So what the heck would you have them do? It’s a NEWS station! Do you want them to have the anchorman openly weep while reading the story?? Or maybe have him say something about fire and brimstone!?
Ok, here’s an edited version for you a la fox news:
Gary Ridgway, a liberal looney and all around sob, has admitted to killing dozens of (probably good god fearing) women in the Pacific Northwest, a confession that gives him more murder convictions on his record than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
We’ve also got some unconfirmed reports that they found a copy of the qur’an and a Dungeons and Dragons book under his mattress.
Thank you for tuning into Fox; the spin stops here. :rolleyes:
Well, how do you think their coverage should have been different? No mention of how many people he killed? More moralizing and editorializing about how evil serial killing is? And how was their coverage similar to covering a football game, other than the mention of a statistic? It’s not like they had slo-mo replays, color commentators, or computer generated splash-graphics proclaiming, “This Soulless Sociopath Brought to you by Budweiser: The King of Beers!”
Do you think the guy that got the Guinness record for being struck by lightening seven times was happy about it? Do you think anyone else aspires to duplicate his dumb luck?
How about someone like Red Dooin who holds the (post-1900) MLB record for most career errors (320). I doubt old Red hung his hat on that achievment.
Josef Stalin killed something like 20 million people during his reign. Should our history books omit the fact that his government killed more of its own people that any other in history? His actions were despicable, but one can’t deny that it’s “an unsurpassed measurement.”
I thought it was very sensibly-phrased, and is a fact worthy of noting for the average reader who might not know about the history of killings in that region.
For offensive/tacky, they could have said “a confession that earns him more…” or “a confession that scores him more…”
If you’re interested, or if you aren’t already disturbed enough by this monster and want to ruin your afternoon, you can read the prosecutor’s summary of evidence here (PDF format). It’s long, so you should probably right-click to download, and then open and read the file locally. And despite the length, it’s also riveting, in the sense of being so horrifying you can’t tear your eyes away, page after soul-flensing page.
Some of the details are frighteningly mundane; see page 25, for example, in which he describes how he would put his victims at ease and make them think he was just a normal guy by putting some of his eight-year-old son’s toys on the dashboard of his pickup truck. Other details are stomach-churningly gruesome, such as the description on page 29 and 30 of how he sometimes had sex with the women’s corpses, including a few who had “decomposed enough that maggots had begun to appear on the bodies.”
There’s more. It’s worse. Read the document at your own risk.
I am not a supporter of the death penalty, but if the authorities in Oregon are able to pursue their charges and make them stick, I will remain silent as Ridgway is led to the gas chamber.
In the case of Ridgway, he’s been convicted of more murders than any other person. In many serial killing cases, prosecutors just go after the few charges that they can build the strongest cases for.
McVeigh, IIRC, was tried, convicted an executed only for the murders of the eight federal agents who were in the building he blew up. I’m not sure what prosecutors decided to about the other 150+ murdered.
Jim Jones, of course, committed suicide before he could ever be brought to justice, and so was never convicted of anything.
Henry Lee Lucas, to give another example, was convicted of just one murder and executed, although on death row he gave testimony that he had killed well over 300 people, over 100 of which have been verified.
I was thinking of Lucas when I heard about Ridgeway’s “record.”
Without doing much in depth research though, it sounds like Ridgway’s not quite as full of shit as Lucas was. Henry Lee confessed to every unsolved murder he found out about, basically for the attention, whether he was actually involved with the crime or not.
I thought that Lucas (he is dead now isn’t he?) was shown that he couldn’t have committed most the murders he claimed. Lucas was also extremely fucked up thanks to his mother. I haven’t followed the link that Cervaise has provided, does it offer anything to help understand how Ridgway became as fucked up as he is? Or how the FBI and whoever were not able to catch on sooner?
adam yax: The prosecutor’s document discusses some history from and theories about Ridgway’s childhood, including an incident where, as a teenager, he stabbed a six-year-old boy, apparently for no other reason than to see what it was like. There’s nothing conclusive, though; psychologists, profilers, and others are going to be studying this guy for decades before they get a handle on his psychopathy.
There’s a lot more information about how Ridgway was able to escape detection for so long. He was identified as one of a handful of primary suspects very early on, and there are a couple of absolutely heartbreaking near-miss encounters where if an officer had shown up a minute sooner he might have broken everything wide open, but he didn’t, and so the killing continued. But (paraphrasing something in the document) Ridgway seems to have had an uncanny instinct for what the forensic analysts would be looking for, and avoiding or eliminating it. Example: If his victim scratched him, he would carefully cut her fingernails to get rid of the traces of his skin so it wouldn’t be found on the corpse.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, the document is very informative. Just be warned that it also contains some utterly horrifying sidenotes that will haunt you. I’m going to hide this for the sake of more sensitive readers; highlight at your own risk.
At least once, he drove his young son out to the woods and, while the kid was sleeping in the truck, he had sex with a previously-dumped corpse a few yards away.