S&D: Serial Killers

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.