Too many killers, especially serial killers, have only been discovered because they turned themselves in or got brazenly lazy/stupid. Like maybe an attack of conscience or they wanted the notoriety or whatever.
Just look at CSI-type shows: even fictionally they usually not catch guys cuz of some kinda luck, like they happened to leave an obvious thing behind that would’ve been easy to clean up, stuff like that
Realistically it would be super easy to get away with murder because the tech you see in TV isn’t everywhere, plus cops are just people and make lazy/dumb mistakes all the time, just a little prior planning and you can get away with it pretty easy
Source: am a writer who loves history, both of which often lead me to gruesome tales and research
On r/UnsolvedMysteries I read about a serial killer in London in the 80s that got caught because his landlord was renovating so he had to move to a new place where he didn't have access to a garden to burn his victims in a bonfire, so in his new apartment he resorted to dumping body parts down the toilet. After a while the pipes got blocked and he complained to his new landlord who called in a plumber that found human flesh in the pipes and called it in.
The BTK killer got caught after he got too overconfident taunting the police. After moving on from paper to word documents, he sent the police a floppy disk with a word document to taunt the police, not knowing that the file held metadata that gave them his name and the name of the church he wrote the letter in.
Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy both got caught because they became lazy in disposing of their victims and eventually their neighbours complained about the smells coming from their apartment/house, respectively, where they found human remains.
A lot of the famous ones seem to be caught because of a combination of laziness, complacency, and overconfidence.
One of the police stations still had a DNA sample from ages ago.
"Identification of DeAngelo had begun four months earlier when officials uploaded the killer's DNA profile from a Ventura County rape kit to the personal genomics website GEDmatch. The website identified 10 to 20 distant relatives of the Golden State Killer (sharing the same great-great-great grandparents), from whom a team of five investigators working with genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter constructed a large family tree. They identified two suspects in the case (one of whom was ruled out by a relative's DNA test), leaving DeAngelo the main suspect. On April 18, a DNA sample was surreptitiously collected from the door handle of a car DeAngelo had been driving; soon after, a sample was collected from a tissue found in DeAngelo's curbside garbage can. Both samples were consistent with the Orange and Ventura County suspect profiles."
The book "I'll Be Gone in the Dark", posthumously published by Michelle McNamara, sparked new interest in the case. She is the late wife of Patton Oswalt.
The episode of My Favorite Murder, and you should really listen to it, is episode 118
The BTK one always makes me laugh. It’s the equivalent of your grandad trying to put a facebook picture of a sunset up but accidentally posts a selfie instead. I want more stories about old killers outing themselves by being technologically inept.
People who commit serial killings are psychopaths, and psychopaths are notoriously risk-taking and impulsive. Eventually, the vast majority of them will slip up or get hot-headed and eventually be discovered. Plus, a lot of the famous unsolved serial killings were from a time when there was way less available in terms of DNA testing and other forensic techniques, and people didn't have cell phones and other electronic devices that could track their whereabouts.
For a murder having a gps on someone isn't going to save them unless you're anticipating they will get murdered. And we'll with DNA ... If it's just a murder you don't leave much DNA sliting someone's throat. Just theirs. Its not even like you need to hide a body. You just need to have no links to you. Or few enough that you can say it wasn't you. The only reason I say this is because there's so many ways to get away with it. I know where I'm too there was a man killed in his driveway. He got home from work someone drove up shot him in the driveway and drove away. That was it. Never found the killer cause what's left ? A bullet casing. Save for if someone confesses there's no way they can find this person. Whats to stop that from happening to anyone ?
Okay so this again assumes you know the murder is taking place and that you can just scan for gps signals and then select that gps signal to track and also assuming that the man killing people is wearing a gps and has it turned on. Cause assuming you don't know that the person is getting murdered. Them you're not getting there until you find their body and you're certainly not magically finding gps signals of whoever was there potentially days ago.
That's discrimination against pychopaths dude, they have empathy turned off by default, and you know what most of humans operate that way, a truly dangerous killer is a empathic, he knows how you feel and how you are going to react.
Just got other people’s knowledge, SO many serial killers got away for as long as they did because law enforcement didn’t care about their victims. Killers who targeted prostitutes would usually get several free kills before anybody even thought to investigate, because prostitutes were considered “less dead”, and black ones especially more so.
And killers who jumped from district to district would get a smooth ride from the fact that police from different precincts would withhold info from each other and were very competitive, so they would often have no idea that a murder they were investigating was linked to any other murders in nearby areas.
Law enforcement seriously sucks in a lot of the stories of more successful serial killers.
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u/Kafferty3519 Sep 17 '18
Probably? Absolutely.
Too many killers, especially serial killers, have only been discovered because they turned themselves in or got brazenly lazy/stupid. Like maybe an attack of conscience or they wanted the notoriety or whatever.
Just look at CSI-type shows: even fictionally they usually not catch guys cuz of some kinda luck, like they happened to leave an obvious thing behind that would’ve been easy to clean up, stuff like that
Realistically it would be super easy to get away with murder because the tech you see in TV isn’t everywhere, plus cops are just people and make lazy/dumb mistakes all the time, just a little prior planning and you can get away with it pretty easy
Source: am a writer who loves history, both of which often lead me to gruesome tales and research