Healthcare CEOs seem to be doing well.
Are there any serial killers still active in the US today? With all the tech like dna, fingerprints, flock camera's etc. Would it be almost impossible to be one?
Submitted 2 days ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
0ops@piefed.zip 1 day ago
Well most of them
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Yet another job taken by big holding companies and billionaires.
ruuster13@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
boaratio@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Ice agents.
58008@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Motiveless murder/disappearance - that is, where the victim has no enemies or any reason to have become a victim of murder (e.g. robbery) - are extremely hard to solve even today. Police are much better able to capture criminals today, but they’re still batting a pretty measly average overall, and especially so in cases of motiveless disappearances. The US has ~350 million people in it, and there are enormous swathes of land that are uninhabited or are only lightly inhabited. Massive marshes, endless forests, etc. Dumping bodies in there is so effective that sometimes even serial killers who have confessed and are helping the cops locate victims’ bodies can’t find them all.
The behaviour of killers outside of the crime itself is usually what fucks them. Bragging to people, taunting the cops, leaving calling cards/clues, or just becoming so confident and hubristic that they lower their standards and get caught for future murders through sheer sloppiness.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Also most serial killers don’t want to talk to the police. They just wanna be left alone to torture and murder prior nobody cares about like truck stop prostitutes. The bonus is that if you’re a long haul trucker that frequently crosses state lines, there’s a lot likelihood that the couple of police departments who even bothered to try solving those crimes will ever actually talk to each other enough to compare evidence.
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The town I grew up in, and the next town are connected by a road (shocking, unusual, I know). There was an 8 month period where the police departments and politicians all agreed that there should be a way to pass high urgency alerts back and forth, in case there’s someone fleeing along that road, or anything like that.
It was eventually decided that the viable ways were:
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a desk agent would fax over a document and call to notify/confirm about the event.
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one department would have to replace some substantial portion of their IT system so it could work with the other system.
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they could pay for a custom solution, maybe.
They settled on option 1, and it worked. Every time I hear politicians talk about sharing information across organizations, I think back to a working meeting with two vendors going down a list of protocols and standards, eventually deciding there was no common ground. It’s been made difficult, and no one in the industry appears to want to fix that.
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FilthyHands@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Philadelphia seems to have a new one every 10-15 years. Here is the most recent one to get caught. It is a developing story, We don’t even know how many victims yet. For more Philly serial killers, here is a wikipedia list.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Pennsylvania does that to people.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
Recently saw a short video about this, and data shows serial killers are all but disappearing. The absolute height of serial killers was around the 70s.
Agent641@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Millennials are killing the serial killer industry
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The reasoning is more about investigations getting better at catching murderers after their first kill, preventing them from ever becoming serial killers.
But that isn’t what’s happening. It’s a 50/50 coin toss whether someone gets caught for murder. statista.com/…/rate-of-homicides-that-go-unsolved…
What I’ve heard is that pollution (like lead and other chemicals) is what rotted children’s brains and made the murder rate skyrocket in the 70s, 80s, and 90s as they reached adulthood.
Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Specifically in the Seattle/Tacoma area of the US. Nearly every notable serial killer was born in the region within a few years of each other. This was during the massive increase in smelting for WWII.
BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
The percentage of homicides that remained unsolved was sitting barely above 50% last I checked. That number goes up and down a bit but has overall been getting higher over time (worse) since the 1960s.
Your chances of getting away with being a serial killer have never been better.
False@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’d guess that trend is more homicides being caught and recorded as such, even if they remain unsolved.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 days ago
Could well be, I'm sure there were lots of poisonings and whatnot that earlier forensic science misattributed to natural causes.
But it could also be that murderers are getting more savvy too. There have been so many CSI-style shows, police procedurals, and so forth that it doesn't take a great genius to know how to make it a lot harder for police to identify you. Like, if you made an untraceable "ghost gun" to shoot someone with, don't carry it around in your backpack for days after shooting the guy. Sheesh, basic stuff.
unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 1 day ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Wettlaufer
For every new bit of technology, there's someone who finds a way to do stuff that the technology would never catch because the inventors of the technology never thought of the idea in the first point. Case in point, Elizabeth Wettlaufer is one of Canada's most prolific serial killers. They in all likelihood wouldn't have caught her if she herself hadn't confessed at some point. She was a nurse in a nursing home who regularly killed her patients by overdosing them on insulin. Because of the nature of her patients, those deaths never aroused enough suspicion to be investigated by police.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Plenty of cops that would qualify
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Europe has solved a few long cold cases of serial rapists and murderers by using DNA database data from services like 23andme and Ancestry. They can find someone related to a killer. Legally this violates laws and cannot be used in court, but it gives the police the person to watch to prevent another event.
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 2 days ago
Serial killers have access to the same internet as the police.
velma@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
There’s estimated to be upwards of 50 serial killers currently active in the US today.
It is much harder to be a serial killer now, but police are still not great at their jobs and especially communicating across state lines. Hell, even communicating across county lines have proven to be too difficult for police to manage or care to do.
supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Additionally police are often the murderers themselves.
We all saw what happened to George Floyd.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Shit, the Golden State killer was a cop that operated with impunity for years. He was only caught because a relative used one of those DNA ancestry services.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
That’s not a victim silly, it’s just a domestic dispute. Now return the boy to the nice Mr Dahmer.
original_charles@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Who’s coming up with that estimation?
velma@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
The FBI along with others that study crime rates and methodology.
Who do you think would be studying this sort of thing?