​What is it about serial killers?

An exclusive Q&A with Dr. Scott Bonn

By Sabrina Hornung

sabrina@hpr1.com

Dr. Scott Bonn is a renowned criminologist and serial killer expert. He is a professor, a best-selling author and he also travels the country discussing America's fascination with serial killers and true crime. In January, he’s bringing his 90-minute show to Fargo and Bismarck followed by a Q&A session, so get your questions ready.

During High Plains Reader’s exclusive Q&A opportunity, Dr. Bonn revealed a number of startling statistics. Interestingly enough, 80% of his audience is women ages 25 to 54. Then again, that statistic holds true for the bulk of networks airing true crime content. We couldn’t help but ask why. What attracts us (and maybe more specifically, women) to the darker side of humanity?

High Plains Reader: So why do you think women are so interested in serial killers?

Dr. Scott Bonn: Well, I'm glad you asked that question, and it comes right out of my show, and it's this; I think that if you had to reduce it to one word, it's empathy. We, as humans, have the empathy “chip,” if you will, in our brain, which the serial killers do not. It's the thing that distinguishes them, it’s the inability to feel the pain of others, which is why they're able to do what they do. I think it's particularly strong among women.

And women identify with the victims, which — if you watch the shows “48 Hours,” (and you know what, I like to call those the “OG true crime shows”) “Dateline,” “2020,” “America's Most Wanted,” — the victim is almost always a woman who goes missing or abducted and/or murdered.

So women identify with the victim, and I think that they are looking for answers — “How do I identify a potential perpetrator?” I had a woman say to me recently, “I don't want to become the murder victim of the next Ted Bundy, but I don't want to date him either.”

They're looking for tools. They're looking for red flags to identify potential danger and to avoid becoming a victim. And in addition, I think it's also a desire to understand the motivations of these individuals, because it's so incomprehensible what they do.

Think of Jeffrey Dahmer who abducted, raped, killed, dismembered, cooked and ate his victims. It's beyond comprehension to most of us, so there's this burning desire to understand, because I know I speak for myself, but I think a lot of people don't like the ambiguity. You don't like not knowing the answer to something. We feel much more secure and comfortable when we know the answers. So I think subconsciously, the feeling is, if I could just figure out why they do what they do, then maybe it's not so terrifying after all.

I do a Q&A session in the second act of my show. Here's where I get so many questions from women about how to identify potential danger and so forth. What I've noticed about my show is it becomes almost like a sisterhood by the end of the show, through interaction, and it's almost like a catharsis of fear…It's almost like my show helps them to dispel or rid themselves of their fear. So my show almost always ends up on a very high note, and everyone's in a wonderful mood.

HPR: The woman who said they didn't want to become a murder victim or end up dating a Ted Bundy, that just kind of blows my mind thinking about the anonymity of social media, online dating and all this stuff that can enable predatory behaviors. How do you think that some of these serial killers would have viewed social media anonymity? Maybe that’s more of a philosophical question…

Dr. Bonn: Nope, It’s a practical question, too. Through catfishing, and you know, various techniques, how predators lure their victims… I can't point to a serial killer who's used social media or dating apps to lure victims, but it certainly makes sense. I mean, imagine if a Ted Bundy had access to social media and dating apps back in the 1970s. He might have been even more prolific than 36.

One of the things that's so terrifying about the Ted Bundys and the John Wayne Gacys and for that matter, Dennis Rader, who gave himself the name “bind, torture, kill,” is they look fairly “normal,” you know, and they function well in society. Many times they're even celebrated, they're considered, “the toast of society” in some cases, especially Ted Bundy.

He was in politics. People loved him. He was a handsome guy and that makes it even more terrifying, because we want our monsters to look like monsters. We don't want them to be handsome and charming. We want them to look like the boogeyman, you know? They're much easier to identify if they look like Freddy Krueger in “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

HPR: Why do you think there was an uptick or “heyday” in the 1970s and 80s for serial killers? Maybe “heyday” is a terrible term…

Dr. Bonn: It is kind of a strange term to use for, you know, serial killers, but yeah, people do call it the heyday in the 70s and 80s. And I'll tell you exactly why I think it's the case.

Because, by the way, the one thing that you didn't say (which you may or may not be aware of): serial killers have been steadily on the decline since the 1990s. I'll give you the answer to your question, but to give you just the frame of reference to work with, it's been documented that there were at least 650 serial killers in the United States in the 1970s. By the 80s, that number increased to more than 800, but by the 1990s the numbers started to dwindle. They start to taper off, and they've consistently tapered off until the latest decade, which we're almost halfway through. Less than three dozen serial killers have been documented this decade, so that you can see the fall-off has been incredible.

So why? Well, first and foremost, I think we have to give a tip of the hat to these profilers in Quantico, Virginia, one of whom was a mentor of mine, the late, great Roy Hazelwood. And they pioneered the science in the early 70s to identify and profile these individuals. Before 1973, so little was known about serial killers that they didn't even call them serial killers. They called them mass murderers. They lump them together with what we would think of today as mass shooters.

When they develop these new tools, guess what? You find a lot of what you're looking for. You have effective tools, and they suddenly discovered, man, there's more of these around than we even thought. I really firmly believe that prior to the 1970s many serial killers went undetected as such. And what I mean by that is, I suspect that if you have a serial killer, for example, who may have had eight victims, but they didn't connect the dots of the crime scenes. You only have a serial killer if you can connect those dots and they were treated as a separate murderer/ murders.

So, the science, the profiling, got much better. But then they also got better — much better by the 1980s — at the actual policing and apprehension phase of it. And the big game changer there came in 1986 with the introduction of DNA analysis for the first time. So now you could connect an individual who had no other connection, physical or otherwise, to a crime scene, almost invisibly connect them to the crime scenes. That's how they solved cases like the “Golden State Killer” that had been one of the biggest cold cases in history.

IF YOU GO:

Serial Killers with Dr. Scott Bonn

Saturday, January 4, 8 p.m.

Fargo Theatre, 314 Broadway N, Fargo

fargotheatre.org/event/serial-killers-with-dr-scott-bonn/

Sunday, January 5, 8 p.m.

Belle Mehus Auditorium, 201 N 6th St., Bismarck

bismarckeventcenter.com/events/2025/serial-killers-with-dr-scott-bonn