Edmund Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Herbert Mullin are some examples.
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It isn’t necessarily that they were more active, but more that they became much more *visible* and easier to catch around that time for a number of reasons.
(1) The sharing of information/news across geographic areas became easier, and also more common. The radio and television started gaining popularity and becoming accessible in the 1920-1930s. This made it easier for people to *connect* murders that occurred in different areas. Before, people just never really knew much of what was happening outside their own city.
(2) After they found one serial killer, police started to find more because their communication with other jurisdictions drastically improved. Crossing between police jurisdictions used to be a great countermeasure for serial killers, because the separate police departments didn’t share information, and thus rarely connected the murders.
I can’t remember if it was Bundy or another killer, but there’s a documentary where Seattle detectives were talking about how they just didn’t consider the possibility and didn’t make the connections just because they didn’t communicate enough.
This meant the murders were treated as separate crimes, the investigations were done completely separate, and that just made it easier for serial killers to get away with it. Also, solving 3 murders that everybody thinks were done by 3 different people doesn’t get near the same priority as solving 3 murders by 1 guy.
(3) the biggest one, DNA testing became a thing in 1986 for criminal investigations, making it much easier to connect two crimes and discover a serial killer exists
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