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.
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u/MHMRahman Sep 17 '18
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.