S&D: Serial Killers

Haha that was what I was thinking of writing the second I saw the thread title -- my hackles go up when people romanticize these awful people or overuse words like "fascinating" in describing them -- this is a personal issue as all my old goth friends were like that and it became such an obvious tired pose after a while

...that said, you can't front on Edmund Emil Kemper, who in his final act of savagery, decaptated his mother, stood her head on the mantel, and was heard by neighbors screaming at her for several hours. He had apparently also thrown some darts at her in his post-murder frenzy.

Kemper — IQ smart, even if a total social cataclysm in the non-metaphorical sense — also said (something like): "You pass a girl in a the street , and part of you thinks, 'She's cute, I'd like to date her' — and another part thinks, 'I wonder what her head looks like on a stick'"

I find the fact if Kemper's self-reflexive comedy timing the most ugly and most scary fact abt him, actually — certainly the hardest for me to process and be comfortable with. I can't be comfortable with it, bcz it means a state of mind i put a lot of moral trust in and enjoy — a playful sense of fun — is not firewalled territory after all.

in your heart you know I'm right.

i'm just rereading sherlock holmes at the moment, after a regrettable mini-binge on jack the ripper books:
holmes = 1887-whenever, ripper murders = 1888 basically

i think a lot of holmes material is conan doyle (unconsciously?) dealing with ripper material, transforming it to cope with it, and help others cope => as usual, the cliche of victorian politeness is exploded... story after story centres on a hyper-nasty detail (little old lady sent two severed ears in the post) (this is a particuarly ripperish one actually)

(eg: the 'monster' who dances mockingly round the police, playing games with them, becomes the master detective in principle defeating crime, though actually almost always merely explaining it afterwards)

(if i were charlotte cornwell i wd be using this as proof that CD *was* the ripper)

*lawyers descend: mark s is no more*

*geeks out*

The fact that he is fairly beloved by goth serial killer fetishists and wannabe serial killers is pathetic.

Time to dredge up the last post on this
thread?

And the word is "Hoden", du Angeber. Fick dich ins Knie.

That's either the best or the worst film script idea I've ever heard.

mmmmm.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/photos/movies/ripley2.jpg

http://www.cinema.com/image_lib/18_31_thumb.jpg

Destroy:

http://www.mostradelcinemadivenezia.tv/2002/images/ripleys%20game.jpg

http://www.manhunter.net/remake/gfx/160/ralph_fiennes.jpg

Destroy:

http://www.thisisbradford.co.uk/bradford__district/leisure/cinema/jpg/red-dragon.jpg

Interesting thing is that ever since Gary Ridgway was arrested for about four or five of the Green River killings, ever since he's been in police custody, suddenly they're finding the remains of some of the missing females who were thought to have been the victims of the Green River killer. They found Pammy Avent, April Buttram, and Marie Malvar, and hopefully they'll find Kelli McGinness, Rebecca Marrero, Patricia Osborn, Kase Lee, and Kristi Vorak. And I wonder who the unidentified victims were. Hmmm.

*swoon*

Search: anything by Jack Olsen

*stares and blinks*

:0 ...

They make good villains in films because there is a kind of existential force of evil aspect to them.

Does anyone remember the Cereal Convention in Sandman?

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/images/directors/02/21/manhunter.jpg

Oh definitely. I just put photos of the attractive movie serial killers under Search. The scenes where Fiennes is all "I'm hideously disfigureded! Like my soul!" are hilarious because he is so not.

Programing Language Inventors or Serial Killers?

I can't help but find Zodiac to be the most interesting, mostly because of the cypher work, the symbology, and the obvious invented personas/information purely for the "I'm fucking with you" vibe. Not getting caught also adds intrigue bonus points...

I'm reading his bio. It's hellascary.

-- DV (dirtyvica...), November 5th, 2003.

You read too many comics.

That's either the best or the worst film script idea I've ever heard.

-- @d@ml (nordiA HREF="mailto:icskilla@hotmail.c">icskilla@hotmail.com), November 5th, 2003.

Depending on whether or not it stars Keanu Reeves in a major role.

-- nickalicious (nza2342...), November 5th, 2003.

ROFFLE

i think im in love

>>>I'm reading his bio. It's hellascary.

Ah, memories. The summer & autumn that Ramirez was at large in SoCal it was a big, big deal if you lived down there. Come autumn in southern California there's little nicer than to just leave your window open and let the breezes come through the room. My friend Rozz liked to sleep with his windows open; he was also the singer from Christian Death, and normally very very into the whole serial-killer-as-poetic-icon thing (as were we all). But he was pretty terrified of the Night Stalker, who at one point got into a house just a few blocks away from the Rozz household - though the cops were on his trail by that point, so nobody died in that particular break-in. We had a mutual friend named Gene who bore a resemblence to the police sketch of Ramirez that'd been airing on the local news; I remember Rozz noting the resemblence once at a party and grabbing my wrist and whispering "I think the Night Stalker looks like Gene!" It was just really adorable & endearing how much Rozz was thinking about this whole current-events killer-at-large thing in such a normal, ghoulishly-fascinated-but-holy-fuck-I-ain't-wanna-die way.

it would be great if there was some serial killer who decided to be the greatest serial killer of them all by hunting down and killing all the others.

-- DV (dirtyvica...), November 5th, 2003.

RIP http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hZhDoDqouJ3AOSJHeB7TBN-fYTnQD94CU9NO2

i used to live in the same apartment building as this guy, just 20 years later. there were probably other serial killers living there, though.

Oh, Shawcross. How much will we not miss him...

Wikepedia details on various serial killers:

"He began to stalk local women as a teenager, knocking down or choking them unconscious, and fleeing with their shoes."

"Bonin carried out the crime with his primary accomplice, Vernon Butts, a 22-year-old factory worker who boasted of being a wizard, and who slept in a coffin."

"Herbert Richard "Herb" Baumeister (April 7, 1947 – July 3, 1996) was an alleged American serial killer from suburban Westfield, Indiana outside of Indianapolis. He was the founder of the successful thrift store chain Sav-a-Lot in Indiana."

"He was connected to the bodies due to his habit of drinking vodka out of the little bottles similar to alcohol bottles found on airplanes, and pouring them into an orange juice bottle to make a screwdriver."

"There has never been any firm evidence that the alligators actually ate any of his victims."

"Strange events followed his death that lead some people to believe he was, as he had claimed, possessed by the devil. Detective Geyer was taken seriously ill. The warden of the prison where Holmes was held committed suicide. The foreman of the jury that convicted him was accidentally electrocuted. The father of Emeline Cigrand (one of Holmes' victims) was horribly burned in a boiler explosion. The priest who delivered the last rites on Holmes' body was mysteriously found dead on his church's grounds. Finally, a fire completely destroyed the interior of the Chicago district attorney's office, leaving only a photograph of Holmes untouched."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Sowell

four more bodies today, plus a skull in a bucket

Urgh. As a teenager I found it intriguing. Now? I don't find it that fascinating anymore.

I find the fact if Kemper's self-reflexive comedy timing the most ugly and most scary fact abt him, actually — certainly the hardest for me to process and be comfortable with. I can't be comfortable with it, bcz it means a state of mind i put a lot of moral trust in and enjoy — a playful sense of fun — is not firewalled territory after all.

mark s HUGELY otm here even if I'm not quite sure what "self-reflexive" means

i was just about to copy and post that from mark s. really insightful.

(think he meant 'inflective'?)

duh reflective

If I can explain it correctly; the act of examing oneself but in doing so actually influencing one's own behavior. Kind of a loop of cause and effect. How that is tied to the comedy timing, that I don't understand completely. Maybe it's the quote that explains it: sort of funny but, in saying it also causing it, making it real. Does that make any sense at all?

No, he definitely meant reflexive. Not reflective. Reflective lacks the causal effect. I think. Mark S, I admire, but he's so way out of my league. :-)

you're more than likely right- i'm the dude that just typed inflective, after all.

obv destroy all of these motherfuckers. i think the creepiest one ever might the btk killer, since iirc he was a family man and a pretty normal churchgoing suburban dad type who was also a totally disassociated berserk killer.

Why do so many serial killers work as truckers?

Why do so many serial killers work as truckers? Does the transient, rootless nature of the job stir in some people a latent potential for violence? Or do the already violent seek out a job that provides the mobility, and soundproof vehicle, to hunt undetected?

The FBI was so alarmed by what they saw as a pattern of long-haul truckers preying on vulnerable victims like prostitutes, hitchhikers, and stranded motorists that they launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, a special unit that collects forensics data to track cases and suspects.

Investigators acknowledge that a specialized unit is needed because truck driver/highway murders are especially difficult to solve. They often involve multiple jurisdictions, isolated crime scenes with few witnesses, and little or no forensic evidence. Crisscrossing the country, truck drivers have a built-in ability to evade authorities.

One of the obvious, but nevertheless frightening, things about trucker killers is that while they're often caught for just one crime the far-reaching, wide-ranging nature of their routes suggests they're possibly, even likely, responsible for many more.

(more at link)

Viz beat them to it as did Clarkson

don't really see how one can be beaten to the punch on this subject...?

I find the fact if Kemper's self-reflexive comedy timing the most ugly and most scary fact abt him, actually — certainly the hardest for me to process and be comfortable with. I can't be comfortable with it, bcz it means a state of mind i put a lot of moral trust in and enjoy — a playful sense of fun — is not firewalled territory after all.

one of the best things ever said on ilx imo

it would be great if there was some serial killer who decided to be the greatest serial killer of them all by hunting down and killing all the others.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Wednesday, November 5, 2003 2:51 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

ok, weird

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkly_Dreaming_Dexter

when I was doing study on the biological bases of violence I spent a lot of time looking at serial killers obv.

the US produces more serial killers than any other nation. we have 6% of the world's population and 75% of its serial killers. europe combined is a distant 16%. it could be argued that the US has spent more time on analysis and detection of serial killers, but the percentages are so far off it's difficult to explain. it might sound like uber-romantic social criticism, but I started seeing serial killers as a nightmare byproduct of the american dream. all the highways, personal freedom, pursuing your dreams, ultimately leading to these aberrant extremes of nomadic personal freedom and individualism. so that truckers link above really resonated.

I also had the notion that myths of vampires and werewolves were based on early serial killers. imagine you're living in a small village hundreds of years ago where everyone knows everyone else. if strings of motiveless, savage murders began to occur, imagining that someone you knew was transforming into a monster nightly was likely more comforting than the ugly reality.

Doesn't Russia have a lot too?

I think they've had a handful of prodigious ones

It's that Kemper made what he did into a joke he was the subject of, isn't it? Which is why it's so awful, he knew exactly what he was doing. That was kinda the point. Like y'know the Joker, man

Yes v brilliant orig post

And I don't think that can be processed tbh, limits of humanity type stuff

it's similar to thinking about fetishes. I'm not really sure how/why people are attracted to animals, but they are.

I'd never heard of Kemper before.

Holy fuck, what a terrifying individual.

S: Jack the Ripper. Was genuinely scared of him opening my bedroom door at age 9 or so in I dunno, 1986? Despite the fact he would've been like 130 or so (and I wasn't a prostitute), was still terrified, the whole thing was so debased and awful. Wasn't fascinated, scared. Gave a speech abt him tht year which prob made me look a potential SK myself, really

factoid: the FBI originally called them "stranger killers" before they figured out serial killers do victimize people they know

A lot of them must've been pretty popular then

had not heard of kemper, *googles*

From Wikipedia:

At the time of Kemper's murder spree in Santa Cruz, another serial killer named Herbert Mullin was also active, earning the small California town the title of "Murder Capital Of The World." Also adding to the college town's infamy was the fact that Kemper's and Mullin's crimes were preceded three years earlier by multiple murders committed by John Linley Frazier, who murdered Santa Cruz eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family. Kemper and Mullin were briefly held in adjoining cells, with the former angrily accusing the latter of stealing his body-dumping sites.

I'd never heard of Kemper before.

Holy fuck, what a terrifying individual.
--Huckabee Jesus lifeline (HI DERE)

kemper, the seinfeld of serial killers

The Night Stalker scared the crap out of me when i was a kid. I just remember that hot summer and that scary ass artist rendition of him, with those buggy eyes and creepy look. then there was something about him targeting yellow houses by freeways and we had a yellow house by the freeway!! i just knew this devil looking dude was gonna come climbing through my window.

kemper's wiki reads like

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FHAAH32TL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_.jpg

was kinda hard being in school in Santa Cruz and NOT hearing about Kemper

I find the fact if Kemper's self-reflexive comedy timing the most ugly and most scary fact abt him, actually — certainly the hardest for me to process and be comfortable with. I can't be comfortable with it, bcz it means a state of mind i put a lot of moral trust in and enjoy — a playful sense of fun — is not firewalled territory after all.

one of the best things ever said on ilx imo

― a full circle lol (J0hn D.), Thursday, December 3, 2009 5:54 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

it's not the same thing i realize but maybe it comes from the same place: this reminds me of all the jailhouse interviews/correspondence that the hipster grifter is doing, this self-awareness, self-clowning, matched with total sociopath behavior.

or you know the pages of vice magazine

didn't know where else to post this but O_O

http://io9.com/5448369/suspected-tylenol-poisoner-writes-science-fiction-novel-about-poisonings

James Lewis was accused of putting cyanide into Tylenol capsules back in 1982, causing several deaths. His involvement has never been proved, but now he's self-published a new science-fiction novel called Poison!, which is making people wonder anew.

Lewis' novel follows a psychologist named Dr. Charles Rivers, who can both read and control other people's minds (similar to Heroes' Matt Parkman). Rivers also has a slew of high-tech gadgets. He uses all of the resources at his disposal to investigate a rash of poisonings in his Missouri hometown, including his own father, who appear to have been poisoned with a bizarre mixture of toxic chemicals. But while Rivers is investigating the poisonings, he comes across evidence of a criminal mastermind named Agua Naranja (Orange Water), who has discovered a way to cause earthquakes, using techniques pioneered by Nikola Tesla.

okay WAHT

And wow, man that story they link to from the Boston Herald adds a whole new level of crepey to this guy: http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=349846

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uf95INZmWI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Alcala

worst. date. ever.

He won a date with "bachelorette" Cheryl Bradshaw, who subsequently refused to go out with him, according to published reports, because she found him "creepy."

a peeled banana

Jed Mills, an actor who sat next to Alcala onstage as "Bachelor #2", later described him as a "a peeled banana" with "bizarre opinions."

LIFE slideshow of Ed Gein's house:

http://www.life.com/gallery/39992/inside-a-serial-killers-house#index/0

Serial killer and terrible housekeeper

i honestly dk how i got down this wormhole just now but reading this is p chilling/interesting in its mundanity, 'i stopped @ dennys for moons over my hammy and grabbed some chocolate milk' etc. not a serial killer but dude was inspired by the show dexter

http://www.scribd.com/doc/51760361/Manuscript-from-Mark-Twitchell-s-laptop#archive

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/calif-serial-killer-richard-ramirez-dies-19349065

Richard Ramierez was the first serial killer that ever caught my attention. In 6th grade, I accidentally videotaped Manhunt: Search for the Night Stalker off of TV, for some reason thinking it was an actual horror movie based on the TV Guide description I guess. A year later, my English teacher found a true-crime paperback about Ramirez that I had left in my desk. It led to a parent/teacher/principal conference and was partially responsible for me being dropped from the GT program.

Hate him. Not for my personal reasons, just for the murders he committed. Didn't die soon enough.

i found myself googling 'where did all the serial killers go' like a month ago. seems like they've been replaced with spree killers in the 21st century

'siri, where did all the serial killers go?' would make a great song title

the new generation wants instant gratification, whatever happened to patience

There was one arrested in Alaska a few months ago. Maybe they just aren't as big a news draw.

there were 2 in sacramento area, the Speed Freak Killers (Herzog died last year but Shermantine is still on death row)-- suspected in the deaths of more than 70 ppl, many dating back to the 80's. FBI is still excavating the well where a lot of remains have been found

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_Freak_Killers

I only just learned of these 2 recently myself. Crazy shit.

they are kind of rare, and yeah spree killers are the new serial killers as far as the media's concerned.

I remember when the night stalker was at large/when he was caught by the mob, that was crazy shit. for a brief period it was like all the Xtian right's hysteria about heavy metal-listening, satan-worshipping, killer rapists had some basis in reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doodler

http://www.laweekly.com/2005-10-06/news/eastside-story/

Eastside Story
The day we caught the night stalker
By Ben Quiñones

The summer of 1985 was setting up to be a good, long, lazy one for L.A. The city was still on a sports high from hosting the ’84 Olympics, where Boyle Heights boxer Paul Gonzalez had won a gold medal, and Magic Johnson’s “Showtime” Lakers had just beaten the much-hated Celtics to win another NBA championship. And, if Ronald Reagan was turning Central America into a tropical war zone and AIDS was starting to devastate the world, at least Quincy Jones gave us a fleeting sense of unity by producing the all-star artist hit “We are the World: USA for Africa.”

I was a young Mexican growing up across the Los Angeles River in East L.A. and attending school as a seventh-grade scrub at Stevenson Junior High. My family lived on 4048 ½ Princeton Street, a back house on a dead end in the heart of the LiL Valley Gang. During that unbearably hot summer the sounds of Wham! and Punky Brewsterreruns would drift through open windows and screen doors.

It looked like I’d be doing the usual summer stuff — hanging out at the corner store, Ken’s Market, chewing on some Now and Later’s while playing Frogger, going to the Boulevard Theater on Whittier Boulevard to watch The Goonies for 99 cents and swimming at Ruben Salazar Park (formerly Laguna Park), also on Whittier.

But the summer of 1985 would also be a season of terror in L.A., thanks to the Night Stalker, a 25-year-old Mexican drifter from El Paso named Richard Ramirez. The Texan had two loves: AC/DC’s “Night Prowler” and crawling into open windows to kill. He began his murder rampage in June 1984, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1985 that the bodies started “making sense” to the cops. There were 13 victims in all, mostly girls and women between the ages of 6 and 83. Some had been beaten and raped, some savagely mutilated. (One woman’s eyes were gouged out.) As mementos, Ramirez would leave behind inked Satanic pentagrams.

Angelenos had seen death before, but this terror was on another level. Sales of guns, guard dogs and burglar alarms seemed to reach an all-time high. Neighborhood watch groups sprung up all over the city and vigilantes began patrolling the streets at night. Doing our part as good East Angelenos, we walked the beat around our street. I, along with my childhood friends Fernando and Efren Torres, and my older brother Rigo, protected our street with bats, pipes and homemade numchucks that we fashioned by taking old broomsticks, cutting off two pieces and then nailing or screwing on a thin chain to each end. We were Mexican ninjas. We also had the backing of the LiL Valley cholos, the older veteranoswho hid a greater arsenal on Raspberry Hill, a large brush area with raspberry shrubs on top of the hill beyond our street. It was a place where you could pick berries and pick up hidden knives and guns.

I was not afraid of the Night Stalker — I grew up in a gang war zone. I had seen the casualties of that war up close, including a drive-by where at least 10 LiL Valley cholos got shot up by rivals. I didn’t know it, but I was already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Deep down I wanted a piece of the Night Stalker.

As the killer continued his spree, he got meaner but sloppier and was ID’d through fingerprints, his first mistake. On August 30, an arrest warrant was issued and Ramirez’s mug shot was plastered all over newspapers and broadcast on TV. He fled into, of all places, East L.A., where perhaps he felt he could hide out among the brown. That was his second and costliest mistake. The story goes that Ramirez showed up to the 3700 block of East Hubbard Street, just a few blocks from my house, looking for a car to steal. He found a red Mustang parked in a driveway, but its owner, Faustino Pinon, quickly grabbed Ramirez around the neck, pushed him off his property and began chasing him.

Ramirez then threatened to kill a neighbor unless she surrendered the keys to her Ford Granada. The screaming woman’s husband rushed to her aid with a metal post. He, along with other neighbors who’d quickly armed themselves with steel rods and tools, pursued Ramirez, who now ran for his life. He was hit with fist and metal post like an evil piñata. Finally, a block away from where it all began, the Night Stalker collapsed to the ground and was subdued, while the mob beat him until sheriff’s deputies arrived. Ramirez raised his hands to the deputies, begging for protection. The crowd had to be held back as the lawmen saved the killer’s life!

“They caught the Night Stalker!” Word quickly spread as my friends and I got on our old, beat-up Schwinn bikes (the kind you build and not buy) E.T.-style and rode with our adrenalin pumping to Hubbard a couple blocks away, where the sheriffs were placing a bandaged and demoralized Richard Ramirez into a squad car. As I stood behind the sheriffs and saw Ramirez in person from a few feet away, he didn’t seem like the monster that he was — no modern-day Jack the Ripper, just another hapless soul. (One who’d end up on Death Row, where he sits today.)

Soon every television crew converged here to let the world know that the Night Stalker had not only been caught but almost beaten to death in East L.A. The neighborhood that took great pride in the capture was allowed by Sheriff Sherman Block to have a huge block party with each end of Hubbard cordoned off by the sheriffs. That whole night a DJ played cha-chadisco jams like Tapps’ “Burning with Fire” and Lime’s “Babe We’re Gonna Love Tonight,” while what seemed like all of East L.A. danced their asses off. We had to celebrate — after all it’s not every summer when Satan’s right-hand man gets caught in East L.A.

SLEW of posts already from SoCal friends who remember that time vividly with Ramirez (I was living in upstate New York at that point, only returning right around July and even then just going to San Diego rather than LA/OC). One friend mentioned violence and murder done to family members by him -- another talked about how, after the police reconstructed his movements, she and her family were almost victims as he was breaking into their home, only to be stopped by the house alarm going off. Unsettling to say the least.

jesus. serial killers are the worst. when son of sam was active in the 70s in nyc my mom couldn't sleep because her brother was a hippie who lived in a brooklyn and didn't lock his door or window

this is from the L.A. Times in 1985:

Here is a chronology of the 16 murders and some of the two dozen assaults police believe were committed by Night Stalker suspect Richard Ramirez, along with other key developments in the case:

Early 1985: Two people are slain in undisclosed parts of Los Angeles. Later, police will link these slayings to the Night Stalker. The locations and dates have still not been revealed.

Feb. 25: A 6-year-old Montebello girl is taken from a bus bench near school while waiting for an older sister. She tells police that she was carried away in a zippered garment bag, sexually assaulted and dropped off in the Silver Lake area.

March 11: A 9-year-old Monterey Park boy is kidnaped from his home at night, sexually assaulted, then left in Elysian Park, near Silver Lake.

March 17: Dayle Okazaki, 34, is killed, and her roommate, Maria Hernandez, is wounded in an attack in their Rosemead condominium.

March 17: Two miles from Okazaki's home, Tsal-lian Yu, 30, of Monterey Park, is pulled from her car near her home and shot several times. She dies the next day.

March 20: An Eagle Rock girl is kidnaped and sexually molested by a man who breaks into her family's home at night.

March 27: Vincent Zazzara, 64, a retired investment counselor, is beaten to death and his wife, Maxine, 44, is stabbed to death by an attacker who enters their ranch-style Whittier home through an open door. Their bodies are found by a business acquaintance two days later.

May 14: William Doi, 65, is shot to death in his Monterey Park home by an assailant who crawls through an open window. Doi, whose wife is assaulted, manages to telephone the emergency 911 number before losing consciousness--a call that police later said saved his wife's life.

May 29: Mabel Bell, 84, and her invalid sister, Florence Lang, 81, are beaten in their Monrovia home, high above the San Gabriel Valley on a narrow, winding road. The women are found four days later by a gardener. Bell dies July 15.

June 27: Patty Elaine Higgins, 32, is slain in her Arcadia home. Her throat is slashed.

July 2: Less than two miles from Higgins' home, Mary Louise Cannon, 77, of Arcadia, who had fought off two bouts of cancer, is murdered. Her throat is slashed.

July 7: Joyce Nelson, 61, is beaten to death in the Monterey Park home where she lives alone.

July 11: More than 600 residents jam a Monterey Park Neighborhood Watch meeting, anxious over the murders in their hometown and other nearby San Gabriel Valley communities. Police say they cannot yet connect the murders to a single suspect.

July 20: Chainarong Khovananth, 32, is slain in his Sun Valley home. His wife is beaten and raped, and their 8-year-old son is beaten. An estimated $30,000 in jewels and cash are stolen. Police are given a clue: A witness tells them the suspect fled in a maroon-colored Pontiac Grand Prix with a damaged right front fender.

July 20: Max Kneiding, 68, and his wife, Lela Ellen, 66, are shot to death in their Glendale home.

Aug. 6: Christopher Petersen, 38, and his wife, Virginia, 27, are both shot in the head in their Northridge home and survive.

Aug. 8: Elyas Abowath, 35, is shot to death in his Diamond Bar home. His wife is beaten. Their two children, ages 3 and 3 months, are not harmed. Later in the day, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block tells reporters that the attack on the Abowaths is the latest in a series of six killings that authorities have linked to the same suspect. It is the first public revelation that a serial killer is loose in Southern California.

Aug. 10-11: Reports of crimes made by citizens to LAPD's Communications Division, which processes emergency crime calls, jump more than 15% during the weekend, apparently because of anxiety over news of the Night Stalker's attacks. Gun shops report increased sales.

Aug. 13: The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors offers a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Night Stalker.

Aug. 14: Sheriff's investigators say they now believe that the Night Stalker is responsible for a seventh slaying, the March 17 shooting of Tsal-lian Yu in Monterey Park.

Aug. 17: In the first killing outside Southern California, Peter Pan, 66, is shot and killed in bed in his San Francisco home. His wife, Barbara, 64, is shot and beaten but survives. The house is ransacked.

Aug 20: A four-hour search in San Marino for a man resembling the Night Stalker is called off after homicide detectives find that the man, who fled in his car when he was stopped by a police officer, was not the Stalker.

Aug. 22: Homicide investigators announce that they believe the Night Stalker was responsible for the Aug. 17 slaying of Peter Pan. A day later, they link an additional seven murders to the Night Stalker, bringing the total to 14. They also indicate that at least three different forms of evidence link the Night Stalker to the Southern California and San Francisco killings: ballistic tests, messages scrawled on walls and a "distinctive" but undisclosed piece of evidence the killer has left behind in the homes of his victims. Meanwhile, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein announces that her city is offering a $10,000 reward.

Aug. 25: Bill Carns, 29, is critically injured--shot in the head while sleeping in his Mission Viejo home. His 29-year-old fiancee is raped.

Aug. 28: In what police call a "significant break," a stolen 1976 orange Toyota station wagon that had been spotted near the scene of the Mission Viejo attack is found abandoned on a Los Angeles street. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles City Council offers a $25,000 reward for the Stalker's arrest and conviction, and Gov. Deukmejian announces the state will offer $10,000 more.

Aug. 29: Investigators say they have found "good" fingerprints on the stolen Toyota, thanks to a laser examining device. Meanwhile, they announce that they have linked the two murders that occurred early in the year to the Stalker, making a total of 16.

Aug. 30: Police issue an all-points bulletin for the arrest of a suspect--Richard Ramirez, whom they identify as being the thin, curly-haired man known as the Night Stalker. They make public a photograph of Ramirez.

Aug. 31: Police arrest Ramirez, taking him into custody after he is captured and beaten by angry citizens who grab him on an East Los Angeles street after he reportedly tries to steal a woman's car.

may be not 100% accurate anymore.

my wife was growing up in woodland hills at the time and basically everyone was terrified. also, there was this guy, who was even more terrifying since he was never caught:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Night_Stalker

this guy was scum obv but there is something funny to me about like patton oswalt noting his death on twitter and calling him a "piece of shit." like no duh, he was a serial killer. there's basically nothing you can say that doesn't end up sounding like a weak understatement.

also Treeship "serial killers are the worst" should be your catchphrase

the sheer number of victims so close together ...when you see them listed like that it is really overwhelming, quite terrifying even now

Feel like these need to be added to the thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLiaFzbgJSA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihi7FtIRBE0

Oswalt's wife is a serial killer blogger with no discernable writing talent and a lot of fans.

i also thought it was weird and hypocritical for oswalt to turn a blind eye to his wife's serial killing and yet condemn ramirez, but i wasn't going to say anything.

xpost i like her blog! 'no discernable writing talent' is p harsh imo.

Yeah, ok, fair enough. I have a bit of a bias against amateur detectives, and that's very much where she's coming from.

this guy was scum obv but there is something funny to me about like patton oswalt noting his death on twitter and calling him a "piece of shit." like no duh, he was a serial killer. there's basically nothing you can say that doesn't end up sounding like a weak understatement.

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, June 7, 2013 6:05 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not a serial killer but in the aftermath of Thomas Hamilton shooting 16 kids + himself in Scotland in the 90s, there was a front page tabloid article which stuck with me, claiming with relish that he'd been thrown into an incinerator LIKE A BAG OF TRASH rather than afforded the dignity of a burial. as after-the-fact hardmanning goes it's fairly understandable but also peculiar and kinda funny

the dunblane massacre was well out of order to be fair

patton oswalt was just an example. and i understand/sympathize with the impulse. but it's also so ineffectual that i can't help but find it funny.

Peter Pan, 66, is shot and killed in bed in his San Francisco home

:/

He didn't look a day over 14, but.

i feel like i missed out (uh, not really) on the serial killer scares of the 80s (and i guess early 90s?). i can vaguely remember the Dahmer trial, but has there been any that the media have latched onto since then?

i actually read Hunting Humans a few years ago because it was mentioned on this thread. it's a great book and i still think about it--the gist of the argument has some greater applications than just random loner killers i think. not sure it really holds water but it's a necessary corrective to the psychological or theological approach (ie, just its just "evil") often taken.

Guilty lol at "Aug. 17th slaying of Peter Pan" xpost

poor Wendy

i wonder if Barbara knew about Wendy

i feel like i missed out (uh, not really) on the serial killer scares of the 80s (and i guess early 90s?). i can vaguely remember the Dahmer trial, but has there been any that the media have latched onto since then?

There has, just not in the American media...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pichushkin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surender_Koli
http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/2011/03/16/accused-rapist-killer-jack-mogale-awaits-his-fate

Isn't there a serial killer at large in Long Island right now?

The Long Island serial killer is really fascinating. LOTS of stuff on You Tube about it.

Idk if there is a racial element to the relative lack of media interest. Quite a few of the most recent ones to have been caught (Lonnie Franklin, Anthony Sowell, Samuel Little) have been black, as have most of their victims.

i feel like i missed out (uh, not really) on the serial killer scares of the 80s (and i guess early 90s?). i can vaguely remember the Dahmer trial, but has there been any that the media have latched onto since then?

The BTK killer (bind, torture, kill) was caught in 2005 (thanks to a floppy disk, iirc!), although the murders were many years earlier. This got a lot of play in the media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader

iirc the Green River killer case went cold for a long time until police finally arrested and charged Gary Ridgway in 2001.

I remember being stationed overseas when Berkowitz was at large, although I wasn't quite 8 years old. That was my dad's home turf so he kept up on the news from home about it all the time.

Snowtown murders in Australia. Craaaazy shit.

Forgot the Pig Farmer Killer earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton

Also in Canada, the Highway Of Tears murders are still unsolved (quite possible there's more than one killer though)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Tears_murders

Also unsolved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Killing_Fields_(location)

Pickton case is crazypants

Texas Killing Fields is a particularly grim one for me.

fuck, the Vice Issei Sagawa documentary is just...

Dude's comic is pretty cool, I hate to say

But yeah, fascinating and weirdly likeable as he is...it's pretty annoying that this guy is able to live in relative peace & that Vice just played into it like he's some sympathetic character, meanwhile giving zero recognition to the person he killed. It's fucked up to say, but I'm kind of proud to live in 'murica, where a dude like this would not survive for very long as a free man.

Also what the fucking fuck at whoever orchestrated that porno. I kind of hate them more than I hate Sagawa.

This guy was a big deal 'round here in the mid '90s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81ngel_Maturino_Res%C3%A9ndiz

does the beltway sniper count

xp yeah, in general i like lenient/rehabilitative prison systems -- and don't think murderers should always serve life in prison, necessarily -- but it pisses me off that issei sagawa is free, and that vice treated him as just like this eccentric. also he doesn't seem extremely repentant so i'm not sure if japan is very safe with him at large...

There was one arrested in Alaska a few months ago. Maybe they just aren't as big a news draw.

― хуто-хуторянка (ShariVari), Friday, June 7, 2013 5:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is exactly it, the media just doesn't care any more. There's a serial killer active in long island and it's just a local story.

I'm still amazed that Luka Magnotta wasn't a bigger deal.

Was Dahmer the last one to achieve real celebrity status? Gary Ridgway doesn't seem like the type I could assume most people would know right way.

I just looked up Luka Magnotta. Jesus christ on a cracker that is horrifying.

Looked Magnotta up too. Fucking hell, it takes a LOT to squick me out...

magnotta's the gay porn star kitten killer one right? i remember all my gay friends going on about that one, apparently it's not hard to find the videos. i'd totally forgotten angel resendiz but yeah that was a big deal briefly. vivid memories of this also - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gainesville_Ripper. can also remember the summer of dahmer. he does seem to be the last one to achieve that icon status of a gacy or bundy. apparently serial killings have gone down and while i'm sure datamining and just better information technology in general has played the largest role apparently media not turning these guys into rock stars has helped also, whether that was any kind of deliberate move on the part of the industry or if they just followed the money to mass shootings and terrorism (where media exposure is also a motivation) i don't know.

yeah I think the "Hunting Humans" boom is (unintentionally) as much about the sociology of the cult of personally that sprung up around serial killers up until Dahmer.

Have the slightly creepy intuition that no real fame has accrued to any since then because none of them have been *artistic* enough. No originality.

boom = book of course

I'm not a student of this or anything, but I notice that Dahmer was arrested the same year as Silence of the Lambs. If he was the last one to gain widespread notoriety, would the movie have anything to do with that? Maybe it was an apotheosis of sorts, eclipsing all subsequent real-life versions.

yeah i could see these grand guignol tabelaux serial killers (which probably reaches its apotheosis w/ se7en) presented in media would set a standard that actual dull drifters and nerds serial killers could never live up to. the rest of the nineties 'serial killers are a kind of performance artist' cliche is just exhausting that interest and then columbine preceded by the smaller school shootings (and maybe in a weird way andrew cunanan) provide a more easy to work w/ for tv and definitely more legitimate alternative. it's odd cuz serial killers are sort of built for the internet (fincher's zodiac is almost a movie about the internet, or at least burying yrself in data and the difference between data and information) but maybe the timing element plays against it, something where there can be months or even years between incidents is handicapped in an age where a story that goes two or three days w/ no developments is dead in the water.

I think that issue of sustaining a media narrative is pretty insightful.

serial killer mythos also perhaps tied to old boogie man myths (as in "go to bed or Jeffrey Dahmer will get you") which while certainly timeless in certain respects almost seem of another era--one with more loneliness, darkness, and weird sounds in the night than we tend to experience any more.

Most serial killers have no interest in being artistic. They are gratifying other urges. The majority try to keep their activities as low-profile as they can, so they can operate as freely as possible. Movies and tv require stories filled with terror and heroics. Serial killers are usually just sordid and disgusting.

Yeah it's important to draw a distinction between the culture around these guys and their pathetic realities. nevertheless there is often a certain consciousness in how they present themselves to the police and media. zodiac certainly good example of that.

nowadays I'm much more frightened that some random guy will open fire on me at the mall or something. but then again thinking of someone crawling through your window on a warm summer night has a special horror of its own.

something where there can be months or even years between incidents is handicapped in an age where a story that goes two or three days w/ no developments is dead in the water

That seems exactly right. The Columbines and Auroras and Boston Marathons, awful one-time events that unfold minute-by-minute, are much more in sync with the internet age.

the boy in the homemade balloon who wasn't in the balloon, although the balloon spent a couple hours live on CNN == perfect internet age story

no serial killers involved :-(

maybe the distinction between local and national news matters too. there was a murder in Austin on New Year's Eve a year ago and i won't bore with all the details but it definitely had all the hallmark elements. Huge story for a few weeks, parts of the community around UT especially were very on edge. We found out later he had killed himself a few days after the murder, possibly after seeing police sketches of himself plastered all over town. It was an eerie time.

I'm watching The Snowtown Murders right now and wondering if this is such a good idea...

creepy + v disturbing

i liked it but it's hard to watch

serial murder is a p bad idea

yea i know there was a praise-heavy thread on it but i had to turn it off

I'm working while watching it so I have a little bit of a buffer, but the bit with the wallaby heads was the first indication of what I was in for.

It is staggeringly good but it really fucked me up.

It's not helping that I think Daniel Henshall is handsome.

Oh no not the dog.

I'm going to try not to liveblog my viewing of this movie, but I may have to pop in for support now and then.

Is he the protagonist or the charismatic? You're in for some whiplash either way...

Btw my mustache needs cutting so badly ATM that I kind of resemble the drugged out sunken cheeked accomplice :(

Ugh the dog scene.

The movie actually gets more disturbing btw so strap in!

Daniel Henshall plays John, who is the charismatic, I believe. The guy who gets the kid to go along with his killing spree. This fella:

http://www.boudist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Daniel-Henshall-Snowtown-209-590x885.jpg

Yep he is a magnetic motherfucker.

We'll talk later abt the particular scene where his performance will haunt me to the end of my days

yeah he's really great -- and I get a weird Australian Ricky Gervais vibe from him

apparently a good portion of the supporting cast and extras are all locals

oh wow all of them except the 2 main stars were locals!

Apart from Daniel Henshall and Richard Greene, the actors were locals with no acting experience that Kurzel had found in the area where the murders occurred, with most from Davoren Park. Kurzel himself grew up in the area and felt that using locals would move the film from being a one dimensional horror show to a tragic human story showing what happens when people are disadvantaged. Davoren Park is considered one of the most violent and dysfunctional suburbs in Australia and a place where emergency vehicles fear to go without a police escort. According to Kurzel, far from the "wow, I'm going to be a movie star" attitude that he had expected, he had some difficulty convincing them to take part.[8][9]

that last line is kinda... dude, I could have told him that

is this on tv right now y/n

It's on Netflix streaming

Yes. That's where I'm watching it.

That's amazing about the actors. The kid who plays Jamie is fantastic.

The mom, too.

Yeah the Mom is great

Uh oh

lol

DUN DUN DUN

A thing is happening.

A bad thing.

ohhhhh my god

those bad things will continue to happen fyi

all bad things all the time from here on out iirc

heres my thoughts from the horror thread:

Snowtown/alt title The Snowtown Murders - well if you are craving a soul-destroying bleak horror skincrawler ala Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer this is one for you. its fairly brilliant, and incredibly well-acted, and deeply in the camp of "movies that are so hard to watch that i dont really recommend them". its a rough one, and gets worse when you find out that it is a true story.

otm

I went to school with Eire's biggest serial killer, was friends with him at different periods between infant school(Our Lady of Lourdes, Brackenhall, Huddersfield) and the last 2 years at high school(All Saints High School,Bradley, Huddersfield). He was the type who would try and instigate other people to "do stuff" like "c'mon let's throw a brick through that window, you do it". I never felt threatened by him and got the better of him in a few pathetic adolescent pushing matches. I was talking to an aunt in Dublin and he is a major folk devil over there, the tabloids put "Nashy" on the front cover on quiet news days. This was my lesson in the banality of evil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grangegorman_killings

All right. It's over.

I actually had a hard time keeping track of all of the people they killed. Some of them were just random, right? Like not for revenge or because they were child abusers? The last scene was, for being completely bloodless, was just brutal.

We'll talk later abt the particular scene where his performance will haunt me to the end of my days

― Thelema & Louise (Jon Lewis), Wednesday, July 10, 2013 7:46 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Very much want to know which scene. I can think of a few contenders. "Again... stop. Again... stop." being pretty high on the list, and also the bit outside with the kid and the bricks. The look on his face.

As far as I know from the actual story, pretty much everyone was killed with some kind of imagined 'justification', though it wasn't always very apparent. using drugs, or being overweight, or mentally handicapped, or child-abuse...the more he killed, the wider his net was cast.

There's good background on the wiki page that makes a lot of the stuff they left out or glossed over in the movie a bit clearer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowtown_murders#The_murders

Nash is also linked with the unsolved murder of a pensioner in Huddersfield from the mid 90's and I bumped into him a few times in this period and had a fight with him on a bus when he tried to nick my walkman in '93. I am only going into this because he could be up for release soon. He wants to be moved to England to get an earlier release.

Xpost yes "again... Stop." is the scene I meant. The bright, elevated look in his eye as he searches the vic's face for every precious sign of death.

Boy yeah. Visually, his clean, unblemished face up next to the victim's brutalized face really reinforced that bright elevation (good way to put it).

I'm reading the wikipedia article and these dummies just killed all sorts of people they knew, huh? And they moved and left a barrel behind, like it was a box of old magazines or something.

I rly want to read a book abt the case but the one which is available readily in the US looks like it might not be the strongest of the 3 that have been written.

Also: damo holy crap!

Also: damo holy crap!

I imagine people would think I am a bullshitter when I say this stuff, it is the truth. I would think the same myself to be honest. Whenever I bump into old school friends, the first topic is Nashy.

I believe you! I was too immersed in Snowtown before to respond.

He was the type who would try and instigate other people to "do stuff" like "c'mon let's throw a brick through that window, you do it".

People like that make me fundamentally uneasy and always have. Not because I think they are going to be serial killers, probably.

My mother often sees his mother in the area and she confessed to me that she hides from her and avoids eye contact. She has this very Irish "bad apple comes from a bad tree" attitude. Don't blame her tbh.

Yeah, I don't think "how to casually interact with the mother of your region's most notorious serial killer" is covered in most etiquette books.

Damo'z Parrot:

Am I to understand that Nashy never stood trial for this? Not covered in wiki article, but holy shit that's gotta be creepy..

He is currently doing a life sentence in Dublin and is trying to get moved to England because he would have already been released for a life sentence in England.

from

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/murder-accused-fails-to-block-trial-1.534666

This is the abhorrent cunt here.

http://img.rasset.ie/0002a9d2-314.jpg

The phrenologist in me goes 'ah the forehead'

lol

http://thoughtcatalog.com/jay-roberts/2013/10/i-met-a-convicted-serial-killer/

Spectacularly written account of a pleasant afternoon spent with Randy Kraft.

wow @ that essay. i had to look up randy kraft but he was a real piece of work.

crazy stuff

Wow. The comments are actually good, too.

Yeah, and the author also shows up in the Metafilter thread.

This was very good. Thank you for sharing it, Plasmon.

Kraft is such a type too--it's almost strange how genuine psychos like that follow such a predictable pattern of behavior. probably mentioned this upthread, but one thing the author says in Hunting Humans (mentioned a lot upthread) that has stayed with me is that people don't just "go crazy," they go crazy in socially proscribed and predictable ways.

i've often wondered (i obviously think about this stuff too much) if the murders are just a by-product of the other urges...that killing someone is just a logical extension of all the other things they want to do--either because those things happen to cause death or they want to eliminate the witness. anyway, not something i can or want to delve into deeply.

cool article.

serial killers don't really seem to be a "thing" any more.

like, they feel more like a medai myth/cliche at this point.

the shift to mass murder killing sprees seem to be the result of a different kind of psychosis

the interesting thing about the (maybe dubious) thesis of Hunting Humans that serial killing is a kind of social performance in addition to a private fetish, that in the boston strangler's words it was about "getting one over on those people," (this is why he thinks that many of them have to get caught to "complete" the act) is that the mass shooting type of thing does seem to issue from similar impulses. if anything it ratchets up the "performance" angles and seizes attention that few other things do in a distracted mass media environment.

yeah, but the killing one person at a time, the fixation on the particular victim and (a lot of times) the victim's particular traits, not to mention the sexualization of it - this seems very different from the "I'm gonna kill as many random people as possible" motive

it's true there are important differences. most obviously the psychosexual element (or maybe a freudian would disagree!). not to mention that serial killers are probably way more common. what's that old canard about 100s being active at any one time?

the overlap, i think, involves the selection of a very controlled set of circumstances and victims. shootings, for instance, always seem to take place in a very specific location for the perpetrator.

not to mention that serial killers are probably way more common.

that doesn't seem to be the case at all, which is what I was getting at. I can't remember the last high profile serial killer case that got any attention, and yet there is a mass shooting (or attempted mass shooting) like once a month now

either serial killers are too good now & don't get caught or the cops are too good & catch them before they get very serial

cops not really good at motive-less crimes, I think we can rule out the latter

i think in a true statistical sense they have always been quite rare. but i do think that sort of thing definitely still goes on--more likely in rural areas.

some recent American ones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Keyes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island_serial_killer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Cullen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Sleeper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Sowell

John Douglas says "A very conservative estimate is that there are between 35-50 active serial killers in the United States"

Hasn't been one in the UK for a while

So nice that we had Anthony Sowell and Ariel Castro active in the same city at the same time WHAT UP CLEVELAND?

long island serial killer was mentioned in a throwaway line in a recent nyer piece on online prostitution which was jarring

i've seen articles claiming that serial murders have been on the decline since 1990 although the data is p hazy. you can tease out a bunch of different conclusions from the general trend but its certainly true that the media/public arent as interested in serial killers. interesting to think about i guess, change in social fears post-9/11, cultural immediacy, the way violence is expressed

Hasn't been one in the UK for a while

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradford_murders

change in social fears post-9/11, cultural immediacy, the way violence is expressed

I think this is totally true (see also how horror movies changed in that time). but yeah I dunno if its just cuz we don't care about it anymore and the prospect of mass death is so much more frightening/palpable than being randomly kidnapped and murdered, or if its because there really are just fewer serial killers

it's possible a lot serial killers are also caught earlier due to better technology available to law enforcement. Before they actualize their serial killer goal.

you guys watch too many CSI episoes

I think he could be right though

I liked the one where a guy was id'ed as a killer because his victim's aids blood splashed into his eyes, infecting him with HIV. Or as Jorja Fox noted, "she killed you right back."

Executive Producer
Jerry Bruckheimer

i agree that law enforcement is better and that makes a difference. particularly in bigger cities with more potential for surveillance. one thing you notice about a lot of the more famous serial killer is how often they had brushes with the law that got lost in the shuffle. kraft among them! there's certainly been a lot of work done in regards to identifying these types that probably wasnt in place 30-40 years ago.

it is true that every crime scene these days is covered in semen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C3RrvZMx-M

Agents Day Morris and Barnard Marcus are marketing the flat but with no mention of its history. Richard Evans, from Day Morris, said he had not known he was selling Nilsen’s former home, adding: “In that case I've under-priced it. No, but seriously, we were unaware. I don’t see the importance of it — something that happened 25, 30 years ago.”

He called it a “very sweet” property: “It is a very nice top-floor flat with glorious views. It is ideal for one person.”

Barnard Marcus describes it as having “the added benefit of balcony giving panoramic views” and says: “Internal inspection highly recommended.” Branch manager Maxine Casey said they would “let people know” of the property’s history during viewings as “it would be worth mentioning”.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/serial-killer-dennis-nilsens-flat-goes-on-sale-for-100k-profit-after-a-swift-makeover-9154198.html

Thought this revive would have something to do with the new craigslist killer.

I stumbled into this MetaFilter thread on the death of Loretta Saunders and the hundreds of missing and murdered Canadian Aboriginal women. Saunders story is tragic, but the full details of just what's happening is grim.

Audio interview here: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/current_20140219_18949.mp3

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/craig-and-marc-kielburger/aboriginal-women_b_4638968.html

At the core of Pearce's work is her database. She has meticulously documented 3,329 missing and murdered aboriginal and non-aboriginal women using public sources like newspaper articles, web sites, public police files, and missing person posters. Some of the cases date back to the 1950s, but the overwhelming majority are from 1990 to 2013.

Where possible, Pearce also recorded the ethnicity of the victim. She discovered another risk factor: simply being an aboriginal woman. Of all the missing and murdered women in the database, 24.8 per cent are aboriginal, even though aboriginal women make up only about two per cent of the Canadian population.

this is a really good read (book excerpt):

http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/murders-in-the-night/#disqus_thread

try this instead: http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/murders-in-the-night/

Destroy: Ted Cruz (aka Zodiac killer). He should have stayed away from politics.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/cannibal-couple-eat-30-people-russia-dmitry-baksheev-natalia-military-aviation-academy-krasnodar-a7967216.html

Huge cannibalism case broke open in Russia yesterday.

j f c

Yep, it is completely nuts. They think he started when he was fifteen or sixteen and don't really know how many people they could have killed over the last twenty years.

jesus

Awful. Seminole Heights is about five miles away from where I live.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/serial-killer-seminole-heights-tampa-florida/

Ongoing story up here; if guilty, one of the oldest (66) serial killers ever.

http://torontosun.com/news/local-news/mcarthur-accused-serial-killer-ranks-with-gacy-dahmer

Yes, I was reading about him last week.

I might have mentioned this somewhere else on ILX but when I lived in London, I worked with a woman who had worked with Dennis Nilsen at a Jobcentre during the time of his arrest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Nilsen Worse? She'd been at a dinner at his house. O_O

Detectives believe Gacy — a Democratic Party mover who often dressed as a clown — was responsible for more than 30 slayings.

thanks, Toronto Sun

Ya. Clemz should have probably found a different source than that shit stain of a tabloid.

Paul Bernardo, basically Canada's Charles Manson in terms of notoriety (and even sicker, if anything), was happily denied parole last week. Disagree with this editorial--I don't see him ever getting out, although his female accomplice did, as part of a plea, 13 years ago.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/10/18/face-it-schoolgirl-killer-paul-bernardo-will-probably-be-free-one-day.html

agree

Ian Brady is the most obvious comparison surely? And yeah it's remarkable that Karla Homolka is out and remarried with three children and a new name. Compared to how Myra Hyndley was treated.

yeah def a strong Brady vibe

It’s weird to me how serial killers are to an extent *seemingly* not as much of a thing anymore. Meaning they have either gone deep underground and are avoiding detection or maybe they’re caught before they can get very far thanks to advances in crime solving via DNA or security or even internet tracking and so on.

Maybe the police are downplaying serial murderers in the media to not give them encouragement so to speak? idk I’d be curious to read up on that. Mass murderers seem to be the thing the past twenty years, as trends in murderous crime goes.

However:

https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/good-luck-sleeping-tonight-serial-killers-plague-almost-all-cities

My w1fe and I are both into this as a topic, not so much in a lurid sense but in a problem-solving sense (which is maybe why Mindhunter was an obsession for us both.) Maybe bc she grew up as a girl spooked by the Night Stalker, and I grew up remembering faintly the Gacy crimes and pretty well haunted by a restaurant massacre that took place near where I lived, one that remained unsolved for years.

We revisited one of our honeymoon spots in Ashland OR and much of the time we discussed the unsolved decapitation murder of a college dude that took place a couple years before. Very romantic :(

i'm not sure serial killers were ever really that much of a 'thing'. they are uncommon and I believe have always been. They seem to arrest a few a year, every year, in the US. If anything maybe they've lost some of the media space to the new kind of monster, the one who keeps people enslaved in their home for years on end.

2,000 sounds like a lot

i think that given the huge #’s of missing adults & children every year that 2,000 serial killers isn’t out of the question & may be kinda conservative

the ones we know about are the ones who got publicity &/or got caught. ie icebergs are 90% submerged etc

interstate & cross-country trucking routes are overdue for scrutiny in this arena ... let alone for drug trafficking & human trafficking

From that interview he's counting anyone who's killed more than 1 person. That's a wider range of types of murderers than most of us would consider the classic serial killer.

There are def fewer “classic” serial killers than there used to be. Now we have mass shooters instead. Our collective pathology has changed its manifestation.

i think to narrow it down, he's counting those who have killed people in at least two separate incidents. not sure how that's broken down, it seems to me the classic serial killer of stalking and quietly killing someone at random is different from other types of murderers who could be included there. i agree w/VG in terms of what's overlooked, and how perhaps police depts let alone the public can not notice serial killers operating. in certain areas they're especially overlooked; in urban areas, in minority populations, etc.

i think to cite on example, if you believe what is considered likely about the city of Juarez, where hundreds of women have been murdered or gone missing, it's a situation not where there were a couple killers operating w/impunity but the entire atmosphere of the city, the sense that no one would care, that allowed not two or three but dozens and dozens of different men to murder women at will. Perhaps yes, some (if not most) just killing one woman but on the other hand many, many of them killing two or three or more on different occasions. Operating as serial killers.

yeah exactly

the idea that there arent serial killers anymore because they’ve gone out of fashion. is kind of privileged thinking imo

rural areas, regions trashed by meth, Juarez, the Canadian indigenous women...killing ppl who arent missed and/or living somewhere that ppl routinely ignore, it could go on forever & not be stopped

like i’m not in favor of it but it is mental to think that it is not happening. yes, there’s no more Gacys and Kempers because suburbanites watch their kids obsessively & teen girls dont hitchhike “just to get around” anymore but societal shifts don’t magically wipe sexually motivated homicides from the picture just because we have podcasts & iphones now.

my mom and cousin would always walk home from school back in the '50s (in Chicago!) when they were in elementary and middle school. she remembers one incident where a young guy in a nice red car tried to convince them to take a ride and her cousin was ready to do it, and my mom had a very bad vibe about it and just as her cousin was about to hop in she convinced her to not go and they took off running and the guy's reaction was not "ok cool" but something...else. something angrier like angry that they were going to get away.

many years later my mom was taking photos at a creek at a place near where i grew up, and she was alone, and a "friendly" guy who was walking the trail offered to help her with some photos, and after a couple photos and my mom being very nervous about this (he was big, she is 5'2" 95 lbs) he started to get agitated, angry even, about her nervousness. she "went to her car" to "get a filter" and took off, fast. said she hadn't had that feeling since that incident in the '50s.

idk what they were really on about, and it could be just bad weird guy energy vs anything sinister, but that weird guy energy is i'm sure certainly more heightened when you're vulnerable and it probably feels more sinister than a guy like me could imagine.

Those were some intense stories

i think my grandparents and great aunt & uncle thought it would be totally safe to let their kids walk many blocks to and from school by themselves, if they paired up...

yeah it was so much looser back then, and parenting also seems like it had a v narrow scope too?

my favorite murder podcast catchphrase is “fuck politeness” which is sassy etc but cuts to the heart of the damage that happens a lot of women (and boys and kids!) were or are taught to go along to get along & be polite as not to upset the nice young men giving off weird guy energy

it’s a real thing even now

Bruce McArthur (see just above revive) has gotten a lot of media attention up here.

In terms of the media, the serial killer has been replaced by the mass shooter (or mass vehicular killer). This is simplistic, but that would seem to be an obvious reflection of the how media works today. Serial killings usually unfold slowly, over years and sometimes decades; the mass shooter involves instant, blanket coverage.

And yeah it's remarkable that Karla Homolka is out and remarried with three children and a new name.

Amazing last line in her Wikipedia entry: "In May 2017, it was reported that Homolka has been volunteering at her children's elementary school in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a Montreal neighbourhood."

I’m all for redemption but that is stupid.

im not for redemption and that is criminal

since she is living under a new identity now, was the school able to do a real background check on her?

Her kids go to the school and it sounds like she just participated in a parent-supervised trip to a museum or something so I can’t imagine they would be doing background checks.

feels like this is not a situation where "we wait for an ordinary check to come up" should be the measure

"i think my grandparents and great aunt & uncle thought it would be totally safe to let their kids walk many blocks to and from school by themselves, if they paired up..."

not to be too "American exceptionalism" but in Paris in 2018 lots of little kids (like ages 5-10) walk to/from school every day, and take public transportation, alone. There have been a few Parisian serial killers but I would think a bigger factor in why American kids don't do this anymore is city layout.

Man, how weird must this be for Homolka's kids

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/05/31/convicted-serial-killer-karla-homolka-volunteering-at-montreal-elementary-school.html

Who is this person who married her and decided she would be a good person to raise children with?

assuming any of em know?

Everyone in Canada over a certain age knows who Karla Homolka is.

I read about this case this morning because of this thread. It’s extremely fucked up she is not in jail. I want good conditions for prisoners and a path to rehabilitation for most people who feasibly could re-join society, but this woman tortured and murdered young teenagers.

xp i figured she was under an assumed identity now

Fucking disgusting

The husband certainly knows. The school maybe not.

In terms of the media, the serial killer has been replaced by the mass shooter (or mass vehicular killer). This is simplistic, but that would seem to be an obvious reflection of the how media works today. Serial killings usually unfold slowly, over years and sometimes decades; the mass shooter involves instant, blanket coverage.

i'm going on pure speculation here and i really don't know how much the hard work of reporters helped to shed light on quietly operating active murderers, vs the more instantaneous and visceral and public violence of mass shooters, but we personally know someone who was a crime reporter in L.A., and who wrote a true crime book which received a lot of notices for quality and in terms of being an important book in the genre, and who worked very hard on the urban crime beat. And she was let go by her newspaper despite all her accolades and bonafides and the importance of her work. she seemed fairly cynical about the current media landscape iirc, it sounded positively nightmarish.

i think local crime coverage really gets a short shrift nationwide these days, generally speaking. the crime might be covered, but the followup doesn't exist anymore. and w/serial murders you'd need followup, and w/mass killings it's much more tied up in one tidy package.

again, pure speculation; people who have worked in media could shed better light on that.

i think you are onto something there definitely

it might also be Thomas Harris's fault

It’s extremely fucked up she is not in jail.

Her reduced sentence and early chance at parole caused much outrage at the time. It's been a few years since I read this really good book on the case, but as I remember it--same old story--the Crown was panicky that, without her testimony, they didn't have enough solid evidence to put away Bernardo. (And there was a key videotape that was being held by one of the attorneys?) So they basically gave away the store when cutting a deal with her. Many people feel that she may even be the more culpable of the two.

This book.

https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/1bde9b93-a652-443c-9a5b-45012201d7fa_1.e00874c8862cc20007d135fba719f599.jpeg?odnHeight=450&odnWidth=450&odnBg=FFFFFF

They couldn’t subpoena the videotape?

I’m mostly disturbed that she has children and is raising them. I guess the state can’t do anything but what a nightmare.

I'm trying to remember specifics but I can't--the prosecutors were in a tough spot, I think. I don't think anybody knew about the videotape except the lawyer who had it, and he subsequently was disbarred or something.

Ken Murray: he sat on the tape(s) for 17 months.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/torture-tapes-left-lawyer-traumatized/article18422428/

Jesus

Imagine sitting on evidence of a murder to protect a client.

well...lawyers and the law, eh

I guess it might fall under attorney-client privilege? Seems weird that video of a murder could be protected information. Would like one of the lawyers to explain this

Murray was Bernardo’s lawyer, not Homolka’s iirc. Bernardo’s defence was that Homolka was the killer and Murray intended to use the tapes to show she was lying after she testified - though he belatedly realised that she was withholding evidence illegally.

quite confusing, he thought the tape helped his client so he kept it hidden for almost a year and a half because reasons

Very odd. It doesn’t sound like it was especially exonerating.

I gotta stop reading about this. Apparently he applied for parole recently and gave some self-pitying excuse about how he was acting out due to low seld esteem. How reprehensible and also ridiculous.

His argument is that the tapes would have come up sooner had the prosecution not gone out of their way to stop Homolka from being cross-examined. Bernardo always claimed he had never actually murdered anyone and, in theory, the tapes would have been used to show that Homolka was lying about being a reluctant participant - which could have introduced a measure of doubt as to whether he might have been telling the truth. He would almost certainly still have been convicted of murder even if Homolka had actually killed them but there might have been more hope of parole at some point.

There is pretty much no prospect of him ever getting released.

i feel so sad for homolka's kids - they're gonna find out one day what their mother did and it's gonna fuck up them up.

yeah that will be an awful experience

Just read Peter Vronsky's Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers From the Stone Age To the Present. Kind of an odd book. Vronsky has a weird style in which he veers between fairly dry sociological analysis and jarring pop culture refs. Also too many exclamation marks!

But definitely some interesting material, especially the stuff about pre-Jack the Ripper "werewolves" and the medieval witch panic as a state-sanctioned serial killing epidemic. The section on the 19th-century French serial killer Joseph Vacher and the pioneering investigation that led to his arrest is particularly fascinating. I'd never even heard of him before

read today about the benders of kansas, 1869-1872, a sweet spot where pioneering and serial killing mix and match

pioneering must have had it’s share of serial killers you would think now looking back. everyone’s dying left & right from every disease/trampled by livestock/drunken fistfights, creates a pretty convenient & chaotic cover for deliberate violence, lotta ppl not being missed etc

few opportunities to taunt law enforcement via the media though :(

Pony Express rider with a bag full of Frontier Zodiac letters

The Ingalls family, made famous in the books and television series Little House on the Prairie, lived near Independence, and Laura Ingalls Wilder mentioned the Bender family in her writing and speeches. In 1937 she gave a speech at a book fair, which was later transcribed and printed in the September 1978 Saturday Evening Post and in the 1988 book A Little House Sampler. She mentioned stopping at the inn, as well as recounting the rumors of the murders spreading through their community. She alleged that her father, "Pa Ingalls", joined in a vigilante hunt for the killers, and when he spoke of later searches for them she recalled, "At such times Pa always said in a strange tone of finality, 'They will never be found.' They were never found and later I formed my own conclusions why."

TO EDITOR SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BY THE TIME THIS REACHES YOU ANOTHER GIRL WILL BE DEAD STOP YOU WILL NEVER FIND ME STOP I'LL KEEP KILLING FOREVER STOP

"Uh . . . are you sure you want me to send this, sir?"

however --

Some have cast doubt on the story saying that Laura would have been only 4 when her family moved away from the area, and that the Benders were exposed in 1873, two years after the Ingallses left.[21]

someone needs to make this into a film: Bloody Nights: A Little House on the Prairie Thriller

if it was two years after the Ingallses left then WHY DID PA KNOW SO MUCH ABOUT IT HMMM

Also - what was the most brutal act ever depicted in an episode of little house? I was well versed in my youth and I'm sure there must have at least been a murder at some point but the hardest core thing I can recall atm is albert getting strung out on morphine (well I suppose there is the act of domestic terrorism in the series finale)

there was the episode where Charles and Albert are drawn away from the Ingalls ranch by a Comanche tribe and return to find the place in flames and Mary and Laura have been kidnapped (the others are all dead.) Charles and Albert spend years hunting Laura (Mary having been killed and left along the trail early on.) It's pretty harsh stuff.

when pinkerton man dale cooper has to find laura it gets pretty dark/weird

ah yes how could i forget the aguirre-like visionary sequence when charles and albert have been travelling without food or water for five days and think they see a giant weathercock sticking out of a mountaintop

xpost

The episode of Little House where a young girl is raped in a barn (?.) was some heavy, dark shit for a little kid to see.

I believe that episode was called “Sylvia”, the victim was Albert’s girlfriend (Sylvia), and the rapist wore a really creepy plastic mask.

I have told ppl about the Albert-on-morphine storyline & no-one believes me

I remember and validate your experience VG

I remember Albert being on morphine, but didn't he also later possibly die?

As for murder, Mr. Edwards' son was murdered, but I don't personally remember this and am not sure it was handled "darkly".
Charles had another son who was shot, but survived.
It was also pretty brutal when Mrs. Garvey (?) and Mary's baby died in a fire which I believe was started when Albert and the Garvey's son were smoking or something.
But the scary masked rapist was the thing that most left a childhood impression on me.

god i hardly caught any of little house when i was younger and now I'm glad

little house on the prairie, and the basement beneath it

xxposts ty jon <3

anyway i am basically ride or die for Little House forever

kinda want to rewatch it..but i’m deep into the Mary Tyler Moore Show & Hill Street Blues for the foreseeable future

anyway how did we get from serial killers to Little House? oh Benders, right right

Did you hear about the Nun who liked Bingo?

She always had a little prayer on the housie

xpost

i definitely want to rewatch little house during whatever time I left to me, it's gonna make me feel CRAZY to see though, it's like my weird hidden moral bedrock

hill street too (big time), and taxi, and st elsewhere. If you told me today I will never have time to rewatch those four shows I would be v v downcast

here ends my perversion of thread purpose

I can't remember what thread it was where I was arguing that the US doesn't have serial killers anymore because all the psychopaths are now mass-shooters but this seems relevant and backs up my theory: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/15/are-american-serial-killers-a-dying-breed

Watching the Ted Bundy doc on netflix.

well really it only backs up my theory that there are fewer serial killers than there used to be

xxp

yeah I don't really buy the mass shooter as replacement for serial killer theory

they're a pretty different breed

xp. it doesn't really back it up very strongly.

well it is the Guardian!

the rise of mass shooters seems to be more of a coincidence than a switch-off, as it were. i don't doubt that it's more difficult to actually be as somewhat cavalier and casual a killer as some of these guys were, but at the same time the pathology driving serial killers isn't something that would go away, and it's not one that typically answers to pleas to self for caution. i'd be curious to see if there were in-depth corresponding analyses of captured killers who seemed to have a similar M.O. to past killers, the only difference being they were captured early on in their, uh, "careers".

yeah I don't really buy the mass shooter as replacement for serial killer theory

they're a pretty different breed

I guess I think of it in big-picture sort of terms - there are these violent currents in society and the avenues of expression that they take vary from one period to another depending on a variety of factors, and for whatever reason for awhile there it was serial killing, whereas now it's mass shootings. I have no statistics or grand theory to back this up, just spitballing. Might roll in how generations of men are no longer routinely exposed to horrific violence on the battlefield too, why not.

xp

like, it used to be that if you felt compelled to kill a whole bunch of random people, hey just join the army or a bushwhacker unit or become an outlaw or a pirate or whatever.

i think it's harder for serial killers to go years without leaving behind any real evidence of their presence now. everyone's got a cell phone, anyone can take a quick picture with their phone at a moment's notice and send it to someone, few ppl hitchhike or pick up hitchhikers anymore, we've got DNA evidence now...

the Vronsky book cited in the Guardian article (and which I talked about up thread briefly) has an extended section on the soldier as serial murderer, as it happens

and before that he talks about witch hunting as an institutionalised expression of those desires

yeah the behaviors seem to be so key. baby boomers tell you stuff about their lives that often feel very foreign. like i remember my ex-mother in law telling me how she hitchhiked with a female friend when they were in their mid 20s to Mexico and back from Toronto. i would think someone had lost their damn mind if they were doing that now.

there's also better forensic evidence, more surveillance, cell phones, as you mention, law enforcement agencies doing better to share info - that bundy doc shows just how little cooperation there was between law enforcement while he was in washington state, utah, and colorado. he may as well have skipped abroad when he moved state

Serial killers are very different from mass killers.

Also I think serial killers were a reflection of a different time. (Not only their ability to go unnoticed for a long time. But also it says more about society if that makes any sense. The way mass shootings seem to be more prevalent than before.)

the main difference seems to be that there's not really a sexual component to mass shooters, seems like that was more of a focus for serial killers generally speaking. but apart from that idk

Mass shootings seem like they’re aimed at public recig ition and reflect a world where life is more public

plenty of serial killers wanted public recognition

True. The mass shootings seem inherently public though. They take place in public; they are a spectacle

Some mass killers are incells, which I would say counts as a sexual component.

it counts as motivation, but the act itself does not involve sex

serial killing is a libidinal thing though. straight serial killers tend to kill women and girls while gay serial killers tend to kill men and boys. serial killers have types of victims. serial killers plan. serial killers want to get away with it. etc.

(male serial killers i should add)

serial killers have types of victims. serial killers plan.

so do mass shooters

serial killers want to get away with it.

debatable

most mass shooters in america are men that kill a woman that they know and people who happen to be around them. that's not a type. the las vegas shooter who is now the most prolific mass shooter shot at a crowd of people he couldn't possibly have distinguished.

serial killers tend to try and get away with it for at least a while

that's not a type.

gays, black people, coworkers...

Jews etc.

kindergarteners, fellow students

I'm using "type" in the way that people talk about serial killers having a "type" of victim. this is not synonymous with "group of people of any description"

yeah but again I would say that "type" is usually driven by the sexual component w serial killers. Mass shooters tend to have types or groups of people that they are going after, but as you say it's not a libidinal thing.

mass killers are more revenge and absolute chaos fantasy types afaict.

also what struck me about the Vegas dude was that what he did was almost create the type of scene you could re-enact in Grand Theft Auto, just getting to the top of a building and raining down gunfire on people and blowing shit up and holding out for as long as you can. i'm not "blaming video games" but it is kind of interesting.

read this last night thought it was good:
https://believermag.com/the-end-of-evil/

Hadn't even heard of this guy - Canadian Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, operated in the Toronto LGBTQ community.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/canadian-serial-killer-bruce-mcarthur-life-imprisonment-792388/?fbclid=IwAR0IKiYiNWBXAzD2F-rhQ2UwfcG-xjj_hQqi3WWCzfH_47ogHPoM-oqckws

On why he could fly under the radar for so long: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/alleged-serial-killer-divided-toronto-lgbtq-community-bruce-mcarthur-703592/

An 80 year old woman in Russia.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/serial-killer-russia-woman-elderly-body-parts-fridge-berezovka-khabarovsk-a8777026.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2lIYYylY8FA9aFxcYYCvJoOKcFlCNqJqCJla4oqOHIZf50wrkGbXkYto8#Echobox=1550063517

https://z98rocks.iheart.com/content/2017-10-24-the-voice-behind-many-bestselling-books-on-tape-is-actually-a-serial-killer/

According to a 1987 Los Angeles Times article, Edmund Kemper recorded himself reading hundreds of books for an initiative known as the Blind Project. It was a campaign set up by the prison that houses Kemper, the California Medical Facility State Prison, and even though Kemper, a fan of necrophilia, is serving eight concurrent life sentences for the murders of six female college students, according to the LA Times story, blind people are incredibly grateful for him.

Among the books Kemper lent his voice to are Flowers in the Attic, The Glass Key, Merlin's Mirror, Petals on the Wind, The Rosary Murders, Sphinx and Star Wars. In fact, between 1977 and 1987, he spent over 5,000 hours in the recording booth, using up an estimated four million feet of tape.

was reading about richard ramirez i.e. night stalker on wikipedia the other day and peaced out when it started to list his killings. apparently there is a new doc about it which... NOPE.

i mean jesus

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Richard_Ramirez_2007.jpg

There are some valuable interviews with survivors and families of victims and the procedural detective story aspects are interesting especially in terms of time and place but they do these stylistic devices which are really inappropriate. Also they brush way too quickly past Ramirez’s horrifying childhood which isn’t conducive to the stated goal of wanting to know why someone would do those things.

i got the feeling just from the article that the satan angle was played really hard by the media at the time. it does seem like being beaten to the point of unconsciousness numerous times before reaching the age of 9 would have more of an effect on one's behavior than satanic panic bs.

Yeah I kept thinking about the satanic panic atmosphere specific to the time (like I would assume his theatricality during the trial seems was influenced by that more than anything else) but the filmmakers have predictably zero curiosity toward contextualizing any of that.

still i mean maybe he was a demon look at that photo

also apparently he was quite a thottie in prison

the satanic thing was a big part of it at the time as far as I can remember. That summer was really scary! I was 10 years old in LA, our house was right off the Freeway and I was terrified of this guy.

yikes

i was alerted to it because of a lovefingers tweet, apparently any kid who lived in la around that age at the time is psychically scarred because of it.

the one great thing was the day they found him and he caught a beatdown from the people in the neighborhood. The sense of relief and joy that went over the city was really palatable, he really did traumatized us all.

Watched Night Stalker. I didn't know much about the case going in, though I'd seen photos of Ramirez in the courtroom. As a documentary, not much, mostly contemporary interviews from the two main detectives and survivors; very little attempt to put everything in the context of the time or place (maybe a little bit right at the beginning.) It's so weird from the vantage point of today that Ramirez could come back to L.A. from Arizona and not know that his face is on the front page of every L.A. paper. The man he murdered in San Francisco was named Peter Pan. The story of the six-year-old survivor was especially sad and compelling. Gil Carrillo seems like a good guy. Dianne Feinstein--who completely undermined the case--has been around forever. Amazing that you were right there through all that, carne.

I read Ramirez's letters at the Museum of Death in NOLA. dude had a sense of menace even in the fucking letters he wrote from jail. I felt queasy after reading them.

The man he murdered in San Francisco was named Peter Pan.

he can die, he can die, he can die!

dude

we started watching this the other night but I only got ten minutes into it. seemed more about the detective big-upping himself and telling his life story.

i said elsewhere that the production/editing was ott but the interviews are all great, i would much rather hear from homicide detectives & survivors than talking heads trying to “humanize” ramirez or whatever

i'll give it another shot when i'm less exhausted when I was that night. yeah definitely not looking for a 'fanboy' documentary of dude or anything!

*than

It was less the interviews themselves, for me, than that was pretty much all there was. My own preference, purely in terms of a film, would be a narrator, mostly footage from when it happened--the neighborhood arrest, for instance, was great--and less time on those interviews. I guess they were working within the strictures of what they had. It did spook me, though. I finished around 11:00 p.m., and I had planned on taking a shower afterwards. Held off until today.

Severely underrated outside of France:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_de_Rais

I loved the two main detectives tbh. Couldnt get enough.

i would much rather hear from homicide detectives & survivors than talking heads trying to “humanize” ramirez

definitely not looking for a 'fanboy' documentary of dude or anything!

I thought the film (or series, or whatever) struck the right balance here. It was very clear on what Ramirez's childhood was like, but it didn't dwell on it, and it positioned that information at the beginning of the fourth episode, at which point you're fully aware of everything he's done.

agreed, the show centred the crimes and the victims rather than Ramirez himself, who wasn’t even mentioned by name until the last episode. I also liked that it highlighted how institutional incompetence and petty one-upmanship between police jurisdictions were a major, major reason why Ramirez wasn’t caught earlier. And even though the detectives were the main talking heads, the series didn’t portray them as flawless heroes (there was even that one horrible cop who bragged about beating up perps ugh).

The man he murdered in San Francisco was named Peter Pan.

he can die, he can die, he can die!

― if Spaghetti-Os had whammy bars (Neanderthal), Wednesday, January 27, 2021 6:05 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

guilty lol

yeah that idiot cop boasting about beating up a perp, what a wanker. I thought there was going to be some context added: like I was having a breakdown at the time because of work stress or something. But no it was a very banal story with no point told by a pitiless thug that likes beating the shit out of people and then boasting about it on a netflix doc!

I liked how the editorial decision was clearly to just let him at it tbh

I also liked that it highlighted how institutional incompetence and petty one-upmanship between police jurisdictions were a major, major reason why Ramirez wasn’t caught earlier.

You get this a lot in fictional films, but it's usually resentment when the FBI comes in and pulls rank on an investigation that local cops have already begun (Silence of the Lambs, Mindhunter, etc.). Here, it was more like tension between co-equals in L.A. and San Francisco.

yeah the City vs County stuff was maddening, like preventing the car from being fingerprinted. cmon. it seems like it was just out of puerile competitive vindictiveness that the city put up roadblocks like that

you hear about it all the time but seeing it on a huge case like that is just ugh

Id not discount the power of the framing here too tho. Our two boys were settling scores left, right and centre here

tru

Isn't there a serial killer at large in Long Island right now?

― emilys., Friday, 7 June 2013 23:22 (ten years ago) link

Not anymore

https://nypost.com/2023/07/14/gilgo-beach-lisk-serial-killings-suspect-in-police-custody-report/

A suspected serial killer has been arrested over the notorious Gilgo Beach murders in Long Island, The Post can confirm.

Rex Heuermann, 59, a married architect at a New York City firm, was arrested after being matched to DNA, sources told The Post Friday as cops swarmed his home on 1st Avenue in Massapequa Park.

Gilgo Beach is very close to wear I grew up. I remember when they found the first remains. I hope the girls’ families have some peace now.

wow.

Ugh where not wear

Gonna be interested to read about how they tracked him down though seems like the family DNA database thing has started to be the break in the case on many of these (iirc both the golden state killer and that guy they caught for the Idaho college student murders were nabbed that way)

oh wow yeah those families have really been through it, hope this gives them some relief

if anyone is curious, Robert Kolker’s “Lost Girls” book covers these murders - highly recommend if you haven’t read it

Glad a suspect was caught, but I really need to know why an architect who works in Manhattan is living in such a shithole of a house.

I guess if I was a serial killer I probably wouldn't ever want to do renovations if it might involve having workers on the property snooping around.

Xpost

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdUOG8pL_m0

I guess if I was a serial killer I probably wouldn't ever want to do renovations if it might involve having workers on the property snooping around.

True, but he had a wife and possibly one or two kids living there as well, according to what I've read. I wonder what they thought of living in that shack while dad commuted to his Fifth Avenue office every day.

I had always felt married serial killers were more a thing of the 70s and earlier. Feel like in this era of electronic communication and surveillance, keeping secrets from anybody is much more difficult.

The last couple major serial killers they caught were the usual "devoted family man", iirc the golden state killer and btk fit that profile.

it’s not really a matter of technology improving - hiding in plain sight (including deceiving a spouse) is a power move for them bc they believe they’re smarter than anyone else and/or technology

they will continue to believe it & act accordingly until humans no longer walk the earth

My best friend in hs lived in the town this guy is from. Range of houses in terms of style and condition but I was also a little surprised when I saw it.

xpost sorry i went right into Keith Morris mode lol

*son

One article I implied the break was related to communications/surveillance technology that the Feds brought to bear only recently. For years prior to that, local (Suffolk County) police had refused to bring in the Feds or utilize other technology. Ten years ago someone had taunted the sister of one of the victims with one or more phone calls in which they gloated about the killing and the calls were only traced to somewhere in Manhattan.

My guess is the reference to DNA was that a recent sample had confirmed the suspect already under surveillance was connected to the crimes, not that they found the suspect with DNA.

article I read

I read Kolker's Lost Girls three or four years ago--I don't remember, but I guess it ended then with the murders unresolved.

Yeah I saw something earlier about communications and cell phones being one of the final pieces of evidence.

_I guess if I was a serial killer I probably wouldn't ever want to do renovations if it might involve having workers on the property snooping around._

True, but he had a wife and possibly one or two kids living there as well, according to what I've read. I wonder what they thought of living in that shack while dad commuted to his Fifth Avenue office every day.

that's how they found him

It’s very hard for me to understand how a guy like this can have an outwardly stable job and seemingly normal family life.

Whereas nice, normal people often struggle with this stuff.

https://imgur.com/a/38me63N

oh dammit - I don't remember how to post pics

Anyway, breaking news from the news12 Long Island instagram account (shut up) - Pizza was used to match DNA to Gilgo Beach suspect which is just the most perfectly Long Island thing.

It's becoming apparent that this might have been solved years ago had the previous Suffolk County DA not been so corrupt and incompetent.

Yeah the entire thing was crazy corrupt. I have to reread about it to remember the details but that much has been clear for a while.

I say that because the task force found this guy was only formed in February 2022 after the previous DA refused for years until he got convicted of corruption.

xp

I mean:

The task force formed to restart the investigation into the Gilgo Beach serial killings was created in February 2022 — more than 10 years after human remains were first found on a stretch of Long Island.

Six weeks later, in March 2022, Rex Heuermann was first named as the potential suspect in the killings, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said at a news conference Friday.

I just read about how they used his Amex statements to link him to a tinder account which was under a fake name and email which was linked to burner phones. He had repeatedly been searching for info on the case and suspects and also for info on the victims families.

So fucking creepy. Oh and they’ve already established that his wife was either out of state or abroad when 3 out of the 4 murders happened. They could have figured this out years ago. Jesus.

The way these guys will revel in the pain of the families is just some of the sickest shit, not that any aspect of their crimes isn't already on that level.

That's the part that just made my skin crawl. Not only do you have the pain of losing a family member, but you get stalked afterwards by the creepazoid who did.

it.

America

Gilgo Beach serial killings suspect Rex Heuermann has permits for 92 guns, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said at a news conference Friday.

“He has a very large safe in which guns are kept,” he said.

When asked if investigators have found all 92 guns, Tierney said, “We are continuing to execute search warrants, so I’m sure we will have that answer shortly.”

just normal gun things

some amazing detective work by the task force on the cell phone side, everything is outlined here;

https://www.scribd.com/document/659084376/Gilgo-Beach-murder-court-documents#

Having read that, this guy's fucking cooked.

also the more I've read about this, they had most of these pieces around to solve this case years ago and simply didn't bother

guy seems to have not understood the point of a burner phone is that you use it once, or for one task, and then get rid of it.