Has there ever been a case of a serial killer just stopping? Make a decision to stop killing, drive up to the local police station, give the authorities a list of the victims and where to find the remains, and then accept the inevitable consequences of their actions – has that ever been done?
Some serial killers do stop (e.g. the Zodiac Killer), but they don’t necessarily turn themselves in. Perhaps they just die or get incarcerated on some other charge that keeps them off the streets for a while…
Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, killed his last victim in 1991, but was not arrested until 2005. However, he did continue to send letters to the police and the media until 2005.
What’s-his-face—the guy in Santa Cruz, California in the sixties. Called the cops from a pay phone and promptly retired from the business.
Edmund Kemper.
Quite a few serial killers age out and quit killing like Rader and Zodiac apparently did, and a few even turn themselves in to the police, a famous example being Edmund Kemper. Kemper called the police from a phone booth and confessed to his murders, after overcoming their extreme skeptcism.
tru.tv’s website has a pretty good article on some others: Serial Killers who Surrender.
ETA: Scooped on Kemper! 
Okay, I did not know about him. I have checked his Wikipedia entry. Fascinating!
So if I’m reading between the lines correctly… yes gytalf2000 its OK to just stop. While you are at it turn yourself in.
One of the problems with the unsolved cases like the Zodiac killer is we don’t know if they voluntarily stopped. Perhaps they died, were jailed for a very long time for another crime, or moved to someplace far enough away that their crimes in the new locale weren’t connected to the crimes in the old one.
If with arrest, confession and conviction, things are not always simple. The Boston Strangler is a particularly muddied case. We have no idea if Albert DeSalvo committed most of the crimes. It’s possible that someone else let DeSalvo take the blame and the “real” strangler continued to commit crimes in Boston and possibly elsewhere.
Thanks very much for the link.
The Wiki page says he’s coming up for a parole hearing this July!
I’m pretty sure that’s just a formality of the sentence he received and not a likely probability of release. Still, it weirds me out a little. (I remember the news stories about all those killings in the area as a little kid.)
Wow, what a relief! At least I’ll have a clear conscience when they throw the switch.
Seriously, now – I had a dream a few nights ago, where I was watching some CSI type of show, with this scenario. A serial killer had just walked into the local police precinct, and confessed to a few dozen murders.
I really should have realized right away that I was dreaming, because Caroline Munro was in it as one of the principal investigators, and she was dressed as “Stella Star” from the 1978 clunker of a movie, “Starcrash” :
http://blogs.commercialappeal.com/the_bloodshot_eye/2010/09/starcrash-on-dvd.html
I have some strange dreams…
Jack the Ripper comes to mind.
Most serial killers are compelled to kill until they are incarcerated or die. Ted Bundy escaped from prison and could have stayed out. But he went on a horredous killing spree in Florida, one of the top states for executing serial killers. Ann Rule, who knew Bundy, speculates that on some unconscious level he knew that being dead was the only way he would stop killing.
Yeah, I wonder if Jack the Ripper really just ceased his killing on his own – did he stop at five? Of course, something might have happened to him, like dropping dead of a heart attack or stroke. I doubt that he “got religion”, or anything like that…
I think one of the suspects died and another was incarcerated shortly after the last known murder. So it’s possible that’s why those killings ended.
I didn’t know that. Interesting!
Yeah but I thought he didn’t start corresponding with the media until about 2004, so he was idle for about 14 years. In the interim, he joined a church and was appointed to its board, which is how he was eventually caught, because he stupidly used the church’s computer to create the messages he sent to the media, which they traced back to the church. And he was one of about 5 people that had access to the computer in question.
I always wondered why Rader (BTK)quit, as he seemed to be still really enamored by his secret killer side. Continuing to communicate with police and boasting, etc.
I lived in Santa Cruz when Kemper was killing people. He killed his grandparents when he was 15 and then later started killing again (also killed his mom and some of her friends, as well as a number of strangers). There were actually two different serial killers active at the same time in Santa Cruz then and it was really scary. Three years before that, a random, Charles Manson-type killer murdered Dr. Ohta and his family. He was everybody’s eye doctor and everyone knew his kids.
Kemper killed a number of female hitchikers. Hitchhiking was a major mode of transportation, especially for college students, in those days. With all the media, most women stopped hitchhiking, but some just decided to be more cautious and discriminating about which cars they got into. It was one of the main ways students got up the hill to UCSC.
Unfortunately Kemper was driving a UCSC car with the logo on the side, which was issued to his mom. Looked pretty safe to most women hitchiking onto campus. He would reach across them to “check if the passenger door was locked” and drop a chapstick behind the door handle so they couldn’t open the door.
One of the most effective cures of criminal behavior is the passage of time. Old people don’t commit crimes at the same rate as young people.
A lot of what serial killers do is sexual in nature. It seems to make sense that a drop in the libido due to age might be enough to make a serial killer stop.
That’s just a theory.
Interesting.