there's actually a brain injury in his history when he's four years old. It's so severe that it's reported in the newspapers he's hit

by a car. He run his head first into a car as a four year old kid, and has taken serious enough that he's hospitalized, and and and so you know, even in you know, the one case that one serial killer with with with whom I am having you know, conversations with and interviewing and dealing with, this head injury scenario raises its its head. Whether if as a result of injury or whether there is other causes or that kind of brain pattern is left to be seen. But

right now, that is the X you know. The current explanation, because we've got a problem with the trauma model, is that, you know, thousands millions of children grow up traumatized, subject to abuse, all sorts of horrible things happen to them, yet they don't necessarily become serial killers. So what is it? What is that X factor? And that remains. The more we study serial killers, the less we appear to know.

We still don't know that X factor. And I write one of my books, I say, I think it's too early for us to just rule out old fashioned, the biblical evil, whatever that might be. You know, maybe one day we'll have a scientific firm ford an explanation. But we still haven't figured out why so many traumatized children end up not being serial killers and the few the do.

So you also provide some of these famous and not so famous cases and delve into them to show not only the influence of pornography and also the shift in society and culture and how that influenced their crimes and

their behavior, but also dramatic examples like Jeffrey Dahmer. We don't have much time left in this interview, but can you tell us a little bit about Jeffrey Dahmer some of the things that you've pointed to and discovered in his story that demonstrate some of the things that you have expressed, and not only your theory about serial killer surge, but also just your study of serial killers in general.

for nutritional purposes. It's it fulfills some other need. And in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, I mean, this was an individual who struggled not to kill. He was killing essentially to keep the objects of his love close to him. He didn't like to be left, and and and and so you know, at first he attempts he keeps a mannequin with him and and you know, he uses this mannequin kind of as a sex doll, but his grandmother finds it and forces him to get rid of it.

But he's struggling not to be killing people. And it's not about killing for him, it's about having these people. In fact, he had one way he attempts not to kill his victims as he attempts to inject battery acid into the brain of one of his victims in the hope that he can just zombify them and keep them in this zombie state without taking their life. And of course it doesn't work, and so eventually he begins to resort to cannibalism to keep these people with him. It's

the ultimate taking of a person. So he is collecting these corpses that become his love dolls. The killing for him is not part of his obsession. It's doesn't give him any pleasure at all. It's a chore. It's just keeping these people. And because cannibalism is a very primitive urge,

as is fighting, as is the sexual reproductive impose. And if you take these urges and strip away, you know, cities and civilization, and you just throw human beings into the jungle or into the cave without any of these kind of structures of civilization, you know, we are left in an animal state. And what do animals do other than you know, half sex, eat, and fight, and run away. You know, I called it the four apps. Fleeing, fighting, feeding,

and fucking. These are essential to the survival and evolution of any species. And you know, it's we've essentially only been civilized out of you know, anthropologists kind of have a very wide swap about how long are species of human beings Homo sapiens have been around. You know, some say it's around one hundred, one hundred thousand years, others saying, you know, as long as a million years. But we know one thing that we've only become civilized in approximately

the last twelve thousand years. It's a drop in the bucket. Prior to that, we were living out there like cats and dogs and every other kind of animal species, including cockroaches, and we were all in order to survive, capable of fleeting, fighting, feeding, and you know, fornicating. Otherwise, if any one of those functions ceased, we wouldn't go around today. Our species would

be gone. And so I don't think twelve thousand years is enough long enough for us to have been you know, kind of the mother nature taking that out of our human character, our instinct. We still have that instinct. I certainly remember as a child, fellow children being extremely violent. You know, there was a lot of biting and scratching and aggression, you know, among my playmates certainly, And so I think we're all born with these impulses and instincts,

and it's socialization but essentially weeds that instinct out of us. It, you know, the rules, morality, religion, law, society begins to instill in us inhibitions. We're almost domesticated, so to speak. And and so my argument is is probably we're all born in the infantile stage as these bundles of potentially raping, killing, cannibalistic existences that we have to get unmade from. And so what serial killers are essentially is a failure in

the unmaking of our primitive state. That's basically my argument. And sons of sons of Cain. But serial killers are not made, they're actually, you know, where the rest of us are unmade from being there.

way as the the Second World War was. And during the Second World War there was a kind of a cultural thing that soldiers, you know, we're not encouraged to talk about when they bought home, about what they you know, really happened. And of course the war on Terror is a clandestrian war also drops this kind of cone of silence on the soldiers that fighted it. Often they come home and by virtue of the nature of that war,

they can't talk about it. Moreover, it's not just the fathers are coming home, but now it's the mothers as well, who sometimes go into combat and experience this this war. So there you have right away the double combination that I link the you know, sixties seventies, the growing baby boomer generation serial fillers too. You have similar kind of scenario, but it even gets worse. Only have the trauma of COVID.

This is you know, we don't know yet what kind of psychological impact it's going to have on the young and the children. So we'll know in about fifteen years, twenty years whether my hypothesis is I hope I'm wrong, you know, because if I'm not, then you know that serial killer surge we saw between the seventies and nineteen nineties is going to look like a day at the beach compared to what's coming at us.