Apart from the pusher, do you think there's any active serial killers at large in this country?
Does modern policing and surveillance mean that it's highly unlikely anyone would be able to murder lots of people over a prolonged period of time, unless they go completely under the radar like Shipman?
>that it's highly unlikely anyone would be able to murder lots of people over a prolonged period of time
Most serial killers are eventually caught because they more or less always follow the same rituals and methods. So that police will at some point be on to you and able to predict your moves. Or they will have gathered enough connecting evidence from the different cases that they'll be able to track you down. The behavioural patterns you create will end up being your undoing because they become a piece of the puzzle with every new murder.
Also though, even if you varied your MO everytime you killed somebody, to the point that nobody would suspect that the cases are connected, a murder is a quite difficult thing to keep a secret. Either there will be direct eyewitnesses, or somebody around you will become suspicious for whatever reason and report you. Maybe they will spot belongings of a victim in your shed that they recognise from a news bulletin. Or they'll realise that you were in the same place the day that person was killed and saw you come home with a peculiar look on your face. So you're flirting with disaster every time, and in the end it's just a game of probabilities. You very likely won't get away with it time after time, despite your best efforts to cover your tracks.
If I were so inclined, I'd work my way up the corporate ladder at a large pharmaceutical or telecommunications company. Then I can kill people remotely with deadly vaccines or 5G DEATH RAYS.
The chances are fairly high that someone is killing vulnerable people. Sex workers, homeless people, migrant workers, teenagers in the care system - the sad reality is that lots of people just disappear and nobody looks for them particularly hard.
>>442040 Serial killers are more prevalent in bigger countries. There is at least two nomadic serial killers that trek the Appalachian mountains living wild coming into towns to seek charity and victims. The only reason we know they exist at all is they caught a third who corroborated witness accounts from attacks the length and breadth of the region.
I don't think we have enough wild areas for that. We're never more than 75 miles from a chip shop.
>>442050 >Serial killers are more prevalent in bigger countries
It's more about population density. I'm sure we've had a few murders in the central Wales, Scottish Highlands, Yorkshire Dales etc. where it's just logged as 'hikers body never found' or words to that effect. Public service coverage is stretched thin with an enormous search area and if it involves county lines then it's a whole world of working out who wears the trousers and who has to spend resources.
The problem we have is that everything that goes on (at least) a motorway is tracked so you can only really do it once unless you commit to moving to the middle of nowhere or have a bulletproof excuse. Plus you need to find victims and stalk them for an opportunity which is probably very difficult unless their doing campfires. Maybe if you were known as a drone enthusiast...
Shipman provided a nice blueprint if you like killing people. You need to identify a group of people where death is not surprising and commit it in a way that fits the narrative of how they die. That precludes violent death, for the most part, unless you're into throwing free-climbers off a cliff or very subtly sabotaging base jumpers gear.
A rent boymale prostitute overdosing on heroin? A likely teenager in care drowning while on ketamin? That forgetful OAP taking double the dose?
I imagine there are several serial killers who consider what they do an act of mercy, and a small handful of people who pick on vulnerable people who do the same.
Oddly, being trafficked is a safety net because you are an investment that needs to pay off. So if you're at the shit end of society, being female as a fuck hole is propbably safer than being an arse one.
>You need to identify a group of people where death is not surprising and commit it in a way that fits the narrative of how they die.
There was a nurselad in Germany who worked in two hospitals and was able to kill at least 85 people with lethal doses of various different medicinal drugs before somebody caught on to him.
Like you say, if a patient dies in hospital who was maybe already in frail or critical condition, then you don't suspect that somebody has been going around there deliberately drugging patients to death. If somebody dies after a risky surgery or is in the last stages of terminal cancer, the cause of death will be put down simply as a complication from that surgery, or as terminal cancer.
The true number of Germanlad's victims could be as high as 300 according to the article, but it's impossible to ever know for sure.
The police have a Missing Persons Unit, but they only have records of people who have been reported as missing and of unidentified corpses. There's no database of people who have gone "off the radar" so to speak, because nobody has the resources or the inclination to keep tabs on them. We don't even know exactly how many people are in the country, because migrants coming from the EU didn't have to register that fact anywhere, nor did people leaving the country.
About 5,000 people are known to be missing long-term at any given time, but the actual number of missing people is almost certainly vastly greater. If you keep missing appointments at the JobCentre, nobody checks to see why, they just stop your benefits. Homeless people drift in and out of contact with services often enough that it's considered unremarkable. If you don't have friends and family looking out for you, it's incredibly easy to just vanish.
There's no safety net any more, if there ever was one.
>>442073 None of that sounds very interesting at all. You're just being shit at your job on purpose and having old/vulnerable people fall asleep forever over multiple years.
Makes you wonder what serial killers see in it all frankly; "ooooh I have the power of life and death over people who can't remember to use the toilet. I bet it was my double dose that done it and not that particularly stressful episode of Antiques Roadshow".
Open your curtains and trim the hedges or you'll get a visit from the police.
>migrants coming from the EU didn't have to register that fact anywhere
They actually did after something like 3 months complete with some proof they were contributing to society. You also have to factor that they would need to use plane tickets and use ID at entry points because we were never in Schengen.
>>442075 I imagine it's either a genuine conviction that it's best for the victim, or a kind of capricious boredom or catlike mischievousness. Because it's so easy, and I don't think anyone will ever find out.
The article says he mainly did it to then seemingly come to the patient's rescue and show off his reanimation skills to his coworkers. But if 85 people died despite what you had everybody believe were your best reanimation efforts, then it sort of falls on its arse. You will appear more shit at reanimation than a trained hospital nurse can reasonably be expected to be.
>>442075 That's a very bizarre way to say someone using an app flags a concern and their location is logged through GPS. You and they are making it sound like they are using satellite imaging and they're not.
I've often wondered about this. Not because I want to kill anyone, if I ever did that it'd be because I'd given up on life and would be eventually be hoping for suicide-by cop; but rather just as a little mental puzzle.
To what extent do you need to cover your tracks to throw off the scent? Just how easy is it for the pigs to use technology and such to place you at the scene of a crime? How many steps do you have to separate yourself from the events to make it something they couldn't trace back?
Part of me reckons it's not so much about covering up your tracks so there's no evidence, but more about throwing them off with false leads and lead them to widen, rather than narrow, their pool of options/suspects/whatever. My tinfoil hat side tells me I'd need to leave my phone at home so the GPS tracking doesn't give me away, but thinking more rationally, how would they even know to track my phone if I wasn't a suspect in the first place? It's not like they can just go on a big clever computer, rewind the GPS tracker to that night, and watch little dots on a map move around. That's the sort of thing they'd have on CSI: Miami where they can go "Computer! Enhance!" but doesn't work that way in real life.
So, murder weapon. Let's say you go out and buy a crowbar from B&Q, if they find the weapon they could conceivably trace that back somehow and get you buying it on the CCTV. But if you went out to do your murder and just picked up a big rock from the side of the road on your way, where would they go with it? Or even just use something you've had lying around in your cupboard for ages and don't even remember where you got it, just dump it at the scene and assuming it's clear of prints etc, that's pretty much an investigatory dead end.
Witnesses are probably the hard part in this country. I can't think of a realistic way you would manage, in this country, not to be seen by someone. This is where I think you'd have to go about throwing them off the scent rather than trying to hide any trace- Steal a car and use that to go to/from the scene. Steal it from an area nowhere near your home, dump it back somewhere near there but not far off. Then they have to investigate a car theft as well as a killing to begin to trace you, which is itself a decoy.
The last bit I can think of now is that you're probably better off doing something like this in broad daylight at rush hour, when there's tons of people around- You're less likely to stick in people's memories if you're one of hundreds of people they saw driving down Brookstone Close that day, rather than the single one they noticed turning up at 2am. Harder to narrow you down.
The really difficult bit would be to stop yourself leaving hair or bits of skin etc on the scene as DNA evidence, but even then as I understand it, they have to already have you in the database, and again it's probably not just as simple as googling your DNA to compare it to every other piece of DNA they have on file- They'd probably need to narrow it down first and do a more direct comparison.
But, I'm entirely talking out of my arse, this is just the kind of shit I find myself thinking about on a long boring shift. If I'm completely wrong about any of this I'd love to hear why, for... Reasons.
>>442094 rewind the GPS tracker to that night
Are you _sure_ that Google/Apple aren't storing this stuff? I'd imagine they are if you're using maps or whatever, and I wouldn't stake my freedom on not being tracked by this, or by cell tower records.
Ebay phone / Tesco SIM for each adventure.
Better just Shipman it in plain sight. Or not do fucking serial killing.
>>442094 The canal pusher probably has the right idea. Go for a coastal walk and knock someone off a cliff. Even inland there's enough places in the countryside that aren't overly touristy, particularly if the weather's bad, where you could make it look like someone accidentally fell from a great height.
>>442096 I bet your registration number would show up on some statistical analysis as being present at multiple scenes of accidents. Maybe not right away, maybe not for a few decades, but that information is being stored and will be analysed by someone, sooner or later.
>>442097 There are plenty of places in the countryside you could get to via a train or bus.
Also, if you rented a holiday cottage for a week in, say, Polperro I reckon you could go anywhere on the coast between there and the River Fowey without once being picked up by ANPR because it's all narrow country roads in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Don't you think you'd start looking really shifty after a couple, and just confess? Maybe I'm just not cut out for a life'o'stabbing.
Wasn't long distance truckers killing prostitutes a thing? Although, he / they got caught, so clearly not foolproof.
Depends if you were of a mind to want to kill random strangers in the first place. If you're genuinely enthusiastic about doing it then it probably won't bother you so much.
>>442094 >The really difficult bit would be to stop yourself leaving hair or bits of skin etc on the scene as DNA evidence, but even then as I understand it, they have to already have you in the database, and again it's probably not just as simple as googling your DNA to compare it to every other piece of DNA they have on file- They'd probably need to narrow it down first and do a more direct comparison.
You'll need a plan here in short: Ideally you want to destroy the body but that's complicated and liable to get you caught red-handed. Fortunately it's an odds/time game where the environment is not conductive towards good DNA matching. Anyone who has ever had an animal die in the space between walls/floors will know that corpse flies can get anywhere for example which introduces contamination.
So do your killing in such a way that people won't find the corpse for weeks, maybe even bury the body in a deep hole, cover it with soil and then put a bird carcass further up so any police will assume that sniffer dogs picked up a false positive and they might not return for months. Like otherlads points out this is of course still relying on your methods being unmistakably murder (anyone who has ever dealt with the police will know they can be a bit thick) rather than just them going for a swim alone.
>>442098 >There are plenty of places in the countryside you could get to via a train or bus.
Even assuming that you use cash, public transportation is covered with CCTV positioned to catch your face. If you're driving then that's not likely to happen unless you visit a petrol station.
>>442103 >Even assuming that you use cash, public transportation is covered with CCTV positioned to catch your face.
That's not insurmountable, you have to wear a mask on public transport anyway. Some sunglasses on top of that and you'll be fine.
I reckon if you alternated disguises (including putting stones in different parts of your shoes) and were careful to buy your tickets in cash from randomised locations, you could get away with it.
Serial killers can't really exist anymore due to the improvements in policing, improvements in forensic science, and the ubiquity of smartphones and GPS. A bunch of the cold cases that were closed recently (GSK, Claremont) were done so because a nephew or cousin of the perp submitted DNA to 23andMe or other such genomic services i think.
I'm trying to find an old video (from like 2013 ish I think) about the Gilgo Beach murders/Long Island Serial Killer.
I remember there was this mental piece on 60 Minutes or something about Shannan Gilbert's murder where they had interviews with the asian lad that drove her around, the client that invited her to his party, and this Lynchian Doctor who was selling her drugs, but it seems to have been scrubbed from the net. I was also sure that the 911 call had been released, but I'm seeing things online now saying that lawyers are trying to get the call released.
The story was basically that a craigslist escort went to a bougie party for a job and freaked out (maybe due to drug use, maybe due to 'Eyes Wide Shut' type stuff) and got lost in some marshland. She made a lengthy 911 call and wasn't really taken seriously by the operator. Police started searching the region and found all these body parts in burlap sacks, before eventually finding her remains in a state of undress.
It seems like there might be a serial killer in Long Island, or maybe they accidentally found where gangsters dump bodies, or maybe the area this girl died just happens to be a good place for people to dispose of human remains.
The Henry Lee Lucas documentary on Netflix a couple years back was pretty interesting. Like he was a despicable criminal, but police seemingly dumped a bunch of cases on him to get them of their books and he claimed to be responsible, even though it was impossible for him to have been in the area for some of them, just because he liked the attention and special treatment.
There's maybe 5 or 6 potentially valid interpretations for what the situation here is, like in Twin Peaks.
Do you reckon murder tourism is a thing? I don't mean something like Hostel, I mean going to somewhere like Cambodia and killing a few street urchins that nobody would ever miss.
I can't see it in Cambodia tbh. All the bad shit that happened there since Khmer Rouge means that the people there now really look after each other. Apparently you used to be able to shoot cows with an RPG, but nowadays it's stricly watermelons.
I think that Moldova is basically a playground for Russian Mafia sadists, so the Hostel thing could be a reality there.
I've seen conspiracy theories that suggest that's what that shooting in Las Vegas a couple years ago was (Arab royalty shooting rednecks in America).
One might argue that some squaddies do in the name of their country isn't that far from Murder Tourism, but because it's in the interests of shadowy Global Finance it generally goes unquestioned. The recent controversy about the Ozzie troops doing war crimes and Abu Ghraib and the like being the few instances we become aware of this being a thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYTxuW2vmzk
>>442109 That's still a thing. My friend went travelling around Southeast Asia in 2017 and he was asked at a shooting range whether he wanted to fire machine guns at cows.
Apparently people are paying to rape Uighurs in China, so it's not a huge leap to suspect that there might be some Murder Tourism going on in these Uighur camps.
Also the Genocide in Myanmar coupled with its poverty mean that such stuff is likely to occur there currently also.
Southeast Asia still seems to be a place where anything goes in some areas. If Gary Glitter was able to have orgies with twelve year old girls on a regular basis down there, imagine what else is possible if the price is right. Even if that was some years ago now. Say you pay somebody a thousand quid to get you somebody to rape, possibly torture and kill, then that is an outrageous sum for a poor person down there, while it's nothing for the kind of human scum who goes there to do that kind of thing.
Not to be That Contrarian Lad, but looking at the statistics more as I got older has really diminished my interest in the subject. War/crime related to the economy and other forms institutionally-embedded violence kills far more people than the work of individual murderers.
Even psychologically it seems like a bit of a dead-end in terms of research, as by now I think the patterns of the garden variety American spree shooter or serial killer are fairly well understood.
I think the interest you describe is more based on the human drama of it, which in my opinion is absolutely the wrong way to look at people who are largely repeating traumas.
>Even psychologically it seems like a bit of a dead-end in terms of research, as by now I think the patterns of the garden variety American spree shooter or serial killer are fairly well understood.
>I think the interest you describe is more based on the human drama of it
It's the media, innit. If it bleeds, it leads, every time. Any story of a spree shooter or some sexually abnormal serial rapist or murderer is tabloid gold and gets milked for every last drop.
I mean yeah, but you evidently had enough interest in the subject to look into it in such a level of detail. That it turned out to be a bit disappointing and mundane under the surface just is what it is, really, you know?
My fascination has always been with war, because it's so impersonal and formalised, almost. Industrialised slaughter where humans just throw themselves in the grinder. It's chilling.
