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victims were slain by strangers and persons unknown —a total of 11,800 people! 13 Before going further here, however, we should make one thing clear: “Strangers” means that the investigation determined definitively that the victim did not know the killer. This includes not only random victims of serial killers, but also, for example, store clerks shot dead by strangers in the course of a robbery. “Persons unknown” on the other hand, means precisely that—investigators simply did not know whether the victim knew the murderer; it does not necessarily mean that the perpetrator was a stranger—only that the relationship to the victim was not determined or not entered into a supplementary report upon which these statistics are based. There has been a tendency in the past, especially on the part of the media, to lump together “stranger” and“unknown” killings and issue alarmist reports that serial homicides by strangers are approaching 50 percent of all murders, without drawing attention to the ambiguity in the categories as explained here. Moreover, the FBI has done little to discourage that practice for its own political reasons, as we shall see further on. 14 However, the fact remains that serial murder victim totals fall into those two categories—stranger and unknown—and the proportions of these categories among total murder statistics continue to rise.
    Throughout most of the 1990s, the murder rate in the United States (as opposed to aggregate numbers of murders) has been dramatically declining, with a drop from 9.8 per 100,000 citizens in 1991 to a record low of 4.1 by 2000. 15 But since 2001 the rate has begun to creep upward again, and this is without including the deaths on 9/11 incurred during the terrorist attacks that year. Moreover, the volume of homicides by persons unknown and strangers continued to climb steadily to a current rate of 57.7 percent of all murders in 2001. 16 Of that number, strangers perpetrated 13.1 percent, while in the remaining 44.6 percent of homicides the relationship between victim and offender was simply unknown. There are no precise figures as to how many of those homicides were committed by serial killers. This does not bode well when accompanied by the fact that in 2001, only 62.4 percent of homicides were cleared, a percentage that has been continually declining since 1961, when 94 percent of the 8,599 U.S. murders that year were routinely solved. 17 Today one’s chances of getting away with a “perfect murder” are steadily creeping toward fifty-fifty.
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    How many unidentified serial killers are currently out there? Serial killers stop murdering because they move to a different jurisdiction, are arrested for some other crime, die, are killed, commit suicide, or simply grow old, mature, and become bored with or burned out on their fantasy by the process described previously. Many such unresolved serial murders seem to mysteriously cease on their own, such as the infamous Zodiac Killer, who killed between six and thirty-seven victims in San Francisco between 1968 and 1969; the Southside Slayer, who killed twelve black women in Los Angeles beginning in 1984; and the Black Doodler, who killed fourteen gay men in San Francisco nearly two decades ago. The Green River killings appeared to mysteriously cease in 1984 and remained unsolved until 2001.
    Serial killers sometimes do burn out, and depending on the personality of the individual they either allow themselves to be captured, commit suicide, or cease killing on their own and quietly fade away back to where they came from. Some are arrested for other crimes after they stop killing and end up suddenly confessing, like Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler) or Danny Rolling (the Gainesville Ripper). Obviously there is no known fixed number of victims before a serial killer stops: Edmund Kemper killed ten women before he ended his career by killing his mother and then