Gee, ya think?!
What does it mean to “create fantasies in real life”? Where else would fantasies be created? Is this an attempt to defend freaks who fantasize about committing random murders? Color me unimpressed. He’d be free but it’s not like I’d like to have him over for dinner.
But yeah, if it makes you happy, his second problem is acting on his fantasies. Are you going to argue that it is the acting on it that makes him crazy? If you are, that’s absurd.
Zebra, I know no more than what belladonna said earlier in the thread.
Pedro, the problem is acting on his fantasies. Hell, today alone I fantasized about:
(a) the subway preacher being run over by the train
(b) the chronically unwashed coworker drowning in a vat of Liquid Dial bodywash
© the annoying cell phone user’s antenna being struck by lightning
I’m not in any danger of ever acting on these (admittedly non-sexual) fantasies. I’ve never had an urge to actually carry them out. I believe that was the distinction Annie was trying to make.
Here is a thread I’d started about the BTK investigation a while back, I posted the update about it yesterday. I’m very glad this particular boogey man has been caught, and I am glad he will be locked up out of society so he can’t have any more “projects”. He’s a powermad lunatic IMO.
Perfectly sane people do fantsize about committing murder (see post above) Indeed, if people could read minds, we’d all be in the booby hatch or jail.
Fortunately, most of us don’t attempt to create fantasies in real life. Most of us keep them as fantasies.
My point is the distinction between not comitting acts because you know they are wrong, and commiting acts that you know are wrong because you don’t give a damn that they are illegal and morrally wrong. BTK is obviously the latter type of person.
I am aware of the distinction and I believe I addressed that issue. If you have “projects” that consist of potential murder victims and a hit kit, none of which are crimes by the way, then you have a serious problem and should seek help.
That was for D_Odds, my apologies
It’s because he wasn’t a “common” killer, he was a boogeyman when he was able to hunt. I know people who until recently actually feared going to Wichita for anything, and wouldn’t stay there overnight because they feared becoming one of his victims that much, even years after he went underground. What has made me a bit sad is, that instead of doing a jig and singing “Ding dong, the witch is dead!”* my relief at knowing that “the” boogeyman of Wichita Kansas has been caught is tempered by knowing there are more like him out there, who haven’t been caught. :eek:
*[SUB]Yep, that’s a deliberate usage, meant for humor. [/SUB]
I do keep Liquid Dial at home. Not a vat’s worth, but mixed with water, it should suffice…
What turns people on sexually can seem pretty strange. Yes you can find internet sites for people who are into snuff and necro sex. I think most of those people wouldn’t harm a fly. Quite of few murder scenes in horror movies, if you just listen to the soundtrack, change the music from CHI CHI CHI to boom-chicka-bow-wow you wouldn’t know the difference.
But some people have such a bug up their ass* about sexuality that anything that isn’t missionary sex is perverse and it can not be discussed or explored ever and you must be evil to even think those thoughts.
*I’m not talking about anyone in this thread and yes you can find internet sites about sticking bugs up your ass for sexual pleasure.
Yeah, and, see, that’s the problem with the conventional wisdom about serial killers: By it’s nature, it can only be based upon the ones that are caught, and not the ones who get away with it undetected.
Serial killer profiles these days are largely formed from interviews with a handful of killers caught many years ago before we knew much about them and before things like DNA testing came into play. The only ones they had to use to try to come to conclusions with were the mad dogs who were so sloppy, unlucky and just plain unhinged that they were caught. And then unfortunately these “experts” didn’t take into account that they had a lousy sample set and didn’t go looking into the crimes of killers in other countries.
BTK quit killing. The Green River Killer quit killing. Andrei Chikatilo quit for long periods of time and may have eventually stopped.
Serial killers come in all sorts of varieties. Some have no remorse at all, some do. Some are psychopaths, others are delusional. Some are dumber than rocks, some are quite smart.
In many ways I think the profiles being used are doing more harm than good, because they are only looking for certain kinds of people from the most studied cases and ignoring the rest.
They were all caught.
Who hasn’t been caught besides Jack the Ripper?
Those were all caught but their methods are not included in the FBI’s profiling techniques, and violate the common beliefs those “experts” have about serial killers. (And I should point out that many profilers are no rethinking the old supposed beliefs about killers as a result of these new examples.)
Who hasn’t been caught? The list goes on and on (roughly chronological order)…
The Austin Axe Murderer
The Victorian London Torso Murder
The New Orleans Axman
The Black Dahlia Murder (who some think was a serial killer with other victims)
The Zodiac Killer
The Madison, Wisconsin serial killer who disappeared years back (may have been someone traveling, so victims could be spread out everywhere)
Most likely the Atlanta Child Murderer
The current serial killer(s) in northern Mexico – perhaps hundreds of victims
A new serial killer the police finally just admitted exists in the Edmonton, Canada area and has for like two decades been killing people
The I-45 serial killers
Those are just off the top of my head. Give me a few hours and access to books and I could easily list hundreds.
Plus all the ones who are so good that nobody ever linked the deaths together as serial killings…
I don’t wish to be argumentative, but does Beth Short count? Was anyone else killed like that?
I suspect that law enforcement takes the non-typical cases into account. If it’s statistically more likely that a serial killer is white, male, abused as a child etc, they are more likely to catch him using those criteria.
Thanks for pointing out how many unsolved serial cases there are. I had no idea.
Beth Short may or may not count. That’s the thing, we don’t know. There are at least two books out now trying to link her case to other unsolved murders of women, at least one of which I think had the torso cut in half like that. There was some torso murderer Eliot Ness investigated out more toward the East Coast, I don’t recall if that was series or not, but I think some tried to link that to the Black Dahlia case also. Butcher of Kingsbury Run maybe? But I thought there was a large number of years separating the cases… though with BTK (and Ridgway, Chikatilo and others) we know that they can space them out over a long, long time.
And, believe me, that was just a short list. There are plenty of other unsolved strings of murders, as well as some that are officially solved but unofficially possibly not. For instance, many people will argue that the Boston Strangler wasn’t really caught (I hear people saying DNA showed the guy they got didn’t do it, but I am not really up on the latest news there).
And, honestly, I don’t even try to keep track of them, so other people could come up with much longer lists. I mostly study just Jack the Ripper myself, but you can’t help but pick up info about other killings from talking to others interested in that case.
Surely you realize that just as some criminals who commit other crimes like mugging, armed robbery, rapes, or carjacking are caught, there are a certain amount who aren’t caught. Why would it be any different with serial killers. Those who work at tracking the criminals down admit themselves that there are killers out there who aren’t caught yet, and may never be caught.
Yes. The Cleveland murders were a series; though officially unsolved, there is a strong sense of who did it.
I’ll assume you realize (with the “Usually”) there are women who are just as bad, but just in case you don’t, I present: Homolka…
…who’s about to be released, BTW. I bring her up, because I think she’s more disturbing than BTK: More functional’almost Goebbels-esque in her ability to play people; a calculating evil.
Yes, that’s why I asked. 
Thank you.
I just loved how Rader is whining in the press about how his wife is divorcing him. Like it’s soooo unfair, and the cops should feel soooo bad about wrecking his life like this, 'cause he doesn’t deserve it, you know. It’s, like, way too big a punishment for those little crimes he committed.
Maybe I’m reading a tone into the statements I read that isn’t there, but it struck me as funny. Not “ha ha” funny, but “you piece of shit, I hope this is just the beginning of your suffering” kind of funny.