S&D: Serial Killers

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?