Always thought Aileen Wuornos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Wuornos) was an interesting one as women serial killers are quite uncommon and also never thought Charlize Theron was capable of killing all those people.

As far as people getting away with crimes. Intelligence sure helps but there are lots of other factors in play.

I think anonymity is a huge factor.
Dna, fingerprint and other forensic technologies have made huge leaps and bounds over the last few decades but this mostly comes into play once you have suspects to compare these things to. If your DNA/fingerprints are on record I would assume your likelihood of getting away with any serious crime is massively low. If you aren't in the system, they could have cups of semen and that won't do anything other then to confirm your guilt once caught.

Digital footprints can play a factor with things such as the ample cameras everywhere but i think stuff like cell phone tracking also requires suspects, i don't think they could just take 6 random crime scenes and be like "Computer Enhance" and be able to run some search for all cellphones that were in those areas at that time, on the other side if you are a suspect and they look at your phone's history one could probably track you to all the crime scene areas.

Look up the "Toy Box Killer" David Parker Ray. You can also hear the recordings he'd play for his victims before torturing and killing them but I'm not gonna link them as they're extremely disturbing.

I've had a morbid fascination with serial killers for years and am convinced there aren't any more twisted than Ray.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Parker_Ray

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_Murphy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shankill_Butchers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Ellis

This piece of crap was killing prostitutes the same time Dahmer was eating gay men. I don't know what method you are using to determine intelligence, but I know his intelligence level was not high, it was normal at best. I knew people connected with the case. He is dead, and that's a good thing.

The larger the investigation, the higher the intelligence is required to avoid capture. Doesn't sound like a lot of resources were deployed. 7 victims over 21 years does make it tougher. Detectives retire which makes continuity challenging.

I read the whole transcript. Pretty ****ed up.

I can't imagine coming to, finding myself chained up, and then listening to that as an outline of what my next couple months will look like.

Just watch one of the Saw movies.

Young African-American women were murdered. The Milwaukee police didn't completely give up. They got the bastard. I don't care what they did for a living or how they lived their lives, each one of these women were some man's daughter. I have two daughters. They are my sunshine. One is a 31 year old former all American track athlete, hence my 2+2 name. Yeah, yeah. I'm old.

From FOX6 in Milwaukee, POSTED 3:51 PM, DECEMBER 2, 2013, BY MYRA SANCHICK, UPDATED AT 08:14PM, DECEMBER 2, 2013

Steven Spingola was a Milwaukee homicide detective who worked on two of the murders associated with Ellis.

"They were choked and they apparently went with him willingly up until the point the homicides occurred," said Spingola.

Ellis had been arrested twelve times for various offenses between 1981 and 1998. However, he wasn't pinned as being a serial killer until 2009. One reason Ellis got away with it at first...

"The victims were prostitutes. They had drugs in their system. They had multiple sources of DNA," said Spingola.

Ellis also eluded police because his DNA was missing from the state's data banks. It turns out Ellis got another inmate to submit DNA under Ellis' name.

Eventually Milwaukee police re-examined evidence that led them to Ellis. But that wasn't before two others, Chaunte Ott and William Avery, were convicted for two of the murders and later freed. Both are suing for wrongful convictions. (end)

One good thing, besides the son of a ***** dying, new procedures have been implemented at the Department of Criminal Investigation in Madison, WI to prevent these types of errors.

I am not a Law Enforcement groupie. I have just been around a long time.

Ed Gein - technically not a serial killer, but in interesting character nonetheless.

Guy obviously a total scumbag. All serial killers (or any killer) are scumbags. We anoint any "interesting" label to some of them based on charm/looks or the quantity/quality of the victims.

What makes Gein not a serial killer?

I wondered too, but it looks like he was only ever accused of 2 murders, and someone above said the official definition was 3 or more.

despite previously knowing much of the overarching stuff, gacy wikipedia ****ed me up.

Where did he acquire so many skulls?

Graveyard.

FBI considers two murders over two periods to be serial killing. Kind of like a gang can have two people. It seems that three separate murders though is the general consensus.

This is how you get attention (Son of Sam):

In an almost incomprehensible letter to NYPD Captain Joseph Borrelli, Berkowitz wrote: ‘I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game — tasty meat.

‘The wemon of Queens are z prettyist of all [stet]. I must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt — my life. Blood for papa.’

He was a grave robber/body snatcher. I think he only confessed to killing two but if I had to guess, I'd say he probably had many more.

This is auto-fame when you have a mayor telling couples to go to different places and women are changing their style and color. He (Berkowitz) also had story after that his neighbor's dog was directing him.

**Tensions were so high that Mayor Abraham D. Beame directed the police to shoo couples away from places where couples would go to be alone. Suddenly, the fear was that being in such places could make them targets.

Suddenly, women with long brown hair were dyeing it blond or cutting it short, thinking they would be less vulnerable.**


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

There's certainly no national data base. Certain communities or counties certainly have something at this point, you'd like to hope even a couple statewide at this point, but there is no national database.

And I'm not sure what procedures you need to improve when you have something like police ignoring an extremely rare signature component of the case. Official policy - don't do that? My comment about the police not linking the Tate and LaBianca killings for months was a comment on the human element, which is present regardless of how much technology increases. You don't necessarily link two homicides via gunshot that happen across town from each other, but two killings of multiple people with something written on the walls in the victims blood? Again, that is an incredibly rare occurance. So rare that given the proximity in time and space, the cases absolutely should have been linked immediately.

Error is human, and cannot be completely eliminated.

As for Gein, I can see the arguments against calling him a serial killer, given that he "only" killed two women. However, I think given why he was killing (fresh bodies), he well could have had more victims going forward had he not been caught right after the second. It's a fine distinction - he had the psychology to kill more, he just never got the chance (thankfully). Plus a lot of people assume that he must have had more victims given the wide variety of items he has made from people, although AFAIK there was never any evidence to support that assumption. Morbidly fascinating case, and one of the inspirations for Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs - the author took elements from three actual killers when developing Buffalo Bill.

Re: the database thing, there are 16 federal states in Germany and they all use different software apparently.
Also there's no good work-around available between some of them, so police working on homicides actually take it to the road and then enter their data manually again where needed. Insanity

This is a somewhat unique case for a serial killer

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ng-90-patients

Recent South African serial killer case

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-41072524

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Miyazaki

"Tsutomu Miyazaki, also known as The Otaku Murderer or The Little Girl Murderer, was a Japanese serial killer, cannibal, and necrophile who abducted and murdered four young girls in Saitama and Tokyo Prefectures from August 1988 to June 1989. His crimes included vampirism and preservation of body parts as trophies."

"During the trial, facts surrounding his parentage emerged, revealing that he was the result of his father's incestuous relationship with one of his sisters. Subsequently, Tsutomu's premature birth left him with deformed hands, which were permanently gnarled and fused directly to the wrists, which meant he needed to move his entire forearm in order to rotate the hand."

They hanged this maniac. I wasn't aware that Japan had the death penalty. For some reason, I imagined that due to their non-pacifism after WW2, the death penalty would be eliminated as well.

There is a doc on Högel, w interviews w him. It is ****ing awful

Ed Gein held a morbid fascination with my parents. I can remember them talking about him back in the day (1960's). My dad knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy... who had inside info. Plainfield WI is 100 miles or so from our home, so it was like the crimes happened in our backyard. When I was growing up, everyone I knew had heard of Ed Gein.

For some reason, my Mom would talk about the lamp shades Ed Gein made from human skin. I think it had to do with her WWII duty. She was charge of the plastic surgery nursing dept. in Paris.