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Originally Posted by Legs
I have been following true crime cases/trials since the early 80's I would say there have been more on average in the last 5 years than ever.
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You didn't have the internet in the early 80s. Many small town cases would never have made the light of day in big city press before the interconnectness that the world wide web has brought. I'm not sure there's actually been an increase, at least one that exceeds the rate of growth of the population. Since the 1950s? Yeah. Since the 1970s? Nah.
Let me add, I grew up in a relatively small town in the Texas Panhandle, one pretty typical of the era. When I was in high school in the early 70s, we were evacuated from the school building from 3 to 6 times a year due to bomb threats, in one case they actually found a bomb.
As for child killings, one I can think of that nobody heard of on a national basis. In 1978, a mother killed her child in a small town's Walmart parking lot by stuffing papertowels in her throat, dumped her body a couple miles out of town, then went back into the Walmart saying her daughter had been kidnapped. A frantic search ensued. The girl's body was found later that day. The mother confessed that same evening. Horrible? Yes. Widely known? No.