S&D: Serial Killers

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.