Most Serial Killers Are Black, by Robert Hampton, American Renaissance, May 30, 2019
Earlier this month, a Kenyan illegal immigrant was charged with killing 11 elderly women in Texas. Forty-six-year-old healthcare worker Billy Chemirmir reportedly murdered women who were between the ages of 76 and 96 for their valuables by suffocating them with pillows. Authorities claim Mr. Chemirmir posed as a healthcare worker or repairman to get into the women’s homes. He had worked as a home aide for many of the women he is charged with killing.
Mr. Chemirmir came to the U.S. on a tourist visa in 2002. He overstayed but was able to get a green card in 2007 after he married an American citizen. Mr. Chemirmir had a long criminal record before his arrest, but was never deported. Police are now reopening 750 other cases of old people who died alone.
It may turn out that Mr. Chemirmir is one of the worst serial killers — defined as someone who has killed two or more people on separate occasions — in American history. Yet, he doesn’t fit the stereotype — he’s black. Serial killers are supposed to be white. In fact, blacks are considerably more likely than whites to be serial killers.
According to a 2016 Radford University study, just 51.7 percent of all serial killers in America since 1900 have been white. Roughly 40 percent were black. The numbers have become more lopsided in recent decades. In the first half of this decade, 60 percent of serial killers were black, while only 30 percent were white. Blacks have been the outright majority of serial killers since 1990.
Whites have never been overrepresented among serial killers. The decade with the highest percentage of white serial killers was in the 1920s: Whites were 78 percent of mass murderers even when they were 90 percent of the population. The 1920s also saw blacks account for the lowest percentage of serial killers at 18 percent. At that time they were about 10 percent of the population.
America had the largest number of serial killers in the decade of the 1980s. Whites were 83 percent of the population, yet were only 53 percent of mass murderers. Blacks were just 11 percent of the population, but were nearly 37 percent of serial killers.
Over 67 percent of the victims of serial killers have been white, and 37 percent have been white women. Blacks are disproportionately overrepresented at 24 percent of victims.
The stereotype of the white serial killer is false. So is that of the white mass shooter; whites are underrepresented among mass shooters, and have been for years.
A possible reason why serial killers are thought to be predominantly white is that nearly all of the famous ones are white. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the BTK Killer, and others have inspired books and films. Their trials were front-page news and their names live on. In fictional accounts of serial killers, such as Se7en and Silence of the Lambs, the villain is almost always a white man, further reinforcing a false stereotype. [More]