This is how the BTK killer (Dennis Rader) was caught.
Interesting that of the examples cited in the wiki article, the vast majority are cartoons, comedies, or parodies. This seems to be a parodic trope that has taken on a life of its own far beyond a relatively small number of uses in serious drama.
SEND me a bottle of [FONT=“Impact”]SCOTCH[/FONT] [COLOR=“Cyan”]or[/COLOR] you
*WILL *never see Your Thread again.
My friend and I were discussing it last night and we figured that between ransoms, ransomers spend all their time cutting out letters and sorting them.
Please tell me they traced him through the library card he had to show to use the computer.
Not so. Trivially easy. Here ya go:
The mystery of Saddleworth Moor: who was ‘Neil Dovestone’?, The Guardian, May 14, 2016.
Story about a long-unidentified mystery man found dead on the moor. The word “moor” or “Moor” appears 38 times. Truly a modern real-life Sherlock Holmes story!
The point being, in these modern times, Google is the ransomer’s friend.
ETA: Only difficulty, perhaps, once you’ve found your article, is finding a hard copy to clip.
You could always simply use a Ransom Note Font
Of course, you’d want one with lots of alternative letters.
That second cite calls it a “largely largely Discredited Trope in modern fiction given the prevalence of computers,telephones and other more convenient forms of covert communication”. Worth noting in that context that Jussie Smollett (apparently) used that technique when mailing himself a racist threatening letter. Presumably he was aiming for something which gave a really threatening vibe, over something which represented what an actual threatening letter might look like these days.
This actually points out that our popular understanding of this kind of note is distinctly different from Hound of the Baskervilles. When we picture the typical “ransom note,” it consists of words–or sometimes individual letters–in a wide variety of different sizes, colors, and fonts, as Colibri illustrates here.
The note in Hound of the Baskervilles took all of its words from the same newspaper–indeed, from the same article!–and Holmes was able to easily identify it as The Times based on the typeface. So the more popular idea of the ransom note as an assemblage of random fonts seems to be an “improvement” on the Holmes original.
A prank at my high school, years ago: some students kidnapped the Baby Jesus from the town’s life-size Christmas creche display. They left behind a ransom note with clipped-out letters: We got the kid. When they returned Baby Jesus a few days later, it was then chained in place by the town to prevent future kidnappings.
Even as a child that bothered me - how hard is it to find an “m”, two "o"s and an “r”? The passage was cut from the Times, so there’s your “m”.
Regards,
Shodan
Actually he was caught when he submitted a floppy disk to police. They recovered a deleted Word file that had metadata identifying a church, last modified by “Dennis.” They found a Dennis who was a member of the church council, and things opened up from there.
I vaguely recall some work of fiction depicting someone doing an anonymous note by using a stencil.
Ah, perhaps these pranksters were influenced by Kurt Vonnegut’s critically-despised 1976 novel Slapstick. It features a religious cult that calls itself “The Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped”.
This church is founded on the belief that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ has already occurred, but that upon coming back to the world, Jesus was kidnapped by the forces of evil. Its members are easily recognized by their habit of constantly turning their heads from side to side and generally peering around wherever they go, searching for signs of the kidnapped Christ.
It’s barely on-topic, but I find this concept so satirically hilarious that I can’t resist a chance to mention it.
Robert Graysmith, whom you have to take with a grain of salt, had a theory that the reason the Zodiac’s handwriting never yielded to any kind of analysis, nor matched to samples from suspects, was that he had a master sheet of letters from different people’s handwriting, and traced each letter one by one.
Graysmith did have a point that at the time the Zodiac wrote, printing was unusual, and some of his letters looked like normal print, while others looked like they might have been taken from cursive writing; some leaned, and some were upright, and there was remarkable consistently for each letter-- every E looked just like every other E.
I don’t know whether I agree with Graysmith (who also thought that the Zodiac had a lightboard, something he, as a political cartoon artist would know of, but not many people are even aware exists); nonetheless, it’s an interesting idea, and a good one to exploit if I ever write a mystery novel.
Granted, the Zodiac was 1960s-early 70s, it’s still a lot later than The Hound of the Baskervilles. So there’s a more modern idea. If you incorporate a cold lightboard, with LEDs, you have a pretty nice modern idea. You could also hunt up your handwriting examples on the internet, and size your letters as you needed.
On top of that, as BTK he actually asked the cops if they could trace a MS Word doc and they were like, “No! Absolutely not! Totally safe just send it to us right now and there’s absolutely no way to trace you at all.”
Not that any of us are about to go out and do crimes, but if you do and you’re concerned about evidence, the police may not be the best people to ask for advice.
Good will always triumph because evil is stupid.