Postcards from the Golden Age of Serial Killers

Man vs. Bear

Photo Credit: iStock (Nazarii Neshcherensky)

Even without spending much time on social media, the Man vs. Bear meme that started on TikTok was hard to avoid. It asked, “which would be more dangerous to a woman alone in the woods, an unknown man or a bear?” The fact that most women chose the bear set off a slew of provocative conversations. Some of the discourse centered on whether this was even a legitimate question, if all men had been already categorized as dangerous. The meme poked at the toxic masculinity zeitgeist and yielded think pieces in the Washington Post and the LA Times (great statistics in the Washington Post article).

Women are great consumers of true crime, and some say the genre is making them paranoid. That presents one possible explanation for a meme suggesting that all men are a threat. Mix that with the power of social media to spread anything far and wide, and a surface view came out on toxic masculinity (misinformation on the odds of outrunning a bear also came out).

As I saw the meme, this wasn’t about the barista who makes your skim latte, the guy in front of you at the bank, or a debut author at a book signing. The specific reference to the woods indicated the kind of man who seeks out women when and where they are vulnerable and in that way the meme felt irresponsibly facile, failing to distinguish which men should be seen in a predator’s light. Then I began to think, when were the woods ever safe to begin with?

For me, the meme is almost solely about the danger of being alone in the woods.

The woods, of course, are the place of our dark fears, and where danger lurks. The place that fairy tales have long warned us not to go into. Those woods have never stopped being dark. The impulse to say that an encounter with an unknown man in the woods might very well be dangerous comes from an understandable place—women fear sexual predators and most sexual predators are men,¹ and very often they seek their prey in desolate areas; apartment stairwells, and the fringes of college campus in the early hours, and scenic (but out-of-the-way) hiking trails. Even with our cell phones and CCTV cameras, the woods are still the woods. The pairing of those in our minds frames what might be most telling within the meme; how civilized are we really if the woods can never be safe?

America has been here before, at the strange intersection of modern progress and prosperity and random, brutal crime. The post-World War II era meant developing suburbs and blossoming consumerism. This was a time of major appliances and a forward-thinking culture and the ancillary belief that all of that progress had surely made the world safer. It was the era of the shopping mall. Celebrated in the Joan Didion essay, “On the Mall,” along with “bluejeans, baseball, bourbon and television,” she describes shopping centers that “float on the landscape like pyramids to the boom years.”² The mall is no longer in its heyday, but it was integral to mid-century American identity. So large, they were coolly anonymous. So filled with other shoppers, they gave the façade of a gathering place.³

The local mall of the 1970s was the stand-in for Main Street and the center of the teen experience. It was the haven for hanging out and window shopping. That decade also began the golden age of the serial killer. One theory for this unsettling confluence is that freedoms emerging from the 1960s spilled out into reckless behavior, like hitchhiking and partying with strangers. Another strong argument indicts the large demographic shift away from tightknit rural communities. A modern “society of strangers.”⁴ The social anonymity that was the hallmark of serial killers was also the hallmark of shopping malls.

Photo Credit: iStock (raw206)

Ted Bundy, perhaps the face of “the golden age,” is well known for his media-friendly image and the wide range of his unspeakable crimes. That he frequented parking lots, hunting for his victims is among the facts that received less attention. The dark forests young women had long been warned to stay clear of had come for our suburbs, our malls, and our transportation, but it would take time for America to believe this. Much like today, with our iPhone apps and Amazon deliveries seeming to promise a world so advanced, it just has to be different, we’d placed outsized trust in the newness of suburban living. Malls sold the premise of community and security. For teenage girls, malls sold makeup and clothes and the independence of getting there.

It took 47 years to solve the murders of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Kelly, though essential details were known and immediately publicized. In 1974, they left for the Paramus mall to buy bathing suits for an upcoming trip down the shore, were last seen at the bus stop, and were not seen again until their bodies were found in a wooded area roughly 15 miles away. It was posited that Mary Ann, with what her family called her “devilish” personality, had decided to hitchhike. There was comfort in the theory. The world could still be safe if you took in the warning and didn’t take rides from strangers.

Photo Credit: The Courier News, April 9, 1975

The Lyon sisters were more of a mystery. On the first day of their Easter vacation, twelve-year-old Sheila and ten-year-old Kate left for slices of pizza at a shopping center close to their home and were never seen again. The girls’ disappearance was the definition of any parent’s worst nightmare and called a “regional trauma.”

Maybe without an internet to spread news like wildfire, each trauma was destined to be regional. Maybe it wasn’t the limits of the news cycle, but the stubborn grip on the illusion that malls were our downtowns. Though the circumstances of two pre-teens vanishing were easy to surmise, there were no immediate arrests (like the Pryor-Kelly case, that would take years) and any threat foretold by their disappearance had yet to crystalize into a specific thing: i.e., malls are dangerous; suburban parking lots are dangerous.

In time, that would change. Attempts to hide the crime statistics, couldn’t cover up ongoing headlines.

At the end of August 1976, sixteen-year-old Christopher Righetti rode his moped to Paramus Park, then the newest and most innovative mall in the area, enclosed and known for its food court. It was the middle of the afternoon. It would have felt safe to anyone, including Kim Montelaro, who had borrowed her father’s green Cutlass to buy a magazine at the mall’s Walden Books. As she returned to her car, she was unaware that Righetti was stalking her.

On that summer afternoon in 1976, he was still enough of a youth to be described as “husky,” yet already well-practiced in the skill of overpowering women. At fourteen, he’d raped an eighteen-year-old and spent a year in a juvenile detention center. After his release, he’d been arrested for carjacking another woman, but the case was not prosecuted.

When Kim didn’t pick up her brother from football practice, her family became worried. That night, her father located her abandoned car at the mall. Other than her sneakers that had been left inside the car, there was no other sign of her. A few days later, two ten-year-old boys playing in the woods adjacent to a nearby swim club found Kim’s body.

Paramus and its web of shopping centers is the American retail/consumer capital. The borough is deep within the North Jersey ecosystem where I grew up.

Three weeks after Kim’s murder, I went to Lodi for my driver’s test. A seventeen-year-old’s first real taste of maturity. Access to a car, even one I didn’t own, still meant freedom. I put my license in the plastic window of my wallet with big plans ahead of me. I imagined owning a credit card. Every time I drove to Paramus Park, I thought of Kim Montelaro. To this day, I’m rarely in a mall parking lot without thinking of her.

Women should be able to go shopping or jog in New York’s Central Park. "Women should be able to go out and run at any time of day or night that they want to and it's absolutely disgusting they can't."

What does it mean to exist in a world that refuses to be safe and demands of us to be cautious around strangers, more aware of our surroundings and ever less trusting? Chrissie Hynde, in her memoir, relayed the advice she’d have given to her younger self about hanging around with the wrong crowd and what that had cost her. Bowing to no one as she summed up her “hard learned” lessons, she piqued the feminist community who interpreted that she was blaming herself for a sexual assault. Learning to watch out for yourself is a useful tip. Don’t run out into traffic. If you fail to, and get hit by a car, it may be the driver’s responsibility (sure you can sue), but still, you’ve been hit by a car and that could have been avoided if only you hadn’t run blindly into the street. Do not put yourself in an obviously dangerous situation is what it means to take care of yourself in an unsafe world. None of this is “code” that women are at fault if they were suggestive clothes. That is not this conversation.

Gut feelings and personal choice are ways we navigate most risk, and then there’s navigating going into the woods alone. That part of the meme was quite specific.

 Photo Credit: iStock (wirestock)

From afar, bears are great fun to watch. They hunt salmon on webcams. There’s a yearly contest, starting with “Fat Bear Week” and then a popular tally (“Vote for the fattest bear of the year!”). Meeting them where they live is a different experience.

John McPhee, the longtime writer for The New Yorker and lifelong resident of Princeton, NJ, went to Alaska in 1975 on one of his many explorations of America’s wilderness. In a field 800 miles outside of Anchorage, where he’d traveled with guides on a canoe and kayak trip, he noticed what looked like “a hill of fur” which he realized was a big boar grizzly bent over and eating blueberries by the branchful. The wind was favorable that day and bears, in general, are nearsighted, and the one 110 yards away from McPhee remained preoccupied stuffing berries into its maw.⁵ Once pure fear subsided, McPhee regained the presence to feel the bear and its stature. “He implied a world. He was an affirmation to the rest of the earth that his kind of place was extant.” That bear and the wilderness were one and the same.

Women who’d grown up in the 1970s learned not to hitchhike and to look around whenever in a parking lot. The violence of the world will not bend to modern times. Like water, it will always find a path. When approaching the woods, a metaphor for the world we cannot control, I think a mashup of Chrissie Hynde’s memoir and John McPhee’s experience gets me to some advice I’d been given many years ago when discovering yet again that the world is arbitrary and unfair. Be careful but not fearful. The woods may not be dangerous all the time, but there’ll never be any assurance that they’re safe. The woods are the same woods they always were.

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Episode Notes

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Click here to read previous issues in this series about the cultural touchstones from the 1970s and what we call “toxic masculinity.”

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Just One More Thing

How much time do you spend on the internet, watching bears? Reading about serial killers?

1. Not all men are sexual predators and not all sexual predators prey on women (John Wayne Gacy along with the lesser known, but just as prolific and monstrous Dean Corll, being two examples).

2. The White Album (1979).

3. Big Table Podcast Episode 40: Alexandra Lange on America’s Malls

4. Crime, Media and Culture (2018).

5. Coming Into the Country (1977).