S&D: Serial Killers

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In terms of the media, the serial killer has been replaced by the mass shooter (or mass vehicular killer).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".