Edmund Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Herbert Mullin are some examples.
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It isn’t true, most likely.
Before then they weren’t tracking crimes the same. Criminology was pretty shit. A number may have never had their victims identified as murdered because of the poor understanding of things back then. When bleeding is how you cure a cold, imagine a serial killer doctor in that time. No one is going to be really questioning when some of the sick patients die.
Then we started developing criminology. We started tracking crimes on a local and not so local scale. We better understood the causes of death and could pinpoint a number of things we couldn’t have before.
A secondary factor is the media. As it became cheaper and easier to publish the news for the masses they began to cover things like big news crimes, local events, etc. So we had more third hand, wide spread evidence of these criminals.
Not to mention that tied into this secondary factor is also record keeping and preservation. The nearer in history, the more stuff we have in better condition. A serial killer covered by the papers in the late 20th century would have been gossip and undocumented as ‘Brendan the Fucknut who Murdered Seven’. The best case scenario for most of them would be entering into a kind of boogeyman or mythological status back in the 17th century.
Hansel and Gretel could be a story about a legit serial killer of children turned urban legend turned childrens story warning of disguised danger.
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