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they talked when they were dying.”
    According to his plea-bargain statement, “I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away, and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”
    By now Ridgway is almost indistinguishable from other serial prostitute killers. Just like Richard Cottingham, Ridgway was steadily employed and had a wife, a house, and children (just like fifty-year-old Robert Yates, who had five children, a wife, a house, and a mortgage. Like Ridgway, Yates quoted biblical scriptures as he murdered thirteen women in the Spokane region.) Although many of them were in failed relationships, the failures were often no more extraordinary than the typical divorce. Cottingham, for example, had separated from his wife, but had a relationship with a girlfriend until the day he was arrested. She described him as entirely “normal” even though he did take her several times to the same Quality Inn in New Jersey where he murdered two of his victims and was arrested torturing his last. William Lester Suff (thirteen prostitute murders) and Arthur Shawcross (eleven victims) were in long-term relationships when they committed their murders.
    Ridgway represents truly everything we know about serial killers today—everything and nothing at the same time—because the answer to the main question of why continues to elude us.
The Serial Killer Epidemic: The Statistics of Murder
    How many serial homicides take place? Almost every month somewhere in the world a new case of serial homicide is reported by the police, and except for Antarctica, no continent has been spared. From Alaska to New Zealand, from South Africa to China, cases of serial murder appear to be on the increase—slowly in the Third World, and alarmingly rapidly in the industrialized nations. Anybody could be a potential victim of a serial killer—absolutely anybody: man, woman, child, old, rich, poor, obscure, or famous—nothing makes one immune from being a potential victim, as the murder of Gianni Versace demonstrated. And should anybody suggest the obvious, there is even a case of a serial killer being killed by another serial killer! (In August 1970, Dean Corll, who murdered at least twenty-seven male youths, was killed by Elmer Wayne Henley, one of his partners in the murders.)
    As noted earlier, while not all serial killings are stranger-on-stranger, many are. Serial murder statistics are buried somewhere within the rising rate of “motiveless” and stranger murders, which have been on a breath-takingly dramatic rise since the 1970s. The FBI reported that motiveless crimes accounted for 8.5 percent of all homicides in 1976; 17.8 percent in 1981; and 22.5 percent in 1986. 12 Serial murders were considered motiveless and fell into that category. (Today, serial murders, because of their sexual component, are often defined as felony-related.)
    By 1995, when the aggregate numbers of homicides in the United States peaked, an extraordinary 55 percent of 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