https://abcnews.go.com/US/stockton-police-search-apparent-serial-killer-tied-murders/story?id=90849014
Six unprovoked murders of men ages 21 to 54 over the last few months appear to be the work of one person, according to police in Stockton, California.
Hope we get a TV show or a movie of the week.
Serial Killers still exist? I thought they were outdated since the 80s.
shareVery retro.
shareVery Meta
shareSo true. Everybody is really nice nowadays…hang on, I’m going to pull over to pick up this hitchhiker.
shareI bet there are as many serial killers out there now as they've ever been. What changed around 1980 is that serial killers stopped famewhoring, no more sending letters to the police or media as the age of modern forensics began to dawn!
Seriously, that's why the Zodiac is still famous, not for his number of victims, but his self-publicizing.
The thing is these days there is too many chances to get caught with increase in surveillance (cameras, cellphones, etc) and improvement in forensic technology. Too risky to be a serial killer. Gun violence or mass shootings is the "in" thing these days and they can claim more victims in a short time frame than any serial killers.
shareOkay, if I had to become a serial killer who didn't get caught, I'd prey on the underclass, the homeless, the crack hos, the drifters, people who live away from surveillance cameras and reliable witnesses, people whose deaths are barely investigated. And I'd do it without signature methods or markers, in varied jurisdictions, so no single law enforcement body would realize they had an ongoing problem.
And look, I became a vegetarian because of an argument like this, I ate veggie for a month because of an internet argument, and found I couldn't go back to eating dead animals. But there's, you know, a limit what I'll do to prove a point.
Speaking of serial killers, I came across something interesting regarding BTK. He sent in a wordsearch puzzle which actually had some really strong clues about his identity. It contained '6220', 'address' 'wichita', 'serviceman', 'officer', 'pet' and 'lostpet'. Raider was an animal control officer and lived at 6220 Independence St. Park City, Kansas, a suburb of Wichita.
He was caught, by other means, in 2005. By then, databases were widely available, some person running out various possibilities among the clues might not unlikely have figured this out by getting all the addresses with house numbers 6220 in the greater Wichita area and cross-referencing with the address of every animal control officer in the area who was a veteran. That would have yielded a VERY small list of strong suspects.
http://www.zodiackillerciphers.com/?p=454
Very cool
shareWichita born and raised here. Dennis Rader is a fame whore. Many people suspect he wanted to get caught. Detective Landwehr actually tricked the bastard into sending him crucial evidence to whom they had been searching for.
shareFor such an awful monster that was an amazingly stupid mistake for Rader to have made…He was generally very organized but computers and files were still pretty new to lots of people.
Rader: ‘If I send you a message can you trace it?’
Detectives: : ’No, of course not buddy. Tell us all about it.’
Rader: ‘Cool…Incoming data.’
Was he a putz or did he want to get stopped? Who knows, he’s where he belongs now.
The other thing as that Raider had the 6220 street number on the wordsearch, and killed a women a few doors down on the same block - though he didn't take credit for it.
A cross-reference and sort of all street numbers of all home invasion killings would have picked up that 'coincidence'.
It could very well be that Rader was finally ready to come in out of the cold, and bask in his gory glory. He is obviously a very, very, very strange fellow. Arguing against that was his social status, the esteem of his family/friends. On a subconscious level, though, it does seem pretty likely that he did have a desire to be caught. Like I said, a more systematic data-analytics approach on the wordsearch puzzle contained well enough clues to his identity to close the case. All this cat-and-mouse, though, only took place I think in 2004-2005, when he was caught from the word document.
He sent the Police taunting messages from a computer in the Church he helped to volunteer at. He was a weirdo that enjoyed committing horrible murders yet seemed to want to get caught.
Rader was an annoying guy that volunteered for the Home Owners Association gig. He was That annoying weirdo.
Oddly enough he was regarded as as a’ stickler to the rules’ and a bit annoying but otherwise well regarded.
In 175 years we should all be concerned about his release!