#serial killers

[homocidalpotat]

I learnt about Jack the Ripper earlier in history today. And I was so confused to learn he killed 5 (maybe 6) people. A serial killer is defined as "a person who commits a series of murders, often with no apparent motive and typically following a characteristic, predictable behaviour pattern", and with that information, I always assumed it would be tens if not hundreds of people. Especially renowned killers like Jack the Ripper, who is still a mystery today. Do any serial killers actually kill that many people? I've killed more people in one game of Wink Murder than Jack the Ripper did in 3 months. He should get on my level.

Also one of the suspects I learnt about was John Pizer (the Leather Apron) and...

Tell me that's not Jimmy (Mouthwashing) if he had a moustache

Look him up !!

[mapsontheweb]

Number of Serial Killers by Country

[greasyfilms]

Amazing but "bad" movie, Monstrosity AKA The Atomic Brain.

[vivisecti]

ROBERT MAUDSLEY

Robert Maudsley is a British man born in 1953 and he is still alive today.

you might have heard of him because he was nicknamed "Hannibal the cannibal" or "the brain eater" and is considered one of the UK's most dangerous inmates of all time

He only killed pedophiles and sex offenders. He killed 4 of them (3 murders and one manslaughter)

John Farrell, age 30, on 14 March 1974. Farrell showed Maudsley photographs of children he had molested.

David Francis, age 26, on 26 February 1977. Francis was a convicted child molester, sentenced to Broadmoor.

Salney Darwood, age 46, on 29 July 1978. Darwood was imprisoned for sexual-assault and the killing of his wife.

William Roberts, age 56, on 29 July 1978. Convicted for sexually assaulting a 7-year old girl.

As a child, Robert was physically and sexually abused by his father really badly. I wont go into detail but it was pretty much the worst stuff I have ever heard.

As a teenager he was forced to do prostitution which he did not want to do- but he had to fund his drug addiction so he needed the money. He did drugs to cope with what happened to him.

At that time he tried to kill himself multiple times and had to get psychiatric help for that. He told these therapists he wanted to kill his parents.

In 1974 when Robert was 21 and still having to work as a prostitute a man who was a client (John Farrell) showed Robert his child porn collection (all photos he had taken himself) because he thought Robert would be impressed or something.

So Robert immediately killed him. He garroted John- which is where you put a wire over someone's neck and dig it into them until they die.

He then turned himself into the police pretty much straight away and was considered too mentally ill to stand trial. So he was sent to Broadmoor Hospital, which is an infamous hospital for the criminally insane in the UK.

Once he was admitted, Robert quickly realized that there were convicted pedophiles in Broadmoor and he set out killing them one by one.

In 1977 he teamed up with David Cheeseman (who was a pedophile/rapist himself) to kill a second pedophile: David Francis. Robert couldn't commit this murder alone and wanted maximum efficiency i think ? This is purely speculation but maybe Cheeseman's willingness to torture a pedophile to death was why Robert enlisted his help rather than killing Cheeseman too.

Oh well, nobody's perfect i guess not even Robert. maybe he thought Cheeseman was redeeming himself? idk.

The attack was revenge on David Francis for sexually assaulting a fellow inmate.

they tortured him to death over NINE HOURS. NINE. HOURS. also because they were locked up they had no weapons, right? so they did it with spoons.

Part of Francis's brain was found missing with a spoon stuck in his skull (Robert probably ate some with the spoon? but we dont know)

So Robert got a third nickname. "Spoons"

He was transferred from Broadmoor to Wakefield prison, where in 1978 he killed 2 more men.

He originally set out to kill 7.

He garroted Salney Darwood because he'd killed and sexually assaulted his wife. Robert lured Salney into his cell by pretending he was asking for French lessons.

That same day he cornered and stabbed William Roberts to death and hacked at his skull with a makeshift dagger and slammed William's head against the wall multiple times. just absolutely mulched him yknow.

Robert then calmly walked to the wing office and told the officer that they would be two prisoners short next roll call.

In 1983 they built a special cell for Robert because he was so dangerous- he is basically being kept in a glass box in the prison basement.

In 2000 he asked for a pet budgerigar and was denied :(

give the man a pet bird for fucks sake !!

free my man he did nothing wrong !!

[alexanderwales]

When the BTK killer resumed messaging the cops in 2004, he did a lot of research into how not to get caught, some of it by just chatting up police and FBI agents. Long after the fact, it was revealed that some FBI agent had (accidentally) talked him out of sending emails, because there was no way to do it truly anonymous.

So he sent messages that were typewritten or printed and then photocopied multiple times. One of the then-recent technologies were document tracking marks, little near-invisible yellow dots that the FBI could look for, along with marks on the edges of the documents. He made sure to use public equipment at libraries and copier places, so nothing could be traced to his specific personal stuff. He wore gloves while he did all this. He would carefully cut off the edges of the pieces of paper, to remove the tracking marks. He would use older equipment he'd researched that didn't have tracking technology.

All this is like ... the kind of thing you'd see in a cop show, or a movie, right? Some little bit of technobabble where the protagonist explains that our killer is clever enough to have gotten around all this stuff.

So why did BTK stop doing this? Why'd he send in a floppy?

Well, this was all really time-consuming. He had a job, he was a church leader, he did Boy Scouts, he had a family, he was scouting victims, and he was just annoyed that he was spending all this time trying not to be caught.

This is just ... so macabrely funny to me? He had this involved plan for how to taunt the police and get away with it, and it was working, and he just ... found covering his tracks tedious? It just does not match with the movie version or popular conception at all. There's this recurring trope of the "careful and meticulous" serial killer who has thought of everything and is one step ahead, but I have never seen that same serial killer taking all these precautions as being intensely irritated by how time-consuming taunting the police is. The grizzled detective says, "He'll slip up, and that's how we catch him", but this is framed like getting sloppy is a result of escalation, or like the detective is going to outwit the guy. And instead, at least in the case of BTK, it was that he found the evasion thing just really supremely boring and tedious. It took too much time out of his day.

In the show Dexter they show him lovingly arranging his kill rooms, setting out his tools like this is "part of it" for him. But the kill rooms and the tools are a way to not get caught, they're not necessarily part of the fantasy or whatever. So you could write Dexter, but we spend a lot of time with him going to out-of-the-way hardware stores using cash to pay for things, and being just ... rolling his eyes the whole time, tapping his foot, trying to manage these mundane aspects.

I have a love and appreciation for the mundane, maybe because I'm a contrarian, maybe because I see it so seldom. And this is a little moment that stands out to me, something that happened not because of an ever-increasing bloodlust or a clever detective, but because going to different copy stores and cutting the edges off papers to recopy was tedious.

[rising-psyche]

Jeffrey Dahmer and Borderline Personality Disorder.

{Borderline personality disorder is one of its diagnoses, a part and not the only one}.

Of all the mental diagnoses that Jeffrey Dahmer received before and even after his death, Borderline personality disorder is the one in which you see meaning in everything if you investigate what his motivations for his crimes were, as he declared. Not only that, but how his behavior appeared in his childhood and especially in his adolescence.

• What is Borderline Personality Disorder?

It is a mental disorder that is quite difficult to deal with for those who have it, characterized by emotional instability that manifests itself in all personal areas of that person. There is a hypersensitivity to everything where the bearer will always feel things around them in a greater way than others, which is why feelings and emotions are almost constantly on the surface - which makes Borderline people extremely intense.

These excesses that the disorder causes are far from being just something about the individual who has the problem, but something in which he sees himself under power to the point that his "overly emotional sense" spreads to his interpersonal relationships or the way he sees any contact with any other person where he feels the need for affection and permanence.

— The symptoms:

Extreme emotional instability

Impulsiveness

Constant insecurity

Feelings of worthlessness and self-deprecating thoughts

Negative image of yourself

Frequent fear of rejection and abandonment

Tendency to self-destructive habits such as drinking excessively, taking drugs, etc.

Strong irritability, aggressiveness when something upsets you and severe anxiety

Tendency to isolate

Need for affirmation to feel safe

If we look closely at the symptoms and how the disorder dominates the sufferer, it is easy to understand why this diagnosis is so logical in Dahmer's case. When you read about his life and what he himself said during interrogations, you see that he demonstrated all of these characteristics long before he became a murderer.

The reasons why the disorder may arise are vague to say, but generally the incentives come from the lack of family structure where the person grew up as a child, moments of maternal or paternal neglect and even witnessing the separation of parents during childhood - especially if it's a turbulent divorce like it was between Joyce and Lionel Dahmer.

And here I will explain why this can interfere with that child developing the disorder:

There is no doubt that Joyce and Lionel Dahmer were often more concerned with settling their own issues than giving the necessary attention to the effects that the problems between them could have on their children, and this was most triggered by Jeffrey. Descriptions of what he was like are typical, seen as withdrawn, shy and quiet, but his parents probably thought it was just "his way" and nothing more. Some of this may be true, some may not. Jeffrey never knew how to express himself or say at least a little about how he felt, so he expressed it in other ways. Perhaps the trigger for his mind to slowly become ill is the fact that he blamed himself for his mother's illnesses, which got worse after his birth (this is a common Borderline behavior that puts oneself in a position of "burden" and uselessness).

"Jeff's response was classic. He blamed himself for his mother's illness. He had known for as long as he could remember that she was depressed after her birth and that he had caused her illness. He must also have caused each relapse. He couldn't articulate his pain, for fear of pushing his mother over the edge again. He had to keep to himself, say little and do even less, to protect her, to keep some calm in the house. The more she saw of him, the worse it would be for her. His brother David said: '[Jeff] never learned to be open with his feelings of frustration…he went into the woods alone and cut down trees for firewood.' They could hear it banging against tree trunks from inside the house. It felt like vented anger". (The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, Brian Masters)

Access to the emotion of anger was already present from an early age, but Jeffrey suffocated everything he felt for himself and we see how this continued throughout his life until, fatally, he lost control of everything.

When his mother divorced his father and left with David, even if Dahmer didn't express it at that moment when his mother asked him not to tell his father that they were leaving, it is clear that the feeling of abandonment hit him. His mother asked him to accompany them, yes, but it's fair to speculate that perhaps Jeffrey wanted her to give up and everyone to stay home.

"He was now almost eighteen, and perhaps old enough to look after himself, but it was significant that he was not consulted, and also that the Dahmers were so involved in their quarrel that they did not realize how dangerously disconnected their eldest son was now". (The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, Brian Masters)

Many times, there were episodes of inattention and negligence on the part of their parents that would make an increasing difference from the beginning to the years. It's safe to say that his aversion to abandonment or at least his suspicion of it came from a solid foundation when he experienced it between his parents. When Dahmer decided to isolate himself so strongly and over time, his contained desperation for attention and some affection took on gigantic proportions and would finally become evident in a tragic way.

Dahmer's indifference during adolescence, from another angle, was just a camouflage because he refused expression. The disorder forms from adolescence to early adulthood, and here we have another characteristic point: obsessions as an occupation of the inner void. Dahmer developed his fascination with dead animal bones and had a cabin with an animal cemetery where he spent most of his hours. This can be explained as an escape, it was his first true interest and when he met him, he dedicated himself to it, worrying Lionel Dahmer who wanted his son to leave his own world instead of just experimenting with animal bodies and bones.

Another detail is how Jeffrey always used alcohol as an alternative to alleviate what he felt and didn't express it. During the period of separation, his self-destructive habit largely increased. So, he resorted to isolation and drinking as his technique to not suffer so much from the divorce.

It is surprisingly common to see this contrast in the formation of Borderline personality disorder: on one side there is a true purposeful loneliness that others may associate with "not caring" when, in reality, on the other side there is a great wound and a lot to be said. It's like a silenced scream.

"It was my way of blocking out any painful thoughts, just putting on an attitude of not caring or pretending not to care, to spare myself the pain of what was going on with the divorce. Maybe it started then. It was effective, it worked." (Dahmer in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, Brian Masters).

• Inside the crimes.

It is by emptying the mind to look at Dahmer's perspective on his actions that we can find one of the feelings that best fits this diagnosis.

Unlike someone who would kill simply for cruelty and pleasure, in his testimony, Dahmer stated that he killed because he wanted those boys to "remain." There were the morbid fantasies and again, the screaming urgency of not wanting to be alone again. He made everyone sleep with sleeping pills because according to him, that's the only way to make them stay as long as he wanted. Whenever one of them said they needed to go at that time or mentioned that they needed to go the next day, for Dahmer, it was like a threat where the desperate feeling of not being left screamed. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, one of the most latent behaviors of a Borderline is the panic of being left, abandoned. Here, of course, Jeffrey created criminal means in search of company, but if you look at the beginning and how he negatively withdrew throughout his life, in addition to dealing with dark thoughts and the prison of painful feelings, you realize how impossible it was that a good result would come out of it. He was seriously ill and no one knew either because of him or others who had investigated him before and although they did, they did not make a deeper study of his mind when Dahmer said he was "in significant psychological distress".

Even in how he kept the victims' remains because he "felt their presence like that" and didn't want to get rid of them because he "wanted to spend more time with them", there is great awareness of how a person with the disorder can be so desperate for a minimum of affection and contact that is unimaginable. Obviously Dahmer's problems were several and all complex, but the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder for Dahmer is coherent and assertive based on his speeches, history and also what, in his distorted vision, he intended when he murdered.

*****

The impulsiveness in his actions is also quite evident, since Dahmer's murders in particular were completely reckless and became sloppy. And about this lack of care that he started to have, we see how Jeffrey was someone who really had his self-esteem destroyed because everything that involved him, he didn't care what happened to him - part of it because he knew what he was doing was wrong, the distinction between right and wrong was never lacking (for this and several other reasons it is irrational to diagnose him as a psychopath, he was many things but psychopathy really doesn't fit).

It is important to highlight that the overwhelming feeling of emptiness is one of the "ghosts" of BPD, causing the individual to view his own existence as something often without purpose or meaning. It is an internal emptiness where nothing truly satisfies him, it is as if Dahmer saw no reason for anything on a daily basis because one of the things that depressed him was precisely this dense emptiness.

During school, as illustrated in the book "My Friend Dahmer", despite his shyness, it is notable how Jeffrey had long shown wanting attention and wanting to belong somewhere when he played embarrassing pranks. This is nothing more, within the Borderline spectrum, than the manifestation of a much observed feeling, which is the need for validation, belonging, to "fit in" with other people. This was his way of getting attention at the time.

Irritability always existed, but he rudely stifled his emotions and expressed them non-verbally, which would have been appropriate on several occasions. Instead, for example, hitting tree trunks with pieces of trunk was more viable.

It is a certainty that Jeffrey Dahmer was a Borderline and this can be confirmed only by evaluating the behavior, his triggers for crimes, childhood and adolescence occasions and others. This is by no means all, Dahmer had an absolutely vast psychic field and this is what makes so many people interested in him/his story.

[ohthatsmiggles]

richard in a police car after being caught | extensive head injuries caused by civillains

[sn0wwhit3]

⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆♱⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆♱⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆♱⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆♱⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺

[fuzzyghost]

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 28: Murder and

Disappearance Edition II

Given that Judge Crater, Roanoke, and the Dyatlov Pass Incident are credibly solved, though not 100% provable, I'm leaving them out in favor of things ,ore mysterious. I almost left out Amelia Earhart, but the evidence there is sketchier.

[columprncess]

SEMIH ÇELIK

WHAT DID HE DO?

On October 4, 2024, Istanbul was shaken by a horrific incident where 19-year-old Semih Çelik brutally murdered two women within half an hour before taking his own life. The victims of violence against women, Ayşenur Halil and İkbal Uzuner, both 19 years old, were killed in the Eyüpsultan and Fatih districts, respectively.

Semih Çelik first went to his girlfriend Ayşenur Halil’s home in Eyüpsultan around 3:30 p.m., where he killed her by slitting her throat. Shortly after, he met with İkbal Uzuner near the historic Edirnekapı city walls in Fatih. There, he decapitated Uzuner, dismembered her body, and threw her severed head in front of her mother. Earlier that day, Uzuner’s mother had received a phone call from an unknown man who had answered İkbal’s phone. The man reassured her, saying, “Your daughter is in safe hands.”

Çelik had attempted suicide before and was reported missing twice.

The 19-year-old’s mother received another call, which directed her to come to the Edirnekapı area, claiming her daughter’s phone had fallen from the city walls. When she arrived, hoping to retrieve the phone, she was met with the horrifying sight of her daughter’s severed head being thrown from the walls and some body parts, shattering her worst fears. Çelik, who tied a rope around his neck, committed suicide by jumping from the walls.

Authorities revealed that Çelik had a history of psychological problems and had been hospitalized five times over the past year due to mental health issues. His father confirmed his son’s struggles, stating in his police statement: “When I entered his room, I saw drawings that resembled satanic figures. When I asked him about them, he said, ‘You wouldn’t understand. Our (generations’) ways of thinking are different.’” Police searching Çelik’s residence found a notebook containing disturbing charcoal drawings of dismembered human figures, eerily resembling how he committed the murders. The police also found a video of Çelik threatening to kill one of the women. Searching through his mobile phone, police also found he was part of an ‘incel’ chat group online.

^ first victim -İkbal Uzuner was 19-years-old. (his girlfriend)

^ second victim - Ayşenur Halil was 19-years-old - his classmate

Çelik had three prior criminal records and worked as a butcher. He had also attempted suicide before and was reported missing twice. His father, mentioned that Semih had previously received treatment at Bakirkoy Mazhar Osman Mental Health Hospital, Eyup Mental Health Center and Cerrahpasa Mental Health Hospital. As of early October 2024, a total of 300 women have become victims of male violence in Turkey.

The historic Edirnekapı city walls in Fatih

[mapsontheweb]

Ten US federal states with most serial killer victims

[dennisnilsenstie]

The Ken and Barbie killers,Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo when they were children.

[batmanlovesnirvana]

You know what villain I’d like to see in The Batman Trilogy ? PROFESSOR PYG. This man would fit so well in Reeves Universe. Lazlo Valentin, the pig-mask wearing, opera-singing lunatic surgeon, is the serial killer behind The Perfect Crime sidequest in the Arkham games.

This man makes Joker look sane himself.

Hell even an hallucination of the Joker considered Pyg to be too insane, you've got to be a special kind of nuts to even make someone like the Joker of all people think that. Joker will normally make a comment about the villains Batman puts away in the GCPD, the comments he makes for Pyg pretty much show that, if Joker were alive, even he would be put off by how deranged Pyg is, and this is coming from the hallucination of someone considered absolutely insane by most of Gotham City.

He honestly terrifies me. One of those Batman villains I could see some version of actually existing and its just intensely scary to me. Also the way he talks in Arkham is downright disturbing.

Professor Pyg in concept is an intriguing foil to Batman, the problem is the comics treat the character with bare minimum characterisation. Even, Hush by comparison feels nuanced and layered.

Personally prefer Gotham’s portrayal of the character. That version creeped me out, rather than the hyperbolic or shock horror version in the comics.

In conclusion, I like him a lot. I think a lot of people write him off as being a generic psycho killer or “creepy for the sake of being creepy” but I think he’s more interesting than that. It makes me wonder if those people actually even know anything about him. He does need some more fleshing out though which will hopefully come with time as he’s a relatively new addition to the rogues gallery.

[alexanderwales]

The BTK killer probably would have gotten away with it if he hadn't insisted on sending out communications, though there's also a chance that forensic genetic genealogy would have led to him eventually, as it did with Golden State Killer.

He sent a message asking whether they could track him if he sent in a floppy disk, and they said "no". (Specifically, he had prearranged that they put an ad in the paper with the words "Rex, it will be OK," if the answer was no.)

The floppy that he sent in had a single file, "TestA.rtf", which had no identifying metadata, but when the disk was run through EnCase, a digital investigation software, it showed that there was another file which had been "deleted". It was still present on the disk because a floppy drive doesn't (by default) write over deleted files, it just unallocated the space. That file was an agenda for a meeting at a church, and the metadata said the user who saved it was "Dennis", so they Googled the church name, found that the church president was Dennis Rader, drove by his house and saw the same car they already had on grainy video, tested crime scene DNA against his daughter's medical records, and that was basically it. The time from him sending the floppy to getting arrested was ten days.

So the police lied to him. It helped them to catch him, but this is now enshrined in serial killer lore, and I have to imagine that any aspiring serial killer like BTK will have read this account. I wonder if there was ever any consideration of the balance here. I've read some accounts that they "tricked" him, but I don't think that this rises to the level of trick, it was just a lie, albeit one that he set himself up for.

Part of the strategy with BTK was to stroke his considerable ego, to say that he was interesting, to get him to communicate more, hoping that he would slip up. This, too, is part of serial killer lore, and understanding of how serial killers work and how the police will attempt to catch them.

But as time stretches into the future, it seems like these tactics can only work once if the criminals in question are even remotely attempting to evade capture. Doesn't the "meta" evolve? The police will simply lie to you, so you can't trust any information from them. Do the police think this understanding is a net good? I kind of think it's not, especially since it seems like it torpedoes the other strategy of rapport and trust building.

I don't think they were wrong to lie, necessarily, but it does seem like a trick that you can't use too many times, at least not on those who are doing even a smidgen of research.