S&D: Serial Killers

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.