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.
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.
Also most serial killers don’t want to talk to the police. They just wanna be left alone to torture and murder people nobody will care to look for like teenage runaways working as truck stop prostitutes. The bonus is that if you’re a long haul trucker that frequently crosses state lines, there’s a low likelihood that the couple of police departments who even bother to try solving those crimes will ever actually talk to each other enough to compare evidence (this is an actual theory of something that might be happening).
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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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. The reasoning is more about investigations getting better at catching murderers after their first kill, preventing them from ever becoming serial killers.
Millennials are killing the serial killer industry
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. https://www.statista.com/chart/28644/rate-of-homicides-that-go-unsolved-in-the-us/
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.
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.
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. This is one of the reasons serial killers target sex workers, queer people, and people of color the most - the broader public care less about these victims and the police don’t work as hard to solve their murders.
queer people, and people of color
That’s not a victim silly, it’s just a domestic dispute. Now return the boy to the nice Mr Dahmer.
Additionally police are often the murderers themselves.
We all saw what happened to George Floyd.
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.
There’s estimated to be upwards of 50 serial killers currently active in the US today.
Who’s coming up with that estimation?
The FBI along with others that study crime rates and methodology. Several universities have studied these homicide rates for example.
Who do you think would be studying this sort of thing?
50 and growing, with Kash on the job.
Who do you think would be studying this sort of thing?
Bored housewives addicted to true crime drama?
I remember when words like “study” and “research” actually had particular meanings…
There are people who study this shit in an academic setting.
There’s people that study these things as a profession.
I think you mean “Informational Murder Porn”
I was asking for you to link a source in an apparently not direct enough way.
Would you please link a source to this claim so I don’t have to just take your word for it?
I cannot find the FBI actually saying how many they estimated were currently active.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Accountability_Project
It’s an estimation made from the data of unsolved murder statistics mostly.
That’s why the stat is up to 50 and not a firm number.
Theory:
Healthcare CEOs seem to be doing well.
Well most of them
Yet another job taken by big holding companies and billionaires.
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.
Ice agents.
Plenty of cops that would qualify
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.
Pennsylvania does that to people.
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. Especially if you target a poor urbanized area and/or minorities.
I’d guess that trend is more homicides being caught and recorded as such, even if they remain unsolved.
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.
They blame a lot of it on the shift to gang violence and detectives having less time allocated for crimes of that nature. Supposedly forensics only comes into play at all in 10-15% of cases. Hard to decode everything as someone not in that world though.
Serial killers have access to the same internet as the police.
